Since everyone is talking about Elon Musk more than ever the past couple of days — given his attempt to force a government shutdown, his endorsement of Germany's neo-Nazi party, and his general attempts to take over the U.S. government — I keep thinking about a thread I saw on BlueSky about 10 days ago.
I didn't know how much to credit it at the time, and I still don't. It's written by Seth Abramson, a name I know from Twitter but don't have a good handle on how authoritative he is.
Checking into him, the answer appears to be... sort of. He's a published, even best-selling author, and a University of New Hampshire professor. He was also a major Bernie bro in 2016. Some people consider him a conspiracy theorist, while others think he has written pieces that are ahead of the curve.
So with that caveat, here's his thread with a few things emphasized by me:
Over 2+ years of working on a biography of Elon Musk, I've learned that his ambitions are significantly grander than anyone realizes. He wants to be the first trillionaire ever. He wants to be the most famous human who ever lived. He wants to rule the world. He wants to live forever.
All literally.
To speak of what Elon Musk actually wants and intends to do almost makes one sound touched, as he's the first human to be in the position to achieve goals of this sort. For instance, it is estimated he will become the first trillionaire by 2029. His odds of being the most famous human ever are good.
He's positioned himself atop or near the top of the industries required to control geopolitics —robotics, AI, bioengineering, satellite communications, mass transport, international diplomacy, green energy — lacking only networked markets, which he seeks to enter with X as a so-called "everything app."
I see no coherent argument for him being anything but the most dangerous man in history. He's on drugs, doesn't experience empathy, and is a white supremacist, the richest man on Earth, media illiterate, a pathological liar, unscrupulous, a fraudster, and candidly (sans one subject) barely educated.
But none of that is what really makes him scary.
His sociopathy is at a different scale than we have ever seen before because he simply doesn't see himself as responsible to humankind as it exists today.
He is the most dangerous combination of two ideologies imaginable: a narcissist transhumanist.
This is another way of saying that he would allow the entirety of humanity to perish as long as he and his son X were able to survive. Nothing else matters. That's not sociopathy at a scale even our criminologists are trained to understand, as they are usually analyzing people without any resources.
He also believes there's a chance that if he works hard enough in certain industries he can become the first man to have his consciousness digitized and thereby become immortal.
Since in his view he's the most important person ever to live, there's no higher calling for him than becoming immortal.
I really don't care whether people accept what I'm saying as a Musk biographer. I learned from being a Trump biographer who was right about him from the beginning and who counterfactually is still told the opposite by people who understand the man not at all that expertise no longer really matters.
People will judge what I say about Musk the same way they judged what I said about Trump: whether it sounds plausible to them based on the limited information they have now and their own internal emotional atmospheres.
Which is kind of like saying we judge everything from.... our existing data set.
So when I write things I know to be true about Trump and Musk I do it for myself and because I know the facts, not because I believe in trying to persuade people to trust experts or follow facts. And if what an expert is saying sounds facially implausible because it's unprecedented, well... ballgame.
The only way to understand Musk is to understand that everything about him is unprecedented. His wealth is unprecedented. His ability to hide his white supremacy for many decades has been unprecedented. His ability to pass off the work of others or actual failures as his successes is unprecedented.
His ability to have so many beneficially untrue words written about him by biographers and media is unprecedented. It exceeds significantly that of Donald Trump. His ability to purchase an election and become a co-president when he is ineligible to serve is unprecedented.
All of this is wholly new.
I'd place his ability to escape consequences at the level of Donald Trump.
For instance, the conservative Wall Street Journal recently revealed that he has been lying for years about not having contact with Putin when in fact he's been having contact with him all along.
The story died instantly.
I can't believe that people who escaped being duped by Donald Trump, for instance Bernie Sanders, are now completely duped by Elon.
This underscores how unprecedented he is; he is duping even those people who escaped being consumed by the biggest scam and hoax of our times — that being Donald Trump.
