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| Meta Title | The Trouble with Elon - Sam Harris |
| Meta Description | I didnāt set out to become an enemy of the worldās richest man, but I seem to have managed it all the same. |
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| Boilerpipe Text | I didnāt set out to become an enemy of the worldās richest man, but I seem to have managed it all the same. Until this moment, Iāve resisted describing my falling out with Elon Musk in much detail, but as the manās cultural influence has metastasizedāand he continues to spread lies about me on the social media platform that he owns (Twitter/X)āit seems only appropriate to set the record straight. I know that it annoys many in my audience to see me defend myself against attacks that they recognize to be spurious, but they might, nevertheless, find the details of what happened with Elon interesting.
Of all the remarkable people Iāve met, Elon is probably the most likely to remain a world-historical figureādespite his best efforts to become a clown. He is also the most likely to squander his ample opportunities to live a happy life, ruin his reputation and most important relationships, and produce lasting harm across the globe. None of this was obvious to me when we first met, and I have been quite amazed at Elonās evolution, both as a man and as an avatar of chaos. The friend I remember did not seem to hunger for public attention. But his engagement with Twitter/X transformed himāto a degree seldom seen outside of Marvel movies or Greek mythology. If Elon is still the man I knew, I can only conclude that I never really knew him.
When we first met, Elon wasnāt especially rich or famous. In fact, I recall him teetering on the brink of bankruptcy around 2008, while risking the last of his previous fortune to make payroll at Tesla. At the time, he was living off loans from his friends Larry and Sergey. Once Elon became truly famous, and his personal wealth achieved escape velocity, I was among the first friends he called to discuss his growing security concerns. I put him in touch with Gavin de Becker, who provided his first bodyguards, and recommended other changes to his life. We also went shooting on at least two occasions with Scott Reitz, the finest firearms instructor Iāve ever met. It is an ugly irony that Elonās repeated targeting of me on Twitter/X has increased my own security concerns. He understands this, of course, but does not seem to care.
So how did we fall out? Let this be a cautionary tale for any of Elonās friends who might be tempted to tell the great man something he doesnāt want to hear:
1. When the SARS-CoV-2 virus first invaded our lives in March of 2020, Elon began tweeting in ways that I feared would harm his reputation. I also worried that his tweets might exacerbate the coming public-health emergency. Italy had already fallen off a cliff, and Elon shared the following opinion with his tens of millions of fans :
the coronavirus panic is dumb
As a concerned friend, I sent him a private text:
Hey, brotherā I really think you need to walk back your coronavirus tweet. I know thereās a way to parse it that makes sense (āpanicā is always dumb), but I fear thatās not the way most people are reading it. You have an enormous platform, and much of the world looks to you as an authority on all things technical. Coronavirus is a very big deal, and if we donāt get our act together, weāre going to look just like Italy very soon. If you want to turn some engineers loose on the problem, now would be a good time for a breakthrough in the production of ventilators...
2. Elonās response was, I believe, the first discordant note ever struck in our friendship:
Sam, you of all people should not be concerned about this.
He included a link to a page on the CDC website, indicating that Covid was not even among the top 100 causes of death in the United States. This was a patently silly point to make in the first days of a pandemic.
We continued exchanging texts for at least two hours. If I hadnāt known that I was communicating with Elon Musk, I would have thought I was debating someone who lacked any understanding of basic scientific and mathematical concepts, like exponential curves.
3. Elon and I didnāt converge on a common view of epidemiology over the course of those two hours, but we hit upon a fun compromise: A wager. Elon bet me $1 million dollars (to be given to charity) against a bottle of fancy tequila ($1000) that we wouldnāt see as many as 35,000 cases of Covid in the United States (
cases
, not deaths). The terms of the bet reflected what was, in his estimation, the near certainty (1000 to 1) that he was right. Having already heard credible estimates that there could be 1 million deaths from Covid in the U.S. over the next 12-18 months (these estimates proved fairly accurate), I thought the terms of the bet ridiculousāand quite unfair to Elon. I offered to spot him two orders of magnitude: I was confident that weād soon have 3.5 million cases of Covid in the U.S. Elon accused me of having lost my mind and insisted that we stick with a ceiling of 35,000.
4. We communicated sporadically by text over the next couple of weeks, while the number of reported cases grew. Ominously, Elon dismissed the next batch of data reported by the CDC as merely presumptiveāwhile confirmed cases of Covid, on his account, remained elusive.
