Giving Patrick Boyle the last word on Musk v. Trump

As always, I feel slightly guilty about posting excepts from these transcripts (they're never as good without Boyle's delivery), but here are a few highlights.

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The biggest sign that things would not last of course was the  Jim Cramer tweet.  Once Cramer said he was bullish on the friendship, you could basically set your  watch to it knowing that disaster was looming.

Now, I hate to say this – but if Musk is right in saying that he made Trump – Trump should probably be a little bit nervous – as it has become somewhat noticeable over the years that everything Elon Musk makes – burns to the ground.

Judged on sales alone, the Cybertruck has been more of a flop than the Edsel – and that is a big deal, because the Edsel has gone down in history as an enduring icon of failure in the automobile industry. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, ineffective marketing, flawed design, a high purchase price, and poor workmanship led to “consumer blowback” when the Edsel was released in 1957. While Ford had planned to sell 200,000 Edsels a year, they only managed to sell 63,000 cars and had to scrap the new brand entirely two years later.

Elon Musk predicted that he would sell 250,000 Cybertrucks in the first year – after all, he had taken a million deposits – but Tesla ended up selling just under 50,000 Cybertrucks. The failure could possibly be blamed on ineffective marketing, a flawed design, a high purchase price, poor workmanship, and general fugliness – but none of this actually mattered – as, despite the decline in sales, Tesla stock rose 62.5% and hit an all-time high in 2024.

I asked Grok – Elon Musk’s chatbot – why the stock had gone up so much despite all of the bad news and the corporate underperformance. I figured Grok would be the best person – or graphics card – or whatever it is – to ask, as Elon Musk has described it as being “scary smart.” Grok explained to me that despite a decline in Tesla's vehicle deliveries, Tesla stock surged because of Elon Musk's political influence and because of optimism about Musk's close ties to Donald Trump and his advisory role within the U.S. government.

Grok said that investors were betting that Musk’s influence in government could lead to favorable regulatory changes for his businesses.

Now, I had to ask Grok if it thought that the investors had been foolish in their optimism, and it told me that “their enthusiasm looks like it was riding more on hope than on grounded reasoning.”

I wasn’t really sure about the ethics of the whole situation either, so I asked Grok if it thought that this was an example of crony capitalism – and it replied yes…

I’ll tell you – life has gotten a lot easier now that I can outsource my morality to a graphics card.

Yes, you can also count this as a recommendation

 I recently read (and took notes and reread numerous passages from) Edmund Morris’s biography of Edison, so you will be hearing quite a lot about it here on the blog over the next few weeks.

Though it got very good reviews, one aspect of the book that threw a number of critics was the reverse chronology. The prologue to the book was a short chapter on the death of Edison. The next chapter discussed the final decade of his life, with the title Botany (every chapter was titled after the field of science that Edison was focused on at the time).

One of the things I liked about this backwards telling of Edison's story is that we are introduced to the man not through his early and spectacular successes, but through arguably the greatest failures of his career: the disastrous mining operation that cost him his fortune, the attempt to be the first to create a viable system of talking pictures, his plan to bring military research into the 20th century, and his search for a viable native alternative for rubber production.

What's notable is that, though deeply flawed, all of these ideas were good—even great—and often remarkably prescient.

His innovations in automating mining did have an effect on the industry, and the advances he made in the production of cement had a huge impact on the construction industry, including providing much of the raw materials for Yankee Stadium. The only problem was that no level of innovation could overcome the cheap and superior ore recently discovered in the West.

When it worked, his talking picture system was, if anything, superior in sound quality to what came a decade later. Unfortunately, it didn't work that often. As with Langley's steam-powered planes, the work was impressive, but it was simply the wrong approach.

While the specific technology (all defensive—that was his one rule) that he and his team came up with during World War I was clever and often anticipated major advances of the next two or three decades, it was his plans for a massive, civilian-controlled research and development lab—in many ways DARPA decades before DARPA—that are truly remarkable and represent an incredible missed opportunity. It turned out the navy wasn't all that eager to be reformed.

Edison's last great project had him move into the entirely new field of botany, throwing himself in with characteristic energy and focus despite advanced age and failing health. His research was top-notch, showing that even in an area as far removed as could be imagined from electrical or mechanical engineering, he could set up top tier R&D teams. As with mining, however, Edison ran into the hard truth that no amount of innovation can overcome competitors with a better supply of a cheaper product. In this case, it was the one-two punch of the rubber cartels never making their anticipated production cuts, followed a few years after Edison’s death by the development of synthetic rubber, that doomed the idea of American-based production. Somewhat ironically, Edison himself was on record for decades having predicted that synthetic materials and fibers would soon replace most natural materials.

"A company for laying out plans to ship 100 million AI “companions” that will become a part of everyday life, but nobody to know what they are"

From Ed Zitron's newsletter:

So, now that we've got that out the way, here's what we actually know — and that’s a very load-bearing “know” — about this device, according to the Wall Street Journal:

OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman gave his staff a preview Wednesday of the devices he is developing to build with the former Apple designer Jony Ive, laying out plans to ship 100 million AI “companions” that he hopes will become a part of everyday life.

...

Altman and Ive offered a few hints at the secret project they have been working on. The product will be capable of being fully aware of a user’s surroundings and life, will be unobtrusive, able to rest in one’s pocket or on one’s desk, and will be a third core device a person would put on a desk after a MacBook Pro and an iPhone.

