1. This underrates the role luck played in his success. Yeah, he's smart, but he's been hit on the ass with a rainbow a number of times.
2. Government is not business.
3. I think the evidence that he's currently nowhere near his best is pretty strong. Aside from his very public weirdness, Tesla is not in very good shape right now despite the various dog and pony shows he's put on.
Or the way Noah conveniently ignores his much government subsidies from the Obama era also helped Solar City, SpaceX and Tesla. Also he didn't build all of these companies from scratch. He bought some of them.
In reality though, I don't discount Trump or Elon as dumb, and frankly I'm agnostic to their actual IQ. I've seen people online claim that Trump has a 130 IQ, and I got a 1390 on my SAT the first time I took it, and I'm certainly not a genius.
That said, it doesn't matter what someone's money is or talents, the fact is that Elon has the air and leverage of the most power man in the world and can do and has done a lot of harm with his platform and access that he has thus far. I can't imagine this will get better this far. To speak on my personal experience, I've met lots of smart scientists that are excellent at drug discovery and development in my life, but they can't get a drug from a lab to market, but I've met wall street guys that can make a company profitable and help get a drug to market, but they have no R&D skills. Humans work best when we use our specialized skills together, not when we all think we are Bruce Wayne, Tony Stark, or Elon Musk...
Yeah. I don't think Elon is like, stupid-stupid. I think he is an adept navigator of systems -- namely, capturing them. Doesn't mean what he does with that is remotely intelligent, and if you're claiming that your core competency is efficiency, it's very easy to mask shit outcomes. I also could run many things efficiently into the ground and, with enough money, spread the risk around to launder my reputation.
Musk and Trump qualify as complementary evil geniuses who are changing American economic and political life. Simultaneously, Musk purchased Trump for $280 million, and he wants to get his money's worth.
I dunno, I'm starting to think online progressives might be advised to consider this perspective as it relates to a lot of the mouth-breathers who make typos in their Tweets, yet nonetheless seem to be mysteriously falling upward over and over again.
Twitter is Elon's greatest achievement - to date (ask me next quarter and I will have a different answer.) To argue otherwise is to miss the point and the danger of Noah's thesis. Musk is not dumb. He is dangerous. Xitter plays a fundamental role in Musk's relationship with intellectual elites and media censorship. He's played X like a fiddle, shaping discourse and orchestrating censorship to serve his ambitions.
Yep! And Twitter exemplifies the Musk method well. This was an impulsive purchase (possibly on a Ketamine trip?) that he then tried to escape through aggressive litigation based on a flimsy-at-best legal strategy. After being forced to complete the purchase, Musk made rapid, aggressive changes that massively disrupted the business—numerous critics assumed it would quickly fail and be repossessed by its creditors. Yet he and his team stabilized it well enough.
Musk then parlayed that crap asset into serious political power within the MAGA movement and eventually intertwined himself closely with Trump and his team. He now has the ability to massively disrupt the federal administrative state in ways that none of us can fully appreciate.
This demonstrates how Musk and his team operate in aggressive, risky, and capable ways —with rapid adjustments as needed—to win in highly unpredictable outcomes.
There may be parts of the federal government that can be improved via the "Musk method" - making aggressive moves, seeing what works and doesn't work, adjusting in real time. However, unlike Silicon Valley, there are areas in government where this won't work. Take national security for example. The enemy only needs to be right once; those in charge of national security need to be right all the time. Musks' attitude that any existing process or regulation should be "default gone" and added back if its proven to be necessary gives hostile actors a massive attack surface. This should worry us all.
I agree that DOGE is unlikely to work towards improving government efficiency or effectiveness using any metrics that would be appreciated by Noah and his subscriber community, including myself. Yet, I think that is irrelevant to the general concern about Musk, et al. likely having a large, disruptive impact on federal state capacity. Moreover, they may be more focused on breaking certain functions they find displeasing (eg, the CFPB and the EPA) and branding that as “efficiency” for better optics.
Yes, they may fail to achieve a reasonable interpretation of their stated aims. Yet, Trump, Musk, and other MAGA-affiliated individuals may be pleased with their outcome nonetheless. Hopefully we can convince enough voters to be angry at their actions.
Not to mention that he did dump something like 80% of Twitter's workers and the company continued to function about the same as before. I'm sure he thinks about that when considering the federal bureaucracy.
Yeah, but mis-/dis-information is the norm there. The Fourth Estate was supposed to be the place the Founders intended Americans get informed. Not hopelessly confused and misled.
Wait, hold my beer please, there's some illegal Haitians out back eating my dogs...!!
It didn't "work out." Musk made it work out. Even if we do stipulate that Musk fucked up the Twitter deal (if nothing else he did probably overpay), it seems odd to argue that parlaying a suboptimal business acquisition into a role as the US president's majordomo is some kind of point *against* his competence.
With the latest release of Grok, the latest funding round for X and Xai (which are combined) is at $44 billion which is the price Elon was forced to pay for Twitter after his impulse buy. He’s fired lots of deadwood employees, but rebuilt value by improving the product, hiring AI scientists and building a giant data center for Grok training, which benefits also from training on all the posts made on X.
Not my experience at all. I still follow Noah, Matt Yglesias and all kinds of smart, opinionated people. I honestly don't know what you're talking about. Are you even a user? Or just repeating the conventional wisdom?
Failure doesn't count against success in business. Failure is the default option. Someone who is 1-4 at starting businesses is way ahead of anyone who is 0-0.
Not really sure what you're talking about here as I am talking about business owners and not employees. There is more accountability for a business owner than just about any other job.
> That Tesla and SpaceX had near-death experiences is a matter of record.
Yep, luck works both ways—both good and bad—and Musk, et al. have managed it well enough to keep his projects alive and, at times, thriving.
> And Giving him credit for xAi? That is extraordinarily premature.
While much of xAI is still a hot mess, the general consensus seems to be that they’ve built a state-of-the-art model on par with the offerings from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and other leading firms. It is noteworthy how quickly they’ve caught, primarily by spending massive amounts of capital. That alone is impressive and it puts them in the race to win considerable market share in some parts of the GenAI product and infrastructure space.
Tesla would have gone bankrupt if not for Obama’s loan. PayPal he was one of a few people and not the most important. What is xAI a leader in? Twitter he torched ~$40B in value (must be nice to be filthy rich!) and is now trying to strong arm advertisers to make up for it. SpaceX I will give you. Not taking sides just trying to be accurate. Elon did not literally make all not these companies by himself with no assistance only sheer genius and hard work.
This is a strawman. Noah and other commentators are not claiming Musk founded all of these companies or did all the work single-handedly. But the point stands that he is the most successful business creator and developer of our time. He lies a fair amount and seems like he has issues, but that’s not the point here.
He's a risk taker. Elon loves risk. He doubles down on it. The default for risk-takers is failure. He has succeeded more often than he has failed. The blamestorming here is pure cope.
Agreed, but his success with Tesla & SpaceX made him overconfident.
As a result he's loosing focus. Every VC in the Valley keeps telling fresh founders to focus at all costs. Elon is now involved in a billion initiatives, imperilling the success of everything he built up for...whatever he's up to.
Many have shorted Tesla. All have failed. Keep predicting, eventually you'll be right. Pure mood affiliation - you can't stand the guy and reason backwards to show how he will fail.
No, I think Elon is an incredibly talented guy. And quite cunning, far as I can tell. But I personally believe the stock market in general is overvalued, and Tesla perhaps the most overvalued stock of all at 180 P/E. It's in the nature of bubbles to pop. Irregardless of personal feelings.
I agree completely. So does Warren Buffett. He never owned Tesla, but he's been dumping Apple stock for the last year and piling into cash.
Funny how everyone talks about Tesla but nobody talks about Apple. Apple is benign, Tesla is evil, even though they're both part of the overvalued tech bubble. That's the mood affiliation piece. Find your villain, work backwards.
I have to laugh at your use of the word cunning. It's what one half of what people call a Russell conjugate: a pair of words with the same meaning but opposite connotations. Steve Jobs was intelligent, Elon Musk is cunning. The guy can't win.
Currently reading Isaacson's biography, I think the initial point isn't as invalid as I would have previously assumed based on his track record. Tesla nearly went bankrupt during the Great Recession, and largely on account of Musk's own dubious design decisions that made the Tesla Roadster much more expensive than initially projected (though the game-saving bailout from Daimler was impressive and Musk's own doing). Musk's heart and soul were always clearly in SpaceX, and in my view the achievement there is truly monumental, but even so, the first three tests were a failure - in part a consequence of the breakneck speed that Musk set - and would have also probably gone under had the PayPal mafia not bailed him out as a favor for driving him out of PayPal.
So I suspect there are plenty of alternate timelines - perhaps the majority of them - in which SpaceX and Tesla went under, and his net worth ends up in the $100Ms, not the $100Bs, by 2025.
It remains to be seen what happens with xAI. X hype aside, it comes off as far behind OpenAI, and at best level pegging with the half dozen other near-frontier models.
XAI? I suppose it’s impressive that they got their data centers for training set up quickly, but do they actually do anything particularly well? They’re inferior to ChatGPT on reasoning, Claude on prose, Deepseek on costs, etc. the only thing grok has going for it is the lack of content restrictions
Tesla is a walking meme, its valuation never made any sense. it makes even less sense now
they have legitimately zero significant advantages vs the rest of the market. And what they do have now is an atrocious brand image that a large portion of western consumers dont want to touch
Conservatives are not exactly a prime market for EV vehicles. And, specially, american conservatives can't make up for reduced worldwide sales, even if they were to miraculously and hypocritically start buying EVs en masse.
The problem is also that Tesla is now facing very aggressive competition, and ,as i mentioned, does not have a significant product edge on any aspect. Every big european manufacturer now has EVs with similar range to Teslas, and the build quality of a mercedes is not even comparable to the shoddy stuff tesla gets away with. They've also beaten tesla to the affordable entry market, for which tesla has literally zero options for sale.
The main point is that they need as many people of all ilks as they can get if they want to make their valuation make any remote sense going forward, tainting the brand with a large amount of the worlwide public is going to cost the company.
If you’ve listened to Elon on Tesla calls, he’s not trying to be an EV company. People also compared Amazon to Barnes and Noble.
The data collected from cars on the road is their competitive advantage. And their people. Their strategy to avoid costly cameras is another. If these pan out, Tesla will be ok. It’s an IF but it’s always an IF with Elon’s strategy.
On the left, this business of quoting someone's IQ, SAT and ACT scores etc to infer the sum total of intelligence or abilities is equally as abhorrent when people on the Right use it for racist (even eugenic) reasons. I was irked a bit when you started by quoting his SAT scores etc. -- a very slippery slope -- but was relieved when you made the bigger point about someone's total abilities and what they accomplish or can accomplish, irrespective of those scores.
I’m one of the dumb people who worries too much about our deficit so I’m watching the goings on with some mixed emotions. Given your cross experience, I’m curious if you feel there is any room for zero based budgeting in the government?
Government should fill the gaps in the economy in a manner that is exactly juxtaposed to the private sector economy—consequently, the opposite of zero based budgeting. When the economy is bad, government should step in and spend whatever it takes to get to full employment; when the economy is good, government should extract whatever it takes in taxes to prevent inflation. The problem is while sometimes we do the former, we never do the later.
The Debt is a historical accounting which isn’t very meaningful to a country that can print money, unlike a business. The deficit can promote employment and/or cause inflation. But we should never lose sight of the fact that, unlike a business which may want to tighten its belt or borrow based on its particular needs, in an economy, one person’s spending is another’s income and vice versa. Too paraphrases Keynes, what ever we can do, we can afford. Government should never prevent a man with a shovel from digging a useful hole because of numbers on a spreadsheet.
Thank you for your thoughtful response. I don't think that ability to print money is without massive risk. Inflation is the biggest tax to ordinary people and quite destructive and you can see this in country after country. When politicians do not have the will to raise taxes directly, they can just resort to debasing their currency. I respectively disagree with your Keynesian framework that Topmen have the wisdom to step in and do the right thing. Yes debt levels don't matter. Until they do. And then it is too late. Agree to disagree.
Inflation is a big risk. But when you have an economy in recession or depression, printing money isn’t as risky as an economy that isn’t producing and has people sitting idle while they lose their houses and savings. Printing money needs to be managed—usually by taxing that money back out of the economy (which we are often reluctant todo).
