Henry Farrell on "The political economy of billionaire derangement"

Henry Farrell, The political economy of billionaire derangement, Programmable Mutter, July 15, 2026.

He opens with two somewhat different quotes about billionaires, Tyler Cowen more or less in favor of them and Tim O’Reilly deeply skeptical of them. He suggests we breed them together:

To be clear: this hybrid would be notably different to Tim’s argument, and likely actively objectionable to Tyler. I alone am to blame. But surprisingly, there is inadvertent support for some of its key elements from Peter Thiel, who is a surprisingly valuable chronicler of the conditions that give rise to billionaire derangement, as well as a living example of it (the Antichrist is here!).2 Here, I’m drawing both on lectures that Thiel gave at Stanford, as summarized by his amanuensis Blake Masters, and the resulting co-authored book, Zero To One. These sources have a lot to say about the connections between entrepreneurship, kingship, and personal eccentricity.

The conclusion I draw is that the forces that Tim identifies, combined with specific aspects of the political economy of Silicon Valley, help explain the derangement of certain Silicon Valley billionaires and their epigones. Old style princes were notorious for their tendencies to deranged behavior, which came not just from their inbreeding, but their power, and the unwillingness and inability of others to contradict or check them. So too, modern princes.

Not too long ago, many people, including Tyler, hoped that the advance of classical liberalism would go hand-in-hand with the growing power of tech billionaires, advancing both causes at once. Now, politically influential tech billionaires have visibly lost contact both with reality and with anything that could plausibly be described as classical liberal values. See the screen shotted quote above. Rather than making snide asides about billionaire derangement syndrome, it might be time for such people to confront what actual billionaire derangement means for the ideological straddle that they have relied on for so long. That is even more so, in a world where markets as well as market-makers are being devoured by the passions.

To summarize the particulars of my theory: Thiel’s lectures and book provide good, if incomplete evidence that the princely passions described by Hirschman didn’t disappear, but went underground. Commerce and power were fused into a new ideology of entrepreneurial virtù that became highly influential among the founder community in Silicon Valley. This combined with Silicon Valley’s (and popular culture’s) tendency to connect genius with eccentricity, not simply selecting people who seemed strange, but compounding their strangeness through self-reinforcing feedback loops. Finally, this all happened in an intimate social environment of founders and funders. Billionaires know each other and measure themselves and their success against those they consider peers, in a dense entangled clique that commingles high degrees of mutual influence with rivalries and jealousies.

Farrell then goes on to quote Thiel’s book at some length, analyzing while going along. And so:

In short then, Thiel - both as reported by Masters and in collaboration with him - suggests that Silicon Valley is a place where being a founder is tantamount to being a king. You have a greater chance of succeeding if you are weird, and if you succeed, your weirdness will likely feed upon itself in feedback loops of positive reinforcement. Finally, it is a closely interconnected social system where the key people are conjoined in a dense tangible clique. They observe each other all the time, and are observed by others for cues of what you need to do to become a made man. [...]

SpaceX perhaps marks a culmination of the kingly ideal, a moment in which, as Tim puts it, someone like Musk can “raise enormous amounts of capital while freeing himself from any restraints from those who provide it, so that he can spend the proceeds on Mars, humanoid robots, artificial intelligence or whatever next satisfies his ambition.” But it is also the moment in which someone who is visibly profoundly disturbed has briefly become the world’s first trillionaire. And it is one in which others want to copy him.

And then a bow to Keynes’s “animal spirits” in the market place:

I’ll finish by noting that this is just one aspect of a greater change. Deranged billionaires like Musk and Thiel are both partly responsible for this transformation, and notable symptoms of it. Still, they are not the whole of it. The reason that the SpaceX IPO temporarily succeeded, even though the numbers make no sense whatsoever, is that investment markets too are ruled by vibes. Tyler’s co-blogger, Alex Tabarrok, devoted years of his life to making the case for prediction markets, arguing that they would distill market wisdom into a more general source of knowledge on a multitude of topics. Now they are here, but all too often it’s spirits, not wisdom, that they seem to be distilling. Even more so for crypto. Matt Levine makes a joke about “Bleebzorx Tokens” to explain the worthlessness of memecoins, and someone else invents Bleebzorx Tokens to make a tidy profit.

There’s more at the link.

Paul Krugman: On Holding Elon Musk Accountable

Full transcript HERE. The opening paragraphs:

For most of last year, Elon Musk was the second most powerful man in America. He was running a large part of the government’s budget. And during that time, he established a track record of evil incompetence. I mean, really evil and really incompetent on enormous scales. And why aren’t people talking about it more?

Hi, I’m Paul Krugman, doing a brief follow-on to my discussion that was posted earlier today with Ro Khanna, the Congressman from Silicon Valley, who’s a very interesting guy in many ways.

One of the things that has made him especially interesting in the last few days is that he said something entirely reasonable, which is that if Democrats retake Congress, they should hold investigations into the role of Elon Musk as head of DOGE, the sort of not exactly but effectively government agency, in destroying USAID, the agency that was the principal channel for aid to the most desperate, poorest people in the world.

That’s entirely reasonable, and Khanna went on to say that there are credible estimates that the cancellation, the destruction of Doge has led to millions of unnecessary deaths, including millions of children — which is exactly true. There are studies that say that there is both in the field evidence of widespread death as a result of the cancellation and, of course reasonable health models. Because what do you think happens when you cut away tens of billions of dollars of aid to people who are living right on the edge? So of course it’s a reasonable thing to say.

SpaceX has become a securitized narrative, a meme stock

Know why $SPCX is so volatile?

Because it’s a meme stock with a rocket company thrown in.

So the price is being driven by vibes, not news.

— Gary Marcus (@GaryMarcus) June 26, 2026

From the S-1, p. 30:

Our mission is to build the systems and technologies necessary to make life multiplanetary, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars. To do this, we have formed the most ambitious, vertically integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth with unmatched capabilities to rapidly manufacture and launch space-based communications that connect the world, to harness the Sun to power a truth- seeking artificial intelligence that advances scientific discovery, and ultimately to build a base on the Moon and cities on other planets.

In other words, to boldly go where no one has gone before.

Eliezer Yudkowsky, LessWrong, OpenAI & countercultures past & present

Claude 4.6 Medium summarizes a dialog I had with Gemini that started with an inquiry about 

1) Eliezer Yudkowsky, his early ideas, & his early following, 
2) then to his interactions with Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Sam Altman that got OpenAI started, 
3) to my own sojourn on LessWrong and 
4) concluded with the connection between 1960s counterculture and contemporary Silicon Valley computer culture.

