Monday, April 21, 2025

Though not directly related to the IRS story, I have to mention that the "spend more time with his families" joke has gotten much more relevant recently

Remember a couple of weeks ago when everyone assured us that Musk was phasing out his role in government? (discussed here Is Elon stepping back to spend more time with his families?)

Not so much...

From the Guardian via LGM:

 
    Donald Trump is replacing the acting commissioner of the US Internal Revenue Service after treasury secretary Scott Bessent reportedly complained to the president that the agency head had been appointed without his knowledge and under the instruction of Doge leader Elon Musk.

    According to a report from the New York Times published on Friday, Bessent believed that the Doge head “had done an end-run around him” to get Gary Shapley installed as the interim head of the IRS, despite the fact that the IRS reports to Bessent. The report cited five anonymous sources with knowledge of the situation.

 ...

On social media, the conflict between Bessent and Musk was visible as Musk elevated a post from far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer in which she accuses Bessent of collaborating with a “pro-impeachment and pro-censorship Trump hater”, referring to the businessman John Hope Bryant. Musk agreed with Loomer, calling the collaboration “troubling”, on X, the platform he owns.  

Here's a longer quote from Loomer on Bryant:

This DEI hire by Scott Bessent just wants to, you know, proclaim that Donald Trump should resign or that he should be impeached because he was fighting for election integrity and fighting against the stolen election of 2020. I thought that we were getting rid of DEI, and then we get to have these uppity Blacks just walk into the Trump administration and start making demands and acting like they run the Treasury department, and that they should have, like, an active role in the Trump administration while they sit around and try to undermine every initiative that Donald Trump has worked on.
Yes, she did just unironically use the U-word.

For a bit of context...

 While we can debate whether his influence is waxing or waning, Elon Musk clearly still exercises unprecedented power for someone in his position. Even as broadly and badly defined as his duties with DOGE are—picking the head of the IRS still manages to go well beyond them. In at least this one sense, Elon Musk’s role is larger than we realized.

Furthermore, he appears to be trying to entrench—or even expand—that power by taking out rivals within the administration. For anyone familiar with the history of Tesla or the company eventually known as PayPal, this is the exact opposite of surprising.

With the Cybertruck on its way to becoming perhaps the most disastrous vehicle launch in history, and with new stories of corruption involving him and the rest of the so-called PayPal Mafia continuing to break, he may have decided that the only way to maintain his fortune—which currently rests on a precariously overvalued Tesla and SpaceX—is to put himself in a position where he can divert billions upon billions of dollars of government money into his enterprises.

While it sometimes seems like the markets, instead of hating * uncertainty, have come around to seeing it as an excuse for optimism—as when they responded with a surge of enthusiasm to the indefinite and often contradictory claims about the tariff pause—at some point, investors are going to have to face reality and start pricing in the cost of palace intrigue, policy turmoil, and an increasingly dysfunctional government. The possibility of Musk forcing out the Treasury Secretary might not lead to the level of uncertainty you’d get from Trump firing Jerome Powell, but it’s still a reminder that, as incoherent and chaotic as our fiscal policies have been over the past few months, they can still get worse.

* I had ChatGPT proofread this and I didn't notice it had changed "hating" to "heeding" for some unfathomable reason. Always double check the LLM.

UPDATE: Eight hours after we posted "at some point, investors are going to have to face reality and start pricing in the cost of palace intrigue, policy turmoil, and an increasingly dysfunctional government."


Friday, April 18, 2025

And it makes parallel parking a breeze.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy mocking stupid people as much as the next guy (and possibly a little bit more than that), but it takes its toll—particularly when the ineptitude is being applied to something I enjoy seeing done well.

When I want to remind myself how cool actual engineering can be, I often check out relevant videos from creators I trust on YouTube. That "trust" qualifier is important. As most of you know, the platform has become an absolute SEO cesspool. That's why I'm very careful about where I click—and even more careful about what I recommend on the blog.

This segment from Jeremy Fielding introduced me to a simple but truly elegant innovation. If you're not already familiar with it, you should check it out. It's cool as hell.