A good example is COViD. People forget that we had 25% unemployment and the markets absolutely crashed in March of 2020–until we printed $3T to hand out to people. That, plus other stimulus, plus supply shortfalls led to 20% inflation over the next few years. Was that bad? Yes. Cost democrats the election. Was it as bad as the depression we would have had without printing that money? Not by a long shot (though if Pelosi had done nothing, Trump would have taken the blame and a Republican couldn’t have won for a generation). It’s also worth noting that the Debt burden (Debt to GDP) actually went down under Biden because of the inflation. At the end of the day we had a Goldilocks economy with low inflation and low unemployment.
However, now we are looking at tax cuts in a strong economy which will certainly lead to inflation. Fiat currency is a great power and with that power comes great responsibility—which does not seem to be the current administration’s strong suit.
I think one of the problems we're running into with Keynesian economics is that when the economy is bad or there's a systemic shock that needs government support (Great Financial Crisis, Great Recession, Covid, etc.), it works very well, both in theory and in practice. That part is great.
But in the good economy times it seems nobody is willing to repay that debt, so it just stacks up indefinitely. As Noah has written many times, 2024 was a record-breaking good economic year for the US in many ways, but we still racked up an extra $1.83 trillion dollars of deficit. The last time we had a budget surplus that repaid any debt was the Clinton years in the 90s! It looks like politically we just lack the will to repay the other half of the Keynesian promise.
If we don't just outgrow this as we did with WW2 or cold war debt, this seems like we're headed for a dark place. But I'm not an economist; would be interested to read Noah's analysis on the debt and CBO projections.
One of the key features of 'pure' zero-based-budgeting (ZBB) is that it doesn't guarantee continuity, which is an essential value of many government functions. Therefore there is limited room for some forms of ZBB as found in the private sector. It's not a coincidence that ZBB fell out of fashion in the public sector in the 1980s. That said, ZBBs value, character and outcomes are quite sensitive to what zero bases are chosen.
There are also many and varied areas of government for which ZBB would be entirely inappropriate, since government is essentially a giant insurer of last resort, and is responsible for providing society's shock absorbers.
However, there alternatives that avoid some ZBB pitfalls but share some characteristics that can be useful, such as sunsetting when applied to many-year terms.
Part of me was also thinking about sunsetting laws and neglected to mention that. Hey, I'm old and the old memory bank can be wonky. Thank you for your thoughtful response.
I think this is the core of the reason he's going to fail, but not fail to make a mess . It's hubris. Even if you concede he's actually quite amazing given what he's done, it turns out that *no* one person can reform the federal government in two months with 30 people. It's a completely different structure, and to do it correctly, you have to actually change laws, which involves politics and Congress. The "stupidity" is that he doesn't realize this, and will simply flail about, ultimately cutting 0.2% of the budget in the most damaging way possible.
The thing is, he has often failed. And in business that's ok if your wins are big enough. In government it's not. And this hubristic pattern is visible in his failures. He tried and failed to defeat geometry with his silly tunnels. He will fail at sending anyone to Mars because of the basic physics of the problem that no amount of code can overcome. The federal government is more like geometry and physics than electric cars.
If this were a problem of building something I'd have more faith. I have no doubt if he could recreate some particular department from whole cloth it would be better than it is. But that's not the problem statement.
I actually fear more him not failing. That is, Musk succeeds at destroying the administrative state and reducing state capacity, and then his boss makes it stick by strong-arming Congress and fighting, undermining or ignoring the courts.
At that point, there's no rule of law, and no checks or balances reamaining. Only power, domination, graft and greed.
People who are commenting on the "failure" of Twitter are missing the point. For pocket change (admittedly overpaid for it) he has bought himself a major megaphone with 600M + active monthly users and 250M DAILY users. Small overpayment on Elon's part to get such a large platform from which to broadcast and compete against legacy-media. Seems brilliant, even though I personally am not a Musk fan, NoahOpinion makes all good points.
It's not about his competency or intelligence... The problem here is his absolute maliciousness, lack of humanity and main character syndrome.
Case in point, name one charitable cause he's championing that doesn't benefit him (ie tesla). For someone who is the richest person in the world, there are so many things he can do to help the US and the world...
Musk's maliciousness is exactly why Noah insists that people not underestimate his capabilities. The point is to counteract the damage he causes needs someone as capable, not less. Do not cope.
This whole article is a list of his companies helping the US and the world enormously, leading the charge in EV transition, building US industries and giving so many places good internet for the first time. His riches, largely ownership stakes of those companies, reflect the "help" people have received from his companies.
On the flip side, Musk doesn't seem to be a good philanthropist at all, so if he actually starts a charity it will not help nearly as much in my opinion.
Not a charity, but when a killer asteroid is about to smash into earth and end civilization, having SpaceX technology available to possibly avert it would do more than all other charities combined. All the climate alarmists screaming about existential risk may finally realize what that phrase means.
That is an important thing. But people who think about existential risk recognize that asteroids are not high on the list of important ones. We’ve gone tens of thousands of years without any significant impacts, and it’s unclear whether any impact at all in the last 64 million years would actually be an existential risk.
AI, nuclear war, and pandemics are the existential risks that are most significant right now, because, although they haven’t struck this way in millions of years either, we’ve done a lot to make them more risky.
Agree. The question of his intelligence is a straw man issue. No one can seriously doubt his native intelligence. Or, for that matter, his drive, focus and ability to push schedules. He’s great at making a technological possibility into an unlikely reality while others struggle.
Placing him at the head of a process to remake government, though, is political terrorism. Musk lacks common sense, emotional intelligence, empathy and basic decency. He has no interest in developing consensus, following the law or considering the human impact of his actions. Indeed, he cares nothing about government, democracy or values. For Trump, these are features, not bugs. He needs someone who is has no trouble sending government programs and workers to the political guillotine without a trial, evidence or second thoughts.
So I do not underestimate his intelligence or organizational abilities. Nor do I underestimate his capacity to do great harm at warp speed.
Not sure he *is* being malicious about this other than a bit of petty revenge on the FAA, CFPB and such. I think he's mostly earnest about the mission, and simply believea enough wrong things for various reasons that he'll break a bunch of stuff.
Yeah, demanding that all DOD, FBI and Intelligence agency employees write up 5 bullet points on whatever top secret projects they're working on to justify their employment...is just moronic.
If they DON'T, Musk fires them. If they DO, they go to federal prison for treason.
If he were serious about the mission, he would be focusing on areas where a meaningful amount of money can be saved. Since he’s not, I feel we can safely conclude that he’s not serious about the (stated) mission.
Meh, so he's malicious. There is no scarcity of malicious people. I remember somebody writing an essay on personalities and roles in organizations and described some set as "they're sociopathic enough to make good managers".
Yes, part of it is cope. People don't like to admit that their ideological enemies are highly intelligent, much less generational geniuses.
But Elon is unique in that he has published hundreds of his innermost thoughts on the public forum that he controls -- and those thoughts are absolutely insipid.
I have never read an Elon Musk tweet that rose above an adolescent level of insight. One would expect him to be a modern-day Marcus Aurelius, sharing his musings on a wide range of topics, but without fail his comments are juvenile, shallow and poorly articulated.
He's not just a twat -- he an utterly uninteresting twat. His autism doesn't quite explain it, either. It's not just a lack of social skills, it's a complete lack of intellectual depth.
So people are forced to grapple with the question of how a generational visionary genius could be so lacking in analytical depth. Which is the real Elon -- the genius or the insipid troll?
And the answer, of course, is... both. As Stephen Jay Gould said, human intelligence is not a three-dimensional quality, like height. A human being can be brilliant in some areas and utterly shallow and mediocre in others. So Elon provides a valuable object lesson in the multivariate nature of human intelligence.
(BTW, I've met Elon several times, including a long conversation in a bar in the early 2000's... I thought he was one of the most remarkable people I'd ever met at the time. I've since gained and lost a lot of esteem for him.)
Just to point out though he's never been formally diagnosed with autism, it's been a self diagnosis if I remember from his biography. That said even if he is on the spectrum, his posts and rants read like someone who peaked at 15, and maybe part of his personality is he just loves trolling and being contrary for the lulz...
Elon Musk bought two small companies (Tesla and SpaceX) and made them both huge through a combination of managerial skill, what we'll call creative maneuvering through government regulations, an unparalleled ability to build hype, and a few lucky breaks. He used the money from those companies to start his own companies with his own ideas like the hyperloop, which all basically failed.
Elon Musk is extremely good at hiring talented people and instilling in them a cult-like dedication to working on his ideas, and his ideas are usually big swings, and whether or not that's a good thing depends on how good the idea is. Right now, his idea is that he's America's Javier Milei and he needs to basically eliminate the federal government even though doing so will crash the economy. He's not going to make government "more efficient" and he's not trying to. It's also not clear how much his talents apply to this situation, and many of the same traits that make him so successful can be liabilities in other contexts.
> “He’s not going to make government ‘more efficient.’”
Yes, and I think Noah largely agrees. At most, there’s a ton of uncertainty about what DOGE* will actually accomplish. Maybe some of it will eventually be seen in a positive light, but I doubt Noah is optimistic.
But Musk is actually being empowered to make serious changes to the federal administrative state, and he has a history of making drastic changes. Moreover, we shouldn’t underestimate his and his team’s ability to disrupt the status quo—a theme I fear runs through these early comments that attempt to downplay his past success.
Musk is an obsessive and impulsive actor with a history of making massive changes and a track record of managing them well enough to prevent the total collapse of his projects. Moreover, he is willing to pivot rapidly in terms of tactics, narrative, and even goals. Hence, we shouldn’t delude ourselves with hopes that courts or economic disruption will foil Musk and will ultimately lead to his failure. Numerous past critics over the last decade have made similar mistakes in anticipating the demise of his earlier projects, as Noah cites throughout this article.
We don’t have to like Musk or agree with his goals to recognize that he’s a sophisticated actor with a history of making big things happen through novel, risky actions. Instead, we need to seriously consider the possibility that we may end up with a radically different federal administrative state in ways that none of us—not even Musk and his team—can currently imagine. Personally, I find any attempt to downplay that risk comparable to climate change deniers comforting themselves with an unsustainable status quo.
* I’m feeling increasingly resentful about having to refer to this meme-named group of broken toys as if it were a serious political project.
> is it actually the case that anyone is downplaying that he is likely to be disruptive, whether for good or ill?
I’m seeing a lot of attempts to downplay Musk’s past successes, though some of that may be my own bias about the broader public discourse around Musk over the last decade or so. I worry that could mislead some into a false sense of comfort. While I wouldn’t recommend stressing out about DOGE either—because Musk’s projects tend to follow an unpredictable, circuitous route—we should still recognize his and his team’s ability to make large, disruptive changes and manage their way through setbacks.
> it was implying that the things he is doing aren't going to work out because he isn't very smart
I think focusing on Musk’s intellect—or lack thereof—is an example of such a distraction-at-best way of looking at the situation. People have been citing his lack of actual business talent or relevant engineering acumen as evidence that Tesla, SpaceX, or Twitter/X would fail for roughly a decade. Musk has some capability, and while categorizing it is fine as an intellectual exercise, it’s not particularly important for appreciating the fact that he and his teams have accomplished massive, disruptive changes in unanticipated ways—due to some team-wide combination of obsession, aptitude, and, at times, self-delusion.
My advice: take a playful approach to watching the current Musk fiasco without forming particularly strong opinions about how it’ll play out. Individuals and institutions that could be harmed by these disruptions should definitely take appropriate precautions. For the rest of us, I agree with your “wait and see” categorization of Noah’s advice. Specifically, how Democrats should respond to Trump/Musk will require identifying durable, salient harms experienced by an electorally relevant group of voters. Will take some time for that to materialize.
DOGE is like a top to bottom building rehab. The first step is to "demo" the old building. To avoid scrutiny, they're doing the demo as fast as possible. They're trying not to hit gas lines or knock down bearing walls. but the first imperative is to get the demo done before it can be stopped, so if they accidentally start a few fires or cause a partial building collapse, so be it. They're literally in "move fast and break things" mode. Sometimes big and expensive rockets explode, but they believe taking this big risk is required to achieve their objective. I think they mostly understand this aspect of the risk with DOGE, but entrepreneurs live in a world where total failure is ok and even good and unfortunately this blind-spot is showing up here.
I think they've also miscalculated on the political cost. They're moving so fast they're not able to see the political costs that are accruing. By the time these costs show up, they may have burned too much political capital to recover.