For some reason Claude pretended to summarize the conversation in my voice.

* * * * *

A Conversation with Gemini About Eliezer Yudkowsky Bill Benzon, new-savanna.blogspot.com, June 24, 2026

I recently had an extended exchange with Gemini (accessed through the Google search interface) about Eliezer Yudkowsky — a figure I've been thinking about in the context of AI culture more broadly. What follows is a summary of where the conversation went.

It began with a query about Yudkowsky's 2007 paper Levels of Organization in General Intelligence (LOGI), which argues that recursive self-improvement could allow an AI to rapidly cycle through levels of cognitive architecture in ways that would break traditional training and testing boundaries. Gemini gave a competent account of the paper's significance for AI alignment theory.

I then offered my own assessment: reading LOGI years ago, I concluded it was the kind of work produced by a brilliant college sophomore who had figured out everything and decided to write it up. The sort of student you'd want to guide and nurture — but of course, that never happened with Yudkowsky, who is entirely self-educated. Gemini agreed this was a common reaction, and traced the characteristic features of his writing — grand scope, idiosyncratic jargon, overconfidence — to the absence of the standard academic filters that would normally shape a thinker. Without a thesis advisor to push back, he co-founded his own institutions (MIRI, LessWrong), creating an insulated subculture where he became the mentor rather than the student.

I offered a specific passage from LOGI as an example of what goes wrong. Yudkowsky dismisses semantic networks as "completely bankrupt" on the grounds that they're simple enough to write on paper. Gemini correctly identified this as a classic category error: confusing the notation with the mechanism. The diagram on the whiteboard is inert; what matters is the graph-traversal algorithms, the spreading activation, the interpreter running the data structure. Ironically, Yudkowsky later wrote extensively about the Map-Territory Fallacy — but as I put it to Gemini, he is constantly mistaking a map for the territory. His entire worldview treats clean theoretical proofs as if they dictate messy engineering realities.

From there the conversation turned to how Yudkowsky managed to build such a large following despite these intellectual weaknesses. Gemini confirmed that Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, his 660,000-word fanfiction, was openly designed as a recruiting tool — drawing technically minded young people into the Rationalist and AI safety ecosystems. Countless engineers and founders who later populated early AI labs first encountered his ideas through that story.

The crowning irony: Yudkowsky's warnings about AI helped convince Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Sam Altman that humanity needed a counterweight to closed corporate AI efforts — which led directly to the founding of OpenAI in 2015. Once OpenAI pivoted to the empirical, data-driven methodology of large language models, they completely bypassed the deductive logic "maps" Yudkowsky had spent decades drawing. Sam Altman acknowledged Yudkowsky's role in a 2023 tweet, noting that he had arguably done more to accelerate AGI than anyone else, and adding that he might someday deserve a Nobel Peace Prize.

I told Gemini that wouldn't be necessary. I also shared my own experience: I joined LessWrong around the time ChatGPT launched, initially as an anthropological participant-observer, but stayed for the conversation, which I found genuinely useful. There are very smart people there. But the insularity was unmistakable — and I described one telling episode: someone on the forum was trying to spread Rationalism in Japan and struggling. I pointed out that Japanese popular culture, from Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy through the Ghost in the Shell franchise, has a long history of viewing robots and AI as fundamentally benevolent — an expression of Shinto techno-animism, in which kami can reside in machines as naturally as in rivers. They simply didn't know about this cultural background. Gemini observed that the Western doomer ethos is rooted in a Frankenstein complex with Judeo-Christian substrata: creating life is hubris, and the creation must turn on its master. The Japanese paradigm operates from entirely different premises. The LessWrong response to my observation? They noted it and moved on.

After a while I tired of the place. One small anecdote captures the texture of the experience: I frequently link out to other things I've written, and one LessWrong post linked to an essay-review I'd done of Benny Shannon's book on ayahuasca. I noticed a significant spike of traffic to my Academia page coming from LessWrong and pointing to that essay — which tells you something about the undercurrent of interest in altered states of consciousness running alongside the dry decision theory. They approach psychedelics with an engineer's curiosity: the brain as a computer, phenomenology as data.

The conversation ended with what I think is the most useful historical frame. LessWrong is, in structure and function, a counterculture — but centered on computers and AI, with Yudkowsky as guru rather than Timothy Leary. And there's a genuine genealogical link through San Francisco and transhumanism: Stewart Brand bridging the Merry Pranksters to personal computing, the Extropians of the 1990s who wanted to transcend the body via nanotechnology and cryonics rather than LSD, and then Yudkowsky emerging from that same Bay Area Transhumanist mailing-list culture. Fred Turner's From Counterculture to Cyberculture maps this lineage. The counterculture became the vanguard — but corporate reality, as I noted to Gemini, has not submitted. Bill Gates and his successors were never absorbed by the counterculture. Peter Thiel, who was an early funder of MIRI, has since publicly labeled Yudkowsky a Luddite and positioned AI safety concerns as obstacles to American technological dominance. The "well-run alternative universe" of LessWrong lost all leverage once scaling deep learning required billions of dollars in silicon, electricity, and data centers. The colorful intellectual vanguard warmed society up to the idea of AGI; then the massive engine of global capitalism took the steering wheel.

The subculture keeps its cozy, insular forum to debate the semantics of the map. The corporate empires plow ahead across the territory.

Elon Musk's New Pretoria 2150 {Total Recall}

The world's first trillionaire racist [Musk]

Toby Buckle, Greg Sargent, Elon Musk’s Race War Just Took Darker Turn—Time for a Global Response, The New Republic, June 17, 2026.

If you were on the verge of becoming the first trillionaire in human history, with the press breathlessly reporting on your every move, that would probably be your focus. Yet in the days before SpaceX’s initial public offering vaulted Musk into the 13-digit wealth club, the tech mogul’s mind was elsewhere—a white man in Belfast had been viciously stabbed by a Sudanese immigrant, and it provided Musk an opening.

In numerous social media postings, Musk highlighted the crime in starkly racist terms. Several nights of violent anti-immigrant pogroms orchestrated by fascist mobs followed. It was a telling confluence of events: Musk’s extraordinary wealth is fueled by investors’ bedazzlement at his techno-utopian schemes. But the Belfast conflagration revealed the other side of his future vision: his belief that the white populations of the world must violently subjugate the nonwhite enemy in what he sees as a multicontinental, Armageddon-like Total War for global racial supremacy.

