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Intellectual death recorded

On February 17, 2025

At 6:01 pm

In General

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Elon Musk is an idiot on an almost inconceivable scale. He had his high-school toadies pull a random list from a database he doesn’t understand, and on that basis alone decided that 60 MILLION SOCIAL SECURITY ENROLLEES, out of 72 million total, are fraudulent. 83% fraudulent!— Will Stancil (@whstancil.bsky.social) 2025-02-17T14:18:39.674Z

Elon Musk certainly didn’t start out as anything like this sort of idiot, although the notion that he was some sort of Tesla-like genius was always transparently absurd on its face (Embarrassing confession: there used to be a mentally unhinged lawyer on my Michigan football board who constantly referred to himself as a “Tesla-like genius.” The embarrassing part — this was nearly 30 years ago — was I didn’t know who Tesla was at that time, so the phrase was very confusing to me/ End embarrassing confession).

But he’s certainly an astounding idiot at this point. How does this happen? I don’t think it’s particularly mysterious:

(1) If you happen to become the richest man in the world through whatever combination of skill in wealth acquisition, sociopathic charismatic rapacity (but I repeat myself), and crazy-ass luck, it’s probably impossible to avoid, under current cultural conditions, in which money is essentially God, developing the belief that you are, in point of fact, a Tesla-like genius, and not just in Tesla-related fields of intellectual inquiry, but in regard, to quote the timeless wisdom of the book of Ecclesiastes, every single fucking thing under the sun.

(2) This process is greatly accelerated by the stone cold fact that you are surrounded by absolutely nothing but legions of people trying to separate you from your money via the sort of unctuous flattery that would have made Louis XIV blush. No Elon: nobody actually thinks you’re a world transforming genius, or funny, or fuckable, or good at video games etc. etc. etc. THEY JUST WANT YOUR MONEY. Schmuck.

(3) Drugs. I have enough experience with this topic at second hand to recognize a pig junkie on a manic jag when I see one, no matter how rich and famous and celebrated he may appear to be (see 2 supra).

So yeah, when Musk tweets out something that a reasonably intelligent 14-year-old would instantly recognize couldn’t possibly be true as if he had in fact just made a world-shattering discovery that everybody else somehow missed, that’s because fame, fortune, and everything that goes with it (I thank you all) has made him really really really really stupid. Like Donald Trump levels of stupid.

And that is kind of big problem under our present circumstances.