The Mecanum Wheel



If you enjoy this sort of thing, I also highly recommend Tom Scott and SmarterEveryday—especially the latter’s absolutely essential lecture on the issues with the Artemis moon mission.

Thursday, April 17, 2025

For a narcissist with a messiah complex, this is actually pretty much on brand.

As someone who's been following the career of Elon Musk for a number of years, I found this kind of surprising with respect to how far things have gone—but by no means shocking. Between him inching closer to explicit eugenics and the general cult-leader vibe you get from quotes like “Some hate humanity, but I love humanity so much” and the repeated claims that he is saving America / Western civilization / the species itself (seriously, he talks like this all the time), how can you not at least halfway see something like this coming?

















Wednesday, April 16, 2025

"Strauss and the war on data" was one of our most successful early posts but I would dearly love never to have another excuse to revisit it.

 NOAA 

From the NYT via LGM:

President Donald Trump’s administration is seeking to end nearly all of the climate research conducted by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA), one of the country’s premier climate science agencies, according to an internal budget document seen by Science. The document indicates the White House is ready to ask Congress to eliminate NOAA’s climate research centers and cut hundreds of federal and academic climate scientists who track and study human-driven global warming.

The administration is also preparing to ask for deep cuts to NASA’s science programs, according to media reports today.

The proposed NOAA cuts—which could be altered before the administration sends its 2026 budget request to Congress in the coming weeks—would cut funding for the agency’s research arm, the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR), to just over $171 million, a drop of $485 million. Any remaining research funding from previously authorized budgets would be moved to other programs. “At this funding level, OAR is eliminated as a line office,” the document states.

If approved by Congress, the plan would represent a huge blow to efforts to understand climate change, says Craig McLean, OAR’s longtime director who retired in 2022. “It wouldn’t just gut it. It would shut it down.” Scientifically, he adds, obliterating OAR would send the United States back to the 1950s—all because the Trump administration doesn’t like the answers to scientific questions NOAA has been studying for a half-century, according to McLean.

The administration’s plan would “eliminate all funding for climate, weather, and ocean laboratories and cooperative institutes,” says the document, which reflects discussions between NOAA and the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) about the agency’s 2026 budget request. Currently, NOAA operates 10 research labs around the country. They include influential ocean research centers in Florida and Washington state; five atmospheric science labs in Boulder, Colorado, and Maryland; and a severe storm lab in Oklahoma. It also operates the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in New Jersey, the birthplace of weather and climate modeling, as well as a lab in Michigan devoted to the Great Lakes. The agency further funds cooperative institutes, which support a large collection of academic scientists who work closely with the NOAA labs.

The proposal would cut NOAA’s competitive climate research grants program, which awards roughly $70 million a year to academic scientists. It would end support for collecting regional climate data and information, often used by farmers and other industries. And it would terminate the agency’s National Oceanographic Partnership Program and college and aquaculture sea grant programs, which support a host of research efforts.

NOAA officials still have time to persuade OMB to alter the request, but NOAA sources said it is unlikely to substantially change. But this proposal is only the first stage of the budget process; Congress will have the final word in setting NOAA’s spending.

It will certainly face strong opposition from Democrats. “Trump’s budget plan for NOAA is both outrageous and dangerous,” said Representative Zoe Lofgren (D–CA), the ranking member of the U.S. House of Representatives’s science committee, in a statement to Science. “This administration’s hostility towards research and rejection of climate science will have the consequence of eviscerating the weather forecasting capabilities that this plan claims to preserve.”

At NASA, science programs also face severe cuts, according to details first reported by Ars Technica. The White House is considering requesting a nearly 50% cut to NASA science’s office, down to an overall budget of $3.9 billion. According to Ars Technica, the plan calls for: “a two-thirds cut to astrophysics, down to $487 million; a greater than two-thirds cut to heliophysics, down to $455 million; a greater than 50 percent cut to Earth science, down to $1.033 billion; and a 30 percent cut to Planetary science, down to $1.929 billion.”