The Journal earlier reported that the device won’t be a phone, and that Ive and Altman’s intent is to help wean users from screens. Altman said that the device isn’t a pair of glasses, and that Ive had been skeptical about building something to wear on the body. laying out plans to ship 100 million AI “companions” that he hopes will become a part of everyday life.

And from the blog eight years ago.

Wednesday, July 26, 2017

"A company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is."

Another excerpt from Charles Mackay's  Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. I believe "a company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is" was an initial business plan for Groupon.

Some of these schemes were plausible enough, and, had they been undertaken at a time when the public mind was unexcited, might have been pursued with advantage to all concerned. But they were established merely with the view of raising the shares in the market. The projectors took the first opportunity of a rise to sell out, and next morning the scheme was at an end. Maitland, in his History of London, gravely informs us, that one of the projects which received great encouragement, was for the establishment of a company "to make deal-boards out of saw-dust." This is, no doubt, intended as a joke; but there is abundance of evidence to show that dozens of schemes hardly a whir more reasonable, lived their little day, ruining hundreds ere they fell. One of them was for a wheel for perpetual motion—capital, one million; another was "for encouraging the breed of horses in England, and improving of glebe and church lands, and repairing and rebuilding parsonage and vicarage houses." Why the clergy, who were so mainly interested in the latter clause, should have taken so much interest in the first, is only to be explained on the supposition that the scheme was projected by a knot of the foxhunting parsons, once so common in England. The shares of this company were rapidly subscribed for. But the most absurd and preposterous of all, and which showed, more completely than any other, the utter madness of the people, was one, started by an unknown adventurer, entitled "company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is." Were not the fact stated by scores of credible witnesses, it would be impossible to believe that any person could have been duped by such a project. The man of genius who essayed this bold and successful inroad upon public credulity, merely stated in his prospectus that the required capital was half a million, in five thousand shares of 100 pounds each, deposit 2 pounds per share. Each subscriber, paying his deposit, would be entitled to 100 pounds per annum per share. How this immense profit was to be obtained, he did not condescend to inform them at that time, but promised, that in a month full particulars should be duly announced, and a call made for the remaining 98 pounds of the subscription. Next morning, at nine o'clock, this great man opened an office in Cornhill. Crowds of people beset his door, and when he shut up at three o'clock, he found that no less than one thousand shares had been subscribed for, and the deposits paid. He was thus, in five hours, the winner of 2,000 pounds. He was philosopher enough to be contented with his venture, and set off the same evening for the Continent. He was never heard of again

 

Closing thoughts on Trump vs. Musk

This exchange with Andrew Gelman in the comment section for Friday's post is already pretty much a post. After seeing my reply, Andrew directed me to his post from earlier this year which discusses a similar dynamic. 

“They had it all but they wanted more”: Left-wing radicals in the 1960s and right-wingers now 

From Friday:

I'm not saying that Trump and Musk don't have real disagreements, but . . . is part of this just straight-up game theory, kind of like what happens when labor and management attack each other when there are contract negotiations? Strikes, lockouts, and lawsuits are not good for business--they're negative-sum actions--but sometimes the union needs to strike, management needs to lock out, and both sides need to sue, just to demonstrate their seriousness. Basic negotiation strategies.

So, Musk can unleash the social-media attacks, not because it helps him but because it demonstrates his willingness to do so, which brings Trump to the negotiating table, and then Musk can walk it all back.

Another part of this is Musk's apparent confidence that, between he and his allies, and Trump and his allies, they control the news media discourse to the extent that if Musk says X, Y, and Z, and then he later unsays them, the original saying-of-it will be politically unimportant.

I'm not saying that this behavior is entirely strategic or that Trump and Musk don't have anger issues, just that this conflict fits in just fine into a negotiation pattern. Maybe Musk really felt the need to escalate to be taken seriously. And, as is often the case, emotional and rational behavior can go together; indeed, rational strategies can be most effective when they align with emotions.

Andrew 

 _______________

Andrew, 

It's true that these steps are entirely consistent with, and might be highly effective as, negotiating strategies. The problem is, there's no negotiation here. Unless we are talking about some sort of incredibly convoluted, 11th-dimensional chess where there's no way of knowing what the true objectives are, Musk had nothing to gain and virtually everything to lose by going rogue.

Musk was already getting about as much preferential treatment as the Trump administration could manage. They were throwing him government contracts and strong-arming other countries to adopt Starlink. They were killing investigations into his companies and letting him shut down regulatory departments that were supposed to keep him in line. The promise of even bigger graft to come had pumped his companies’ market cap above the trillion-dollar mark.

The only thing they hadn't given him was the continued EV subsidies, but he had to know those were going away—and even if he didn't, by focusing on the spending in the budget, he made it next to impossible to push for even more spending on electric vehicles. He even went so far as to explicitly rule out asking for them as part of his flame war.

Musk did have complaints, probably about the way he was shown the door (though even there, he absolutely had to leave in order to convince stockholders and investors he was focused on his companies). He didn't want to stay, but he might have felt upset over being encouraged to leave.

The key concept here is insult versus injury. Virtually nothing Trump and the administration had done had hurt Musk professionally or financially, but a great deal had been done to hurt his feelings—from passing over his guy for NASA to that humiliating exposé in The New York Times. You can't negotiate away insults. All you can do is get even.

As for the ability to make statements X, Y, and Z go away, some bells are very difficult to unring. Trump is currently trying to pass arguably the most unpopular budget in living memory. This is already a heavy lift, and having Musk attack it from the right does not make it any easier. Should this legislation fail, it would be an extraordinary blow, the ramifications of which would echo for a long time.