They aren't trying to hit any gas lines? Lol they fired people working on our nuclear stockpile, and fired people working on the new avian flu. They are probably leveraging a test version of Grok AI to make decisions for them, and then after realizing it is bad, they are calling people back to work. Additionally, firing thousands of people that got clearance at the Pentagon or CIA in one fell swoop surely won't expose any of them to Honeypot situations or counterintelligence right?
It doesn't matter what their intentions are, the fact of the matter is that actions and outcomes matter. The government is not a private business. Also Elon has shown a willingness to lie about the results from this initiative, call people parasites, and frankly show a level of unprofessional throughout this entire process. (DOGE website originally being empty, then not secure). I think most goodwill though won't actually happen until after the budget fight next month when they cut other programs. The one, two punch will simply be too much.
Yeah. That wasn't worded right. I edited the gas lines bit. What I meant was they're expending minimal effort to avoid gas lines, but they're ok with mistakes and big accidents.
I think they've miscalculated on the downside risks and also on the political costs, but only time will tell if it's enough to stop them from achieving their goal.
The Doge project is nothing more than actions by the Executive branch against DEI and climate change. Even Smith has pointed this out. Your analogies do not apply here.
Tesla was started by Ebehard and Tarpenning in July 2003 but didn’t have a product, design or factory deal until Musk led their first funding round in 2004.
SpaceX was started by Musk alone who recruited rocket scientists and led them to design and develop original rockets.
He did not start a hyperloop company, he came up with an open source technical proposal, which had many weak points, but he didn’t invest money in it. He did make The Boring Company, which though not a great success, does drill tunnels in Las Vegas and elsewhere.
Other companies he started are Neuralink, which has demonstrated working brain implants that allow paralyzed patients to control computers, and Xai whose latest LLM is rated above many of the other top models.
DOGE is not eliminating the federal government, it is streamlining and highlighting waste and fraud. And if USAID or DOE were completely eliminated tomorrow, the economy would not crash.
The problem is that none of the actions of Doge are legal and they don't save much money. Then entire overhead extramural spending of the NIH is a paltry $4 billion. Do the math. If the government was a private company and Elon was hired as auditor to achieve savings, he would have been fired already.
This precisely. It's embarrassing that this supposedly super numerate genius is going after ~.1% of the federal budget. He is doing his best to destroy science in this country for a negligible budgetary effect.
As the Trump wrecking crew rolls through the Executive Branch, I think the questions you need to ask are: if not government, then what? And if government, how? Trump seems to be in discovery and destruction mode now. So USAID gets wail aid. Does it need to be part of government? Not necessarily. All of it? For surely not. Private foundations like the Gates Foundation, public institutions such as the World Bank Development Corp. and private individuals do bit and pieces of the task (and w.r.t. American soft power carry an American-related brand). Are there security-related or social benefit type activities that might rightly be considered part of a reconstructed USAID but not there now? Maybe. But these things rightly belong to phase 2, after the initial pass through. Who or what experts would do this important task. I don’t know (and I bet Musk doesn’t either, again. He’s an engineer, this kind of uncertainty is something he’s used to.), but I bet plenty of concerned stake-holders come forward between now and then. That’s when we need Musk’s well advertised motivational and team building powers. It looks bleak now, but it doesn’t have to be a disaster in the end. In fact it could lead to the more focused, efficient government the DOGE people say they want. In the meantime, we’re in for a rocky ride if we let this go forward. Our choice, kill it now or get on board.
Hyperloop was never intended to be a successful company. It's objective was largely marketing and idea that would politicaly destabilise the case for high speed rail in USA and reduced completion for Tesla.
California did not need Elon's help to be bad at building high-speed rail.
Elon had a big idea, and went in on it hard even though the haters said it was stupid. That's what he does, and sometimes the haters are wrong and he looks like a genius and sometimes they're right and he looks like a moron.
Yes he had a big idea, that idea was, trains work really well at moving people around emissions free. If we have trains here, they will shrink the TAM for Tesla and I will own a company that is less valuable
Yes, but, regardless, Musk and team managed this well enough that it did minimal, if any harm. Notably, he can still raise massive of capital for absurd ideas like impulsively buying Twitter at a massive makeup, without any plan. Moreover, Hyperloop may have some minimal value as proposed in that comment.
To me this is just another example of the Musk method: do something crazy and manage it well enough to avoid too much failure, and, at times, get massive upside. Even his failures have minimal downside for him and his teams.
Javier Milei was elected by the people of Argentina, at a time when inflation was reaching 100% (or more). The inflation rate in the US is ~3% and trending upwards. Elon Musk is just crazy (a mental feature common amongst those with high IQ).
You do have to account for the fact that he has said a whole bunch of extraordinarily dumb stuff about what DOGE is "discovering" over the past month or two, much of which suggests a lack of even passing familiarity with the kind of data they're supposed to be dealing with. (The claims about duplicate SSNs, or people born in 1875 still getting checks, and so on. His original claim about large numbers of 150-year-olds was likely driven by some kind of error working with dates in ISO 8601 format, and then the subsequent table of ages may have to do with _beneficiaries_ being alive long after the person based on whose earnings they benefit -- children and much-younger widows can receive survivor benefits long after somebody dies.) They've also shown a lack of competence at standing up a basic website.
Wired has been doing yeoman's work documenting this stuff.
I have no idea whether he's simply flooding the zone with sh*t and doesn't _care_ that he sounds crazy and incompetent, or if he's actually become so trapped in his K-hole, and/or the bubble of flattery in which yes-men tell him he's amazing no matter what mouth noises he makes, that he's no longer the person he was. Like: Elon of a decade ago would've asked hard questions if somebody told him the Social Security Administration was paying checks to a ton of dead people. (A friend of mine noted that the SSA actually _clawed back_ a check they'd deposited in her dad's account, because he died a day before the benefit date. The SSA _does not mess around_.) But maybe Elon of today actually believes the stuff that "wunderkinds" like Big Balls are telling him, based on having used some LLM to do a half-assed table merge.
Regardless, _something_ is wrong here. Certainly it's not safe to _assume_ that he's become less competent, but it's a possibility that must be considered. Specifically, by the boards of Tesla and SpaceX. Because if he's rendered himself incompetent, they really ought to find new CEOs.
I 100% agree with you. The Elon of 10 years ago doesn't exist anymore. Not sure if he started smelling his own brand like most in the MAGA movement or if years of perceived ketamine abuse or success have driven him to be overly confident and provided him a level of hubris he didn't have before.
This is my take as well. Something is different this time around. It's not just Musk. It's the whole tech industry. I've spent 30 years as a software engineer in Silicon Valley and while there is some legitimate excitement around AI, there's also this feeling that the largest players in the industry are spent. Even with AI, their efforts are highly concentrated in the one thing they seem to still be able to do: spend huge amounts of money and scale. But that's not the same as innovating. There's a whiff of desperation to it.
I also work in tech. Half the time I agree with you that the Emperor has no clothes and we're on the verge of collapse, because the whole thing is a sham. And the other half of the time I feel like the scale and speed of our technology / AI / tools / scale is getting out of control and we're on the verge of collapse.
The Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS) is equally ruthless and exemplifies the kind of efficient bureaucracy that DOGE claims to support. Government works well in many areas—DFAS is a prime example. The real issue isn’t the routine corrections themselves, but how these routine actions are being twisted to serve a political agenda.
My father died recently and it was abundantly clear that the government's #1 priority was wiring the hospital and funeral home systems so that his Social Security payments were immediately halted. Not that there's anything wrong with that! But you'd have to be a complete moron, or Elon Musk, to think that widespread Social Security death fraud is a thing.
Yep the SSA actually did that to me with survivors’ benefits. It actually knew when I graduated high school! I was to get survivors’ benefits until 18 or finishing high school, whichever came later, and being from the South I graduated sometime in May. I got paid for June, I think it was, and spent the money. Then I got angry letters from SSA and had to come up with the $900 or they would garnish my wages.
Hey man! I have to insist that I never said Elon was incompetent. I specifically objected to the characterization of him as "High IQ." Now, I mean, in your post, you make that distinction, so maybe we don't actually disagree over that much after all.
If you want to say that Elon is very competent at spear-heading ambitious projects, OK, sure. Fine. But I actually do object to the specific claim that he's "High IQ."
And, if you'll pardon me, I actually speak from experience here. I literally worked for Tesla, where I would literally see Elon, on a daily basis, make various proposals that betrayed a basic ignorance of like High-School-Senior level math or so. Now, of course, I also saw him show tremendous leadership and be very effective at getting people to run ambitions projects. Yes. I agree.
So, if you'll willing to accept a truce: I agree that Elon is very competent at what he does. Yes. I agree. I nevertheless will continue to object to the *specific claim* that he's High IQ.
That’s semantics, though, right? Because usually on the internet, people will use “high-iq” and “low-iq” in a more general way to praise or denigrate someone. The masses on Twitter are not saying “yes, Elon is smart and good at building businesses, but his IQ probably isn’t too high”. They either say “Musk is a low-IQ idiot” or “Musk is our high-IQ god who will single-handedly rescue the US government, develop AGI, and get us to Alpha Centauri”. They use IQ as a proxy for general competence, and Musk is not incompetent. So it is dangerous as Noah says to say that Musk’s IQ is not high, because it means we underestimate him.
Also, I do somewhat doubt that anyone who completes a PHD in physics has an IQ of less than 120.
He has better things to think about than high school math and these skills decay without constant use. He has minions for that sort of work. As for evidence of book smarts, even Stanford undergrads average +2 sigma; admits to their materials science PhD program are likely around the same or higher and skewed towards mathematical intelligence.
Like most narcissists, Elon's confidence masks profound insecurity.
It's the insecurity, even more than the confidence, that is the engine of his success. A better-adjusted person would have rested on their laurels by now. I've known a number of highly successful people and they all seem to display this trait -- the grandiosity and neediness. Trump is perhaps the best example.
So his pretenses and LARPing are all part of that insecurity.
I can tell you with certainty that you can understand the math while no longer being able to do the math. I remember the concepts from three semesters of calculus from 20+ years ago, but I couldn’t do anything more than simple derivation and integration at this point because I haven’t used it since.
So you disagree that either SAT scores correlate with IQ, or that Elon didn’t actually score 1400 in the late 1980s. Note that the College Board recalibrated scoring in 1995 so scores after that date are not comparable with earlier scores. I scored 1360 in the late 1970s, and I don’t think I’m low IQ, but I also occasionally make stupid mistakes, as may be evident from some of my comments.
I suspect ketamine addiction, plus the classic problem of the very wealthy where they eventually let themselves be surrounded by flatterers who don't tell them uncomfortable truths, and thus lose the ability to exercise discerning judgment.
- Right-wing/groyper brain worms from marinating in that online culture
- COVID? My SATs are similar to his but I definitely got 20% dumber over a few bouts of COVID (even with the shots, kids in school mean you _will_ get every wave of every respiratory disease)
I think the events of the last 10-15 years shows that Twitter/X is an exceptionally poor platform from which to communicate any sort of subtlety in thought. It’s not what it was designed for.
The issue with Musk is that he’s not a very stable person and Trump has given him a lot of unchecked power.
While there’s no doubt that he’s a brilliant entrepreneur, compulsively lying and boosting easily verifiable falsehoods on X is not a sign of emotional maturity. Having so many kids with so many women with no desire to actually parent them is far from normal and carrying his toddler around everywhere may fool his fanboys but not anyone who has been a parent.
What he’s doing with DOGE is irresponsible and purely performative. It has absolutely nothing to do with improving efficiency. You first have to define some objective metrics to measure efficiency. Firing federal workers at random without bothering to find out what they do and taking the time to set goals and measure their performance against those goals makes it clear that improving the efficiency of these workers is not a goal for DOGE.
Let’s take the latest example of asking everyone to provide weekly status to DOGE and cc their managers. Again, his fanboys on X are defending this nonsense as normal practice, citing their years of experience in IT or tech as proof of their credibility. I have over two decades of experience in tech and while sending weekly or even daily status to your team or manager or even skip is normal, sending it to some random person who is completely disconnected from your team or organization and has no idea about your role and performance objectives while “cc-ing” your manager, is not anywhere near normal. If DOGE wants to get status reports, it should be from agency heads, not the rank and file. They should start with defining objectives and key results (OKRs) for the agency for the next month, the next quarter, the next year and then take action when those are not met. That would require putting in actual effort to understand what federal agencies and workers do but if your ideology is that all federal spending is useless, firing people at random is on brand. Just don’t call it department of government efficiency. Just call it BIACS - Bull In A China Shop or even a shorter acronym - BS.