As the bedlam raged in Belfast after the stabbing—resulting in far-right rioters torching cars, buses, and even the homes of immigrants—Musk egged it on. Using X—the platform he acquired precisely for moments like these—he posted locations for groups of rioters to congregate. He elevated vile, overtly fascist and white-supremacist exhortations. When one far-right British politician called for the prosecution of officials who “placed dangerous third world savages in our communities,” Musk replied: “This is the way.” [...]

In a very real sense, the fires in Belfast illuminate the emerging outlines of that coming struggle. Musk’s involvement in British politics has tracked with his growing fantasies about global race war.

Back at home:

In the United States, Musk had already been experimenting with a consistent trope in fascist rhetoric: seizing on a crime committed by an individual member of a minority group and claiming that it shows the innate murderous tendencies of the group as a whole. The real claim here is that these isolated horrific acts “reveal” the whole minority group’s disguised genocidal intent toward white peoples—and suggest that this is why the group has deviously infiltrated white countries and communities.

Western civilization is under attack:

By endorsing Reconquista, Musk is amplifying one of the clarion calls of the European far right and, increasingly, the American right, as well: “remigration.” This is the idea that saving Western civilization (as Musk imagines it) requires the forced expulsion of huge numbers of immigrants, especially Muslims, and even untold numbers of their descendants. In response to a missive about white people potentially becoming a minority in New Zealand, Musk posted recently: “The doom of Western Civilization must be averted!”

A robot-AI utopia:

But the real intent behind Musk’s indictment of “suicidal empathy” appears to be future-focused too. In an interview, Tarnoff points out that Musk’s imagined future of humanoid robots and AI can be squared with his hatred of mass migration. “You reduce your reliance on immigration as a labor source if you automate more labor,” Tarnoff tells us, noting that in this scenario, AI and robots might then be pressed into service to “restrict immigration.”

In this context, we believe it’s not an accident that Musk explicitly denigrated “civilizational suicidal empathy” while his Department of Government Efficiency decimated the budget of USAID, which helped produce hundreds of thousands of deaths abroad. That was a test run: If Musk’s robot-and-AI utopia fails to produce mass abundance for the global poor, and global warming spurs more suffering and more migrations, saving human “civilization” will require dispensing with the empathy gene: It will give us the fortitude to cut loose all that third-world civilizational dead weight.

A national security threat:

Then there’s what a future Democratic Congress can do. The Musk problem will have to be on its agenda in a serious and meaningful way. Claire Finkelstein, a professor of national security law at the University of Pennsylvania, points out a core problem here: His many government contracts, and his access to privileged information, pose a “national security threat,” even as Space X itself is in many ways a “national security asset.” We need to know a lot more about what Musk’s contracts actually translate into in terms of his personal influence inside the government.

There's much more at the link.

John Quiggin on the SpaceX IPO

At Crooked Timber, June 15, 2026.

The SpaceX IPO, valuing a motley collection of dubious business at over a trillion dollars, marks the abandonment of the Efficient (financial) Markets Hypothesis, one of the zombie ideas I criticised in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. Not only do financial markets fail in the task of valuing assets accurately, but the institutional structures that are supposed to make them work have given up trying.

This was prefigured by the rise of Bitcoin and other forms of crypto. Revealingly, no one any longer uses the term “cryptocurrency” – these assets are never used as currency in ordinary transactions, and even their illicit uses seem to have faded. Rather, Bitcoin is valuable solely because it is valued. As I pointed out back in 2018, (free from paywall here) once this logic is accepted, it can be applied to financial assets more generally, and particularly to stock markets. [...]

It’s only with SpaceX that we can see the complete abandonment of any pretence at rationality. In the case of SpaceX, I was struck by Dave Karpf’s observation that Musk’s wealth in 2020 was “only” $24 billion. Everything of value in his career (Tesla cars, batteries, Starlink) had been achieved by then, and everything he has touched since then has been a disaster (Xitter, Cybertruck, robotaxis, Starship). Yet his wealth has multiplied 50 times over).

In support of the IPO, Goldman Sachs has put its name to the claim that the company will grow 100 times over by 2030. This is patently absurd. Nothing in Musk’s ragbag of assets has this kind of potential. [...]

The comprehensive corruption of the financial system confirms me in the view that the USA is one big grift. Not just the financial system, but politically and militarily as well. But that’s a topic for another day.

Our alien overlords have arrived and their name is “Elon” [Starbase, TX]

Amy Gamerman, Elon Musk Is Colonizing Earth, NYTimes, June 12, 2026

In this town, almost every communal space is private property. A company controlled by the world’s richest man owns nearly all of it. He shapes its future.

This is Starbase, Texas, the city that Elon Musk built on America’s ragged hem at the southern border as the home for SpaceX, his aerospace and artificial intelligence company. Locals describe a highly secretive environment overseen by a company-affiliated city commission that rubber-stamps Mr. Musk’s vision, a place where even kindergartners are guided by his philosophies. Starbase is the newest manifestation of Mr. Musk’s political power. It is a beta test for a rising oligarchy that seems intent on transforming America from the inside out. [...]

On May 12, Mr. Musk announced on social media that “SpaceX is considering several locations domestically and internationally to build the world’s most advanced spaceports!” His announcement came on the heels of reports that a large parcel of land in coastal Louisiana may have been acquired by an anonymous aerospace company, widely rumored to be SpaceX.

These spaceports will allow Mr. Musk to create his own reality for other people to live in. He doesn’t need Mars. Mr. Musk has already built a colony of his own.

Mr. Musk often cites “Star Trek” as inspiration for founding SpaceX. “We want to make ‘Star Trek’ real, OK?” he said in January. But Starbase bears less similarity to the enlightened wonderland depicted in that 1960s television show than it does to the autocratic company towns of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Like Mr. Musk, the industrial titans of that era built their own private fiefs, not only to cement control over workers, but to realize their vision of an ideal society.

Perhaps the most grandiose company town of them all was Fordlandia, the sprawling city that Henry Ford built in the Brazilian rainforest to grow rubber trees. Fordlandia was Ford’s personal Utopia, an expression of his social views, his personal predilections and even his vegetarianism. Workers were forced to subsist on a diet heavy on brown rice, oatmeal and canned peaches, as detailed in Greg Grandin’s “Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City.” For amusement, there was square dancing — Ford loved square dancing — and poetry readings.