Though not of the same magnitude, bringing up Epstein and priming his followers to expect an economic downturn due to tariffs are two more genies that will be difficult to get back in their bottles. (It's worth noting that Musk has continued to double down on the Epstein thread.)

It is essential to remember that while Musk is, by most standards, the richest man in the world, that position is extremely precarious. Unlike Bezos or Gates or Buffett or any of the other men in the top five or ten, Elon’s fortune is almost entirely based on a bubble—the belief that companies, both over 20 years old, will, sometime in the near future, suddenly become massively profitable. If Tesla and SpaceX were valued based on even the most generous rational criteria, Musk's net worth would drop by a factor of at least 20 or 30. Balloon men, as a rule, should avoid knife fights—but that's exactly what Musk is engaged in.

(I'll probably rework this into a post next week.)

Mark

ps One other point I should have emphasized was just how insanely self-destructive the choice of targets was on Elon's part. Supposedly, this all started over excessive government spending, which is a strange place to plant your flag if your entire fortune is dependent on government money. At one point, in the heat of the exchange, Musk even basically came out and said, "I don't want your stupid old subsidies."

Now, as we enter the hangover stage of this whole ugly but amusing affair, Musk appears to have remembered—or been reminded—that he does, in fact, want those stupid old subsidies; that it was those taxpayer-funded checks that finally tipped Tesla into profitability and have barely kept it there.

As Patrick Boyle recently put it. "If you take the crony out of crony capitalism, what's the point?"

As of Monday, Musk appears to have entirely and unilaterally backed down.

A few days ago, Musk called for Trump to be impeached and suggested he was involved in pedophilia. Then Trump threatened to terminate Musk's federal contracts. Now Musk is back to promoting Trump.

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— Judd Legum (@juddlegum.bsky.social) June 9, 2025 at 7:53 AM

Musk has deleted his tweet accusing Trump of being in the Epstein files: x.com/elonmusk/sta... He also deleted a follow-up that said "Mark this post for the future. The truth will come out."

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— Matt Novak (@paleofuture.bsky.social) June 7, 2025 at 8:20 AM

Exclusive: Officials at NASA and the Pentagon are urging SpaceX competitors to quickly develop alternative rockets and spacecraft after President Trump threatened to cancel Space X’s contracts and Elon Musk’s defiant response.

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— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost.com) June 7, 2025 at 10:27 AM

The Washington Post has a good post mortem. 

WASH POST: Trump called Musk “a big time drug addict” — and Musk and Bessent came to blows after Bessent called Musk a fraud. A damn circus. 🎪 www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

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— The Tennessee Holler (@thetnholler.bsky.social) June 7, 2025 at 9:50 AM

 

And just a reminder.

“About a third of Tesla’s $35 billion in profits since 2014 has come from selling federal and state regulatory credits to other automakers.” www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

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— Max Boot (@maxboot.bsky.social) June 8, 2025 at 5:57 AM

Sunday night in LA County, 6/8/2025

Both statements are from last night. Note difference between how Trump characterizes conditions in LA ("RIOTS AND LOOTERS"), vs how the LAPD does ("Peaceful Protests")

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— Catherine Rampell (@crampell.bsky.social) June 8, 2025 at 11:16 AM

Hello. I live in Los Angeles. The president is lying.

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— Kai Ryssdal (@kairyssdal.bsky.social) June 8, 2025 at 2:54 PM

 As always with an LA story, I need to start by reminding everyone not familiar with the area just how big LA County is (and this very much is a county-level story). There are almost 10 million Angelenos in an area covering over 4,000 square miles. Inevitably, any Los Angeles story—particularly one involving a crisis—will be wildly unrepresentative. As with the Black Lives Matter protests and the wildfires, it is easy to get the impression of an entire city devastated, particularly if you rely on the East Coast-based press.

Here, I made a helpful graph to assist with “Cities are where very, very large numbers of Americans live” discourse, with real Census data and everything.

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— Kieran Healy (@kjhealy.co) June 8, 2025 at 6:31 PM

 

As best I can tell, the protests are limited mostly to downtown and surrounding neighborhoods. There's certainly been no sign that anything unusual is going on here in the Valley, and as far as I can tell, that's the case for most of the county.

That's not to say this isn't a big deal and we aren't a little on edge. I certainly am, and have been taking precautions in case things should get crazy. I filled my car with gas last night and made sure that all of my batteries are charged up, just in case the unexpected happens. Having 2,000 National Guard troops operating under questionable orders here in town will make a fellow a bit nervous.

I'll be perfectly honest, I wish we had a Jerry Brown or even an Arnold Schwarzenegger, but I have to admit Gavin Newsom has stepped up and is striking the right tone and doing the right things. This could very well be his moment, and so far he's meeting it.

In an interview with NBC News' Jacob Soboroff, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said that Pres. Trump "has created the conditions" surrounding the Los Angeles protests & called Trump's decision to deploy the National Guard "a manufactured crisis," via @msnbc.com — www.msnbc.com/msnbc/watch/...

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— Lora Kolodny (@lorak.bsky.social) June 8, 2025 at 10:47 PM 

I wish I could say the press was also rising to the occasion, but so far the coverage has been predictably weaselly and craven. The New York Times website is terrible. The Washington Post and CNN are only a little better. The extraordinary precedent-breaking and illegality—the transparent attempt to drum up crisis—are pushed aside for countless images of the same handful of acts of vandalism. Perhaps the most representative quote came from the NYT, which talked about ICE “firing back,” despite the fact they were the only ones actually firing.