Such NASA cuts would require ending the operations of a huge host of earth science satellites. They could also result in the closure of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, which has thousands of employees and is one of the agency’s premier centers for earth science research. The cuts would also end plans for Mars Sample Return, the DAVINCI mission to Venus, and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is almost fully assembled.

At NOAA, the agency’s budget would be cut by $1.7 billion, the OMB memo said. The proposal also seeks to cut the National Ocean Service in half, with “no funding for Integrated Ocean Observing System Regional Observations, Competitive Research, Coastal Zone Management Grants, National Coastal Resilience Fund, or the National Estuarine Research Reserve System.” The requests would also close the National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science.

Other NOAA divisions would also be hit. OMB is seeking to radically rework the next-generation geostationary weather satellites planned by the agency’s National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS). That includes cutting its planned atmospheric pollution and ocean color instruments because, as the document puts it, the satellites will deliver exclusively “weather” data. It could also cut the infrared sounder, which tracks changes in the vertical distribution of temperature and moistures, catching storms before they form, and a lightning mapper.

The request would also cut funding for the National Center for Environmental Information—the nation’s primary archive of climate data—by $18 million. And it trims mission support for NOAA’s satellites and data systems by $141 million, among many other proposals.

Though Republicans in the U.S. Congress have so far not shown much resistance to the administration, McLean expressed some hope that lawmakers will not approve these cuts, citing how much of NOAA spending is spread throughout their districts. But that’s not a sure thing, he says. “It’s a very different Congress today.” 

 

Sunday, November 4, 2012

Strauss and the war on data

The most important aspect of Randianism as currently practiced is the lies its adherents tell themselves. "When you're successful, it's because other people are inferior to you." "When you fail, it's because inferior people persecute you (call it going Roark)." "One of these days you're going to run away and everyone who's been mean to you will be sorry."

The most important aspect of Straussianism as currently practiced is the lies its adherents tell others. Having started from the assumption that traditional democracy can't work because most people aren't smart enough to handle the role of voter, the Straussians conclude that superior minds must, for the good of society, lie to and manipulate the masses.

Joseph and I have an ongoing argument about which school is worse, a question greatly complicated by the compatibility of the two systems and the overlap of believers and their tactics and objectives. Joseph generally argues that Rand is worse (without, of course, defending Strauss) while I generally take the opposite position.

This week brought news that I think bolsters my case (though I suspect Joseph could easily turn it around to support his): one of the logical consequences of assuming typical voters can't evaluate information on their own is that data sources that are recognized as reliable are a threat to society. They can't be spun and they encourage people to make their own decisions.

To coin a phrase, if the masses can't handle the truth and need instead to be fed a version crafted by the elite to keep the people happy and doing what's best for them, the public's access to accurate, objective information has to be tightly controlled. With that in mind, consider the following from Jared Bernstein:
[D]ue to pressure from Republicans, the Congressional Research Service is withdrawing a report that showed the lack of correlation between high end tax cuts and economic growth.

The study, by economist Tom Hungerford, is of high quality, and is one I’ve cited here at OTE. Its findings are fairly common in the economics literature and the concerns raised by that noted econometrician Mitch McConnell are trumped up and bogus. He and his colleagues don’t like the findings because they strike at the supply-side arguments that they hold so dear.
And with Sandy still on everyone's mind, here's something from Menzie Chinn:
NOAA's programs are in function 300, Natural Resources and Environment, along with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and a range of conservation and natural resources programs. In the near term, function 300 would be 14.6 percent lower in 2014 in the Ryan budget according to the Washington Post. It quotes David Kendall of The Third Way as warning about the potential impact on weather forecasting: "'Our weather forecasts would be only half as accurate for four to eight years until another polar satellite is launched,' estimates Kendall. 'For many people planning a weekend outdoors, they may have to wait until Thursday for a forecast as accurate as one they now get on Monday. … Perhaps most affected would be hurricane response. Governors and mayors would have to order evacuations for areas twice as large or wait twice as long for an accurate forecast.'"
There are also attempts from prominent conservatives to delegitimize objective data:
Apparently, Jack Welch, former chairman and CEO of General Electric, is accusing the Bureau of Labor Statistics of manipulating the jobs report to help President Obama. Others seem to be adding their voices to this slanderous lie. It is simply outrageous to make such a claim and echoes the worrying general distrust of facts that seems to have swept segments of our nation. The BLS employment report draws on two surveys, one (the establishment survey) of 141,000 businesses and government agencies and the other (the household survey) of 60,000 households. The household survey is done by the Census Bureau on behalf of BLS. It’s important to note that large single-month divergences between the employment numbers in these two surveys (like the divergence in September) are just not that rare. EPI’s Elise Gould has a great paper on the differences between these two surveys.