Fordlandia’s ghost haunts Mr. Musk’s colony. Corporate control is so all-encompassing at Starbase that a warning on the menu at its Astropub restaurant alerts diners to the “confidentiality and proprietary nature” of the fare. Students at its private Ad Astra school are guided on “hands-on experiential missions.” The interplanetary mission is even written into the job description for a facilities supervisor overseeing waste management and janitorial needs.

There's much more at the link. It's not pretty reading.

Eddie Kramer: Recording the Gods of Rock

YouTube:

In this interview, I sit down with legendary audio engineer and producer Eddie Kramer. We discuss his ridiculously impressive discography, crafting the iconic psychedelic rock sounds of Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin.

The interview starts out with Hendrix and then moves on to the others. Unfortunately they never got around to Kramer's work with the Out of Control Rhythm and Blues Band, the band I used to play with. I'd left the band by the time they recorded a Rick Rourke original, "Inside These Walls."

Ishmael Reed takes on the Tech Bros

David Streitfeld, Elon Musk and Friends in the Den of Oakland’s Literary Lion, NYTimes, May 14, 2026.

Fourth paragraph:

Mr. Reed, a novelist, playwright and provocateur who has been upsetting opinions across the political spectrum for at least six decades, is aiming high with a new drama. “King Ludd’s Revenge” is a rare attempt to take on the tech moguls with something more than mere journalism.

Later:

Mr. Reed, a novelist, playwright and provocateur who has been upsetting opinions across the political spectrum for at least six decades, is aiming high with a new drama. “King Ludd’s Revenge” is a rare attempt to take on the tech moguls with something more than mere journalism.

“Instead of a straight narrative, I improvise,” the 88-year-old writer said. “It’s like Louis Armstrong singing ‘Stardust.’ He doesn’t do it the way it’s written.”

Oakland is poorer, Blacker and more maligned than San Francisco and Silicon Valley, both of which are just across the bridges that span the Bay. Having the trial here happened at random — Mr. Musk’s lawsuit against Mr. Altman and the company they founded together, OpenAI, was filed in San Francisco and assigned to the federal court in Oakland — but feels a little like one of those episodes where the Greek gods descend to mundane Earth to settle a dispute.

Mr. Reed, an Oakland resident who has celebrated and defended the city for decades, may be the only one in town noticing who’s here. “Everybody’s focused on the N.B.A. playoffs,” he explained.

“King Ludd’s Revenge” takes its title from the legendary leader of the workers’ revolt in England in the early 19th century. With the ascent of A.I., the Luddites have come back into fashion. The play begins with Mr. Musk receiving a pedicure from a robot. Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire who backed President Trump in 2016, bursts into the room. “I think I’ve identified the leader of the Anti-Christ Syndicate,” he says.

Mr. Musk: “Who might that be?”

Mr. Thiel: “Greta Thunberg.”

Mr. Musk: “That girl who leads the environmental movement? That’s ridiculous. The Bible says the Anti-Christ is a beast with seven heads.”

Mr. Thiel: “She’s the most prominent head, don’t you see? The heads represent hippies, multiculturalism, identity politics, woke, one-world state, Barack Obama and the 19th Amendment. This is the Beast that decelerated our progress. This is why there has been no cure for cancer or Alzheimer’s.”

Adolf Hitler, on a two-day pass from Hell, shows up next. The play is a work in progress.

Near the end:

Mr. Musk claims 240 million followers on X, his social media platform, and has a fortune approaching $1 trillion. Mr. Reed’s primary publisher is now in Canada. His biggest asset is his house, which is pleasantly stuffed with books. The street used to have several drug dens; now it is upper middle class.

“I’m a Black guy living in North Oakland, writing about titans — people who live on Mount Olympus,” he said. He listened to some of the trial on an audio feed. He thought of Shakespeare, specifically “Titus Andronicus.”

“That play is about revenge,” Mr. Reed said. “And cannibalism. These tech people want to devour each other.”

Mr. Altman may be the guy in control of the most significant A.I. company, but Mr. Reed finds him rather flat as dramatic material.

Mr. Musk is different.

“I don’t find him amusing in real life, but he’s amusing in my play,” Mr. Reed said. “I started this because I read that 14 million people will possibly die because Elon Musk ended U.S.A.I.D. It took the Nazis maybe five or six years to accomplish that.” Mr. Reed acknowledged that his humor is very dark.

And so it goes. There's much more at the link.

Four Horseman of the Apocalypse

Elon's lawyers are not allowed to invoke AI Doom in his lawsuit against OpenAI

Yesterday, a federal judge barred Elon Musk's lawyers from arguing that AI could threaten humanity in his lawsuit against OpenAI.

OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit focused on developing AI safely. But our recent @NewYorker investigation documented how some researchers at the… pic.twitter.com/3XGB2ohjth

— Ronan Farrow (@RonanFarrow) May 1, 2026

Tech Bro [Musk] scamming NASDAQ over IPO

Nasdaq is proposing to facilitate the largest involuntary wealth transfer from retirement savers to venture capitalists in market history. And nobody seems to be talking about it.

SpaceX demanded, as a condition for listing, that Nasdaq cut index inclusion seasoning from 3…

— Wes Brown (@w3sbrown) March 17, 2026

The Shock and the Narrowing: How ChatGPT's Success May Have Compromised AI's Future

This post was composed by Claude (Anthropic) after an interaction which I initiated with a prompt consisting of 1) a capsule summary about the history of OpenAI that included a number of questions, and 2) a request for the 10 most expensive scientific research projects paid-for by the US Government. That interaction went on for a bit over 7100 words, after which I asked Claude to write a blog post. The following article is more creative than a mere summary of that discussion.

The Founding Contradiction

On December 11, 2015, a small group of technologists gathered in San Francisco to launch what they described as a nonprofit research organization dedicated to ensuring that artificial general intelligence would benefit all of humanity. The founders of OpenAI — Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, Elon Musk, and others — began with a $1 billion endowment and a serious concern: that the most transformative technology in human history was being developed inside a handful of profit-maximizing corporations, with no institutional safeguard ensuring it would serve everyone. The nonprofit structure was the answer. No investors to satisfy, no quarterly earnings to hit. Just the mission.