Much government spending is useless and the people employed to spend it are redundant. If such an employee finds it impossible to reply to an email with a list five things they did at work last week, they are actually a drain on resources and should not be employed. No one actually needs to read the responses.
You may recall Musk’s five rules for efficiency, used at Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter.
I could list 5 things I did last week. However, there are a couple snags:
* There are limits on who I can tell it to. While what I work on is generally not classified, even the unclassified stuff isn't something to blab about to outsiders until it's vetted. There are, for example, unclassified technical reports that are only supposed to be distributed to DoD personnel; they aren't supposed to be read even by *government* people outside of DoD.
* It's one thing to give a progress report to a supervisor or team leader who already has the background to know what kind of job one does. It's another thing to give a progress report to someone who doesn't know oneself from Adam and has no context and no clue about the job requirements or the technical background involved.
All of this applies to Trump, too - you see this "Trump/Elon dumb" meme everywhere, at best it's misguided copium, and at worst it's just downright dangerous. The man utterly dominated the GOP to successfully win the world's highest office, twice, and frankly regardless of his IQ or mental capacity - he's kicked the absolute shit out of everyone in his way. Getting wrapped up in "orange man bad" or whatever it is is a waste, through and through - forget the name calling and point scoring and fucking focus on beating him if you want to win.
I think words like "smart" and "dumb" elide more than they reveal. It's more that Elon (and Trump) have a set of traits that are extremely helpful in some ways and extremely unhelpful in others. I think it's indisputable that Trump is better at building power in the GOP than anyone else has ever been. It's also indisputably true that his administration is very badly run in chaos, confusion, and infighting, in ways that stymie his goals and hurt him politically. He doesn't have to be a super-genius or a super-doofus, he can just be good at some things and bad at others.
Keep in mind, Seth Abramson is the left-wing Twitter-version of the National Inquirer. If he can’t dig up a narrative, he’ll make one up.
But yes, liberals should not underestimate Elon Musk.
He is smart and capable, in addition to being ruthless, fanatical, and vengeful, really to the point of obsession. The long-term damage he’s already done to small-l liberalism so far should give them pause.
I would quibble with one thing, though: Elon’s talent for building world-beating revolutionary companies in futuristic industries do not necessarily translate to “reinventing government”. Or, even, building an impregnable dictatorship.
He’s shown no talent so far for “public sector reform” per se. Only destroying it and the people who work in it.
In contrast to his ability to recruit and empower talented engineers for his companies, it’s clear he sees government employees largely as stupid, incompetent, evil cartoons.
Conservatives applaud that, but his actions on that front seem to have gone well beyond any demonstration of “ability” or even “ruthlessness” on his part, more just malice and vengeance.
And that seems a mistake, even by his own measures. It’s one thing to beat hell out of global competitors at success in complicated tech industries. It’s quite another to beat hell out of the United States government, and its voters. One is hard; the other is, shall we say, unwise.
Don’t get me wrong. Liberals, again, should not underestimate Elon Musk. If for no other reason than this:
If he does not succeed in blocking MAGA’s opponents from power permanently, he will almost certainly end up in jail or exile. He, at least, believes that, and will act with according desperation, for the next four years.
However, I do not believe liberals should, and will not advise liberals to, fear that Elon will build a techtopia that Americans will genuinely like and approve of.
He has demonstrated no ability to do that. For all his talent, he is no government visionary. It is far easier to destroy political systems than build them; it takes not so much “talent” as malevolence, of which Elon contains oceans.
Yeah for sure. Trump was probably going to pardon him anyway, but I think part of the reason why all of a sudden they are saying Elon has no access to DOGE data or doing anything is because he is running afoul of state laws and protections. I also believe Elon when he says that he will dump a lot of money in the midterms to try and hold on to his power now. Let's face it. Elon can spend half a billion a year on politics and that's a drop in the bucket for him.
Pardons do not apply to state crimes or civil crimes. The president cannot protect him from consequences there.
The president also cannot protect SpaceX or xAI from being nationalized by a future administration on national security grounds. Or Elon from being booted out of Tesla by a future SEC.
All of which will almost certainly happen if any future non-MAGA president takes power.
A pardon is a band-aid on that, at best. Elon knows it, and is likely already planning accordingly.
He has been a great entrepreneur, but stop the fan boy act. He weaponized Twitter and has public employees demoralized. Also he tries to create this mythical image by lying. He lies about the saves he makes and even about something as lame as gaming. The main thing here is that he is evil. He only cares about his objectives and gives zero Fs about what happens to people.
Walter Isaacson's biography of Musk feels episodic and trite to me. It mainly presents Musk's rightward political turn without deep criticism or pushback. Still, it offers valuable insights for anyone curious about Musk's life and ambitions. I can say whatever I want about Musk, but this is his primary driver ==>The man wants to go to Mars. Everything he does revolves around this. The government was an impediment to his goals. Tesla is a side gig. So, too, is Starlink.
His political transformation isn't typical age-drawn conservativism. He sees government as an instrumental tool to achieve his goals. People lose sight of the fact that he is focused on DOGE right now, but he will be largely done in two years and entirely done once he understands the mid-terms, depending on how the resistance to his chainsaw plays in the court, in the midterms and the streets. He will recalibrate. He does not fear being wrong or failure. That is his (and that of science and technology) greatest method for innovation and success. He also has incredible focus.
Musk says stupid things for different reasons, sometimes to try them out. Your post is on point. His value is Mars.
Tim
More reading to understand Musk requires an understanding of Iian Banks's Culture series and Heinlein's The Man Who Sold The Moon.
I have no idea what is next for Musk, but I am confindent his body will be buried on Mars, or maybe abandoned there. We will see.
It's entirely possible that breaking the world economy, the US government, and scientific research, might set back Mars colonization a bit. Just saying.
I've long seen Elon as a ends justify the means personality and he wants to get to Mars at any cost and views government as something that limits him. However, his behavior over the last decade has shown that his ego seems to be getting bigger and bigger and he hasn't quite understood how much people that are regular humans in America and the world require the US government to function. He is so far out of touch with a lot of things. But I do believe he'll launch himself to Mars at some point before his death. Or Trump to upload himself to Twitter and rant and rave for all time.
I think this is a good argument against the Strong Elon Incompetence theory, which is that Elon was always stupid.
But the Weak Elon Incompetence theory, which I think is much more commonly believed, is that Elon has simply deteriorated. He's an addict and Twitter is the equivalent of buying a mountain of cocaine and now he's completely buried himself in it at the expense of everything else. All of the manic energy that went into obsessively building Tesla and SpaceX is now dedicated to his true addiction, shitposting on the platform he owns and livestreaming a cruel and pointless destruction of the US government for his fans.
Smart people can often be modeled as stupid when they're in the throes of their addiction with no one to stop them. It's a tale as old as time for geniuses of all kinds. And the idea that "Elon will constantly make stupid decisions because he's addicted to the thrill of posting to his cruel right-wing mob" doesn't play out that differently from "Elon is stupid" in practice. Maybe the man who walked into Twitter HQ with that sink a few years ago really was the stable genius Elon claims to be, but his behavior now is that of an addict with no one to tell him no. And addicts, however intelligent they may have once been, tend to crash in predictable ways.
For reference, as of the time of this post, Elon has posted on X 220 times in the last 24 hours. That's 9 posts per hour, not counting his replies.
This is not the behavior of a genius driving the world forward, it's the behavior of a drug addict. The things he's doing don't stem from rational choices, they stem from a desire to get more of the drug.
But the drug isn't a physical drug. Elon is addicted to the high that comes from making a post that everyone engages with. He's not destroying the government for reasons related to anything with anything in the real world, it's all to impress his neo-nazi fanbase and continue to get his fix. His only policy commitment is to be as "based" as possible, according to the social media platform that he owns.
The smarts of Musk whether High IQ-enabled or not doesn't prevent him from echoing Russian propaganda and viewpoints. And since he now is in a leading U.S. government position this is not very smart.
Look man i read this and you’re right. But what a lot of people are noticing with Elon is the *rate* at which he says and quite frankly does stupid things *given* all of his great accomplishments. And yes let’s be honest he was helped with gov subsidies for Tesla, though to be fair to him he took advantage of it like nobody else was doing. So credit there.
But again what makes him odd is how much higher he hits above his intellectual weight when it comes to stupid things he says.
It’s also probably a mistake to assume he can figure out something like the fed gov. It’s orders of magnitude way more complicated than Tesla or spacex. But we’ll see. Maybe he’ll figure it out and everyone will grow to love him and he will be reverred. It is possible I’m wrong. But Noah he’s already making enemies over doge in the *right* amount Trump voters he’s hurting. I’ll be surprised if I’m wrong here.
There's a disease that is common among, well, physics people actually, that everything is easy to understand. There's an xkcd about it ("why does your field even need an entire journal?") Being rich makes this effect worse of course.
Trump rolling back CAFE increases and EV targets will hit Tesla’s wallet. Other companies pay them billions annually to buy “credits” to meet the targets. It is not just about consumer subsidies to buy EVs.
No, it was the State Department and the order was placed last year, when Joe Biden was president.
Based on available information, the State Department’s procurement forecast for fiscal year 2025, initially released in December 2024 (during the Biden administration), included a line item for $400 million worth of “Armored Tesla (Production Units).” This led to widespread speculation that the vehicles in question were Cybertrucks, given their stainless steel design and Elon Musk’s claims about their durability. However, no specific model was confirmed in the document, and it was not a finalized order but rather a planning foreca
Elon succeeds lots _and_ fails lots. It's just the successes are so huge they justify plenty of failures. The Boring Company and Hyperloop are dead in the water, but who cares when SpaceX and PayPal are practically institutions? Elon's gift is batting-average success, where you're brilliant even if you only hit one in several pitches, as long as your hits are home runs.
As for DOGE, I'm expecting the US government to be like Twitter for Elon: a failure if you're scoring actual improvements in the core product, but a brilliant success at giving him personal power.
One of the interesting things quoted about him in "Scout Mindset": apparently he believed ex ante that Paypal had a ~10% chance of success. This was pushing back against the idea that startup founders need to be irrationally confident.
1. This underrates the role luck played in his success. Yeah, he's smart, but he's been hit on the ass with a rainbow a number of times.
2. Government is not business.
3. I think the evidence that he's currently nowhere near his best is pretty strong. Aside from his very public weirdness, Tesla is not in very good shape right now despite the various dog and pony shows he's put on.
IDK, with PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, and now xAI, I'm not sure I believe in lightning striking four times.
I can't help but notice the omission of "twitter" on that list.
Or the way Noah conveniently ignores his much government subsidies from the Obama era also helped Solar City, SpaceX and Tesla. Also he didn't build all of these companies from scratch. He bought some of them.
In reality though, I don't discount Trump or Elon as dumb, and frankly I'm agnostic to their actual IQ. I've seen people online claim that Trump has a 130 IQ, and I got a 1390 on my SAT the first time I took it, and I'm certainly not a genius.
That said, it doesn't matter what someone's money is or talents, the fact is that Elon has the air and leverage of the most power man in the world and can do and has done a lot of harm with his platform and access that he has thus far. I can't imagine this will get better this far. To speak on my personal experience, I've met lots of smart scientists that are excellent at drug discovery and development in my life, but they can't get a drug from a lab to market, but I've met wall street guys that can make a company profitable and help get a drug to market, but they have no R&D skills. Humans work best when we use our specialized skills together, not when we all think we are Bruce Wayne, Tony Stark, or Elon Musk...
Yeah. I don't think Elon is like, stupid-stupid. I think he is an adept navigator of systems -- namely, capturing them. Doesn't mean what he does with that is remotely intelligent, and if you're claiming that your core competency is efficiency, it's very easy to mask shit outcomes. I also could run many things efficiently into the ground and, with enough money, spread the risk around to launder my reputation.
Musk and Trump qualify as complementary evil geniuses who are changing American economic and political life. Simultaneously, Musk purchased Trump for $280 million, and he wants to get his money's worth.
I dunno, I'm starting to think online progressives might be advised to consider this perspective as it relates to a lot of the mouth-breathers who make typos in their Tweets, yet nonetheless seem to be mysteriously falling upward over and over again.
Inheriting the equivalent of $500 million from his Daddy didn't hurt. Even Elon didn't inherit a silver spoon THAT big.
If he hadn't made a further $500 million pretending to be a fabulously successful businessman on TV, Trump's bankruptcies would've ruined him.