BLS is a highly professional agency with dozens of people involved in the tabulation and analysis of these data. The idea that the data are manipulated is just completely implausible. Moreover, the data trends reported are clearly in line with previous monthly reports and other economic indicators (such as GDP). The key result was the 114,000 increase in payroll employment from the establishment survey, which was right in line with what forecasters were expecting. This was a positive growth in jobs but roughly the amount to absorb a growing labor force and maintain a stable, not falling, unemployment rate. If someone wanted to help the president, they should have doubled the job growth the report showed. The household survey was much more positive, showing unemployment falling from 8.1 percent to 7.8 percent. These numbers are more volatile month to month and it wouldn’t be surprising to see unemployment rise a bit next month. Nevertheless, there’s nothing implausible about the reported data. The household survey has shown greater job growth in the recovery than the establishment survey throughout the recovery. The labor force participation rate (the share of adults who are working or unemployed) increased to 63.6 percent, which is an improvement from the prior month but still below the 63.7 percent reported for July. All in all, there was nothing particularly strange about this month’s jobs reports—and certainly nothing to spur accusations of outright fraud.
We can also put many of the attacks against Nate Silver in this category.

Going back a few months, we had this from Businessweek:
The House Committee on Appropriations recently proposed cutting the Census budget to $878 million, $10 million below its current budget and $91 million less than the bureau’s request for the next fiscal year. Included in the committee number is a $20 million cut in funding for this year’s Economic Census, considered the foundation of U.S. economic statistics.
And Bruce Bartlett had a whole set of examples involving Newt Gingrich:
On Nov. 21, Newt Gingrich, who is leading the race for the Republican presidential nomination in some polls, attacked the Congressional Budget Office. In a speech in New Hampshire, Mr. Gingrich said the C.B.O. "is a reactionary socialist institution which does not believe in economic growth, does not believe in innovation and does not believe in data that it has not internally generated."

Mr. Gingrich's charge is complete nonsense. The former C.B.O. director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, now a Republican policy adviser, labeled the description "ludicrous." Most policy analysts from both sides of the aisle would say the C.B.O. is one of the very few analytical institutions left in government that one can trust implicitly.

It's precisely its deep reservoir of respect that makes Mr. Gingrich hate the C.B.O., because it has long stood in the way of allowing Republicans to make up numbers to justify whatever they feel like doing.

...

Mr. Gingrich has long had special ire for the C.B.O. because it has consistently thrown cold water on his pet health schemes, from which he enriched himself after being forced out as speaker of the House in 1998. In 2005, he wrote an op-ed article in The Washington Times berating the C.B.O., then under the direction of Mr. Holtz-Eakin, saying it had improperly scored some Gingrich-backed proposals. At a debate on Nov. 5, Mr. Gingrich said, "If you are serious about real health reform, you must abolish the Congressional Budget Office because it lies."
...                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

Because Mr. Gingrich does know more than most politicians, the main obstacles to his grandiose schemes have always been Congress's professional staff members, many among the leading authorities anywhere in their areas of expertise.                                                                                                                                                                                                

To remove this obstacle, Mr. Gingrich did everything in his power to dismantle Congressional institutions that employed people with the knowledge, training and experience to know a harebrained idea when they saw it. When he became speaker in 1995, Mr. Gingrich moved quickly to slash the budgets and staff of the House committees, which employed thousands of professionals with long and deep institutional memories.

