Is Elon living in simulation theory?

Ezra Klein, Elon Musk’s Endgame, NYTimes Oct. 31, 2026.

Ezra Klein has a wide-ranging discussion of Elon Musck with Quinn Slobodian, a professor at Boston University who has just coauthored a book about Musk, Muskism, with Ben Tarnoff. The discussion ends with Musk's apparent belief in the idea that we're living in a computer simulation.

Klein:

I just think that for a person with as much power as he has, to have that kind of psychology to suspect that this is a game where your role in it is making big moves — I don’t really know how to describe that situation. But it is a distinctive one that we all now have a lot of exposure to.

Slobodian:

There are a couple of varieties of the simulation theory, too. One is we are all simply just artifacts of this future civilization’s computer video game.

But the other is that most people are shadow people and a small number of people are actually player characters. And it seems like that’s the one that orients him most.

In the libertarian community that reflected a lot on these things, one of the people is Robin Hanson, the George Mason University economist, who said: What kind of ways would we conduct ourselves if this were true?

And he says: If this were true, then it would make sense to first care nothing about other people — so things like foreign aid and the welfare state would be frivolous things to spend time on — to be as entertaining as possible, to accumulate as much wealth as possible and to try to simply organize the world around you in as successful a way as you can.

There’s this radical reneging on anything like social responsibility that is only possible if you embrace this incredibly nihilistic reaffirmation of your megalomania. And the question is how to remove the props and struts that hold him up in that delusion, because it is not true, and he needs to be somehow persuaded from the outside that it’s not true.

If he continues to be incentivized to indulge in those ways of thinking, then he will never be required to be divested of that.

There's much more in the discussion.