TWR,
Twitter is Elon's greatest achievement - to date (ask me next quarter and I will have a different answer.) To argue otherwise is to miss the point and the danger of Noah's thesis. Musk is not dumb. He is dangerous. Xitter plays a fundamental role in Musk's relationship with intellectual elites and media censorship. He's played X like a fiddle, shaping discourse and orchestrating censorship to serve his ambitions.
Tim
Yep! And Twitter exemplifies the Musk method well. This was an impulsive purchase (possibly on a Ketamine trip?) that he then tried to escape through aggressive litigation based on a flimsy-at-best legal strategy. After being forced to complete the purchase, Musk made rapid, aggressive changes that massively disrupted the business—numerous critics assumed it would quickly fail and be repossessed by its creditors. Yet he and his team stabilized it well enough.
Musk then parlayed that crap asset into serious political power within the MAGA movement and eventually intertwined himself closely with Trump and his team. He now has the ability to massively disrupt the federal administrative state in ways that none of us can fully appreciate.
This demonstrates how Musk and his team operate in aggressive, risky, and capable ways —with rapid adjustments as needed—to win in highly unpredictable outcomes.
There may be parts of the federal government that can be improved via the "Musk method" - making aggressive moves, seeing what works and doesn't work, adjusting in real time. However, unlike Silicon Valley, there are areas in government where this won't work. Take national security for example. The enemy only needs to be right once; those in charge of national security need to be right all the time. Musks' attitude that any existing process or regulation should be "default gone" and added back if its proven to be necessary gives hostile actors a massive attack surface. This should worry us all.
I agree that DOGE is unlikely to work towards improving government efficiency or effectiveness using any metrics that would be appreciated by Noah and his subscriber community, including myself. Yet, I think that is irrelevant to the general concern about Musk, et al. likely having a large, disruptive impact on federal state capacity. Moreover, they may be more focused on breaking certain functions they find displeasing (eg, the CFPB and the EPA) and branding that as “efficiency” for better optics.
Yes, they may fail to achieve a reasonable interpretation of their stated aims. Yet, Trump, Musk, and other MAGA-affiliated individuals may be pleased with their outcome nonetheless. Hopefully we can convince enough voters to be angry at their actions.
Musk has also purchased Trump for $280 million.
Not to mention that he did dump something like 80% of Twitter's workers and the company continued to function about the same as before. I'm sure he thinks about that when considering the federal bureaucracy.
Yeah, but mis-/dis-information is the norm there. The Fourth Estate was supposed to be the place the Founders intended Americans get informed. Not hopelessly confused and misled.
Wait, hold my beer please, there's some illegal Haitians out back eating my dogs...!!
See Walter Issacson's biography of Elon Musk for further details.
Yep. The point of Twitter was to manipulate the electorate, not to be a profit center, though it may yet end up being one.
It didn't "work out." Musk made it work out. Even if we do stipulate that Musk fucked up the Twitter deal (if nothing else he did probably overpay), it seems odd to argue that parlaying a suboptimal business acquisition into a role as the US president's majordomo is some kind of point *against* his competence.
With the latest release of Grok, the latest funding round for X and Xai (which are combined) is at $44 billion which is the price Elon was forced to pay for Twitter after his impulse buy. He’s fired lots of deadwood employees, but rebuilt value by improving the product, hiring AI scientists and building a giant data center for Grok training, which benefits also from training on all the posts made on X.
I think the rest of your points are valid but I don’t see how Elon improved the product at Twitter. It seems substantial worse to me.
Not my experience at all. I still follow Noah, Matt Yglesias and all kinds of smart, opinionated people. I honestly don't know what you're talking about. Are you even a user? Or just repeating the conventional wisdom?
Not if you're a neo-Nazi, looking for dirt on those evil baby-murdering Dems!
I just saw an article speculating that Twitter’s valuation is now what Musk bought it at.
Failure doesn't count against success in business. Failure is the default option. Someone who is 1-4 at starting businesses is way ahead of anyone who is 0-0.
Not really sure what you're talking about here as I am talking about business owners and not employees. There is more accountability for a business owner than just about any other job.
To their credit, that platform is still up and running.
The Twitter purchase was a success if you look at influence instead of profits.
That Tesla and SpaceX had near-death experiences is a matter of record.
And Giving him credit for xAi? That is extraordinarily premature.
> That Tesla and SpaceX had near-death experiences is a matter of record.
Yep, luck works both ways—both good and bad—and Musk, et al. have managed it well enough to keep his projects alive and, at times, thriving.
> And Giving him credit for xAi? That is extraordinarily premature.
While much of xAI is still a hot mess, the general consensus seems to be that they’ve built a state-of-the-art model on par with the offerings from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and other leading firms. It is noteworthy how quickly they’ve caught, primarily by spending massive amounts of capital. That alone is impressive and it puts them in the race to win considerable market share in some parts of the GenAI product and infrastructure space.
For an extensive overview of the initial impressions of xAI from a diverse range of credible participants see, https://thezvi.substack.com/p/go-grok-yourself
Building something vaguely on par with the already saturated market with a tainted brand sounds like someone just wasted a lot of money
Tesla would have gone bankrupt if not for Obama’s loan. PayPal he was one of a few people and not the most important. What is xAI a leader in? Twitter he torched ~$40B in value (must be nice to be filthy rich!) and is now trying to strong arm advertisers to make up for it. SpaceX I will give you. Not taking sides just trying to be accurate. Elon did not literally make all not these companies by himself with no assistance only sheer genius and hard work.
This is a strawman. Noah and other commentators are not claiming Musk founded all of these companies or did all the work single-handedly. But the point stands that he is the most successful business creator and developer of our time. He lies a fair amount and seems like he has issues, but that’s not the point here.
He's a risk taker. Elon loves risk. He doubles down on it. The default for risk-takers is failure. He has succeeded more often than he has failed. The blamestorming here is pure cope.
Henry Ford was notoriously racist and anti-Semitic. Prescott Bush was a Nazi sympathizer.
Thanks, Obama! Then Musk wrangling mismanaged by Biden.
Agreed, but his success with Tesla & SpaceX made him overconfident.
As a result he's loosing focus. Every VC in the Valley keeps telling fresh founders to focus at all costs. Elon is now involved in a billion initiatives, imperilling the success of everything he built up for...whatever he's up to.
Tesla still has a P/E ratio of 180. Doesn't anyone here know how to spell BUBBLE? Wonder how he's gonna genius his way out of that one...
Many have shorted Tesla. All have failed. Keep predicting, eventually you'll be right. Pure mood affiliation - you can't stand the guy and reason backwards to show how he will fail.
No, I think Elon is an incredibly talented guy. And quite cunning, far as I can tell. But I personally believe the stock market in general is overvalued, and Tesla perhaps the most overvalued stock of all at 180 P/E. It's in the nature of bubbles to pop. Irregardless of personal feelings.
I agree completely. So does Warren Buffett. He never owned Tesla, but he's been dumping Apple stock for the last year and piling into cash.
Funny how everyone talks about Tesla but nobody talks about Apple. Apple is benign, Tesla is evil, even though they're both part of the overvalued tech bubble. That's the mood affiliation piece. Find your villain, work backwards.
I have to laugh at your use of the word cunning. It's what one half of what people call a Russell conjugate: a pair of words with the same meaning but opposite connotations. Steve Jobs was intelligent, Elon Musk is cunning. The guy can't win.
Currently reading Isaacson's biography, I think the initial point isn't as invalid as I would have previously assumed based on his track record. Tesla nearly went bankrupt during the Great Recession, and largely on account of Musk's own dubious design decisions that made the Tesla Roadster much more expensive than initially projected (though the game-saving bailout from Daimler was impressive and Musk's own doing). Musk's heart and soul were always clearly in SpaceX, and in my view the achievement there is truly monumental, but even so, the first three tests were a failure - in part a consequence of the breakneck speed that Musk set - and would have also probably gone under had the PayPal mafia not bailed him out as a favor for driving him out of PayPal.
So I suspect there are plenty of alternate timelines - perhaps the majority of them - in which SpaceX and Tesla went under, and his net worth ends up in the $100Ms, not the $100Bs, by 2025.
It remains to be seen what happens with xAI. X hype aside, it comes off as far behind OpenAI, and at best level pegging with the half dozen other near-frontier models.
XAI? I suppose it’s impressive that they got their data centers for training set up quickly, but do they actually do anything particularly well? They’re inferior to ChatGPT on reasoning, Claude on prose, Deepseek on costs, etc. the only thing grok has going for it is the lack of content restrictions
Tesla is a walking meme, its valuation never made any sense. it makes even less sense now
they have legitimately zero significant advantages vs the rest of the market. And what they do have now is an atrocious brand image that a large portion of western consumers dont want to touch
You mean except for 85% of the American conservative consumers who voted Trump/GOP into their current trifecta?
Conservatives are not exactly a prime market for EV vehicles. And, specially, american conservatives can't make up for reduced worldwide sales, even if they were to miraculously and hypocritically start buying EVs en masse.
The problem is also that Tesla is now facing very aggressive competition, and ,as i mentioned, does not have a significant product edge on any aspect. Every big european manufacturer now has EVs with similar range to Teslas, and the build quality of a mercedes is not even comparable to the shoddy stuff tesla gets away with. They've also beaten tesla to the affordable entry market, for which tesla has literally zero options for sale.
The main point is that they need as many people of all ilks as they can get if they want to make their valuation make any remote sense going forward, tainting the brand with a large amount of the worlwide public is going to cost the company.
If you’ve listened to Elon on Tesla calls, he’s not trying to be an EV company. People also compared Amazon to Barnes and Noble.
The data collected from cars on the road is their competitive advantage. And their people. Their strategy to avoid costly cameras is another. If these pan out, Tesla will be ok. It’s an IF but it’s always an IF with Elon’s strategy.
None of those companies are illegal, doge is.
Correlated probabilities!
Somebody writing about Louis Pasteur noted that Pasteur lucked into discoveries that revolutionized biology ... about every five years.
Why shouldn't lightning strike four times?
NeuraLink is also amazing. Paraplegics can now move things just by thinking.
On the left, this business of quoting someone's IQ, SAT and ACT scores etc to infer the sum total of intelligence or abilities is equally as abhorrent when people on the Right use it for racist (even eugenic) reasons. I was irked a bit when you started by quoting his SAT scores etc. -- a very slippery slope -- but was relieved when you made the bigger point about someone's total abilities and what they accomplish or can accomplish, irrespective of those scores.
Why don’t those engineers run those companies?
"Government is not business."
The number of highly intelligent business leaders I've met that don't understand this never fails to astonish me.
FWIW, I've run businesses, a couple government agencies, an NGO plus volunteer orgs.
IMO, businesses are the least challenging category to manage. There are many overlapping skills, but also some distinct ones.
I’m one of the dumb people who worries too much about our deficit so I’m watching the goings on with some mixed emotions. Given your cross experience, I’m curious if you feel there is any room for zero based budgeting in the government?
Government should fill the gaps in the economy in a manner that is exactly juxtaposed to the private sector economy—consequently, the opposite of zero based budgeting. When the economy is bad, government should step in and spend whatever it takes to get to full employment; when the economy is good, government should extract whatever it takes in taxes to prevent inflation. The problem is while sometimes we do the former, we never do the later.
The Debt is a historical accounting which isn’t very meaningful to a country that can print money, unlike a business. The deficit can promote employment and/or cause inflation. But we should never lose sight of the fact that, unlike a business which may want to tighten its belt or borrow based on its particular needs, in an economy, one person’s spending is another’s income and vice versa. Too paraphrases Keynes, what ever we can do, we can afford. Government should never prevent a man with a shovel from digging a useful hole because of numbers on a spreadsheet.
Thank you for your thoughtful response. I don't think that ability to print money is without massive risk. Inflation is the biggest tax to ordinary people and quite destructive and you can see this in country after country. When politicians do not have the will to raise taxes directly, they can just resort to debasing their currency. I respectively disagree with your Keynesian framework that Topmen have the wisdom to step in and do the right thing. Yes debt levels don't matter. Until they do. And then it is too late. Agree to disagree.
Inflation is a big risk. But when you have an economy in recession or depression, printing money isn’t as risky as an economy that isn’t producing and has people sitting idle while they lose their houses and savings. Printing money needs to be managed—usually by taxing that money back out of the economy (which we are often reluctant todo).