Of course, when party control in Congress changes, many of those employed by the previous majority party expect to lose their jobs. But the Democratic committee staff members that Mr. Gingrich fired in 1995 weren't replaced by Republicans. In essence, the positions were simply abolished, permanently crippling the committee system and depriving members of Congress of competent and informed advice on issues that they are responsible for overseeing.

Mr. Gingrich sold his committee-neutering as a money-saving measure. How could Congress cut the budgets of federal agencies if it wasn't willing to cut its own budget, he asked. In the heady days of the first Republican House since 1954, Mr. Gingrich pretty much got whatever he asked for.

In addition to decimating committee budgets, he also abolished two really useful Congressional agencies, the Office of Technology Assessment and the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations. The former brought high-level scientific expertise to bear on legislative issues and the latter gave state and local governments an important voice in Congressional deliberations.

The amount of money involved was trivial even in terms of Congress's budget. Mr. Gingrich's real purpose was to centralize power in the speaker's office, which was staffed with young right-wing zealots who followed his orders without question. Lacking the staff resources to challenge Mr. Gingrich, the committees could offer no resistance and his agenda was simply rubber-stamped.

Unfortunately, Gingrichism lives on. Republican Congressional leaders continually criticize every Congressional agency that stands in their way. In addition to the C.B.O., one often hears attacks on the Congressional Research Service, the Joint Committee on Taxation and the Government Accountability Office.

Lately, the G.A.O. has been the prime target. Appropriators are cutting its budget by $42 million, forcing furloughs and cutbacks in investigations that identify billions of dollars in savings yearly. So misguided is this effort that Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma and one of the most conservative members of Congress, came to the agency's defense.

In a report issued by his office on Nov. 16, Senator Coburn pointed out that the G.A.O.'s budget has been cut by 13 percent in real terms since 1992 and its work force reduced by 40 percent -- more than 2,000 people. By contrast, Congress's budget has risen at twice the rate of inflation and nearly doubled to $2.3 billion from $1.2 billion over the last decade.

Mr. Coburn's report is replete with examples of budget savings recommended by G.A.O. He estimated that cutting its budget would add $3.3 billion a year to government waste, fraud, abuse and inefficiency that will go unidentified.

For good measure, Mr. Coburn included a chapter in his report on how Congressional committees have fallen down in their responsibility to exercise oversight. The number of hearings has fallen sharply in both the House and Senate. Since the beginning of the Gingrich era, they have fallen almost in half, with the biggest decline coming in the 104th Congress (1995-96), his first as speaker.

In short, Mr. Gingrich's unprovoked attack on the C.B.O. is part of a pattern. He disdains the expertise of anyone other than himself and is willing to undercut any institution that stands in his way. Unfortunately, we are still living with the consequences of his foolish actions as speaker.

We could really use the Office of Technology Assessment at a time when Congress desperately needs scientific expertise on a variety of issues in involving health, energy, climate change, homeland security and many others. And given the enormous stress suffered by state and local governments as they are forced by Washington to do more with less, an organization like the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations would be invaluable.

 

Tuesday, April 15, 2025

Why, Robot?

 

[Early Optimus prototype]

When you factor in the pivotal role that Optimus plays in the weak bull case for Tesla, companies and divisions of companies developing bipedal humanoid robots primarily focused on the personal/household market are being valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars, despite a questionable use case and an even more questionable basic design.

As far as I can tell, with all the coverage of these businesses, virtually no one is questioning the assumptions that must be true in order to justify this level of investment. Keeping in mind that, at best, a fifth of U.S. households have robotic vacuum cleaners—and a substantial portion own dishwashers but don't even bother to use them—what share of households in the U.S., let alone the world, are going to shell out thousands, probably tens of thousands of dollars for a robot butler? Given their top-heavy, unstable design, highly inefficient locomotion (compared to wheeled alternatives), and their expense and complexity, why should the humanoid form become the standard, despite offering little to no significant gains in functionality?

