Sam Harris recently recounted having been friends with Elon Musk until winning a bet. They'd wagered on the toll Covid would take on US. Musk was dismissive, estimating no more than 3,500 cases. If he won, he'd give a million dollars to Harris' favorite charity; if he lost he'd get a $1000 bottle of fine tequila from Harris. When CDC showed Covid deaths (not mere cases) north of 3,500 Harris contacted Musk but never heard from him again. He was amazed less by the ghosting than that his now former & allegedly brilliant friend had not grasped the concept of exponential growth.
and then Musk started destroying Sam Harris on Twitter, to the point that Sam eventually left Twitter. He still does. Basically he's out for the kill against anyone who disagrees with him. Gary is not talking about the business decisions in his post, but they are some which are really dumb to (but with outstanding hubris - I'm right and the rest of the world is wrong, I'll show you guys). This guy belongs to a mental institution.
You'd think a person would learn something from losing a million-dollar bet.
The lessons might have included: that exponential growth is a thing, that many smart people were pointing out the risks and Musk should increase his confidence in those, that he should reduce his confidence in people who were confident and wrong (including himself), and that Trump's government didn't have the chops to keep a lid on the pandemic ― almost every government failed, though, and given his political bias, Musk probably *did* learn that. Well, not so much "learn" as "strengthen his preconceived notion that governments can't do anything right". Luckily, Musk isn't a real government employee and DOGE isn't a real government agency, so he *must* be doing a fantastic job rn. Illegal, sure, but "move fast and break things" I guess. And people. Break people.
He has the same problems as all tech bros and their tech Dad forerunners. Studying at the right university at the right time; a wad of cash to keep him away from waiting tables through his studies; made a few lucky calls; met some smarter people who lifted him up; bloated self-confidence. The dumb bit is believing he created all this.
I really think it's important to have experienced some sort of serious hardship to be fully formed adult, especially one with power over others. But just for one's own development. Life is brutal, most if not all of us will meet a brutal end like all creatures, and not fully appreciating that is to be a child. Musk seems like a not terribly pleasant child in many important respects. This is obviously a game to him. Waiting tables might not have been enough but it would have helped a lot.
I don't know. On wikipedia it says his father committed suicide. That's tough. But it's not really what I mean. I mean being poor basically.
He is dumb compared to his opinion of himself. His achievements are very substantial, and I wouldn't downplay them, but he got there by hard work and ruthlessness rather than brilliance.
"I am not at all hopeful. Intelligence, no matter how great or small, mixed with poor intellectual self-discipline, enormous ego, and enormous power has historically proven to be a toxic brew."
He used some inherited money to found a company, from which the adults in the room ejected him as soon as they could. However, it was in a rapidly expanding field, and so that company was able to be sold for a large profit, which Musk shared. He used that money to found a larger company, from which he was again ejected by people who knew what they were doing, an he profited even more than before. With that profit he bought his way into Tesla Motors, upon which (showing he can learn, after all) he got the founder ejected as a preemptive strike. For a few years, that founder's good work allowed Tesla to coast along, but once that ran out and it was Musk's turn to do something, Tesla produced crap such as the Cybertruck and the Tesla Semi, poorly-designed boondoggles that have put the company's future in jeopardy.
But, again, he got in on the ground floor of a rapidly-expanding and profitable industry. With THAT profit, he founded SpaceX, which took three billion dollars from the US government to deliver a lunar landing system that is nowhere on the horizon. And he bought Twitter, which, under his stewardship, has seen its revenues decline by 70%.
A very neat and delightful summary of his career. Although I feel cheated that you did not have had fun with The Boring Company or the rolling but always-doomed-to-vanish-over-the-horizon promise of "self-driving cars in 5 years".
I'm definitely not an expert on Elon Musk's career. Maybe I should have said "His achievements *seem* very substantial". I don't actually know much about what he's done. What he's done to the government appears to be carnage.
Also, as the mother of a lovely and brilliant neurodivergent boy, I can tell you that they both could use occupational and speech therapy to work on executive function.