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— George Conway 👊🇺🇸🔥 (@gtconway.bsky.social) June 8, 2025 at 6:09 PM

In itself it's not the biggest thing but Congress specifically passed a law requiring ICE to allow access to members of Congress because of Trump's antics in the first term. This isn't even norms. It's violating black letter statute law.

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— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm.bsky.social) June 8, 2025 at 8:11 PM

Critically important point from Juliette. The only real justification for federalizing the nat guard over a governors objection is when the civil authorities are defying the law. This is attack on the sovereign right of the people of California to self government.

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— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm.bsky.social) June 7, 2025 at 11:58 PM

I'll close with a historical note. It has been 60 years since the president activated the National Guard in a state without a request from its governor. That was LBJ, and he did it to guard civil rights protesters.

I have to admit, I did not expect us to get to impeachment and deportation by Thursday.

 [Dictated to my phone late at night then proof read by ChatGPT. Apologies in advance.]

Pretty much every Musk watcher I know expected it to get ugly eventually. From the very first days of the administration, it was obvious that two vindictive narcissists with Messiah complexes would not make for a stable co-governing arrangement. We even expected things to fall apart fairly quickly when the cracks started to show, but damn...

Still, other than the speed, none of this is surprising. The first thing you have to remember is that both of these men have anger issues, but Elon's are far more extreme. Journalists who have followed him closely (setting aside those inclined to softball questions and puff pieces) have been telling stories of random rage firings and unpredictable tantrums going back for decades. I assume everyone here remembers how, in response to a mildly critical comment, Elon accused a heroic diver of pedophilia, and how, a few years later, he responded to a drop-off in advertising at his newly purchased Twitter by sitting on stage in a crowded auditorium and telling those businesses to “go f*** yourself.”

Musk is also, like Trump, notoriously thin-skinned, and the past couple of weeks have seen all sorts of insults and injuries—from the New York Times piece (with obvious WH sources) exposing his heavy drug use to the proposed budget virtually guaranteeing that Tesla will never again be a profitable car company. It was probably inevitable that he would lash out and that Trump and his allies would reply in kind, but the escalation has been something to see.

Other than the speed, perhaps the most remarkable thing about this flame war is how exhaustive it has been. I’ve been following these stories way too closely for my own mental health, and I’m having trouble thinking of any major stone left unturned. In addition to calling for his deportation, Trump and his allies have threatened to destroy Musk’s business empire and turn the investigative force of the government against him. Musk has been even more thorough—in addition to calling for impeachment, he has gone after the budget, used Trump’s own language against him, suggested that the tariffs were about to cause a recession, and even briefly threatened to sut off the space station.

The part about impeachment is particularly interesting given JD Vance's role in the White House. Vance was always the princess in the arranged marriage, there to seal the alliance between Trump and the PayPal Mafia. Though it would be extremely difficult to force him out of office, it's hard to imagine him not being frozen out of the administration for the rest of the term.

[Quick question for the audience. While there have been cases of presidents and vice presidents being rivals and having ideological differences—think Reagan-Bush or Kennedy-LBJ, going all the way back to Adams and Jefferson—I'm trying to think of a situation quite this extreme. Does anyone have any suggestions?]

We will see how this plays out and whether or not things calm down over the weekend. It's difficult to imagine them maintaining this intensity, but it's also hard to see how some of these bridges can be unburned. If Musk loses his security clearance, if we are seeing the bubble finally pop with Tesla, or if the budget talks—which are already incredibly unpopular with voters—fall apart, things will not be going back to the way they were.

 

  

 Ahem...

 

'Sore subject': White House confirms physical brawl between key Trump allies 

A physical altercation between Elon Musk and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent precipitated the Tesla founder's quick ouster from the Trump administration, according to a report.

The incident was previously reported as a "screaming match" between the two men, but the physical aspect has since been confirmed by The White House.

The U.K.'s Daily Mail interviewed former Trump adviser Steve Bannon about the DOGE-related scuffle.

"'Scott Bessent called [Musk] out and said, 'You promised us a trillion dollars (in cuts), and now you're at like $100 billion, and nobody can find anything, what are you doing?'' Bannon recounted. "And that's when Elon got physical. It's a sore subject with him. It wasn't an argument, it was a physical confrontation. Elon basically shoved him."

The altercation was confirmed by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Friday, the Mail reported.

Retribution: The final frontier.

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— George Takei (@georgetakei.bsky.social) June 5, 2025 at 10:30 AM

Big balls showing up at work tomorrow:

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— James (@gravitysra1nbow.bsky.social) June 5, 2025 at 1:04 PM

Matt Yglesias, Ro Khanna and the Abundance Boys better start hitting the books so they can figure out how holding billionaires accountable for blatant crimes is bad, actually.

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— e.w. niedermeyer (@niedermeyer.online) June 5, 2025 at 1:51 PM

You can't make it up Congressman Scott Perry voted for Trump's "disgusting abomination" bill Now he's lambasting it and calling on the Senate to stop it How do MAGA Republicans live with their rank hypocrisy

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— Adam Cohen (@axidentaliberal.bsky.social) June 4, 2025 at 8:21 PM

MACO? (Musk always chickens out?) The SpaceX ceo softened his stance on decommissioning Dragon after a user on X told him to basically chillax… www.cnbc.com/2025/06/05/m...