A good example is COViD. People forget that we had 25% unemployment and the markets absolutely crashed in March of 2020–until we printed $3T to hand out to people. That, plus other stimulus, plus supply shortfalls led to 20% inflation over the next few years. Was that bad? Yes. Cost democrats the election. Was it as bad as the depression we would have had without printing that money? Not by a long shot (though if Pelosi had done nothing, Trump would have taken the blame and a Republican couldn’t have won for a generation). It’s also worth noting that the Debt burden (Debt to GDP) actually went down under Biden because of the inflation. At the end of the day we had a Goldilocks economy with low inflation and low unemployment.
However, now we are looking at tax cuts in a strong economy which will certainly lead to inflation. Fiat currency is a great power and with that power comes great responsibility—which does not seem to be the current administration’s strong suit.
I think one of the problems we're running into with Keynesian economics is that when the economy is bad or there's a systemic shock that needs government support (Great Financial Crisis, Great Recession, Covid, etc.), it works very well, both in theory and in practice. That part is great.
But in the good economy times it seems nobody is willing to repay that debt, so it just stacks up indefinitely. As Noah has written many times, 2024 was a record-breaking good economic year for the US in many ways, but we still racked up an extra $1.83 trillion dollars of deficit. The last time we had a budget surplus that repaid any debt was the Clinton years in the 90s! It looks like politically we just lack the will to repay the other half of the Keynesian promise.
If we don't just outgrow this as we did with WW2 or cold war debt, this seems like we're headed for a dark place. But I'm not an economist; would be interested to read Noah's analysis on the debt and CBO projections.
Thank you for your thoughtful second response. Have a great day.
The answer could fill a book, or many books.
One of the key features of 'pure' zero-based-budgeting (ZBB) is that it doesn't guarantee continuity, which is an essential value of many government functions. Therefore there is limited room for some forms of ZBB as found in the private sector. It's not a coincidence that ZBB fell out of fashion in the public sector in the 1980s. That said, ZBBs value, character and outcomes are quite sensitive to what zero bases are chosen.
There are also many and varied areas of government for which ZBB would be entirely inappropriate, since government is essentially a giant insurer of last resort, and is responsible for providing society's shock absorbers.
However, there alternatives that avoid some ZBB pitfalls but share some characteristics that can be useful, such as sunsetting when applied to many-year terms.
Part of me was also thinking about sunsetting laws and neglected to mention that. Hey, I'm old and the old memory bank can be wonky. Thank you for your thoughtful response.
2. Government is not business.
I think this is the core of the reason he's going to fail, but not fail to make a mess . It's hubris. Even if you concede he's actually quite amazing given what he's done, it turns out that *no* one person can reform the federal government in two months with 30 people. It's a completely different structure, and to do it correctly, you have to actually change laws, which involves politics and Congress. The "stupidity" is that he doesn't realize this, and will simply flail about, ultimately cutting 0.2% of the budget in the most damaging way possible.
The thing is, he has often failed. And in business that's ok if your wins are big enough. In government it's not. And this hubristic pattern is visible in his failures. He tried and failed to defeat geometry with his silly tunnels. He will fail at sending anyone to Mars because of the basic physics of the problem that no amount of code can overcome. The federal government is more like geometry and physics than electric cars.
If this were a problem of building something I'd have more faith. I have no doubt if he could recreate some particular department from whole cloth it would be better than it is. But that's not the problem statement.
I actually fear more him not failing. That is, Musk succeeds at destroying the administrative state and reducing state capacity, and then his boss makes it stick by strong-arming Congress and fighting, undermining or ignoring the courts.
At that point, there's no rule of law, and no checks or balances reamaining. Only power, domination, graft and greed.
People who are commenting on the "failure" of Twitter are missing the point. For pocket change (admittedly overpaid for it) he has bought himself a major megaphone with 600M + active monthly users and 250M DAILY users. Small overpayment on Elon's part to get such a large platform from which to broadcast and compete against legacy-media. Seems brilliant, even though I personally am not a Musk fan, NoahOpinion makes all good points.
See also the book Fooled by Randomness.
Or, more succinctly:
https://xkcd.com/1827/
It's not about his competency or intelligence... The problem here is his absolute maliciousness, lack of humanity and main character syndrome.
Case in point, name one charitable cause he's championing that doesn't benefit him (ie tesla). For someone who is the richest person in the world, there are so many things he can do to help the US and the world...
Musk's maliciousness is exactly why Noah insists that people not underestimate his capabilities. The point is to counteract the damage he causes needs someone as capable, not less. Do not cope.
This whole article is a list of his companies helping the US and the world enormously, leading the charge in EV transition, building US industries and giving so many places good internet for the first time. His riches, largely ownership stakes of those companies, reflect the "help" people have received from his companies.
On the flip side, Musk doesn't seem to be a good philanthropist at all, so if he actually starts a charity it will not help nearly as much in my opinion.
Not a charity, but when a killer asteroid is about to smash into earth and end civilization, having SpaceX technology available to possibly avert it would do more than all other charities combined. All the climate alarmists screaming about existential risk may finally realize what that phrase means.
That is an important thing. But people who think about existential risk recognize that asteroids are not high on the list of important ones. We’ve gone tens of thousands of years without any significant impacts, and it’s unclear whether any impact at all in the last 64 million years would actually be an existential risk.
AI, nuclear war, and pandemics are the existential risks that are most significant right now, because, although they haven’t struck this way in millions of years either, we’ve done a lot to make them more risky.
Which is why Elon should spend his time working on Neuralink, Space X and Tesla, not pretending to be an auditor for the government.
Agree. The question of his intelligence is a straw man issue. No one can seriously doubt his native intelligence. Or, for that matter, his drive, focus and ability to push schedules. He’s great at making a technological possibility into an unlikely reality while others struggle.
Placing him at the head of a process to remake government, though, is political terrorism. Musk lacks common sense, emotional intelligence, empathy and basic decency. He has no interest in developing consensus, following the law or considering the human impact of his actions. Indeed, he cares nothing about government, democracy or values. For Trump, these are features, not bugs. He needs someone who is has no trouble sending government programs and workers to the political guillotine without a trial, evidence or second thoughts.
So I do not underestimate his intelligence or organizational abilities. Nor do I underestimate his capacity to do great harm at warp speed.
Not sure he *is* being malicious about this other than a bit of petty revenge on the FAA, CFPB and such. I think he's mostly earnest about the mission, and simply believea enough wrong things for various reasons that he'll break a bunch of stuff.
Maliciousness and earnestness easily cohabit.
Yeah, demanding that all DOD, FBI and Intelligence agency employees write up 5 bullet points on whatever top secret projects they're working on to justify their employment...is just moronic.
If they DON'T, Musk fires them. If they DO, they go to federal prison for treason.
If he were serious about the mission, he would be focusing on areas where a meaningful amount of money can be saved. Since he’s not, I feel we can safely conclude that he’s not serious about the (stated) mission.
Meh, so he's malicious. There is no scarcity of malicious people. I remember somebody writing an essay on personalities and roles in organizations and described some set as "they're sociopathic enough to make good managers".
Yes, part of it is cope. People don't like to admit that their ideological enemies are highly intelligent, much less generational geniuses.
But Elon is unique in that he has published hundreds of his innermost thoughts on the public forum that he controls -- and those thoughts are absolutely insipid.
I have never read an Elon Musk tweet that rose above an adolescent level of insight. One would expect him to be a modern-day Marcus Aurelius, sharing his musings on a wide range of topics, but without fail his comments are juvenile, shallow and poorly articulated.
He's not just a twat -- he an utterly uninteresting twat. His autism doesn't quite explain it, either. It's not just a lack of social skills, it's a complete lack of intellectual depth.
So people are forced to grapple with the question of how a generational visionary genius could be so lacking in analytical depth. Which is the real Elon -- the genius or the insipid troll?
And the answer, of course, is... both. As Stephen Jay Gould said, human intelligence is not a three-dimensional quality, like height. A human being can be brilliant in some areas and utterly shallow and mediocre in others. So Elon provides a valuable object lesson in the multivariate nature of human intelligence.
(BTW, I've met Elon several times, including a long conversation in a bar in the early 2000's... I thought he was one of the most remarkable people I'd ever met at the time. I've since gained and lost a lot of esteem for him.)
I met him once in 1993 and he was both inquisitively smart and unsettlingly weird even then.
Just to point out though he's never been formally diagnosed with autism, it's been a self diagnosis if I remember from his biography. That said even if he is on the spectrum, his posts and rants read like someone who peaked at 15, and maybe part of his personality is he just loves trolling and being contrary for the lulz...
Elon Musk bought two small companies (Tesla and SpaceX) and made them both huge through a combination of managerial skill, what we'll call creative maneuvering through government regulations, an unparalleled ability to build hype, and a few lucky breaks. He used the money from those companies to start his own companies with his own ideas like the hyperloop, which all basically failed.
Elon Musk is extremely good at hiring talented people and instilling in them a cult-like dedication to working on his ideas, and his ideas are usually big swings, and whether or not that's a good thing depends on how good the idea is. Right now, his idea is that he's America's Javier Milei and he needs to basically eliminate the federal government even though doing so will crash the economy. He's not going to make government "more efficient" and he's not trying to. It's also not clear how much his talents apply to this situation, and many of the same traits that make him so successful can be liabilities in other contexts.
> “He’s not going to make government ‘more efficient.’”
Yes, and I think Noah largely agrees. At most, there’s a ton of uncertainty about what DOGE* will actually accomplish. Maybe some of it will eventually be seen in a positive light, but I doubt Noah is optimistic.
But Musk is actually being empowered to make serious changes to the federal administrative state, and he has a history of making drastic changes. Moreover, we shouldn’t underestimate his and his team’s ability to disrupt the status quo—a theme I fear runs through these early comments that attempt to downplay his past success.
Musk is an obsessive and impulsive actor with a history of making massive changes and a track record of managing them well enough to prevent the total collapse of his projects. Moreover, he is willing to pivot rapidly in terms of tactics, narrative, and even goals. Hence, we shouldn’t delude ourselves with hopes that courts or economic disruption will foil Musk and will ultimately lead to his failure. Numerous past critics over the last decade have made similar mistakes in anticipating the demise of his earlier projects, as Noah cites throughout this article.
We don’t have to like Musk or agree with his goals to recognize that he’s a sophisticated actor with a history of making big things happen through novel, risky actions. Instead, we need to seriously consider the possibility that we may end up with a radically different federal administrative state in ways that none of us—not even Musk and his team—can currently imagine. Personally, I find any attempt to downplay that risk comparable to climate change deniers comforting themselves with an unsustainable status quo.
* I’m feeling increasingly resentful about having to refer to this meme-named group of broken toys as if it were a serious political project.
> is it actually the case that anyone is downplaying that he is likely to be disruptive, whether for good or ill?
I’m seeing a lot of attempts to downplay Musk’s past successes, though some of that may be my own bias about the broader public discourse around Musk over the last decade or so. I worry that could mislead some into a false sense of comfort. While I wouldn’t recommend stressing out about DOGE either—because Musk’s projects tend to follow an unpredictable, circuitous route—we should still recognize his and his team’s ability to make large, disruptive changes and manage their way through setbacks.
> it was implying that the things he is doing aren't going to work out because he isn't very smart
I think focusing on Musk’s intellect—or lack thereof—is an example of such a distraction-at-best way of looking at the situation. People have been citing his lack of actual business talent or relevant engineering acumen as evidence that Tesla, SpaceX, or Twitter/X would fail for roughly a decade. Musk has some capability, and while categorizing it is fine as an intellectual exercise, it’s not particularly important for appreciating the fact that he and his teams have accomplished massive, disruptive changes in unanticipated ways—due to some team-wide combination of obsession, aptitude, and, at times, self-delusion.
My advice: take a playful approach to watching the current Musk fiasco without forming particularly strong opinions about how it’ll play out. Individuals and institutions that could be harmed by these disruptions should definitely take appropriate precautions. For the rest of us, I agree with your “wait and see” categorization of Noah’s advice. Specifically, how Democrats should respond to Trump/Musk will require identifying durable, salient harms experienced by an electorally relevant group of voters. Will take some time for that to materialize.
DOGE is like a top to bottom building rehab. The first step is to "demo" the old building. To avoid scrutiny, they're doing the demo as fast as possible. They're trying not to hit gas lines or knock down bearing walls. but the first imperative is to get the demo done before it can be stopped, so if they accidentally start a few fires or cause a partial building collapse, so be it. They're literally in "move fast and break things" mode. Sometimes big and expensive rockets explode, but they believe taking this big risk is required to achieve their objective. I think they mostly understand this aspect of the risk with DOGE, but entrepreneurs live in a world where total failure is ok and even good and unfortunately this blind-spot is showing up here.