Speaking of errors of judgment, your piece is demonstrative of a cultural error. Namely, the inability to distinguish between intelligence and wisdom. These two concepts are constantly conflated in our intelligence-obsessed modern world. It is possible to be intelligent and unwise. It is also possible to be wise and unintelligent. This latter assertion is tough for people to grok because they do not have a good definition of 'wisdom' and they think that intelligence is a necessary, but not sufficient component of wisdom. With an actual working definition of wisdom the mystery of Musk's behavior and the proper diagnosis of his errors is made more obvious. Wisdom is the degree to which you are in acceptance of reality rather than opposed to it. Yes, intelligence can aid people in recognizing a broader scope of the reality around them. But intelligence can also be used to rationalize a lack of understanding and acceptance of the world, too. Intelligence is neutral with regard to wisdom. So, in short, Musk is more behaving unwisely than he is behaving dumbly.
Can't it be said that intelligence, knowledge & wisdom are separate from each-other despite their connections? Can't it also be said that the three of them can affect each-other but they can also exist without each-other?
Yes, but the piece (and AOC’s quote that triggered it) is also about how knowlegeable he really is, that is, how much he really knows what he is doing (aparently he doesn’t).
I'm not sure dumb is the right way to think about this. The actions of the Trump administration and Musk are not logical if you try to rationalize them against normal behavior of an administration, whose goals typically are to strengthen the country and our economy. I sincerely believe that they are willing to do anything to burn down the federal government in a short time period so that 1) there is an opening to privatize all or most government functions, and 2) they can claim that the federal government expenses have been trimmed and therefore we can afford trillions of dollars of tax cuts. Trump and Musk will pay no real prie for this because Trump is scheming for a third term and they both know that they can grift off the people all day long and build massive wealth. Musk doesn't care if Tesla burns to the ground. He can make more money in other ways.
Correct: "Intelligence, no matter how great or small, mixed with poor intellectual self-discipline, enormous ego, and enormous power has historically proven to be a toxic brew."
I'm embarrassed to be negative here ... but I think you are giving Musk way to much credit - he is basically someone who feels no shame or embarrassment about pretending to be an expert where he isn't one. Also, I have problems with the idea that Musk is, or ever was, "sincerely" concerned about the dangers of AI ...
Keep up your excellent work and thank you for these newsletters!
...And there's a whole other commentary to be made about why it is that the 'social function' emotions/sensations of 'shame' or 'embarrassment' elude Musk (as well as Trump, for that matter).
I like the story of that whole gaming kerfuffle. He brags on Rogan about being "top 20" in two extremely popular computer games. Why?? Then it turns out, he faked it. Paid experienced gamers to pump up a gaming character to max, then played in public like a drunken fool. On top of that, he considers chess "too easy". Just "two players".. Prefers "more complex" games like civilization which has a fog of war and a tech tree. To me, that IS stupid.
If Hume was right, more IQ points just means more cognitive machinery that can be used to construct convenient self-rationalizations and stories to justify our behavior. To the extent science "works," it largely does so by using careful procedure and the external world as constraints on those impulses.
Musk’s intelligence is a nothing topic. His path through life has not been about intelligence but about being a big, bold, over-confident white male at the exact moment they opened the sluices & poured money into the 1%. He knew the right people at the right time. He took others’ ideas & commercialised them. But even here we should be careful about attributing genius. So much of business success is luck, persistence & resources. Intelligence has very little to do with it. Once a business is running, it becomes its own self-organising system. CEOs project vision & confidence but having sat with a few, their strongest quality is self-belief, not ability. I’ve seen a few on their way down too & trust me, they shit in the woods like everyone else. The whole fascination with him just feeds his ego. He’s a lucky, privileged, over-supported baby who needed better parents. His ‘intelligence’ is irrelevant.
I don't think the idea of whether Elon is "dumb" or not is meaningful or even relevant to the discussion in any way. I wish people would stop doing this.
If you really look at it, Elon and DOGE are focused on exactly what they said their focus would be, cutting costs.
But what too many are missing is even though costs are cut, the problem still persists. But nothing DOGE is doing--or few others are doing--is focusing on the underlying problems and addressing them. And they don't claim to be trying to do this.