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— Lora Kolodny (@lorak.bsky.social) June 5, 2025 at 7:50 PM

He is now calling for Trump to nationalize SpaceX lmao

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— Josh Billinson (@jbillinson.bsky.social) June 5, 2025 at 3:12 PM

 

I'm sure that's all the reassurance Trump will need. 

Vance spox on Musk's tweet: “It’s insane for anyone to even remotely suggest this. America is blessed to have President Trump leading our nation. He has delivered on promise after promise to the American people, and he has no bigger supporter than Vice President Vance.”

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— Jacob Gardenswartz (@reporterjacobg.bsky.social) June 5, 2025 at 5:58 PM

 

If this ever happens, it will be due to Martin Eberhard, Tesla's founding CEO and inventor of core tech in Tesla EVs, raising the issue in his lawsuit after Musk ousted him from the co. iirc @plainsite.org made those legal records available + @washingtonpost.com did *outstanding* in-depth reporting.

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— Lora Kolodny (@lorak.bsky.social) June 5, 2025 at 2:59 PM

Tesla is a small and imploding car company, overvalued by at least a factor of 20. The only reasons to buy it, other than a stunning faith in the greater fool theory, are the belief that some combination of three things will happen: robo-taxis will largely replace driving and Tesla will dominate the market despite being far behind on the technology; people will spend trillions of dollars on humanoid robots, and once again, Tesla will dominate that market despite again being far behind on the technology; the Trump administration will dump unprecedented amounts of money into the company. Up until recently, the third possibility was the only halfway realistic one. Now there is no rational reason for buying the stock.

Musk was supposed to be "focused" on Tesla after his DOGE special government employee period ended. Today, the company shed $152 billion in market cap (its worst single day hit ever) after Musk feuded with Trump. www.cnbc.com/2025/06/05/t...

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— Lora Kolodny (@lorak.bsky.social) June 5, 2025 at 2:17 PM

I think I’ve recognized that I don’t like Matt Yglesias because it makes me anxious when I can’t tell whether someone is mocking themselves or not

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— Uncovered The Human Hat (@kenwhite.bsky.social) June 5, 2025 at 3:43 

Musk vs. Trump is class Godzilla vs. Rodan

You can't really root for either, but it's still fun to sit back and enjoy the spectacle.

1. We have two erratic vindictive narcissists with messiahs complex. Don't count on rational self-interest. 2. LBJ on Hoover "I'd rather have that son of a bitch inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in"

— markpalko.bsky.social (@markpalko.bsky.social) June 4, 2025 at 6:36 PM

3. Money's always nice, especially during midterms. 4. A rift between Trump and Thiel/Andreessen et al could cause problems, particularly given that JDV is Thiel's hand puppet. (and if things get ugly I guarantee "25th amendment" will start showing up in their Signal chats)

— markpalko.bsky.social (@markpalko.bsky.social) June 4, 2025 at 6:43 PM

One aspect that everyone seems to be missing is the timing. Musk went after Trump's bill shortly after someone in the White House fed The New York Times damaging details about his drug use.

The Trump White House has always been a snake pit with various factions battling for the limited attention of the addled president. Musk made more than his share of enemies, all of whom have the private numbers of various NYT reporters.

Musk is every bit as vindictive, erratic, prone to anger, and narcissistic as Trump, and with Musk, all of those things are amplified by heavy drug use. He has a long history of viciously and recklessly going after people who cross or insult him. What we're seeing is absolutely in character.

@lawrenceodonnell.msnbc.com: Musk vs. Trump. Trump's silence on Musk's budget bill attacks proves who’s afraid of whom youtu.be/HpYM6z5GXys?...

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— The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell (@lastword.msnbc.com) June 4, 2025 at 8:42 PM

It turns out Trump is secretly working with Elon Musk to tank his own bill. They’re so stupid, it hurts.

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— Hoodlum 🇺🇸 (@nothoodlum.bsky.social) June 4, 2025 at 7:34 PM

NEW: GOP rage with Musk spills out privately after break with Trump

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— Axios (@axios.com) June 4, 2025 at 3:40 PM

"40+ years there's been no Dem-disarray remotely comparable to Trump/Musk/Leo/etc fratricide." -- James Fallows

Prometheus Unbound and the Great Pumpkin Theory of Technological Innovation

[I wrote this back in 2023 and only came across it recently, but it still feels relevant, particularly now that Klein is on the talk show circuit hawking Abundance.]

The following is a bit of an unfair oversimplification of the techno-optimist philosophy, but not that unfair. Stripped down to its basics, the pitch we see again and again from Mark Andreessen, Noah Smith, and even to a degree from as Ezra Klein is that we are on the verge of an age of unimagined prosperity where all of our problems will be solved and all we have to do is set free Great Men and destined forces and then simply keep the faith. Think Ayn Rand by way of Silicon Valley with the added requirement that we all need to clap our hands to show that we really and truly believe in the Übermensch (or, as they are known in the valley, founders).

We've previously hit on the apparent contradiction of having a class of visionaries/innovators/entrepreneurs/ technologists who are capable of solving all of the major problems that face us, from global warming to colonizing the planets and yet who can be brought to their knees by almost any obstacle we put in their way, be it regulation or progressive taxation or even mild criticism. 
 
The weirder part is the theory that technological innovation has ground to a halt because we have lost the capacity to dream big. This is the hypothesis that has launched a thousand TED Talks and made untold fortunes for various motivational speakers. From Klein:

We have lost the habit of imagining what we could have; we are too timid in deploying the coordinated genius and muscle of society to pull possibilities from the far future into the near present.