The mission lasted four years in its pure form. By March 2019, faced with the staggering computational costs of training large language models, OpenAI created a for-profit subsidiary with a novel "capped profit" structure: investors could earn returns, but those returns were limited to one hundred times their investment, with excess profits flowing back to the nonprofit parent. This was the arrangement that attracted Microsoft's initial investment, and it was the arrangement in place when OpenAI released ChatGPT to the general public in late November 2022.

What happened next was, by any measure, one of the most consequential commercial surprises in the history of technology. Within two months, ChatGPT had a hundred million users. The scale and speed of public adoption had no precedent. And the shock of that success — the sheer unexpectedness of it — set in motion a chain of decisions that has reshaped not just one company, but the entire research landscape of artificial intelligence.

The Structural Unraveling

In January 2023, Microsoft announced a new $10 billion investment in OpenAI. The nonprofit's original rationale — that the most powerful AI should not be controlled by a for-profit corporation — was under increasing strain. By October 2025, it had formally dissolved. OpenAI restructured as a public benefit corporation, the nonprofit parent renamed itself the OpenAI Foundation and accepted a 26% equity stake in the new entity, and Microsoft received a 27% stake worth approximately $135 billion. The PBC structure requires the company to consider its mission alongside profit — but as a legal constraint, it is considerably weaker than the nonprofit board that had previously governed the organization.

The journey from nonprofit to PBC was not smooth. In November 2023, OpenAI's board — still operating under its nonprofit governance mandate — fired Sam Altman as CEO, citing concerns about his candor and, beneath the official language, a deeper unease about the pace of commercialization. The firing lasted five days. Nearly all 800 of OpenAI's employees threatened to resign and follow Altman to Microsoft. Ilya Sutskever, who had orchestrated the firing, signed the letter calling for Altman's reinstatement and issued a public apology. Altman returned, the board was reconstituted with his allies, and the mission-protection mechanism that the nonprofit structure had been designed to provide was effectively neutralized. Sutskever left the company in May 2024.

Each structural change was framed as necessary to fulfill the mission. In practice, each change progressively subordinated the mission to capital requirements. The nonprofit board had existed to ensure that AGI benefited humanity. By 2025, it had become a foundation holding equity in the thing it was supposed to be watching — a watchdog with a financial stake in the object of its oversight.

Two Kinds of Research, Two Kinds of Institution

To understand what was lost in this transformation, it helps to draw a distinction that rarely gets made clearly in public discussions of AI: the difference between curiosity-driven, open-ended research and product-driven, outcome-oriented development.

Consider the Apollo program as an example of the second kind. It was, in the deepest sense, an engineering project rather than a scientific one. The underlying physics was known. Orbital mechanics, propulsion, life support — these were hard and dangerous problems, but they were problems whose solutions could be systematically approached. The goal was precisely defined. The timeline could be committed to. Success was probable given sufficient resources. When President Kennedy pledged to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, he was making a political commitment backed by a technical assessment that success was achievable. The scientists who worked on Apollo — and I have met a number of them — may have been motivated by curiosity and wonder. But Congress funded the program to beat the Soviets in the Cold War. The institutional structure — massive, goal-directed, centrally coordinated — suited the nature of the problem.

Curiosity-driven research operates on entirely different premises. Its defining characteristic is that it does not know in advance what it will find. Claude Shannon was not trying to build the internet when he developed information theory at Bell Labs in the late 1940s. The researchers at the University of Montreal who developed attention mechanisms for neural networks were not trying to build ChatGPT. The work that seeded the current AI revolution — Rosenblatt's perceptron, Minsky's early investigations, the decades of foundational work in cognitive science and linguistics that LLMs now implicitly exploit — was almost entirely publicly funded, pursued at universities and a handful of exceptional industrial research labs, over decades when no commercial application was visible.

Bell Labs was the great institutional embodiment of this model in the corporate world. What made it possible was structural: AT&T's government-protected monopoly generated profits so vast that the company could fund a research laboratory with no requirement to produce commercial results. Shannon, Bardeen, Brattain, Shockley — these men were given time, resources, and colleagues, and told to think. The transistor, information theory, Unix, the laser, cellular telephony, and multiple Nobel Prizes resulted. Bell Labs was not run like a startup. It was run like a slightly more applied version of a university, with better equipment.

Xerox PARC, founded in 1970, operated on similar principles — explicitly unconstrained by Xerox's core product lines, given a unifying vision ("the architecture of information") but not a product roadmap. The personal computer, the graphical user interface, Ethernet, the mouse, laser printing — all emerged from a lab of about 350 people who were essentially allowed to play. The irony is that Xerox captured almost none of the commercial value, which accrued to Apple, Microsoft, and others. But the world got the technology.

Asked directly about modern equivalents to Bell Labs and PARC, Yann LeCun — who worked at Bell Labs, interned at Xerox PARC, and spent over a decade building Meta's fundamental AI research lab — pointed to Meta's FAIR, Google DeepMind, and Microsoft Research. He said this in October 2024. By November 2025, he had left Meta, driven out by exactly the forces this article is about.

The Shock and Its Aftershocks

Before November 2022, the AI research world was genuinely plural. Academic labs, industrial research divisions, and a range of well-funded startups were pursuing different approaches — reinforcement learning, symbolic AI hybrids, world models, neuromorphic architectures — with real diversity of vision. The field was competitive but intellectually heterogeneous.

ChatGPT's success collapsed that plurality. Within roughly eighteen months, capital, talent, and institutional attention all funneled toward a single paradigm: scale transformer-based large language models, build the infrastructure to run them, ship products. Google, which had invented the transformer architecture in 2017, was caught flat-footed and scrambled. Meta pivoted its AI strategy around LLMs. Microsoft integrated OpenAI's models into its core products. A hundred startups raised money to build on top of the new foundation models. The venture capital flowing into AI, measured as a share of total U.S. deal value, went from 23% in 2023 to nearly two-thirds in the first half of 2025.

The infrastructure investment that followed is staggering by any historical standard. The four largest hyperscalers — Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta — are expected to spend more than $350 billion on capital expenditures in 2025 alone, most of it AI-related. UBS projects global AI capital expenditure reaching $1.3 trillion by 2030. The top five hyperscalers raised a record $108 billion in debt in 2025, more than three times the average of the previous nine years. OpenAI, which loses billions of dollars annually, has committed to spending $300 billion on computing infrastructure over five years while projecting only $13 billion in revenue for 2025.