"We" have mistakenly conflated the two. But the result of their intense focus on their mission is even more dangerous.
As a result of what they have done, the costs and time to solution for those problems is likely to be excessive both in financial and other costs.
There is another perspective on Elon and what he is doing. Many proclaim his expertise in building companies, Tesla, Starlink, X(success???), and others. And regardless of what one thinks of his methods and leadership style, he has been effective.
But what people miss, is that he is not applying the same principles that defined his prior success to the efforts of DOGE.
In his other businesses he has taken "founders mode" to extremes. Getting very deeply involved in aspects of the business, quickly understanding them, quickly addressing them, quickly addressing the myriad of mistakes. The stories of him sleeping on the factory floor of Tesla to deeply understand manufacturing problems are examples of this.
But with DOGE, he and his people aren't deeply engaged in understanding the things they are eliminating. No one has slept on the "factory floor" of USAID, any of the research grants, any of the nuclear protection functions. It's highly unlikely he is sleeping on the floor of his office in the executive wing--but if he is, he's sleeping in the wrong place.
So he has plunged into something, abandoning all his past formulas of success, never focusing on problems, never focusing on the implications of exacerbating the impact of those problems.
Is it cutting costs if you save one buck by creating a problem that will cost twenty bucks to fix a few years later?
And I also doubt that he understands any of his businesses. We see with the Cybertruck, that ridiculous car tunnel company, and Twitter's blue ticks what happens when he tries to make actual decisions himself. Until directly proved otherwise, I have to assume that everything that works about his businesses works because he is being carefully managed away from having any impact on those parts.
For as long as it lasts here's a link to an nih.gov paper on the longterm effects of Ketamine abuse. It goes a long way towards explaining Musk's erratic behavior if those rumors of his recreational use of the drug are true.
Stack ketamine abuse on top of the other stuff he's rumored to be abusing and living in a spotlight while having so much money and influence he's not able to have normal human relationships and it'd fry the brain of even the most intelligent of people.
Microdoses appear to be effective at treatment resistant depression, and may actually improve cognition in some ways while burning out memory and cognition in other ways. Blowing out a person's executive functions prevents a severely depressed person from planning and carrying through with suicide. At least that's the current theory.
We could learn more, but some idiot just destroyed funding for a lot of the research into it.
Why put dumb in quotes? Those are not needed. Elon IS just dumb. He has exactly one thing he is good at, and he is one of the best ever at it. Outside this one very specific thing that has nothing to do with technical competence, Elon is a massive negative to everything he is involved with
I admit that I was rather admiring of Elon Musk in the early days of Tesla and SpaceX, especially for his entrepreneurial audacity. But I have revised my position since he lost his mind. For Elon Musk… « Great wits are sure to madness near allied, and thin partitions do their bounds divide. » - John Dryden
Sam Harris recently recounted having been friends with Elon Musk until winning a bet. They'd wagered on the toll Covid would take on US. Musk was dismissive, estimating no more than 3,500 cases. If he won, he'd give a million dollars to Harris' favorite charity; if he lost he'd get a $1000 bottle of fine tequila from Harris. When CDC showed Covid deaths (not mere cases) north of 3,500 Harris contacted Musk but never heard from him again. He was amazed less by the ghosting than that his now former & allegedly brilliant friend had not grasped the concept of exponential growth.
and then Musk started destroying Sam Harris on Twitter, to the point that Sam eventually left Twitter. He still does. Basically he's out for the kill against anyone who disagrees with him. Gary is not talking about the business decisions in his post, but they are some which are really dumb to (but with outstanding hubris - I'm right and the rest of the world is wrong, I'll show you guys). This guy belongs to a mental institution.
You'd think a person would learn something from losing a million-dollar bet.