5. A few weeks later, when the CDC website finally reported 35,000
deaths
from Covid in the U.S. and 600,000 cases, I sent Elon the following text:
Is (35,000 deaths + 600,000 cases) > 35,000 cases?
6. This text appears to have ended our friendship. Elon never responded, and it was not long before he began maligning me on Twitter for a variety of imaginary offenses. For my part, I eventually started complaining about the startling erosion of his integrity on my podcast, without providing any detail about what had transpired between us.
7. At the end of 2022, I abandoned Twitter/X altogether, having recognized the poisonous effect that it had on my lifeābut also, in large part, because of what I saw it doing to Elon. Iāve been away from the platform for over two years, and yet Elon still attacks me. Occasionally a friend will tell me that Iām trending there, and the reasons for this are never good. As recently as this week, Elon repeated a
defamatory charge
about my being a āhypocriteā for writing
a book
in defense of honesty and then encouraging people to lie to keep Donald Trump out of the White House. Not only have I never advocated lying to defeat Trump (despite what that misleading clip from the
Triggernometry
podcast might suggest to naive viewers), Iāve taken great pains to
defend
Trump from the most damaging lie ever told about him. Elon knows this, because we communicated about the offending clip when it first appeared on Twitter/X. However, he simply does not care that he is defaming a former friend to hundreds of millions of peopleāmany of whom are mentally unstable. On this occasion, he even tagged the incoming president of the United States.
All of this remains socially and professionally awkward, because Elon and I still have many friends in common. Which suggests the terms of another wager that I would happily make, if such a thing were possibleāand I would accept 1000 to 1 odds in Elonās favor:
I bet that anyone who knows us both knows that I am telling the truth.
Everyone close to Elon must recognize how unethical he has become, and yet they remain silent. Their complicity is understandable, but it is depressing all the same. These otherwise serious and compassionate people know that when Elon attacks private citizens on Twitter/Xāfalsely accusing them of crimes or corruption, celebrating their misfortunesāhe is often causing tangible harm in their lives. Itās probably still true to say that social media āisnāt real life,ā until thousands of lunatics learn your home address.
A final absurdity in my case, is that several of the controversial issues that Elon has hurled himself at of lateāand even attacked me overāare ones we agree about. We seem to be in near total alignment on immigration and the problems at the southern border of the U.S. We also share the same concerns about what he calls āthe woke mind virus.ā And we fully agree about the manifest evil of the so-called āgrooming-gangs scandalā in the U.K. The problem with Elon, is that he makes no effort to get his facts straight when discussing any of these topics, and he regularly promotes lies and conspiracy theories manufactured by known bad actors, at scale. (And if grooming were really one of his concerns, itās strange that he couldnāt find anything wrong with
Matt Gaetz
.)
Elon and I even agree about the foundational importance of free speech. Itās just that his approach to safeguarding itāamplifying the influence of psychopaths and psychotics, while deplatforming real journalists and his own critics; or savaging the reputations of democratic leaders, while never saying a harsh word about the Chinese Communist Partyāis not something I can support. The man claims to have principles, but he appears to have only moods and impulses.
Any dispassionate observer of Elonās behavior on Twitter/X can see that there is something seriously wrong with his moral compass, if not his perception of reality. There is simply no excuse for a person with his talents, resources, and opportunities to create so much pointless noise. The callousness and narcissism conveyed by his antics should be impossible for his real friends to ignoreābut they appear to keep silent, perhaps for fear of losing access to his orbit of influence.
Of course, none of this is to deny that the tens of thousands of brilliant engineers Elon employs are accomplishing extraordinary things. He really is the greatest entrepreneur of our generation. And because of the businesses heās built, he will likely become the worldās first trillionaireāperhaps very soon. Since the election of Donald Trump in November, Elonās wealth has grown by around $200 billion. Thatās nearly $3 billion a day (and over $100 million an hour). Such astonishing access to resources gives Elon the chanceāand many would argue the responsibilityāto solve enormous problems in our world.
So why spend time spreading lies on X? |
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# The Trouble with Elon
[](https://substack.com/@samharris)
[Sam Harris](https://substack.com/@samharris)
Jan 15, 2025
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I didnāt set out to become an enemy of the worldās richest man, but I seem to have managed it all the same. Until this moment, Iāve resisted describing my falling out with Elon Musk in much detail, but as the manās cultural influence has metastasizedāand he continues to spread lies about me on the social media platform that he owns (Twitter/X)āit seems only appropriate to set the record straight. I know that it annoys many in my audience to see me defend myself against attacks that they recognize to be spurious, but they might, nevertheless, find the details of what happened with Elon interesting.