I think they've also miscalculated on the political cost. They're moving so fast they're not able to see the political costs that are accruing. By the time these costs show up, they may have burned too much political capital to recover.
They aren't trying to hit any gas lines? Lol they fired people working on our nuclear stockpile, and fired people working on the new avian flu. They are probably leveraging a test version of Grok AI to make decisions for them, and then after realizing it is bad, they are calling people back to work. Additionally, firing thousands of people that got clearance at the Pentagon or CIA in one fell swoop surely won't expose any of them to Honeypot situations or counterintelligence right?
It doesn't matter what their intentions are, the fact of the matter is that actions and outcomes matter. The government is not a private business. Also Elon has shown a willingness to lie about the results from this initiative, call people parasites, and frankly show a level of unprofessional throughout this entire process. (DOGE website originally being empty, then not secure). I think most goodwill though won't actually happen until after the budget fight next month when they cut other programs. The one, two punch will simply be too much.
Yeah. That wasn't worded right. I edited the gas lines bit. What I meant was they're expending minimal effort to avoid gas lines, but they're ok with mistakes and big accidents.
I think they've miscalculated on the downside risks and also on the political costs, but only time will tell if it's enough to stop them from achieving their goal.
The Doge project is nothing more than actions by the Executive branch against DEI and climate change. Even Smith has pointed this out. Your analogies do not apply here.
What does the indiscriminate firing of thousands of probationary employees at various government agencies have to do with DEI or climate change?
That’s not correct information.
Tesla was started by Ebehard and Tarpenning in July 2003 but didn’t have a product, design or factory deal until Musk led their first funding round in 2004.
SpaceX was started by Musk alone who recruited rocket scientists and led them to design and develop original rockets.
He did not start a hyperloop company, he came up with an open source technical proposal, which had many weak points, but he didn’t invest money in it. He did make The Boring Company, which though not a great success, does drill tunnels in Las Vegas and elsewhere.
Other companies he started are Neuralink, which has demonstrated working brain implants that allow paralyzed patients to control computers, and Xai whose latest LLM is rated above many of the other top models.
DOGE is not eliminating the federal government, it is streamlining and highlighting waste and fraud. And if USAID or DOE were completely eliminated tomorrow, the economy would not crash.
The problem is that none of the actions of Doge are legal and they don't save much money. Then entire overhead extramural spending of the NIH is a paltry $4 billion. Do the math. If the government was a private company and Elon was hired as auditor to achieve savings, he would have been fired already.
This precisely. It's embarrassing that this supposedly super numerate genius is going after ~.1% of the federal budget. He is doing his best to destroy science in this country for a negligible budgetary effect.
As the Trump wrecking crew rolls through the Executive Branch, I think the questions you need to ask are: if not government, then what? And if government, how? Trump seems to be in discovery and destruction mode now. So USAID gets wail aid. Does it need to be part of government? Not necessarily. All of it? For surely not. Private foundations like the Gates Foundation, public institutions such as the World Bank Development Corp. and private individuals do bit and pieces of the task (and w.r.t. American soft power carry an American-related brand). Are there security-related or social benefit type activities that might rightly be considered part of a reconstructed USAID but not there now? Maybe. But these things rightly belong to phase 2, after the initial pass through. Who or what experts would do this important task. I don’t know (and I bet Musk doesn’t either, again. He’s an engineer, this kind of uncertainty is something he’s used to.), but I bet plenty of concerned stake-holders come forward between now and then. That’s when we need Musk’s well advertised motivational and team building powers. It looks bleak now, but it doesn’t have to be a disaster in the end. In fact it could lead to the more focused, efficient government the DOGE people say they want. In the meantime, we’re in for a rocky ride if we let this go forward. Our choice, kill it now or get on board.
Hyperloop was never intended to be a successful company. It's objective was largely marketing and idea that would politicaly destabilise the case for high speed rail in USA and reduced completion for Tesla.
California did not need Elon's help to be bad at building high-speed rail.
Elon had a big idea, and went in on it hard even though the haters said it was stupid. That's what he does, and sometimes the haters are wrong and he looks like a genius and sometimes they're right and he looks like a moron.
Yes he had a big idea, that idea was, trains work really well at moving people around emissions free. If we have trains here, they will shrink the TAM for Tesla and I will own a company that is less valuable
More backcasting.
Yes, but, regardless, Musk and team managed this well enough that it did minimal, if any harm. Notably, he can still raise massive of capital for absurd ideas like impulsively buying Twitter at a massive makeup, without any plan. Moreover, Hyperloop may have some minimal value as proposed in that comment.
To me this is just another example of the Musk method: do something crazy and manage it well enough to avoid too much failure, and, at times, get massive upside. Even his failures have minimal downside for him and his teams.
Javier Milei was elected by the people of Argentina, at a time when inflation was reaching 100% (or more). The inflation rate in the US is ~3% and trending upwards. Elon Musk is just crazy (a mental feature common amongst those with high IQ).
You do have to account for the fact that he has said a whole bunch of extraordinarily dumb stuff about what DOGE is "discovering" over the past month or two, much of which suggests a lack of even passing familiarity with the kind of data they're supposed to be dealing with. (The claims about duplicate SSNs, or people born in 1875 still getting checks, and so on. His original claim about large numbers of 150-year-olds was likely driven by some kind of error working with dates in ISO 8601 format, and then the subsequent table of ages may have to do with _beneficiaries_ being alive long after the person based on whose earnings they benefit -- children and much-younger widows can receive survivor benefits long after somebody dies.) They've also shown a lack of competence at standing up a basic website.
Wired has been doing yeoman's work documenting this stuff.
https://www.wired.com/story/doge-incompetence-mistakes-feature-not-bug/
I have no idea whether he's simply flooding the zone with sh*t and doesn't _care_ that he sounds crazy and incompetent, or if he's actually become so trapped in his K-hole, and/or the bubble of flattery in which yes-men tell him he's amazing no matter what mouth noises he makes, that he's no longer the person he was. Like: Elon of a decade ago would've asked hard questions if somebody told him the Social Security Administration was paying checks to a ton of dead people. (A friend of mine noted that the SSA actually _clawed back_ a check they'd deposited in her dad's account, because he died a day before the benefit date. The SSA _does not mess around_.) But maybe Elon of today actually believes the stuff that "wunderkinds" like Big Balls are telling him, based on having used some LLM to do a half-assed table merge.
Regardless, _something_ is wrong here. Certainly it's not safe to _assume_ that he's become less competent, but it's a possibility that must be considered. Specifically, by the boards of Tesla and SpaceX. Because if he's rendered himself incompetent, they really ought to find new CEOs.
I 100% agree with you. The Elon of 10 years ago doesn't exist anymore. Not sure if he started smelling his own brand like most in the MAGA movement or if years of perceived ketamine abuse or success have driven him to be overly confident and provided him a level of hubris he didn't have before.
This is my take as well. Something is different this time around. It's not just Musk. It's the whole tech industry. I've spent 30 years as a software engineer in Silicon Valley and while there is some legitimate excitement around AI, there's also this feeling that the largest players in the industry are spent. Even with AI, their efforts are highly concentrated in the one thing they seem to still be able to do: spend huge amounts of money and scale. But that's not the same as innovating. There's a whiff of desperation to it.
I also work in tech. Half the time I agree with you that the Emperor has no clothes and we're on the verge of collapse, because the whole thing is a sham. And the other half of the time I feel like the scale and speed of our technology / AI / tools / scale is getting out of control and we're on the verge of collapse.
We live in interesting times!
The clawing back must be routine. My father died on the 15th of the month and they clawed back that month’s payment.
Virginia,
The Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS) is equally ruthless and exemplifies the kind of efficient bureaucracy that DOGE claims to support. Government works well in many areas—DFAS is a prime example. The real issue isn’t the routine corrections themselves, but how these routine actions are being twisted to serve a political agenda.
Tim
My father died recently and it was abundantly clear that the government's #1 priority was wiring the hospital and funeral home systems so that his Social Security payments were immediately halted. Not that there's anything wrong with that! But you'd have to be a complete moron, or Elon Musk, to think that widespread Social Security death fraud is a thing.
Yep the SSA actually did that to me with survivors’ benefits. It actually knew when I graduated high school! I was to get survivors’ benefits until 18 or finishing high school, whichever came later, and being from the South I graduated sometime in May. I got paid for June, I think it was, and spent the money. Then I got angry letters from SSA and had to come up with the $900 or they would garnish my wages.
Hey man! I have to insist that I never said Elon was incompetent. I specifically objected to the characterization of him as "High IQ." Now, I mean, in your post, you make that distinction, so maybe we don't actually disagree over that much after all.
If you want to say that Elon is very competent at spear-heading ambitious projects, OK, sure. Fine. But I actually do object to the specific claim that he's "High IQ."
And, if you'll pardon me, I actually speak from experience here. I literally worked for Tesla, where I would literally see Elon, on a daily basis, make various proposals that betrayed a basic ignorance of like High-School-Senior level math or so. Now, of course, I also saw him show tremendous leadership and be very effective at getting people to run ambitions projects. Yes. I agree.
So, if you'll willing to accept a truce: I agree that Elon is very competent at what he does. Yes. I agree. I nevertheless will continue to object to the *specific claim* that he's High IQ.
And that's that.
:-P
Wait, I didn't even see that you had said anything at all!
That’s semantics, though, right? Because usually on the internet, people will use “high-iq” and “low-iq” in a more general way to praise or denigrate someone. The masses on Twitter are not saying “yes, Elon is smart and good at building businesses, but his IQ probably isn’t too high”. They either say “Musk is a low-IQ idiot” or “Musk is our high-IQ god who will single-handedly rescue the US government, develop AGI, and get us to Alpha Centauri”. They use IQ as a proxy for general competence, and Musk is not incompetent. So it is dangerous as Noah says to say that Musk’s IQ is not high, because it means we underestimate him.
Also, I do somewhat doubt that anyone who completes a PHD in physics has an IQ of less than 120.
Ah, fair enough. Misremembered that detail. But o think the overall point still stands.
He has better things to think about than high school math and these skills decay without constant use. He has minions for that sort of work. As for evidence of book smarts, even Stanford undergrads average +2 sigma; admits to their materials science PhD program are likely around the same or higher and skewed towards mathematical intelligence.
Yes, he probably hasn’t. But like math, these are skills that decay if you don’t do them. He just larps as if he has all these skills.
Like most narcissists, Elon's confidence masks profound insecurity.
It's the insecurity, even more than the confidence, that is the engine of his success. A better-adjusted person would have rested on their laurels by now. I've known a number of highly successful people and they all seem to display this trait -- the grandiosity and neediness. Trump is perhaps the best example.
So his pretenses and LARPing are all part of that insecurity.
I can tell you with certainty that you can understand the math while no longer being able to do the math. I remember the concepts from three semesters of calculus from 20+ years ago, but I couldn’t do anything more than simple derivation and integration at this point because I haven’t used it since.
So you disagree that either SAT scores correlate with IQ, or that Elon didn’t actually score 1400 in the late 1980s. Note that the College Board recalibrated scoring in 1995 so scores after that date are not comparable with earlier scores. I scored 1360 in the late 1970s, and I don’t think I’m low IQ, but I also occasionally make stupid mistakes, as may be evident from some of my comments.
His accomplishments don't comport to his recent conduct. Perhaps something has gone wrong with him and people are interpreting that as stupidity.
I suspect ketamine addiction, plus the classic problem of the very wealthy where they eventually let themselves be surrounded by flatterers who don't tell them uncomfortable truths, and thus lose the ability to exercise discerning judgment.
Agree, and some additional possibilities:
- Right-wing/groyper brain worms from marinating in that online culture
- COVID? My SATs are similar to his but I definitely got 20% dumber over a few bouts of COVID (even with the shots, kids in school mean you _will_ get every wave of every respiratory disease)
Well stated.
The recent colossus xAI data centre spin up suggests he’s still functioning at a pretty high level (even if wildly erratic on X).
I think the events of the last 10-15 years shows that Twitter/X is an exceptionally poor platform from which to communicate any sort of subtlety in thought. It’s not what it was designed for.
The issue with Musk is that he’s not a very stable person and Trump has given him a lot of unchecked power.
While there’s no doubt that he’s a brilliant entrepreneur, compulsively lying and boosting easily verifiable falsehoods on X is not a sign of emotional maturity. Having so many kids with so many women with no desire to actually parent them is far from normal and carrying his toddler around everywhere may fool his fanboys but not anyone who has been a parent.