The lessons might have included: that exponential growth is a thing, that many smart people were pointing out the risks and Musk should increase his confidence in those, that he should reduce his confidence in people who were confident and wrong (including himself), and that Trump's government didn't have the chops to keep a lid on the pandemic ― almost every government failed, though, and given his political bias, Musk probably *did* learn that. Well, not so much "learn" as "strengthen his preconceived notion that governments can't do anything right". Luckily, Musk isn't a real government employee and DOGE isn't a real government agency, so he *must* be doing a fantastic job rn. Illegal, sure, but "move fast and break things" I guess. And people. Break people.
Didn’t learn because he didn’t pay (prob wouldn’t have learned regardless)
He has the same problems as all tech bros and their tech Dad forerunners. Studying at the right university at the right time; a wad of cash to keep him away from waiting tables through his studies; made a few lucky calls; met some smarter people who lifted him up; bloated self-confidence. The dumb bit is believing he created all this.
I really think it's important to have experienced some sort of serious hardship to be fully formed adult, especially one with power over others. But just for one's own development. Life is brutal, most if not all of us will meet a brutal end like all creatures, and not fully appreciating that is to be a child. Musk seems like a not terribly pleasant child in many important respects. This is obviously a game to him. Waiting tables might not have been enough but it would have helped a lot.
I don't know. On wikipedia it says his father committed suicide. That's tough. But it's not really what I mean. I mean being poor basically.
Errol Musk, Elon's father, is alive and giving interviews. Check your information again.
That's one less excuse then
Moreover, his father is a right piece of work and explains much of Elon's pathology.
https://youtu.be/J5WyTw0oXDs?si=hqGbQe9bk29Cfrs-
He is dumb compared to his opinion of himself. His achievements are very substantial, and I wouldn't downplay them, but he got there by hard work and ruthlessness rather than brilliance.
"I am not at all hopeful. Intelligence, no matter how great or small, mixed with poor intellectual self-discipline, enormous ego, and enormous power has historically proven to be a toxic brew."
I think that's hitting the nail on the head.
"His achievements are very substantial"
He used some inherited money to found a company, from which the adults in the room ejected him as soon as they could. However, it was in a rapidly expanding field, and so that company was able to be sold for a large profit, which Musk shared. He used that money to found a larger company, from which he was again ejected by people who knew what they were doing, an he profited even more than before. With that profit he bought his way into Tesla Motors, upon which (showing he can learn, after all) he got the founder ejected as a preemptive strike. For a few years, that founder's good work allowed Tesla to coast along, but once that ran out and it was Musk's turn to do something, Tesla produced crap such as the Cybertruck and the Tesla Semi, poorly-designed boondoggles that have put the company's future in jeopardy.
But, again, he got in on the ground floor of a rapidly-expanding and profitable industry. With THAT profit, he founded SpaceX, which took three billion dollars from the US government to deliver a lunar landing system that is nowhere on the horizon. And he bought Twitter, which, under his stewardship, has seen its revenues decline by 70%.
A very neat and delightful summary of his career. Although I feel cheated that you did not have had fun with The Boring Company or the rolling but always-doomed-to-vanish-over-the-horizon promise of "self-driving cars in 5 years".
A decade straight of claiming self-driving cars are coming next year since 2014. Evidence is on YouTube. Literally no one holds him accountable.
I'm definitely not an expert on Elon Musk's career. Maybe I should have said "His achievements *seem* very substantial". I don't actually know much about what he's done. What he's done to the government appears to be carnage.
Were there a test for hubris, both Musk and the current President would have scores well above the 99th percentile. Spectacular scores.
The most spectacular scores ever. Nobody's had such spectacular scores.
Huuuuge scores!
Also, as the mother of a lovely and brilliant neurodivergent boy, I can tell you that they both could use occupational and speech therapy to work on executive function.
It's the Dunning-Kruger effect in full display
Speaking of errors of judgment, your piece is demonstrative of a cultural error. Namely, the inability to distinguish between intelligence and wisdom. These two concepts are constantly conflated in our intelligence-obsessed modern world. It is possible to be intelligent and unwise. It is also possible to be wise and unintelligent. This latter assertion is tough for people to grok because they do not have a good definition of 'wisdom' and they think that intelligence is a necessary, but not sufficient component of wisdom. With an actual working definition of wisdom the mystery of Musk's behavior and the proper diagnosis of his errors is made more obvious. Wisdom is the degree to which you are in acceptance of reality rather than opposed to it. Yes, intelligence can aid people in recognizing a broader scope of the reality around them. But intelligence can also be used to rationalize a lack of understanding and acceptance of the world, too. Intelligence is neutral with regard to wisdom. So, in short, Musk is more behaving unwisely than he is behaving dumbly.