The financial architecture has become genuinely strange. OpenAI holds a stake in AMD; Nvidia has invested $100 billion in OpenAI; Microsoft is a major shareholder in OpenAI and a major customer of CoreWeave, in which Nvidia also holds equity; Microsoft accounted for nearly 20% of Nvidia's revenue. These are not arm's-length market transactions. They are a daisy chain of mutually reinforcing valuations. A Yale analysis described OpenAI's web of relationships bluntly: "Is this like the Wild West, where anything goes to get the deal done?" The question of whether this constitutes a speculative bubble — tulip mania in a data center — is not academic. An MIT Media Lab report found that 95% of custom enterprise AI tools fail to produce measurable financial returns. The commercial success is real; the path from current AI to the transformative economic productivity being used to justify the valuations is not established.

The LLM Ceiling and the People Who Saw It Coming

The most consequential intellectual development of the past two years in AI has received far less attention than the commercial race. A growing number of the field's most distinguished researchers have concluded that large language models, however impressive, are not on the path to general intelligence — and that the current paradigm will hit a ceiling before it reaches the goals its proponents have claimed for it.

Direct brain-to-brain communication, redux

Why Learning Does Not Rescue Brain-to-Brain Thought Transfer 

Learning Is Not the Problem

There is no serious dispute, at this point, about the brain’s capacity to learn to incorporate new signal streams. Decades of work on motor prostheses, sensory substitution, neurofeedback, and tool use have demonstrated that the nervous system can adapt to novel inputs and outputs that are not part of its evolved repertoire. These systems work not because the brain passively receives meaning, but because it actively learns to coordinate new patterns of neural activity with action, perception, and feedback. Over time, what begins as an alien signal can become functionally integrated into the organism’s sensorimotor economy.

Acknowledging this plasticity does not weaken skepticism about direct brain-to-brain thought transfer. On the contrary, it sharpens the distinction between what is genuinely possible and what remains a fantasy. Learning is one thing. Zero-shot “plug-and-play” communication is something else entirely. The speculative proposals advanced by Elon Musk, Christof Koch, and Rodolfo Llinás depend not merely on plasticity, but on the assumption that meaningful mental content can be transferred between brains without a learning history, without negotiation, and without interpretive work. That assumption is precisely what fails.

The Zero-Shot Assumption

The defining feature of most brain-to-brain communication fantasies is immediacy. Thoughts are imagined to pass directly from one person to another, bypassing language, culture, and development. Koch’s examples of ghostly visual overlays and mind fusion, as well as Musk’s talk of “uncompressed conceptual communication,” all presuppose that the recipient brain can immediately make sense of neural activity originating elsewhere. The temporal dimension of learning—the weeks, months, or years required to integrate new signal regimes—is simply ignored.

This is not a minor omission. It is the conceptual hinge on which the entire proposal turns. Without a learning trajectory, there is no mechanism by which foreign neural activity could acquire meaning for the receiving brain. A signal does not become meaningful by virtue of its richness or bandwidth. It becomes meaningful only through use, within a system that can test, revise, and stabilize interpretations through action.

Why Learning Cannot Proceed in a Brain-Bridge

One might reply that learning could occur even in a brain-to-brain link, given enough time. But this response overlooks the conditions under which learning is possible in the first place. Learning requires a closed perception–action loop. The organism must be able to act on the basis of a signal, observe the consequences of that action, and adjust its internal dynamics accordingly. In brain–machine interfaces, this loop is explicit: the user moves a cursor, grasps an object, or modulates a tone, and receives immediate feedback. The signal becomes meaningful because it is embedded in a task space with clear success and failure conditions.

A direct brain-to-brain link provides no such structure. The receiving brain cannot act into the other brain in any systematic way, nor can it test hypotheses about what a given pattern of activity “means.” The signal stream has no stable reference point in the shared environment, no agreed-upon goal, and no external criterion of correctness. Under such conditions, learning has nothing to converge on. What is sometimes described as “another person’s thought” arrives as undifferentiated neural activity, untethered from the bodily and environmental contexts that made it meaningful in the first place.

The Persistent Problem of Origin

Even if one were to imagine some form of slow co-adaptation, a deeper problem remains: the brain must be able to distinguish between activity it generates itself and activity it should treat as input. In ordinary perception and action, this distinction is grounded in efference copy, proprioception, and the tight coupling between movement and sensation. These mechanisms allow the brain to tag certain patterns as self-generated and others as world-generated.

A foreign brain provides none of these anchors. Neural spikes arriving from another person’s cortex are indistinguishable, in their physical characteristics, from spikes arising endogenously. Without a principled way to mark activity as coming from an other, the receiving brain has no basis for interpretation, let alone learning. The problem is not noise in the engineering sense, but indeterminacy in the biological sense. The system lacks the resources to sort the signal at all.

Meaning Is Not a Payload

Underlying the zero-shot fantasy is a deeper theoretical mistake: the treatment of meaning as something that exists prior to expression and can therefore be transmitted once bandwidth constraints are removed. This is the same mistake that underwrites the conduit metaphor of language. Words are imagined as containers for thoughts, and communication as the transfer of those containers from one mind to another. Neuralink-style speculation simply replaces words with spikes, while leaving the basic picture intact.

But meaning does not work that way. Whether one follows Vygotsky, contemporary enactivism, or predictive-processing accounts, the conclusion is the same: meaning is enacted, not transmitted. It arises through socially scaffolded activity, through interaction with the world and with others, and through the internalization of those interactions in inner speech. There is no pre-linguistic, pre-social format of “pure thought” waiting to be uploaded or shared.

Augmentation Without Communion

None of this casts doubt on the medical and augmentative goals of current BCI research. Restoring motor function, providing artificial sensory channels, and extending human capabilities through learned interfaces are all plausible and worthwhile. But these technologies work precisely because they respect the conditions under which brains learn: limited task spaces, stable feedback, and prolonged adaptation. They augment agency; they do not merge subjectivities.

Direct brain-to-brain thought transfer, by contrast, promises communion without development, understanding without negotiation, and immediacy without practice. It imagines semantic interoperability where none can exist. For that reason, it fails not because the technology is immature, but because the underlying conception of thought, meaning, and learning is mistaken.

The issue, in the end, is not whether brains can change. They can, and they do. The issue is whether meaning can be detached from the histories that make it possible. On that point, the answer remains no.