What he’s doing with DOGE is irresponsible and purely performative. It has absolutely nothing to do with improving efficiency. You first have to define some objective metrics to measure efficiency. Firing federal workers at random without bothering to find out what they do and taking the time to set goals and measure their performance against those goals makes it clear that improving the efficiency of these workers is not a goal for DOGE.
Let’s take the latest example of asking everyone to provide weekly status to DOGE and cc their managers. Again, his fanboys on X are defending this nonsense as normal practice, citing their years of experience in IT or tech as proof of their credibility. I have over two decades of experience in tech and while sending weekly or even daily status to your team or manager or even skip is normal, sending it to some random person who is completely disconnected from your team or organization and has no idea about your role and performance objectives while “cc-ing” your manager, is not anywhere near normal. If DOGE wants to get status reports, it should be from agency heads, not the rank and file. They should start with defining objectives and key results (OKRs) for the agency for the next month, the next quarter, the next year and then take action when those are not met. That would require putting in actual effort to understand what federal agencies and workers do but if your ideology is that all federal spending is useless, firing people at random is on brand. Just don’t call it department of government efficiency. Just call it BIACS - Bull In A China Shop or even a shorter acronym - BS.
Much government spending is useless and the people employed to spend it are redundant. If such an employee finds it impossible to reply to an email with a list five things they did at work last week, they are actually a drain on resources and should not be employed. No one actually needs to read the responses.
You may recall Musk’s five rules for efficiency, used at Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter.
1. Question all requirements
2.Delete all unnecessary components
3. Simplify and optimize
4. Accelerate cycle time
5. Automate
DOGE is now on step 2.
“No one actually needs to read the responses. “
I stopped taking you seriously after this line although I should have taken the cue from “much government spending is useless”.
I could list 5 things I did last week. However, there are a couple snags:
* There are limits on who I can tell it to. While what I work on is generally not classified, even the unclassified stuff isn't something to blab about to outsiders until it's vetted. There are, for example, unclassified technical reports that are only supposed to be distributed to DoD personnel; they aren't supposed to be read even by *government* people outside of DoD.
* It's one thing to give a progress report to a supervisor or team leader who already has the background to know what kind of job one does. It's another thing to give a progress report to someone who doesn't know oneself from Adam and has no context and no clue about the job requirements or the technical background involved.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1893662355382263905?s=46
A pathological liar and a sociopath, just like Trump.
All of this applies to Trump, too - you see this "Trump/Elon dumb" meme everywhere, at best it's misguided copium, and at worst it's just downright dangerous. The man utterly dominated the GOP to successfully win the world's highest office, twice, and frankly regardless of his IQ or mental capacity - he's kicked the absolute shit out of everyone in his way. Getting wrapped up in "orange man bad" or whatever it is is a waste, through and through - forget the name calling and point scoring and fucking focus on beating him if you want to win.
I think words like "smart" and "dumb" elide more than they reveal. It's more that Elon (and Trump) have a set of traits that are extremely helpful in some ways and extremely unhelpful in others. I think it's indisputable that Trump is better at building power in the GOP than anyone else has ever been. It's also indisputably true that his administration is very badly run in chaos, confusion, and infighting, in ways that stymie his goals and hurt him politically. He doesn't have to be a super-genius or a super-doofus, he can just be good at some things and bad at others.
Like you can be amazing at sales and marketing but terrible at building a product. They are different skills and aptitudes.
The Orange Man is in fact bad. His political genius is a product of his psychopathy.
Keep in mind, Seth Abramson is the left-wing Twitter-version of the National Inquirer. If he can’t dig up a narrative, he’ll make one up.
But yes, liberals should not underestimate Elon Musk.
He is smart and capable, in addition to being ruthless, fanatical, and vengeful, really to the point of obsession. The long-term damage he’s already done to small-l liberalism so far should give them pause.
I would quibble with one thing, though: Elon’s talent for building world-beating revolutionary companies in futuristic industries do not necessarily translate to “reinventing government”. Or, even, building an impregnable dictatorship.
He’s shown no talent so far for “public sector reform” per se. Only destroying it and the people who work in it.
In contrast to his ability to recruit and empower talented engineers for his companies, it’s clear he sees government employees largely as stupid, incompetent, evil cartoons.
Conservatives applaud that, but his actions on that front seem to have gone well beyond any demonstration of “ability” or even “ruthlessness” on his part, more just malice and vengeance.
And that seems a mistake, even by his own measures. It’s one thing to beat hell out of global competitors at success in complicated tech industries. It’s quite another to beat hell out of the United States government, and its voters. One is hard; the other is, shall we say, unwise.
Don’t get me wrong. Liberals, again, should not underestimate Elon Musk. If for no other reason than this:
If he does not succeed in blocking MAGA’s opponents from power permanently, he will almost certainly end up in jail or exile. He, at least, believes that, and will act with according desperation, for the next four years.
However, I do not believe liberals should, and will not advise liberals to, fear that Elon will build a techtopia that Americans will genuinely like and approve of.
He has demonstrated no ability to do that. For all his talent, he is no government visionary. It is far easier to destroy political systems than build them; it takes not so much “talent” as malevolence, of which Elon contains oceans.
“ If he does not succeed in blocking MAGA’s opponents from power permanently, he will almost certainly end up in jail or exile.”
He will be preemptively pardoned. Thanks, Joe.
Yeah for sure. Trump was probably going to pardon him anyway, but I think part of the reason why all of a sudden they are saying Elon has no access to DOGE data or doing anything is because he is running afoul of state laws and protections. I also believe Elon when he says that he will dump a lot of money in the midterms to try and hold on to his power now. Let's face it. Elon can spend half a billion a year on politics and that's a drop in the bucket for him.
Pardons do not apply to state crimes or civil crimes. The president cannot protect him from consequences there.
The president also cannot protect SpaceX or xAI from being nationalized by a future administration on national security grounds. Or Elon from being booted out of Tesla by a future SEC.
All of which will almost certainly happen if any future non-MAGA president takes power.
A pardon is a band-aid on that, at best. Elon knows it, and is likely already planning accordingly.
He has been a great entrepreneur, but stop the fan boy act. He weaponized Twitter and has public employees demoralized. Also he tries to create this mythical image by lying. He lies about the saves he makes and even about something as lame as gaming. The main thing here is that he is evil. He only cares about his objectives and gives zero Fs about what happens to people.
1. The question remains not his skills but his values. 2. If he is so capable/ smart, why does he say so many dumb/wrong things?
Robert,
Walter Isaacson's biography of Musk feels episodic and trite to me. It mainly presents Musk's rightward political turn without deep criticism or pushback. Still, it offers valuable insights for anyone curious about Musk's life and ambitions. I can say whatever I want about Musk, but this is his primary driver ==>The man wants to go to Mars. Everything he does revolves around this. The government was an impediment to his goals. Tesla is a side gig. So, too, is Starlink.
His political transformation isn't typical age-drawn conservativism. He sees government as an instrumental tool to achieve his goals. People lose sight of the fact that he is focused on DOGE right now, but he will be largely done in two years and entirely done once he understands the mid-terms, depending on how the resistance to his chainsaw plays in the court, in the midterms and the streets. He will recalibrate. He does not fear being wrong or failure. That is his (and that of science and technology) greatest method for innovation and success. He also has incredible focus.
Musk says stupid things for different reasons, sometimes to try them out. Your post is on point. His value is Mars.
Tim
More reading to understand Musk requires an understanding of Iian Banks's Culture series and Heinlein's The Man Who Sold The Moon.
I have no idea what is next for Musk, but I am confindent his body will be buried on Mars, or maybe abandoned there. We will see.
It's entirely possible that breaking the world economy, the US government, and scientific research, might set back Mars colonization a bit. Just saying.
Great post Tim.
I've long seen Elon as a ends justify the means personality and he wants to get to Mars at any cost and views government as something that limits him. However, his behavior over the last decade has shown that his ego seems to be getting bigger and bigger and he hasn't quite understood how much people that are regular humans in America and the world require the US government to function. He is so far out of touch with a lot of things. But I do believe he'll launch himself to Mars at some point before his death. Or Trump to upload himself to Twitter and rant and rave for all time.
Starling exists to give SpaceX a stable and sizable future revenue stream.
I think this is a good argument against the Strong Elon Incompetence theory, which is that Elon was always stupid.
But the Weak Elon Incompetence theory, which I think is much more commonly believed, is that Elon has simply deteriorated. He's an addict and Twitter is the equivalent of buying a mountain of cocaine and now he's completely buried himself in it at the expense of everything else. All of the manic energy that went into obsessively building Tesla and SpaceX is now dedicated to his true addiction, shitposting on the platform he owns and livestreaming a cruel and pointless destruction of the US government for his fans.
Smart people can often be modeled as stupid when they're in the throes of their addiction with no one to stop them. It's a tale as old as time for geniuses of all kinds. And the idea that "Elon will constantly make stupid decisions because he's addicted to the thrill of posting to his cruel right-wing mob" doesn't play out that differently from "Elon is stupid" in practice. Maybe the man who walked into Twitter HQ with that sink a few years ago really was the stable genius Elon claims to be, but his behavior now is that of an addict with no one to tell him no. And addicts, however intelligent they may have once been, tend to crash in predictable ways.
For reference, as of the time of this post, Elon has posted on X 220 times in the last 24 hours. That's 9 posts per hour, not counting his replies.
This is not the behavior of a genius driving the world forward, it's the behavior of a drug addict. The things he's doing don't stem from rational choices, they stem from a desire to get more of the drug.
But the drug isn't a physical drug. Elon is addicted to the high that comes from making a post that everyone engages with. He's not destroying the government for reasons related to anything with anything in the real world, it's all to impress his neo-nazi fanbase and continue to get his fix. His only policy commitment is to be as "based" as possible, according to the social media platform that he owns.
The smarts of Musk whether High IQ-enabled or not doesn't prevent him from echoing Russian propaganda and viewpoints. And since he now is in a leading U.S. government position this is not very smart.
Look man i read this and you’re right. But what a lot of people are noticing with Elon is the *rate* at which he says and quite frankly does stupid things *given* all of his great accomplishments. And yes let’s be honest he was helped with gov subsidies for Tesla, though to be fair to him he took advantage of it like nobody else was doing. So credit there.
But again what makes him odd is how much higher he hits above his intellectual weight when it comes to stupid things he says.
It’s also probably a mistake to assume he can figure out something like the fed gov. It’s orders of magnitude way more complicated than Tesla or spacex. But we’ll see. Maybe he’ll figure it out and everyone will grow to love him and he will be reverred. It is possible I’m wrong. But Noah he’s already making enemies over doge in the *right* amount Trump voters he’s hurting. I’ll be surprised if I’m wrong here.
There's a disease that is common among, well, physics people actually, that everything is easy to understand. There's an xkcd about it ("why does your field even need an entire journal?") Being rich makes this effect worse of course.
Trump rolling back CAFE increases and EV targets will hit Tesla’s wallet. Other companies pay them billions annually to buy “credits” to meet the targets. It is not just about consumer subsidies to buy EVs.
The defense dep is apparently going to buy a lot of cyber trucks lol.
No, it was the State Department and the order was placed last year, when Joe Biden was president.
Based on available information, the State Department’s procurement forecast for fiscal year 2025, initially released in December 2024 (during the Biden administration), included a line item for $400 million worth of “Armored Tesla (Production Units).” This led to widespread speculation that the vehicles in question were Cybertrucks, given their stainless steel design and Elon Musk’s claims about their durability. However, no specific model was confirmed in the document, and it was not a finalized order but rather a planning foreca
Elon succeeds lots _and_ fails lots. It's just the successes are so huge they justify plenty of failures. The Boring Company and Hyperloop are dead in the water, but who cares when SpaceX and PayPal are practically institutions? Elon's gift is batting-average success, where you're brilliant even if you only hit one in several pitches, as long as your hits are home runs.
As for DOGE, I'm expecting the US government to be like Twitter for Elon: a failure if you're scoring actual improvements in the core product, but a brilliant success at giving him personal power.
One of the interesting things quoted about him in "Scout Mindset": apparently he believed ex ante that Paypal had a ~10% chance of success. This was pushing back against the idea that startup founders need to be irrationally confident.
Oh I wouldn’t bet on that. He won’t have personal power if veterans he fires start to turn on him. It’s already happening to he some degree.