This has been a fundamental part of  the basic pitch for every credulously reported the-future-is-now story of the 21st century. Mars One, hyperloops, Theranos, the end of aging, and countless other promises that we were about to "pull possibilities from the far future into the near present," all of which turned out to be costly frauds and failures. 

These "we need to dream again" talks and think pieces take as a given the less-than-shocking observation that people were more excited by technology when technology was doing more exciting things, and flip the arrow of causality in the counterintuitive direction.

Despite not making a lot of sense and lacking historical support, this theory has continued to gain popularity over the past few years until it is more or less conventional wisdom by this point. We are all sitting in the pumpkin patch with Linus being told that if we show any sign of doubt the great venture capitalist will not bring us fusion reactors and space elevators.

The Unlikely Return of the "Progressives Should Be Nicer to Musk" Narrative

[Apologies for the gaps. Twitter no longer plays nice with Blogger, which is probably the least of its issues.]

 

The arguments here aren't even interesting enough to mock. It is, however, a reminder of how reluctant the establishment press is to let go once they've dug their teeth into something. 

 

Monday, April 26, 2021

It actually takes some effort to devise arguments this conventional and this wrong 

It is rare that you come across a comment that is so ill-informed in such an informative way.

Environmentalism is supposed to be pain and sacrifice. Because Musk offers an environmental vision that is fun, futuristic and coded with all sorts of “bro” aspects, he is deeply suspicious and must be stopped.

— Josh Barro (@jbarro) April 25, 2021

Barro is such a creature of the standard narrative that not only does he form his opinions based on the carefully crafted persona of Musk; he assumes that everyone else must be doing the same. If someone disagrees with his take, it has to be due to their reacting differently to that narrative.

E.W. Niedermeyer's response to that same initial tweet could be read as a rebuttal to Barro. 

98% of the Elon-Rheorical Complex is just making criticism out to be hatred of him. If it's a referendum on his image, he wins (so far). Dig into the facts, and many of his ideas fall apart. If he actually delivered on most of his brainwaves, this would be much more obvious.

— E.W. Niedermeyer (@Tweetermeyer) April 25, 2021

It's safe to say that no one who has been seriously following Musk and Tesla in the Financial Times,  the LA Times, Business Insider, Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Edmunds.com or Wired would attribute the criticism to "fun, futuristic and coded with all sorts of “bro” aspects." 

If anything, it is this reputation as a playful visionary (along with the cultivated misimpression that he is some kind of natural engineer) that has largely shielded Musk from his critics for so long. While it might be possible to find people who like their environmentalism dreary, the vast majority desperately want to live in the kind of world Musk promises and couldn't care less about the bro culture trappings. 

The trouble is, most people paying attention have realized that the man is a habitual liar.

Specifically on the question of climate change, here's a reminder of one reason why environmentalists have been falling out of love with Tesla recently.


Jamie Powell writing for FT Alphaville.

From "Tesla: carbon offsetting, but in reverse"

We’re not the first to point this out by any means, but bitcoin is dreadful for the environment. Still don’t believe it? Well Bank of America published an excellent report last week (which can be found on David Gerard’s blog), on the dominant digital coin. And, in particular, its carbon impact. 

 Here are a few choice stats. 

 Bitcoin -- or to be more precise, bitcoin mining -- currently consumes more energy than Greece, and a touch less than the Netherlands. In theory, it wouldn’t be so much of an issue if mining was powered by renewable energy, but 72 per cent of mining is concentrated in China, where nearly two-thirds of all electricity is generated by coal power. 

 For the moment then, bitcoin has carbon emissions that sit comfortably between American Airlines’s output, the world’s largest airline which currently carries 200m passengers per year, and the entire US Federal government. 

 Perhaps the most relevant stat of all, however, is this one:

 

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(Have I mentioned Google hates us?)

 

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Monday, May 3, 2021

Josh and the toasty warm take

 Following up on a comment by Andrew Gelman, I was going to open this post with a discussion of hot takes, but going through the Twitter feed around this topic, and I saw that lots of mainstream media and political thinkers had the same take, greatly reducing its hotness.

If you'll remember, this started with the following tweet from Josh Barro:

Environmentalism is supposed to be pain and sacrifice. Because Musk offers an environmental vision that is fun, futuristic and coded with all sorts of “bro” aspects, he is deeply suspicious and must be stopped.

— Josh Barro (@jbarro) April 25, 2021

Before we go on, I think it's useful to break down the implicit and explicit points Barro is making. Here's my attempt:

a. Musk is fighting climate change

b. But many environmentalists dislike him

c. Because they disapprove of his style and image

The first two points establish a mystery to be solved; the third offers an explanation. While Barro may have intended this conclusion to be provocative, he treats the premise as axiomatic, as do many others.

Well also he’s very rich, which a small but vocal group thinks is per se bad.

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) April 25, 2021

Exactly https://t.co/33kVqRwvlC

— Alec Stapp (@AlecStapp) April 25, 2021

I don't claim to speak for the left, but:
-union busting
-poor workplace conditions/safety
-SWATing whistleblowers
-repeated environmental violations (really)
-market manipulation
-unsafe automated driving development/deployment, even by the standards of an unregulated industry https://t.co/gavkrYrkKV

— E.W. Niedermeyer (@Tweetermeyer) May 1, 2021

And a whole damned essay by James Pethokoukis.