Of all the remarkable people Iāve met, Elon is probably the most likely to remain a world-historical figureādespite his best efforts to become a clown. He is also the most likely to squander his ample opportunities to live a happy life, ruin his reputation and most important relationships, and produce lasting harm across the globe. None of this was obvious to me when we first met, and I have been quite amazed at Elonās evolution, both as a man and as an avatar of chaos. The friend I remember did not seem to hunger for public attention. But his engagement with Twitter/X transformed himāto a degree seldom seen outside of Marvel movies or Greek mythology. If Elon is still the man I knew, I can only conclude that I never really knew him.
When we first met, Elon wasnāt especially rich or famous. In fact, I recall him teetering on the brink of bankruptcy around 2008, while risking the last of his previous fortune to make payroll at Tesla. At the time, he was living off loans from his friends Larry and Sergey. Once Elon became truly famous, and his personal wealth achieved escape velocity, I was among the first friends he called to discuss his growing security concerns. I put him in touch with Gavin de Becker, who provided his first bodyguards, and recommended other changes to his life. We also went shooting on at least two occasions with Scott Reitz, the finest firearms instructor Iāve ever met. It is an ugly irony that Elonās repeated targeting of me on Twitter/X has increased my own security concerns. He understands this, of course, but does not seem to care.
So how did we fall out? Let this be a cautionary tale for any of Elonās friends who might be tempted to tell the great man something he doesnāt want to hear:
1\. When the SARS-CoV-2 virus first invaded our lives in March of 2020, Elon began tweeting in ways that I feared would harm his reputation. I also worried that his tweets might exacerbate the coming public-health emergency. Italy had already fallen off a cliff, and Elon shared the following opinion with his tens of millions of fans :
[the coronavirus panic is dumb](https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1236029449042198528)
As a concerned friend, I sent him a private text:
*Hey, brotherā I really think you need to walk back your coronavirus tweet. I know thereās a way to parse it that makes sense (āpanicā is always dumb), but I fear thatās not the way most people are reading it. You have an enormous platform, and much of the world looks to you as an authority on all things technical. Coronavirus is a very big deal, and if we donāt get our act together, weāre going to look just like Italy very soon. If you want to turn some engineers loose on the problem, now would be a good time for a breakthrough in the production of ventilators...*
2\. Elonās response was, I believe, the first discordant note ever struck in our friendship:
*Sam, you of all people should not be concerned about this.*
He included a link to a page on the CDC website, indicating that Covid was not even among the top 100 causes of death in the United States. This was a patently silly point to make in the first days of a pandemic.
We continued exchanging texts for at least two hours. If I hadnāt known that I was communicating with Elon Musk, I would have thought I was debating someone who lacked any understanding of basic scientific and mathematical concepts, like exponential curves.
3\. Elon and I didnāt converge on a common view of epidemiology over the course of those two hours, but we hit upon a fun compromise: A wager. Elon bet me \$1 million dollars (to be given to charity) against a bottle of fancy tequila (\$1000) that we wouldnāt see as many as 35,000 cases of Covid in the United States (*cases*, not deaths). The terms of the bet reflected what was, in his estimation, the near certainty (1000 to 1) that he was right. Having already heard credible estimates that there could be 1 million deaths from Covid in the U.S. over the next 12-18 months (these estimates proved fairly accurate), I thought the terms of the bet ridiculousāand quite unfair to Elon. I offered to spot him two orders of magnitude: I was confident that weād soon have 3.5 million cases of Covid in the U.S. Elon accused me of having lost my mind and insisted that we stick with a ceiling of 35,000.
4\. We communicated sporadically by text over the next couple of weeks, while the number of reported cases grew. Ominously, Elon dismissed the next batch of data reported by the CDC as merely presumptiveāwhile confirmed cases of Covid, on his account, remained elusive.
5\. A few weeks later, when the CDC website finally reported 35,000 *deaths* from Covid in the U.S. and 600,000 cases, I sent Elon the following text:
*Is (35,000 deaths + 600,000 cases) \> 35,000 cases?*
6\. This text appears to have ended our friendship. Elon never responded, and it was not long before he began maligning me on Twitter for a variety of imaginary offenses. For my part, I eventually started complaining about the startling erosion of his integrity on my podcast, without providing any detail about what had transpired between us.