I don’t use the word wisdom but to some extent that is what the piece is about; poor epistemics is a lack of wisdom, so is hubris
Actually, this is where a phrase I try to avoid (it feels too fancy-dandy), “Epistemic overstepping”, seems wildly appropriate.
dumb people never learn from their mistakes
smart people learn from their mistakes
wise people learn from the mistakes of others
arrogant people never admit their mistakes, only blame others for them
Can't it be said that intelligence, knowledge & wisdom are separate from each-other despite their connections? Can't it also be said that the three of them can affect each-other but they can also exist without each-other?
IMO 1. Yes 2. No
Indeed and well stated :)
Yes, but the piece (and AOC’s quote that triggered it) is also about how knowlegeable he really is, that is, how much he really knows what he is doing (aparently he doesn’t).
I'm not sure dumb is the right way to think about this. The actions of the Trump administration and Musk are not logical if you try to rationalize them against normal behavior of an administration, whose goals typically are to strengthen the country and our economy. I sincerely believe that they are willing to do anything to burn down the federal government in a short time period so that 1) there is an opening to privatize all or most government functions, and 2) they can claim that the federal government expenses have been trimmed and therefore we can afford trillions of dollars of tax cuts. Trump and Musk will pay no real prie for this because Trump is scheming for a third term and they both know that they can grift off the people all day long and build massive wealth. Musk doesn't care if Tesla burns to the ground. He can make more money in other ways.
Correct: "Intelligence, no matter how great or small, mixed with poor intellectual self-discipline, enormous ego, and enormous power has historically proven to be a toxic brew."
I'm embarrassed to be negative here ... but I think you are giving Musk way to much credit - he is basically someone who feels no shame or embarrassment about pretending to be an expert where he isn't one. Also, I have problems with the idea that Musk is, or ever was, "sincerely" concerned about the dangers of AI ...
Keep up your excellent work and thank you for these newsletters!
...And there's a whole other commentary to be made about why it is that the 'social function' emotions/sensations of 'shame' or 'embarrassment' elude Musk (as well as Trump, for that matter).
yes - it's wrong to ignore their narcissism when analyzing the motives and actions of those 2 guys
I like the story of that whole gaming kerfuffle. He brags on Rogan about being "top 20" in two extremely popular computer games. Why?? Then it turns out, he faked it. Paid experienced gamers to pump up a gaming character to max, then played in public like a drunken fool. On top of that, he considers chess "too easy". Just "two players".. Prefers "more complex" games like civilization which has a fog of war and a tech tree. To me, that IS stupid.
yyyyeeepppp
If Hume was right, more IQ points just means more cognitive machinery that can be used to construct convenient self-rationalizations and stories to justify our behavior. To the extent science "works," it largely does so by using careful procedure and the external world as constraints on those impulses.
Musk’s intelligence is a nothing topic. His path through life has not been about intelligence but about being a big, bold, over-confident white male at the exact moment they opened the sluices & poured money into the 1%. He knew the right people at the right time. He took others’ ideas & commercialised them. But even here we should be careful about attributing genius. So much of business success is luck, persistence & resources. Intelligence has very little to do with it. Once a business is running, it becomes its own self-organising system. CEOs project vision & confidence but having sat with a few, their strongest quality is self-belief, not ability. I’ve seen a few on their way down too & trust me, they shit in the woods like everyone else. The whole fascination with him just feeds his ego. He’s a lucky, privileged, over-supported baby who needed better parents. His ‘intelligence’ is irrelevant.
As if his color has any relevance.
Does to an apartheid fan-boy like him.
exactly, he's smart on paper but IRL... not so much..☹️
I don't think the idea of whether Elon is "dumb" or not is meaningful or even relevant to the discussion in any way. I wish people would stop doing this.