I think people should be scared of him. I think people should be scared of what he's capable of and what he'll do. I think people should take nothing he says at face value and should instead simply marvel at how easily he crafts a cult of personality that has nothing to do with his real intentions.
He has it within his power to inflict a Second Great Depression on the US within the next 24 months — and if you think he wouldn't be surrounded by people telling him every second of the day that he was a hero for doing it and should under no circumstances stop the damage he was causing, you're wrong.
Elon does not course-correct. He shifts whatever facts he needs from non-existence into existence. He is effectively above the law now. He is a nation-state unto himself. And whether any of us like it or not, he is the President of the United States come January every bit as much as Donald Trump is.
So the way we should understand the situation we're about to enter into is this: what would happen if the U.S. were suddenly co-run by the two worst men in the history of the country, who also happened to be the two most dangerous men in the history of the country? Assume both men are above the law.
It doesn't matter to me if anyone who reads this accepts it. The facts support it. How it plays out can't be predicted; we'll all bear witness to it in real time over the next 30 years.
But anyone who wants to protect America should now see themselves in part as having to protect it from Elon Musk.
I speak here of American politicians, who should make it their business to oppose Elon Musk at every turn. I speak here of lawyers and judges, who should hound the man perpetually with lawsuits and judgments attempting to slow his ambitions.
I speak here of a culture that should utterly reject him.
I speak here of world leaders who should refuse to meet with him or do business with him or treat him as a diplomat. I speak here of consumers who should boycott his products. I speak here of journalists who must by now know he is the greatest threat to actual professional journalism in its history.
And please understand that we do already have data on his impact.
You can look up all the cities that have been lied to by the Boring Company. You can look up FSD deaths. You can see his destruction of the international public square Twitter used to be. Read up on the sick experiments at Neuralink.
Brave Ukrainian soldiers died because of the way Musk betrayed them in the skies over Crimea. Donald Trump is quite possibly President of the United States — and stands poised to destroy our democracy forever — because of an election Elon Musk helped buy him. Look at how he has hurt his kids and exes.
And for all that, people worship him.
No — I mean it. He is...worshipped.
No Musk biographer can now avoid dipping into Elongelicalism to see what it is all about.
And I am telling you that it is not about admiring the man, it is about worshipping him as a living savior.
The savior of our species.
America showed itself to be entirely inadequate to the task of contesting such a figure when it was just Trump. But from 2022 on, it wasn't just Trump seeking to turn America into an instrument for the venal, it was Musk and Trump. I fear the toll they will enact on us will be more than we can bear.
Note that everything I write about here is discussed in publicly available sources. You simply have to read hundreds and hundreds of them to get past the hagiographies and fantastically credulous reports that gum up the works of doing research into what the man actually intends and who he really is.
Another example of Musk and one of his companies breaking the rules (is that "the law"?) just came out today:
Elon Musk and SpaceX have repeatedly failed to comply with federal reporting protocols aimed at protecting state secrets... Concerns about the reporting practices — and particularly about Musk — have triggered at least three federal reviews… New York Times: Elon Musk and SpaceX Face Federal Reviews After Violations of Security Reporting Rules
Failing to protect state secrets! Seems like the penalties for breaking those rules should be pretty heavy, and not something to be rewarded by putting you in charge of the government.
I've long wondered why any of the billionaires wouldn't want to try to create a habitable planet, since they have to live here, too. Maybe they think they can get to an island or a bunker somewhere. But if Musk, the ultimate billionaire, if not trillionaire, thinks he's the only one who matters and he can transcend... his behavior makes a lot more sense.
By the way, in terms of wealth, keep this in mind:
$100K saved for retirement is a 4.3" stack of $100 bills.
$1M: 43" [a bit less than four feet]
$1B: 3,600 feet. 12 football fields. World's tallest building is 2,722 feet.
Musk: $486B. 330 miles high. 60 Mt. Everests, stacked.
—Steve Roth on BlueSky
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