7\. At the end of 2022, I abandoned Twitter/X altogether, having recognized the poisonous effect that it had on my lifeābut also, in large part, because of what I saw it doing to Elon. Iāve been away from the platform for over two years, and yet Elon still attacks me. Occasionally a friend will tell me that Iām trending there, and the reasons for this are never good. As recently as this week, Elon repeated a [defamatory charge](https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1878731382769471560) about my being a āhypocriteā for writing [a book](https://www.samharris.org/books/lying) in defense of honesty and then encouraging people to lie to keep Donald Trump out of the White House. Not only have I never advocated lying to defeat Trump (despite what that misleading clip from the *Triggernometry* podcast might suggest to naive viewers), Iāve taken great pains to [defend](https://samharris.substack.com/p/the-lie-that-will-not-die) Trump from the most damaging lie ever told about him. Elon knows this, because we communicated about the offending clip when it first appeared on Twitter/X. However, he simply does not care that he is defaming a former friend to hundreds of millions of peopleāmany of whom are mentally unstable. On this occasion, he even tagged the incoming president of the United States.
All of this remains socially and professionally awkward, because Elon and I still have many friends in common. Which suggests the terms of another wager that I would happily make, if such a thing were possibleāand I would accept 1000 to 1 odds in Elonās favor:
I bet that anyone who knows us both knows that I am telling the truth.
Everyone close to Elon must recognize how unethical he has become, and yet they remain silent. Their complicity is understandable, but it is depressing all the same. These otherwise serious and compassionate people know that when Elon attacks private citizens on Twitter/Xāfalsely accusing them of crimes or corruption, celebrating their misfortunesāhe is often causing tangible harm in their lives. Itās probably still true to say that social media āisnāt real life,ā until thousands of lunatics learn your home address.
A final absurdity in my case, is that several of the controversial issues that Elon has hurled himself at of lateāand even attacked me overāare ones we agree about. We seem to be in near total alignment on immigration and the problems at the southern border of the U.S. We also share the same concerns about what he calls āthe woke mind virus.ā And we fully agree about the manifest evil of the so-called āgrooming-gangs scandalā in the U.K. The problem with Elon, is that he makes no effort to get his facts straight when discussing any of these topics, and he regularly promotes lies and conspiracy theories manufactured by known bad actors, at scale. (And if grooming were really one of his concerns, itās strange that he couldnāt find anything wrong with [Matt Gaetz](https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1858766986508927479?lang=en).)
Elon and I even agree about the foundational importance of free speech. Itās just that his approach to safeguarding itāamplifying the influence of psychopaths and psychotics, while deplatforming real journalists and his own critics; or savaging the reputations of democratic leaders, while never saying a harsh word about the Chinese Communist Partyāis not something I can support. The man claims to have principles, but he appears to have only moods and impulses.
Any dispassionate observer of Elonās behavior on Twitter/X can see that there is something seriously wrong with his moral compass, if not his perception of reality. There is simply no excuse for a person with his talents, resources, and opportunities to create so much pointless noise. The callousness and narcissism conveyed by his antics should be impossible for his real friends to ignoreābut they appear to keep silent, perhaps for fear of losing access to his orbit of influence.
Of course, none of this is to deny that the tens of thousands of brilliant engineers Elon employs are accomplishing extraordinary things. He really is the greatest entrepreneur of our generation. And because of the businesses heās built, he will likely become the worldās first trillionaireāperhaps very soon. Since the election of Donald Trump in November, Elonās wealth has grown by around \$200 billion. Thatās nearly \$3 billion a day (and over \$100 million an hour). Such astonishing access to resources gives Elon the chanceāand many would argue the responsibilityāto solve enormous problems in our world.
So why spend time spreading lies on X?
***
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#### Discussion about this post
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[John Corso](https://substack.com/profile/116690534-john-corso?utm_source=substack-feed-item)
[Jan 15, 2025](https://samharris.substack.com/p/the-trouble-with-elon/comment/86374567 "Jan 15, 2025, 6:31 PM")
I believe it is always incredibly important to set the record straight. So well done.
Anyone with a shred of social awareness will recognize that Elon has psychological problems that put his emotional maturity at about the level of a 14-year-old.
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[Jason B](https://substack.com/profile/96205495-jason-b?utm_source=substack-feed-item)
[Jan 15, 2025](https://samharris.substack.com/p/the-trouble-with-elon/comment/86373980 "Jan 15, 2025, 6:28 PM")Edited
I feel saddened by this situation, as I have deep respect for both you and Elon. That said, itās clear that you, Sam, are the more grounded and measured voice here (obviously). While Elonās brilliance and good intentions are undeniable, his current actions suggest a misalignment with the moral clarity we need at this critical time. I believe he has the capacity to reflect and adjust, but his present approach falls short of the thoughtful, honest, and balanced leadership humanity truly deserves. Thank you for speaking your truth and striving to hold Elon accountable. Hopefully, he will find his way back to a more constructive path.