More deeply, Musk is offering an attractive techno-optimist vision of the future. It's one in stark contrast with that offered by anti-capitalists muttering about the need to abandon "fairy tales of eternal economic growth," as teen climate activist Greta Thunberg has put it. Unlike the dour, scarcity-driven philosophy of Thunbergism, Muskism posits that tech-powered capitalism can solve the problems it causes while creating a future of abundance where you can watch immersive video of SpaceX astronauts landing on Mars while traveling in your self-driving Tesla. As journalist Josh Barro neatly summed it up recently, "Environmentalism is supposed to be pain and sacrifice. Because Musk offers an environmental vision that is fun, futuristic and coded with all sorts of 'bro' aspects, he is deeply suspicious and must be stopped."

You'll notice that that these examples include liberals, conservatives and centrists. This is one of the many cases where trying to approach this with an ideological filter not on fails to help, but actually obscures what's going on. The distinction we need to focus on isn't left vs. right but close vs. far.

I don't know of another case where the standard narrative and the story told by reporters on the front lines diverge this radically, and the gap has only grown larger. In one version Musk is a visionary and spectacularly gifted engineer who, though flawed, is motivated only out of a passion for saving the planet. He does amazing things. In the other, he is a con man and a bully who, when goes off script, inevitably reveals a weak grasp of science and technology. Outside of the ability to get money from investors and taxpayers, his accomplishments range from highly exaggerated to the fraudulent.

While this view may not be universal among journalists covering the man, it is the consensus opinion. 

The explanations of Barro et al. are not all that reasonable, but they are probably as good as you can get when you start with the assumption that the standard narrative is right.

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[A year later, they were still at it.]

Friday, April 29, 2022

Updated: A year ago at the blog we were talking about about the disconnect between Musk pontificators and the reporters on the beat. Let's see how that's going

As soon as I run a post, perfect examples start showing up.

NEW: Why, of all the world’s billionaires, do progressives love to hate Elon Musk, whose fortune comes from taking electric vehicles mainstream? https://t.co/Jpi7Okj9Kg

— Alex Seitz-Wald (@aseitzwald) April 29, 2022

barely scratched the complex surface

— Lora Kolodny (@lorakolodny) April 29, 2022

___________________________________________

Picking up from Wednesday and Noah Smith's misinformed defense of the non-founder of Tesla and PayPal. 

While Musk's attempt to buy Twitter has focused the attention of many in the press and a lot of disturbing stories have come out since last year, many commentators are still perplexed at the hostility toward Elon, particularly among liberals who, according to conventional wisdom, should be the ones who hold him in the highest regard. 

An example from an associate editor of Reason (I assume center-right politically).

Elon Musk is left-leaning, is a card-carrying member of the ACLU (and one of its biggest donors), and is in charge of a company that has helped revolutionize clean energy & climate-friendly transportation.

But some people despise him because…he has a lot of money?

— Billy Binion (@billybinion) April 25, 2022

Worth noting that by 2021, Tesla had largely dropped out of the clean energy business.

In the fourth quarter of 2017, Tesla reported a 43% drop in solar deployments compared with when it purchased SolarCity. The company ended up losing its market-leading position in 2018 and now hovers around 2% of the residential solar market, according to Wood Mackenzie. In the first and second quarters of 2021, Tesla installed 92 and 85 megawatts of solar, respectively. That’s less than half of what SolarCity was installing per quarter before the acquisition.

Tesla moved some solar employees to work on building the company’s electric cars and batteries, fired other solar employees, and moved others who had been doing new installations to work on repairs and remediation.

And that Musk's relationship with the ACLU is... complicated.

For too long, the media has painted a halo over the head of the ACLU. https://t.co/IvhKQoW25S

— Russ Mitchell (@russ1mitchell) April 29, 2022

The ACLU helped Amber Heard draft the Washington Post article accusing Johnny Depp of abuse after the organization was promised a $3.5m donation – though at least $500,000 of it eventually came from a fund connected to Tesla founder Elon Musk https://t.co/hVDmhces3j

— Eric W. Dolan (@EWDolan) April 29, 2022

Beyond that, notice that Binion's they-hate-him-because-he's-rich is the same one used by center-left Matt Yglesias a year ago. (see below.)

Like Yglesia, NYT columnist Farhad Manjoo is also generally center-left (though he is also the paper's goto guy for blame everything on liberal hypocrisy stories) 

 

what is this, teslarati? https://t.co/NCa84H2HNz

— Lora Kolodny (@lorakolodny) April 28, 2022

Quick side note: All justifications of Tesla's valuation start with the assumption that it will have a virtual monopoly in the near future, so I guess he's just an aspirational monopolist. 

I cannot think of an example of a major journalist working this beat who has posted one of these "why is everybody mean to Elon?" tweets. Even at Manjoo's own paper, reporters like Neal Boudette are far more likely to point out false statements from Musk and serious safety issues with Tesla's FSD, even when it means dealing with one of the nastiest troll armies on the internet.

 

Why the humanoid robot story matters

 I realize we've had a lot of robot content on the blog recently, and a lot of readers—particularly those who don't follow us regularly—may be wondering what's going on, so this might be a good time for a quick overview.

This really is a big story—no, strike that—this is two or three really big and important stories, all of which interlock around a familiar cast of characters.

It was Elon Musk who drew me into this, so let's start with him.

Musk is, at least on paper, the richest man in the world, but his fortune is mainly based on the wildly inflated stock of a small and imploding car company. The bull case for owning Tesla at this point comes down almost entirely to the supposed potential of two products: robotaxis and humanoid robots—with the latter being probably the bigger driver.

