Elon Musk Really Means It
He's not posturing as a deluded conspiracy theorist. He is one.
Matt Yglesias and Will Stancil had a little tiff on Twitter the other day. Not a major fight. But both men are relentlessly online diehard posters public intellectuals and both have rabid haters and fanboys considerable audiences, so it got some attention. The core question at hand - does Elon Musk really believe the racist right wing conspiracy bait he’s been spewing recently? Or is it an act in service of more material political goals (lower taxes, less regulation, etc)?
Matt Yglesias believes that Musk’s culture war tweets are simply tactical attempts to elect Republicans who will lower his taxes. As much as I’m a fan of Matt’s writing, I think he’s pretty clearly in the wrong here. Elon Musk really believes the stuff he’s saying. He’s been fully red-pilled. The cultural grievance story is right there in the open. Let’s talk about why this is.
Imagine a man whose life revolves around alcohol. He’s loved beer since before he was legally able to drink. At the first opportunity after college, he goes to work at a brewery. He eventually works his way to Head Brewer, and produces some of the best craft beer in his region. He spends all day working with beer. He loves tasting it, talking about it, thinking about it. It dominates his life, but in a healthy way. He’s well-adjusted, mostly healthy, and happy.
Imagine another man whose life revolves around alcohol in a much different way. He drinks when he wakes up. He sneaks several drinks at lunch, even when he’s working. Almost every night, he polishes off a fifth of vodka. He’s an addict. His life would be much better if he never had another drink, but he can’t help himself. Things are slowly falling apart for him, but he continues down the path because that’s what addicts do.
This is how I think about posting on the internet.
The foundational theory of this blog is Posting is the Most Powerful Force in the World. There are some people who can post responsibly, for whom social media is a net positive in their lives. And there are others for whom posting is an addiction, an all-consuming desire. It’s the most alluring thing in the world, the One Ring whose temptations they may be aware of but are still unable to escape. They’ll burn any bridge, do any fool thing in chase of that posting high.
Once you see the internet this way, it’s much easier to identify a certain type of self-destructive, addicted poster. And Elon Musk is exactly that kind of poster.
Twitter user Quantian posted something obvious that we’ve all seen but rarely state bluntly: Elon has massively changed how he posts in the last few years. Five years ago Elon’s Twitter feed was mostly technical rocketry talk with his crowd of reply guys - this rocket engine has this type of igniter. Here’s some detail on the pre-ignition sequence. Rocket/mass ratios, cold gas thrusters and body flap orientations. It’s kind of shocking how normal and nerdy it is. Clearly the tendency towards conspiratorial thinking was already there - the Thai Cave incident where he baselessly accused a rescuer of being a pedophile was in 2018. But back then, his posting wasn’t like it is now.
Current Elon’s Twitter feed is… not healthy. It’s filled with conspiratorial garbage and culture war bait. DEI, liberals, and illegal immigrants. Disney has a woke agenda. Trans influencers are trafficking your kids. Here’s a meme about not getting the COVID vaccine. Misinformation from white nationalist account accounts and pedophilia conspiracies.
Whatever you want to call it - the conspiracy right, MAGA, the alt-right, the terminally online right - there’s an enormous amount of evidence that Elon Musk is simply bought-in to that worldview.
His closest business associates, friends, sycophants and hangers on live in that space. There’s a common bit of wisdom that you become the average of the five people you spend the most time with. If that’s even partially true (and it is), then Elon is clearly someone comfortable living with those politics.
He’s also pretty clearly been radicalized to the right by specific incidents in his life. He essentially never posted about trans people or the gender wars five years ago. But one of his children came out as trans a few years back, got into left politics, completely cut contact with Musk and even changed her last name. And mysteriously, right around that time, Musk began to obsess about how progressive schools were turning kids trans. He blames cultural wokeness for his daughter disowning him. This is when he first started talking about the ‘woke mind virus’. He was also radicalized by COVID lockdowns in 2020. He was furious at California’s extended shutdown of Tesla plants in the state, and vowed to move Tesla headquarters out of the state entirely in retaliation. While he initially supported COVID vaccines, he’s since been radicalized against them and routinely posts anti-vax memes years after the rest of us have stopped talking about them.
Occam’s Razor tells us the simplest explanation for things is usually the correct one1. Elon is a guy who was relatively normal until he began surrounding himself with people on the political right and had multiple radicalizing events in his personal life. That’s how extremism starts. He’s not pulling a clever strategic move when he posts lies that Joe Biden wants to let in millions of illegal immigrants and then let them vote. He’s just been sucked completely into the right wing propaganda vortex.
One of my more controversial views about political discourse is that with a few notable exceptions, you can mostly trust that people mean what they say. People who repeatedly say the same thing over and over actually mean it. They aren’t pretending. They aren’t Machiavellian masterminds. They aren’t playing some sort of Straussian game and sending you secret messages. They mean what they say.