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I didnāt set out to become an enemy of the worldās richest man, but I seem to have managed it all the same. Until this moment, Iāve resisted describing my falling out with Elon Musk in much detail, but as the manās cultural influence has metastasizedāand he continues to spread lies about me on the social media platform that he owns (Twitter/X)āit seems only appropriate to set the record straight. I know that it annoys many in my audience to see me defend myself against attacks that they recognize to be spurious, but they might, nevertheless, find the details of what happened with Elon interesting.
Of all the remarkable people Iāve met, Elon is probably the most likely to remain a world-historical figureādespite his best efforts to become a clown. He is also the most likely to squander his ample opportunities to live a happy life, ruin his reputation and most important relationships, and produce lasting harm across the globe. None of this was obvious to me when we first met, and I have been quite amazed at Elonās evolution, both as a man and as an avatar of chaos. The friend I remember did not seem to hunger for public attention. But his engagement with Twitter/X transformed himāto a degree seldom seen outside of Marvel movies or Greek mythology. If Elon is still the man I knew, I can only conclude that I never really knew him.
When we first met, Elon wasnāt especially rich or famous. In fact, I recall him teetering on the brink of bankruptcy around 2008, while risking the last of his previous fortune to make payroll at Tesla. At the time, he was living off loans from his friends Larry and Sergey. Once Elon became truly famous, and his personal wealth achieved escape velocity, I was among the first friends he called to discuss his growing security concerns. I put him in touch with Gavin de Becker, who provided his first bodyguards, and recommended other changes to his life. We also went shooting on at least two occasions with Scott Reitz, the finest firearms instructor Iāve ever met. It is an ugly irony that Elonās repeated targeting of me on Twitter/X has increased my own security concerns. He understands this, of course, but does not seem to care.
So how did we fall out? Let this be a cautionary tale for any of Elonās friends who might be tempted to tell the great man something he doesnāt want to hear:
1\. When the SARS-CoV-2 virus first invaded our lives in March of 2020, Elon began tweeting in ways that I feared would harm his reputation. I also worried that his tweets might exacerbate the coming public-health emergency. Italy had already fallen off a cliff, and Elon shared the following opinion with his tens of millions of fans :
[the coronavirus panic is dumb](https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1236029449042198528)
As a concerned friend, I sent him a private text:
*Hey, brotherā I really think you need to walk back your coronavirus tweet. I know thereās a way to parse it that makes sense (āpanicā is always dumb), but I fear thatās not the way most people are reading it. You have an enormous platform, and much of the world looks to you as an authority on all things technical. Coronavirus is a very big deal, and if we donāt get our act together, weāre going to look just like Italy very soon. If you want to turn some engineers loose on the problem, now would be a good time for a breakthrough in the production of ventilators...*
2\. Elonās response was, I believe, the first discordant note ever struck in our friendship:
*Sam, you of all people should not be concerned about this.*
He included a link to a page on the CDC website, indicating that Covid was not even among the top 100 causes of death in the United States. This was a patently silly point to make in the first days of a pandemic.
We continued exchanging texts for at least two hours. If I hadnāt known that I was communicating with Elon Musk, I would have thought I was debating someone who lacked any understanding of basic scientific and mathematical concepts, like exponential curves.
3\. Elon and I didnāt converge on a common view of epidemiology over the course of those two hours, but we hit upon a fun compromise: A wager. Elon bet me \$1 million dollars (to be given to charity) against a bottle of fancy tequila (\$1000) that we wouldnāt see as many as 35,000 cases of Covid in the United States (*cases*, not deaths). The terms of the bet reflected what was, in his estimation, the near certainty (1000 to 1) that he was right. Having already heard credible estimates that there could be 1 million deaths from Covid in the U.S. over the next 12-18 months (these estimates proved fairly accurate), I thought the terms of the bet ridiculousāand quite unfair to Elon. I offered to spot him two orders of magnitude: I was confident that weād soon have 3.5 million cases of Covid in the U.S. Elon accused me of having lost my mind and insisted that we stick with a ceiling of 35,000.