And finally, when you get past the fantastic claims and staged—if not outright faked—video demonstrations, how likely is it that these things will pay off soon enough to justify the money being poured into them? 

There are some notable similarities between this hype bubble and what we've seen around AI and large language models, but with one key difference: while they may prove to be something of a dead end in the long term, LLMs are, for the moment, arguably the best tools we have for natural language processing. Bipedal humanoid robots aren't really the best at anything.

Monday, April 14, 2025

If you're presenting two interpretations of Musk and you literally label one of them the "real Elon," you may have revealed a slight bias

[Smith has a good post up on capital flight. Not in any way relevant to the topic here, but I wanted to say something nice.]

I read this more than a couple of times to make certain that Smith didn't have his tongue in his cheek. This level of credulity and straw-manning had to be a joke, right? Sadly, no. This is absolutely consistent with what Smith has written about Musk in the past—and since.

As we've pointed out before, Noah Smith represents a small but wealthy and highly influential group of thinkers: technocratic techno-optimists, largely centered around the Bay Area and distinguished by a tendency to worship billionaire visionaries like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen. Needless to say, the levels of cognitive dissonance have grown deafening around these fellows over the past few months.

Smith represents a viewpoint that carries extraordinary weight in places like The New York Times—which is reason enough to look closely and critically at what he's been saying. In this case, he's also being profoundly dishonest. He grossly misrepresents the arguments* of most of Musk’s detractors while being highly selective with his examples.

It would take me far longer to list the pertinent cases that Smith omitted than it probably took Smith to write the original post, but just to illustrate the point, here’s what I found after a five-minute Google search on Elon Musk’s love of free speech.

Vice: X Purges Prominent Journalists, Leftists With No Explanation

NBC News: Elon Musk worries free speech advocates with his calls to prosecute researchers and critics 

The Guardian: Elon Musk has become the world’s biggest hypocrite on free speech

USA Today: When free speech champion Elon Musk threatens speech, we should take it seriously 

The Verge: Elon Musk is absolutely not a ‘free speech absolutist’

The examples that Smith does include are mostly supported by Musk’s own version of events. For example, Elon Musk insists that he loves Jewish people—but I’m pretty sure there have been examples in the past of antisemites using that very same defense. 

For more background, here's what you find if you follow Smith's link.

Elon Musk has publicly endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory popular among White supremacists: that Jewish communities push “hatred against Whites.”

That kind of overt thumbs up to an antisemitic post shocked even some of Musk’s critics, who have long called him out for using racist or otherwise bigoted dog whistles on Twitter, now known as X. It was the multibillionaire’s most explicit public statement yet endorsing anti-Jewish views.

ICYMI: Musk was responding to a post Wednesday that said Jewish communities “have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.” The post also referenced “hordes of minorities” flooding Western countries, a popular antisemitic conspiracy theory.

It’s the kind of post you can find easily on X these days, and likely would have gone unnoticed had Musk, with more than 160 million followers, not re-shared the post with the comment: “You have said the actual truth.”

The antisemitic conspiracy theory — which posits that Jews want to bring undocumented minority populations into Western countries to reduce White majorities in those nations — is often espoused by hate groups.

It’s the same conspiracy echoed in the final written words of Robert Bowers, the convicted murderer of 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018. His last social media post said that a Jewish nonprofit dedicated to aiding refugees “likes to bring invaders in that kill our people.” The mass shooting was the deadliest attack against Jews in American history.

Musk, in subsequent posts, expounded on his views. He wrote that he does not believe hatred of White people extends “to all Jewish communities.” But then he singled out the Anti-Defamation League, claiming that it promotes racism against White people.

 

 

 Noah Smith Dec 21, 2024

Musk’s friends and confidantes expect the former. They probably know him as a reasonable guy — a Reaganite conservative who was driven to the center-right by the excesses of wokeness, who loves free speech and free enterprise and small government and responsible fiscal and monetary policy and peace between nations, who wants to bring human civilization to Mars and accelerate tech progress and so on.