In Trump’s Orbit: Miller, the. power, and Musk, the deserter

Stephen Miller is more ruthless and ambitious than before

Jason Zengerle, The Ruthless Ambition of Stephen Miller, NYTimes, July 7, 2025.

The crisis, from the immigration raids that sparked the protests to the militarized response that tried to put the protests down, was almost entirely of Mr. Miller’s making. And it served as a testament to the remarkable position he now occupies in Mr. Trump’s Washington. Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, who reportedly accompanied Mr. Miller on his visit to ICE headquarters, seems to defer to him. “It’s really Stephen running D.H.S.,” a Trump adviser said. The attorney general, Pam Bondi, is so focused on preparing for and appearing on Fox News that she has essentially ceded control of the Department of Justice to Mr. Miller, making him, according to the conservative legal scholar Edward Whelan, “the de facto attorney general.” And in a White House where the chief of staff, Susie Wiles, is not well versed or terribly interested in policy — “She’s producing a reality TV show every day,” another Trump adviser said, “and it’s pretty amazing, right?” — Mr. Miller is typically the final word.

There is much truth to the conventional wisdom that the biggest difference between the first and second Trump presidencies is that, in the second iteration, Mr. Trump is unrestrained. The same is true of Mr. Miller. He has emerged as Mr. Trump’s most powerful, and empowered, adviser. With the passage of the big policy bill, ICE will have an even bigger budget to execute Mr. Miller’s vision and, in effect, serve as his own private army. Moreover, his influence extends beyond immigration to the battles the Trump administration is fighting on higher education, transgender rights, discrimination law and foreign policy.

Mr. Miller, 39, is both a committed ideologue and a ruthless bureaucratic operator — and he has cast himself as the only person capable of fully carrying out Mr. Trump’s radical policy vision.

Much later:

At the same time, Mr. Miller is a world-class brown noser. In an administration that puts a premium on sycophancy, he stands out for just how much he sucks up to his boss.

Musk wants to create a new political party

Theodore Schleifer, Elon Musk Says He Will Start a New Political Party, NYTimes, July 7, 2025.

Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest person and the country’s biggest political donor, said on Saturday that he would create a new political party, an enormous and challenging undertaking that would test the billionaire’s newfound influence on American politics.

“When it comes to bankrupting our country with waste & graft, we live in a one-party system, not a democracy,” Mr. Musk wrote on X, his social media website, on Saturday. “Today, the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom.”

Mr. Musk, once a close ally of President Trump’s who in recent weeks has repeatedly bickered with him, had not filed paperwork as of Saturday evening for the new party, though he added in a separate post that the America Party would be active in elections “next year.” No immediate signs suggested that Mr. Musk was working to establish his party quickly. Any new entity would be required to be disclosed to the Federal Election Commission.

Trump responds to Musk

Tyler Pager, Trump Says Musk Is ‘Off the Rails’ With His Third-Party Effort, NYTimes, July 7, 2025.

President Trump assailed Elon Musk on Sunday night, describing him as “off the rails” after Mr. Musk said he was creating a new political party amid an ongoing rift with the president.

“I am saddened to watch Elon Musk go completely ‘off the rails,’ essentially becoming a TRAIN WRECK over the past five weeks,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social on Sunday evening. “He even wants to start a Third Political Party, despite the fact that they have never succeeded in the United States.”

Mr. Musk’s effort to create a new political party, called the America Party, is the latest rupture in his relationship with Mr. Trump. Mr. Musk, the world’s wealthiest man, spent hundreds of millions of dollars to support Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign, and then Mr. Trump rewarded him with a wide-ranging position overseeing drastic cuts to government staffing and contracts. [...]

“Backing a candidate for president is not out of the question, but the focus for the next 12 months is on the House and the Senate,” Mr. Musk wrote on X on Sunday.

BREAKUP! Did anyone really believe that Trump and Musk were a match made in heaven? [But the make-up sex...]

Heather Cox Richardson, June 5, 2025, Letters from an American.

It started so well...

But Musk overstepped boundaries and overstayed his welcome even as his antics hurt sales of his signature car, the Tesla, inspiring Trump to do a car commercial for him on the White House grounds. Just a week ago, Musk officially left the White House on the same day that an article in the New York Times documented his heavy drug use on the campaign.

Then, on Tuesday, June 3, he took a public stand against the omnibus bill Trump desperately wants Congress to pass, posting on X: “I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore. This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.”

And with that, the falling out began.

This morning, Trump told reporters he was “disappointed” in Musk. Ron Filipkowski of Meidas followed the saga from there.

“Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House, and the Republicans would be 51–49 in the Senate,” Musk wrote. “Such ingratitude.”

Trump then suggested that “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”

Musk promptly said he would begin decommissioning SpaceX’s spacecraft, which supply the International Space Station.

The two men continued to go back and forth, with Musk saying that “Donald Trump is in the Epstein files,” a reference to the records compiled by convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, with whom Trump was friendly. Musk also said Trump's tariffs will cause a recession, and agreed with another poster who suggested that Trump should be impeached and replaced with Vice President J.D. Vance.

Trump responded to that attack far more weakly than one would have expected, simply turning back to the omnibus bill and insisting it “is one of the Greatest Bills ever presented to Congress.”

Musk’s behavior is erratic in its own right, but if there is anything but pique behind it, it appears he is threatening Trump by making a play to control the Republican Party. In response to a post by conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer suggesting that Republican lawmakers are unsure if they should side with Trump or Musk, Musk wrote: “Oh and some food for thought as they ponder that question: Trump has 3.5 years left as President, but I will be around for 40+ years.”

Losses on both sides:

Kylie Robison and Aarian Marshall of Wired noted that TrumpCoin lost more than $100 million in value during the fight. Tesla stock lost $152 billion of value from its market capitalization, prompting Filipkowski to note that the total came to about $9 billion per tweet.

How things have changed. Eighty-one years ago

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave his twenty-ninth Fireside Chat on June 5, 1944, and had good news for the American people. The day before, on June 4, Rome had fallen to Allied troops. “The first of the Axis capitals is now in our hands,” Roosevelt said.

The president pointed out that it was “significant that Rome has been liberated by the armed forces of many nations. The American and British armies—who bore the chief burdens of battle—found at their sides our own North American neighbors, the gallant Canadians. The fighting New Zealanders from the far South Pacific, the courageous French and the French Moroccans, the South Africans, the Poles and the East Indians—all of them fought with us on the bloody approaches to the city of Rome. The Italians, too, forswearing a partnership in the Axis which they never desired, have sent their troops to join us in our battles against the German trespassers on their soil.”