4\. We communicated sporadically by text over the next couple of weeks, while the number of reported cases grew. Ominously, Elon dismissed the next batch of data reported by the CDC as merely presumptiveāwhile confirmed cases of Covid, on his account, remained elusive.
5\. A few weeks later, when the CDC website finally reported 35,000 *deaths* from Covid in the U.S. and 600,000 cases, I sent Elon the following text:
*Is (35,000 deaths + 600,000 cases) \> 35,000 cases?*
6\. This text appears to have ended our friendship. Elon never responded, and it was not long before he began maligning me on Twitter for a variety of imaginary offenses. For my part, I eventually started complaining about the startling erosion of his integrity on my podcast, without providing any detail about what had transpired between us.
7\. At the end of 2022, I abandoned Twitter/X altogether, having recognized the poisonous effect that it had on my lifeābut also, in large part, because of what I saw it doing to Elon. Iāve been away from the platform for over two years, and yet Elon still attacks me. Occasionally a friend will tell me that Iām trending there, and the reasons for this are never good. As recently as this week, Elon repeated a [defamatory charge](https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1878731382769471560) about my being a āhypocriteā for writing [a book](https://www.samharris.org/books/lying) in defense of honesty and then encouraging people to lie to keep Donald Trump out of the White House. Not only have I never advocated lying to defeat Trump (despite what that misleading clip from the *Triggernometry* podcast might suggest to naive viewers), Iāve taken great pains to [defend](https://samharris.substack.com/p/the-lie-that-will-not-die) Trump from the most damaging lie ever told about him. Elon knows this, because we communicated about the offending clip when it first appeared on Twitter/X. However, he simply does not care that he is defaming a former friend to hundreds of millions of peopleāmany of whom are mentally unstable. On this occasion, he even tagged the incoming president of the United States.
All of this remains socially and professionally awkward, because Elon and I still have many friends in common. Which suggests the terms of another wager that I would happily make, if such a thing were possibleāand I would accept 1000 to 1 odds in Elonās favor:
I bet that anyone who knows us both knows that I am telling the truth.
Everyone close to Elon must recognize how unethical he has become, and yet they remain silent. Their complicity is understandable, but it is depressing all the same. These otherwise serious and compassionate people know that when Elon attacks private citizens on Twitter/Xāfalsely accusing them of crimes or corruption, celebrating their misfortunesāhe is often causing tangible harm in their lives. Itās probably still true to say that social media āisnāt real life,ā until thousands of lunatics learn your home address.
A final absurdity in my case, is that several of the controversial issues that Elon has hurled himself at of lateāand even attacked me overāare ones we agree about. We seem to be in near total alignment on immigration and the problems at the southern border of the U.S. We also share the same concerns about what he calls āthe woke mind virus.ā And we fully agree about the manifest evil of the so-called āgrooming-gangs scandalā in the U.K. The problem with Elon, is that he makes no effort to get his facts straight when discussing any of these topics, and he regularly promotes lies and conspiracy theories manufactured by known bad actors, at scale. (And if grooming were really one of his concerns, itās strange that he couldnāt find anything wrong with [Matt Gaetz](https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1858766986508927479?lang=en).)
Elon and I even agree about the foundational importance of free speech. Itās just that his approach to safeguarding itāamplifying the influence of psychopaths and psychotics, while deplatforming real journalists and his own critics; or savaging the reputations of democratic leaders, while never saying a harsh word about the Chinese Communist Partyāis not something I can support. The man claims to have principles, but he appears to have only moods and impulses.
Any dispassionate observer of Elonās behavior on Twitter/X can see that there is something seriously wrong with his moral compass, if not his perception of reality. There is simply no excuse for a person with his talents, resources, and opportunities to create so much pointless noise. The callousness and narcissism conveyed by his antics should be impossible for his real friends to ignoreābut they appear to keep silent, perhaps for fear of losing access to his orbit of influence.
Of course, none of this is to deny that the tens of thousands of brilliant engineers Elon employs are accomplishing extraordinary things. He really is the greatest entrepreneur of our generation. And because of the businesses heās built, he will likely become the worldās first trillionaireāperhaps very soon. Since the election of Donald Trump in November, Elonās wealth has grown by around \$200 billion. Thatās nearly \$3 billion a day (and over \$100 million an hour). Such astonishing access to resources gives Elon the chanceāand many would argue the responsibilityāto solve enormous problems in our world.
So why spend time spreading lies on X? |
| Shard | 76 (laksa) |
| Root Hash | 14862242593741677076 |
| Unparsed URL | com,substack!samharris,/p/the-trouble-with-elon s443 |