If you really look at it, Elon and DOGE are focused on exactly what they said their focus would be, cutting costs.
But what too many are missing is even though costs are cut, the problem still persists. But nothing DOGE is doing--or few others are doing--is focusing on the underlying problems and addressing them. And they don't claim to be trying to do this.
"We" have mistakenly conflated the two. But the result of their intense focus on their mission is even more dangerous.
As a result of what they have done, the costs and time to solution for those problems is likely to be excessive both in financial and other costs.
There is another perspective on Elon and what he is doing. Many proclaim his expertise in building companies, Tesla, Starlink, X(success???), and others. And regardless of what one thinks of his methods and leadership style, he has been effective.
But what people miss, is that he is not applying the same principles that defined his prior success to the efforts of DOGE.
In his other businesses he has taken "founders mode" to extremes. Getting very deeply involved in aspects of the business, quickly understanding them, quickly addressing them, quickly addressing the myriad of mistakes. The stories of him sleeping on the factory floor of Tesla to deeply understand manufacturing problems are examples of this.
But with DOGE, he and his people aren't deeply engaged in understanding the things they are eliminating. No one has slept on the "factory floor" of USAID, any of the research grants, any of the nuclear protection functions. It's highly unlikely he is sleeping on the floor of his office in the executive wing--but if he is, he's sleeping in the wrong place.
So he has plunged into something, abandoning all his past formulas of success, never focusing on problems, never focusing on the implications of exacerbating the impact of those problems.
It is far more dangerous than anyone thinks.
Interestingly, he is following the formula of his one failure - Twitter.
hah
"If you really look at it, Elon and DOGE are focused on exactly what they said their focus would be, cutting costs."
cutting costs is only meaningful if the costs cut exceed the benefits cut ... did DOGE make a cost-benefit analysis?
cost for oligarchs...... then no benefit for you peons!
Is it cutting costs if you save one buck by creating a problem that will cost twenty bucks to fix a few years later?
And I also doubt that he understands any of his businesses. We see with the Cybertruck, that ridiculous car tunnel company, and Twitter's blue ticks what happens when he tries to make actual decisions himself. Until directly proved otherwise, I have to assume that everything that works about his businesses works because he is being carefully managed away from having any impact on those parts.
major bad decisions by Elon, right???
"past formulas of success"
Elon Musk had nothing to do with the success of Tesla. NOTHING.
Too much ketamine, maybe?
It would make a good anti-drug campaign: "Kids don't do drugs or you will become Elon Musk!"
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-illegal-drugs-use-ketamine-microdosing-risks-2024-1?op=1
For as long as it lasts here's a link to an nih.gov paper on the longterm effects of Ketamine abuse. It goes a long way towards explaining Musk's erratic behavior if those rumors of his recreational use of the drug are true.
Stack ketamine abuse on top of the other stuff he's rumored to be abusing and living in a spotlight while having so much money and influence he's not able to have normal human relationships and it'd fry the brain of even the most intelligent of people.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4809869/
https://neurolaunch.com/ketamine-cognitive-impairment/
Microdoses appear to be effective at treatment resistant depression, and may actually improve cognition in some ways while burning out memory and cognition in other ways. Blowing out a person's executive functions prevents a severely depressed person from planning and carrying through with suicide. At least that's the current theory.
We could learn more, but some idiot just destroyed funding for a lot of the research into it.
Why put dumb in quotes? Those are not needed. Elon IS just dumb. He has exactly one thing he is good at, and he is one of the best ever at it. Outside this one very specific thing that has nothing to do with technical competence, Elon is a massive negative to everything he is involved with
I admit that I was rather admiring of Elon Musk in the early days of Tesla and SpaceX, especially for his entrepreneurial audacity. But I have revised my position since he lost his mind. For Elon Musk… « Great wits are sure to madness near allied, and thin partitions do their bounds divide. » - John Dryden
🎖️for the Dryden quote.
This can't help bring to mind one of our greatest poets' greatest poem, Named "Ozymandius," but could well be named "Hubris":
"...
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”