There’s strong evidence for this. Political scientists who study promises find that contra to common belief, most politicians actually do keep their promises and make honest attempts to do the things they said they would do during their campaigns. When a politician tells you what they think, for the most part they’re telling the truth!
Consider Trump. The entire Trump presidency was people being shocked over and over by Trump’s disrespect for institutions, ties to white nationalists, defense of indefensible, etc. Theories abounded as to Trump’s ‘true goals’ and speculating what Trump actually wanted became a national past time.
But Trump very clearly signaled from the beginning exactly who he was. There was never a point at which anyone should have been confused by Trump’s actions - he kicked off his campaign by calling immigrants rapists and criminals, of course he’s a racist. He wasn’t trying to hide it! He’s got a long, documented history of racial discrimination in his housing projects, casinos and hotels. He’s been sued several times and lost those suits! We always knew this. Trying to concoct some explanation for Trump other than obvious one - he’s just saying this to rile people up, he’ll mature and tone down once in power, it’s a cover for enacting some other policy… - was always dumb.
Furthermore, when people really are doing some sort of Machiavellian maneuver, it’s almost never a secret. They explain to you, very carefully and explicitly, how the Machiavellian maneuver is going to work. Take the tax bill that’s in front of Congress right now. The bill is a bipartisan bill with wide support from both Republicans and Democrats. Policy wonks, both conservative and liberal, almost universally agree the bill’s changes are good ideas. The only thing that could sink the bill is politics - Republicans might not want to give Joe Biden a ‘win’ in an election year. But this isn’t a secret scheme - senator Chuck Grassley openly stated that he didn’t want to pass the bill because it would ‘make Biden look good’. He didn’t even pretend to have objections to the actual policies, and he wasn’t being secretive about it.
People will tell you who they are! They don’t run complicated schemes, and even when they try they end up declaring the scheme out loud more often than not.
Back to Elon. I’m not going to show you a giant collection of Elon tweets as evidence, you can go find them on your own. Instead, I’ll just show this:
That’s about four tweets an hour for 29 hours straight without any substantial breaks. I submit to you that virtually no one on this planet is capable of that kind of ideological posting as an act. And Elon’s been posting like this for years now.
Nobody is capable of keeping up an act that good for years. You cannot do it. It quickly becomes obvious. Nobody can bullshit that effectively for that long. It’s actually very easy to see how much Elon is just sucked into the fringe right wing ecosystem, because he often doesn’t even get the arguments for his own side correct. He’s often just repeating what he saw random anonymous accounts say. His posts are far more erratic than they would be if he was just parroting a set of talking points.
The man has a crushing addiction to Twitter, to online discourse, and to the culture war. He’s well known for being an impulsive doofus prone to stupid decisions. He spontaneously decided to buy Twitter even though he knew it was a terrible decision2. He routinely spreads idiot-level conspiracy theories. We’ve talked before about the duality of Elon - having to recognize he’s both a genius and an idiot.
He’s not running a complicated game for lower taxes when he posts anti-trans content, when he amplifies conspiracies about immigrants, or when he’s chummy with white nationalists. That’s just who he is now. When Elon Musk tells you over and over who he is, believe him.
This is a somewhat inaccurate paraphrase - A more accurate summary of Occam’s Razor is that when faced with two equally plausible theories, you should choose the theory that requires fewer assumptions.
We know it was a terrible decision, and we know he knows, because he immediately tried to get out of having to purchase it. Alas, he’d already signed the papers.
To the guy who wrote a 3000 word comment longer than my post white-knighting Elon's conspiracy theories: I want you to know that I read the first paragraph, laughed at you, and then deleted/banned without reading the rest. I hope that time for you was well spent.
I'm not trying to diagnose from a distance or anything, but given a spiral that both the frequency and tenor that Elon's posts have taken on the last few years, combined with the stories about drug use that we're reading in the media, It's entirely possible that this is just a guy with addiction issues, combined with whatever is going on in his personal life and his individual psychology.
I think people who are on Elon or, in a similar example, Kanye's, nuts, have a hard time fathoming how this person who is a genius in other ways is not playing 5th dimensional chess on this particular topic. My opinion is that the same traits that lead you to that level of success, are also leads you to going off the rails once you become successful. If you are Kanye, or Elon, or anyone similar, the amount of times that you would have had to ignore people 's opinions, or had people tell you that you didn't know what you were talking about, or that your idea was stupid, or that your dreams were dumb, on the way to achieving wild success would, I think, lead one to believe that they always know better than the people around them, because ignoring other people's opinions has led them to spectacular successes. But as you said before, someone can be a genius at one thing and a complete moron at an entirely different thing. It's likely, in fact.