Let us call this version of Elon “Real Elon”.

But it’s possible to imagine another version of Elon, who exists in the perfervid imaginations of his detractors. Let us call this “Evil Elon”. Regular people, observing Elon’s actions in the public sphere, can’t always tell the difference between Real Elon and this fantasy supervillain.

Whereas Real Elon opposed the CR because of concerns over government spending and legislative complexity, Evil Elon opposed it because it contained national security provisions that would have nixed some of Tesla’s planned investments in China:

Cynics note that the shorter replacement CR, which Elon supported, would have actually spent more money than the CR that Elon killed — the main difference being that the replacement CR didn’t contain restrictions on U.S. investment in China:

In fact, while Real Elon loves capitalism and individual freedoms, Evil Elon is a consistent and dedicated ally of the Chinese Communist Party. When Real Elon calls for Taiwan to become a “special administrative zone” of China, he does it because he wants to avoid World War 3; Evil Elon does it because he likes authoritarian rule, and because the Chinese Communist Party has paid him off.

On Ukraine, similar, Real Elon just wants to end the conflict and stop more Ukrainians from dying. After all, Russia is powerful and determined enough that they’ll almost certainly be able to hold onto a piece of Ukraine at the end of the war; why not just trade land for peace and be done with it?

But Evil Elon wants Putin to triumph, because he sympathizes with authoritarian rulers in general. No one knows what Elon and Putin talked about during their frequent conversations since 2022. But believers in Evil Elon suspect that they conspired to bring about a Russian victory in the war.

When former U.S. Army officer Alex Vindman accused Elon of being used by Putin, Real Elon accused Vindman of treason and threatened him with “the appropriate penalty” because hey, we all get mad on social media and like to punch back at people who attack us. But Evil Elon did it because Vindman was on to something.

When Real Elon declared his support for the German far-right party AfD, it was because he saw Germany spinning into industrial decline and suffering from an immigration policy that failed to exclude violent criminals. But Evil Elon did it because he likes that AfD is vocally pro-Putin and pro-CCP.

In fact, believers in Evil Elon suspect that his support for AfD might also be due to the whiff of Nazi apologia and antisemitism that hang around some of the party’s candidates. Real Elon is a stand-up guy — when he agreed with a tweet about Jewish communities pushing anti-White hatred, he publicly apologized, declaring it the worst tweet he’s ever done, and declaring himself a “philosemite”. And when Real Elon accidentally endorsed a Tucker Carlson interview with a Hitler apologist, he quickly deleted the endorsement once he realized what it actually contained.

But believers in Evil Elon think that these are just the kind of public relations moves that a supervillain would do to cover his tracks. They fear that the massive wave of antisemitism that has swamped X since Elon took over is the result of intentional boosting, rather than simply the inevitable result of more lenient moderation policies combined with the reaction to the Gaza war.1 They do not buy Real Elon’s protests that other platforms have even more antisemitism. ["Musk did not say who performed the audit or share any details from the report. He did not answer any questions for other journalists." -- MP]

And so on. Essentially, Evil Elon is a somewhat cartoonish supervillain, who wants to set himself up as the ruler of one of three great dictatorships, ruling the world with an iron fist alongside his allies Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin — a new Metternich System to enshrine right-wing values and crack down on wokeness and progressivism and obstreperous minorities all over the world.


* While you can certainly find examples of all sorts of crazy anti-Elon theories in the more febrile corners of social media, most of Musk's mainstream critics (such as Linette Lopez, Edward Niedermeyer, Russ Mitchell, and former Tesla booster Fred Lambert) and detractors (like the well-researched channel Common Sense Skeptic) argue that Musk is an unethical businessman and profoundly unreliable narrator whose business depends on staying in the good graces of the CCP and who has increasingly fallen under the influence of the alt-right. I can't comment on the perfervidity of their imaginations (though those I've  chatted with have seemed quite reasonable and sober), but as you'll see from the CSS video, the have a remarkable amount of evidence backing their position.