About Musk and his destructive rampage – a long time coming?

First I excerpt three articles from The New York Times. I conclude with some rather different remarks I made about Musk in 2018.

Michelle Goldberg, Elon Musk’s Legacy Is Disease, Starvation and Death, May 30, 2025.

There is an Elon Musk post on X, his social media platform, that should define his legacy. “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” he wrote on Feb. 3. He could have “gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”

Musk’s absurd scheme to save the government a trillion dollars by slashing “waste, fraud and abuse” has been a failure. DOGE claims it’s saved $175 billion, but experts believe the real number is significantly lower. Meanwhile, according to the Partnership for Public Service, which studies the federal work force, DOGE’s attacks on government personnel — its firings, re-hirings, use of paid administrative leave and all the associated lack of productivity — could cost the government upward of $135 billion this fiscal year, even before the price of defending DOGE’s actions in court. Musk’s rampage through the bureaucracy may not have created any savings at all, and if it did, they were negligible.

Now, Musk’s Washington adventure is coming to an end, with the disillusioned billionaire announcing that he’s leaving government behind. “It sure is an uphill battle trying to improve things in D.C., to say the least,” he told The Washington Post.

There is one place, however, where Musk, with the help of his minions, achieved his goals. He did indeed shred U.S.A.I.D. Though a rump operation is now operating inside the State Department, the administration says that it has terminated more than 80 percent of U.S.A.I.D. grants. Brooke Nichols, an associate professor of global health at Boston University, has estimated that these cuts have already resulted in about 300,000 deaths, most of them of children, and will most likely lead to significantly more by the end of the year. That is what Musk’s foray into politics accomplished.

There's more at the link.

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Kirsten Grind and Megan Twohey, On the Campaign Trail, Elon Musk Juggled Drugs and Family Drama, May 30, 2025.

As Elon Musk became one of Donald J. Trump’s closest allies last year, leading raucous rallies and donating about $275 million to help him win the presidency, he was also using drugs far more intensely than previously known, according to people familiar with his activities.

Mr. Musk’s drug consumption went well beyond occasional use. He told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use. He took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. And he traveled with a daily medication box that held about 20 pills, including ones with the markings of the stimulant Adderall, according to a photo of the box and people who have seen it.

It is unclear whether Mr. Musk, 53, was taking drugs when he became a fixture at the White House this year and was handed the power to slash the federal bureaucracy. But he has exhibited erratic behavior, insulting cabinet members, gesturing like a Nazi and garbling his answers in a staged interview.

At the same time, Mr. Musk’s family life has grown increasingly tumultuous as he has negotiated overlapping romantic relationships and private legal battles involving his growing brood of children, according to documents and interviews.

There's much more at the link, going into the history of his drug use and his problematic treatment of X, his child with Grimes, and of Ashley St. Clair, mother of his 14th child.

There's more at the link.

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Matthew Purdy, The Techno-Futuristic Philosophy Behind Elon Musk’s Mania, May 29, 2025.

Over the past couple of decades, Musk has devoted himself to three grand engineering projects, all with the long-term mission of sustaining humanity far into the future. The goal of his rocket company SpaceX is to establish a city on Mars. Tesla is accelerating the transition to sustainable energy, autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots. Neuralink aims to eventually wire artificial intelligence into human brains so people can keep pace with machines.

“The guy is our Einstein,” Jamie Dimon, the JPMorgan Chase chief executive, said two days after President Trump’s inauguration.

Musk's longtermist beliefs:

In 2022, Musk reposted a link to a 2003 paper by Nick Bostrom, a philosopher who was then at Oxford, with the line, “Likely the most important paper ever written.”

In the paper, titled “Astronomical Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological Development,” Bostrom took a stab at calculating the potential lives lost by delaying the development of technology needed to survive “in the accessible region of the universe” for millions of years. “The potential for over 10 trillion potential human beings is lost for every second of postponement of colonization of our supercluster,” he wrote. [...]

For longtermists, the most pressing threats are often existential, and technology is almost always the cure.

This is Musk’s sweet spot. The focus of so much of his technology — rocketry, humanoid robotics, even his tunneling company — is intended to converge on making “human consciousness” multiplanetary, an urgent mission he complains is frustrated by rules and regulators. He calls colonizing Mars “life insurance of life collectively.” Like an insurance salesman, he has his pitch down.

“For the first time in the four-and-a-half-billion-year history of earth, it is possible to extend consciousness beyond our home planet,” he said on Joe Rogan’s podcast in February.

There's more at the link.

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I was thinking rather differently about Musk when I published this article in 3 Quarks Daily back in 2018, just after the time Space X had successfully landed the boosters from a Falcon Heavy rocket: Three Children of the Space Age: Elon Musk, Freeman Dyson, and Me.

Elon Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa, after Apollo 11, but before Apollo 17. He would have been a year and a half old during Apollo 17, much too young to have experienced it in any meaningful way. For Musk, and for anyone born after the middle-to-late 1960s, human space-travel was something to be experienced only in science fiction. As something people actually do it existed only in historical retrospect.

Musk, among others, is determined to change that, profoundly.

After going into a bit more of the history behind Musk-in-space I invoke Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140, which I had just read, about what life might be like in 2150, after the deluge:

And yet the book is optimistic, if not exactly sunny and cheerful – 600 pages worth of detail. Things are certainly different. But the super rich are, if anything, even richer. Their aeries even higher. National governments are weaker, skyscrapers have food gardens on multiple floors, people are more self-reliant. Gray zones, if you will, are larger; boondocks abound. And living quarters for almost all are smaller. Life goes on.

But there’s nothing in the book about colonies on the moon, among the asteroids, or on Mars. Nothing. Robinson’s attention was elsewhere. But if Musk has his way, those colonies will exist. Their total population? I don’t know, 10,000, 100,000? Who knows? Will they be a net drain on earth resources? Maybe, but most likely not. They simply won’t happen if they cannot at least sustain themselves. If Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos, and who knows who else, if they have their way, they’ll have to return a profit.

I wouldn’t bet on it. I wouldn’t bet against it. I just don’t know.

I still don't know, but Elon Musk has certainly taken a huge turn to the Dark Side.

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Let me offer one final observation. Musk has clearly given a lot of thought to the nature of the universe, in its entirety. I believe that all of the longtermists and the AI Doomers have.

I realized long ago that trying to thing about IT ALL, ALL OF IT, is between very difficult and crazy. I can trace my own thoughts about it all back to my childhood. I’m wondering whether, in thinking such thoughts, one has to make a choice, and choice that is logically prior to one’s thinking: Is there order inherent in the universe, or is it inherently without order? I believe that longtermists and Doomers, the so-called rationalists, have opted for the second. I seem to have opted for the first.

Historically, I believe, the first has led to religious belief. Is it possible to choose that way without (conventional) religious belief?

[Is that what the Fourth Arena is about?]