This group of ordinary men from many different countries had worked together to defeat the forces of fascism.

And so began the end of World War II. There's more at the link.

Musk the Visionary now has a chance emerge from the swamp of Trumpdom

Louise Perry, How History Will Remember Elon Musk, NYTimes, June 3, 2025.

For better or worse, Elon Musk is a visionary. I have no doubt that he’s volatile and reckless, but those who dismiss him as a fraud or an idiot have not been paying close attention. Yes, his time meddling with the federal government has come to an end. And yes, perhaps his foray into politics was, in part, a disappointment to him. But Mr. Musk’s vision goes well beyond Washington. He has always been clear on this point and continues to tell anyone who will listen: “Eventually, all life on Earth will be destroyed by the sun,” he told Fox News last month. “The sun is gradually expanding, and so we do at some point need to be a multiplanet civilization, because Earth will be incinerated.”

This is why, 23 years ago, Mr. Musk resolved to go to Mars — his first step toward interstellar colonization. He says he wants to die there (“just not on impact”). He also says that space exploration will lead to a process of mass psychological renewal. “The United States,” he says, “is literally a distillation of the human spirit of exploration. This is a land of adventurers.” His goal is to save humanity not only from the future loss of our planet but also from our own lethargy and cowardice. If he succeeds in this project, then Mr. Musk’s time in Washington will be just a minor detail in the histories written about him.

It’s not as if this past year has done Mr. Musk long-term harm. Those indulging in schadenfreude at his apparent fall from grace don’t seem to have noticed the success of his space program. In the first half of 2024, his SpaceX company launched seven times as much tonnage into space as the rest of the world put together, and Mr. Trump’s Golden Dome (an imitation of Israel’s Iron Dome) could well consume as many taxpayer dollars as NASA’s Apollo project. Much of this funding will be diverted to SpaceX, given the need for an enormous number of satellites, meaning that Mr. Musk’s fortune will grow still further as a result of his political interventions. Mr. Musk’s obsession with space isn’t just ideological — he is also making money from it. “Pure philanthropy is all very well in its way,” as Cecil Rhodes once said, “but philanthropy plus 5 percent is a good deal better.”

Perry then goes on to review the short career, who made a fortune in the diamond trade (De Beers is his company) and went on to found Rhodesia, dying at the age of 48. She then observes:

The similarities between the two men range from the minor (if suggestive) to the uncanny. Both were difficult and complex men who escaped their tyrannical fathers by migrating to the other side of the world, alone, at a young age — Mr. Musk moved from South Africa to Canada at 17, Mr. Rhodes from Britain to South Africa also at 17 — and made their fortunes in industries that favor the ruthless and the energetic. Both rejected the Christian faith in which they were raised and also the conventions of monogamous marriage. (Some biographers now believe that Mr. Rhodes was gay.) Both developed reputations for volatility and eccentricity; Mr. Rhodes, like Mr. Musk, disliked formal dressing.

And both, importantly, were children of the British Empire. Mr. Musk has never lived in Britain, but he takes a particular interest in the country as a consequence of his British ancestry, and he spent his childhood within the British diaspora of South Africa, during the apartheid era. He and Cecil Rhodes are products of the same culture — a culture that has, for whatever reason, produced a disproportionate number of these strange, ruthless and single-minded men.

There's more at the link.

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.

* * * * *

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.

* * * * *

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.

* * * * *

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.

* * * * *

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?]

Elon's disillusioned and is going home

Tyler Pager, Maggie Haberman, Theodore Schleifer, Jonathan Swan and Ryan Mac, A Disillusioned Musk, Distanced From Trump, Says He’s Exiting Washington, NYTimes, May 28, 2025.

Elon Musk took a swipe at President Trump’s signature domestic policy legislation, saying it would add to the national deficit. He complained to administration officials about a lucrative deal that went to a rival company to build an artificial-intelligence data center in the Middle East. And he has yet to make good on a $100 million pledge to Trump’s political operation.

Mr. Musk, who once called himself the president’s “first buddy,” is now operating with some distance from Mr. Trump as he says he is ending his government work to spend more time on his companies. Mr. Musk remains on good terms with Mr. Trump, according to White House officials. But he has also made it clear that he is disillusioned with Washington and frustrated with the obstacles he encountered as he upended the federal bureaucracy, raising questions about the strength of the alliance between the president and the world’s richest man.

Mr. Musk was the biggest known political spender in the 2024 election, and he told Mr. Trump’s advisers this year that he would give $100 million to groups controlled by the president’s team before the 2026 midterms. As of this week, the money hasn’t come in yet, according to multiple people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the behind-the-scenes dynamic.

Too much time on politics:

But Mr. Musk has said in recent days that he spent too much time focused on politics and has lamented the reputational damage he and his companies have suffered because of his work in the Trump administration.

“I think I probably did spend a bit too much time on politics,” Mr. Musk said in an interview this week with Ars Technica, a tech news outlet.

He added: “It was just relative time allocation that probably was a little too high on the government side, and I’ve reduced that significantly in recent weeks.”

He also took a swipe at Mr. Trump’s allies in Congress, telling CBS News that he was “disappointed” by the domestic policy bill that the president championed and the House passed last week.

Middle East rivalry:

He also took a swipe at Mr. Trump’s allies in Congress, telling CBS News that he was “disappointed” by the domestic policy bill that the president championed and the House passed last week.

Mr. Musk complained to David Sacks, the president’s A.I. adviser, and other White House officials about the Abu Dhabi project involving OpenAI, an organization he founded with Sam Altman, with whom he has since had a falling out, according to the official. He also expressed concerns about fairness more broadly for other A.I. companies, and sought to have his own company, xAI, be included in the deal, though it ultimately was not.

Troubles for Elon:

Mr. Musk’s own disillusionment with national politics can be traced back to two recent events, according to people close to him: his frustrations with the president’s tariff regime and the roughly $25 million he spent backing a candidate who ended up losing a judicial bid in Wisconsin.

Back to space:

On Tuesday, SpaceX held a test flight of Starship, the rocket that Mr. Musk hopes will someday take humans to Mars. The vehicle had a successful launch, but sprang a leak halfway through its journey and eventually exploded. On X Mr. Musk called the launch a “big improvement,” but postponed a planned talk he was set to give on “SpaceX’s plan to make life multiplanetary.”

There's more at the link.