That qualifier is essential for understanding this discussion. Unlike Boston Dynamics, arguably the leader in the field, Tesla is not developing a line of robots designed for various tasks and environments. Instead, Musk has a very specific pitch. He is developing one product—a humanoid robot named Optimus—that, he insists, will be able to do anything and will therefore usher in a new age of prosperity and abundance (Musk’s messianic tendencies are especially notable when he talks about this subject).

We've already talked about how small the market for humanoid, bipedal robots is likely to be and how far behind the pack Tesla is in terms of technology, but perhaps the most striking fact to keep in mind is that it probably doesn't matter. The market cap for the company is insanely high, with a P/E ratio that has scraped—and possibly briefly broken—200. If Tesla were to start trading on any kind of reasonable basis tomorrow, the valuation of the company would drop by one and probably closer to two orders of magnitude. Between here and there, Elon Musk would experience numerous margin calls, since we know he has been using that stock to secure loans. If the market were to suddenly become rational, Musk might very well find himself with a negative net worth.

The valuation is so inflated that Musk is in the position of the gambler who needs to hit the trifecta just to get out of the hole. 

The second story, because this is 2025, involves AI 

The humanoid robot hype bubble has a symbiotic relationship with the larger AI hype bubble. The narrative of the latter is a key part of the viability arguments for the former, while the humanoids provide a potential market for AI companies. (One of the dirty little secrets of the AI bubble is that, so far, no one has come up with a business model where revenue—let alone profit—justifies the current level of investment and excitement.)

In many cases, the people pumping AI are the same ones pumping humanoids, often as part of the same pitches. This is partly due to the previously mentioned symbiosis and partly due to the compatibility of the narratives. Both pitch a world based more on science fiction tropes than on actual technology.

This leads to the third big narrative that humanoids play into: techno-optimism and the coming abundance utopia. The idea being pushed by a wide array of prominent “thinkers” (with varying degrees of sanewashing, ranging from the reasonable-sounding Ezra Klein to the off-his-meds delusional Elon Musk) is that we are about to enter a golden age where machines will meet our every need and fulfill our every desire, as long as we trust our tech overlords and give them anything they want. 

Abundance is definitely having a moment...

SCOOP: Senate Democrats have invited New York Times columnist Ezra Klein and Democratic data guru David Shor to talk to senators at their annual one-day issues retreat on Wednesday, sources tell Axios.

[image or embed]

— Axios (@axios.com) May 5, 2025 at 6:05 PM

 ... but only those who've been following closely realize the movement grew out of Marc Andreessen's techno-optimism, and if you scratch the surface, you'll soon hit LLMs, tech messiahs and, yes, humanoids.

The fortunes and political power of Elon Musk

The biggest hype bubble since Web 3 and the metaverse 

The trendy solution that Democratic leadership is jumping on.

All pretty good reasons to follow this story.

I'm as tired of the snark as you are. Let's do a fun robotics story.

Here's to a cool toy (with very clever engineering) that got a lot of kids interested in robotics back in the day. 

How a 1980s toy robot arm inspired modern robotics
Jon Keegan

Described as a “robot-like arm to aid young masterminds in scientific and laboratory experiments,” it was the rare toy that lived up to the hype printed on the front of the box. This was a legit robotic arm. You could rotate the arm to spin around its base, tilt it up and down, bend it at the “elbow” joint, rotate the “wrist,” and open and close the bright-­orange articulated hand in elegant chords of movement, all using only the twistable twin joysticks. 

Anyone who played with this toy will also remember the sound it made. Once you slid the power button to the On position, you heard a constant whirring sound of plastic gears turning and twisting. And if you tried to push it past its boundaries, it twitched and protested with a jarring “CLICK … CLICK … CLICK.”

It wasn’t just kids who found the Armatron so special. It was featured on the cover of the November/December 1982 issue of Robotics Age magazine, which noted that the $31.95 toy (about $96 today) had “capabilities usually found only in much more expensive experimental arms.”

...

I needed to know the story of this toy. I reached out to the manufacturer, Tomy (now known as Takara Tomy), which has been in business in Japan for over 100 years. It put me in touch with Hiroyuki Watanabe, a 69-year-old engineer and toy designer living in Tokyo. He’s retired now, but he worked at Tomy for 49 years, building many classic handheld electronic toys of the ’80s, including Blip, Digital Diamond, Digital Derby, and Missile Strike. Watanabe’s name can be found on 44 patents, and he was involved in bringing between 50 and 60 products to market. Watanabe answered emailed questions via video, and his responses were translated from Japanese.

 ...

The bold look and function of Armatron made quite an impression on many young kids who would one day have a career in robotics.

One of them was Adam Borrell, a mechanical design engineer who has been building robots for 15 years at Boston Dynamics, including Petman, the YouTube-famous Atlas, and the dog-size quadruped called Spot.

...

Borrell had a fateful reunion with the toy while in grad school for engineering. “One of my office mates had an Armatron at his desk,” he recalls, “and it was broken. We took it apart together, and that was the first time I had seen the guts of it. 

“It had this fantastic mechanical gear train to just engage and disengage this one motor in a bunch of different ways. And it was really fascinating that it had done so much—the one little motor. And that sort of got me back thinking about industrial robot arms again.”

 ...

Eric Paulos, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, recalls nagging his parents about what an educational gift Armatron would make. Ultimately, he succeeded in his lobbying. 

“It was just endless exploration of picking stuff up and moving it around and even just watching it move. It was mesmerizing to me. I felt like I really owned my own little robot,” he recalls. “I cherish this thing. I still have it to this day, and it’s still working.”