Musk’s behaviour has always been controversial and he’s always been kind of a dick, but I don’t think it is controversial at all to say that until some years ago he has been extremely net positive for society and humanity in general. However, he’s behaviour and actions turned much more disruptive in the recent years while, at the same time, the reach of his actions and opinions have also maximized.
So, do you think Musk is still net-positive for humanity or he already turned to be net-negative in your view? I’d be interested to read your arguments below (also if you think that he’s never been net-positive, for example).
I crossposted this question in LessWrong. I think having a flavour on how these communities feel about Musk is important because EA and the rationalist community have had kind of a “close” relationship with Musk -partly having helped shape his ideas and with adjacent organizations having received donations from him.
I’m (mostly) a lefty, I really don’t like the guy and I think he might be net positive still. Normalizing EVs and battery power in general is so huge for climate change, and I think the jury is still out on whether his X takeover and his political efforts are that negative. I think given Trump’s overwhelming win, it’s not so plausible he made the difference in the election, and now he’s in the mix he might well be an opposing positive force too (for example his recent pro immigration influence)
But this is wild speculation and super shallow. Interested to hear other thoughts.
I think the use of the word “still” makes this a much easier “no” than it might otherwise have been. SpaceX and Tesla have been hugely significant companies, he’s played more role in them than he is sometimes credited with and it’s not at all obvious that other companies would have done similar things on similar timelines in his absence, but if he were to divest all his shares in both companies and start slagging them off tomorrow, electric car sales and tech development would be fine (EV sales might even rise...) and the number of space launches would continue to rise. Even if both companies went down with him, the viability of electric cars and commercial space launch businesses is demonstrated now.[1] I also don’t think that Twitter would be rainbows and sunshine in his absence or that Trump wouldn’t have won without his endorsement, but the empowering of engineers is a past accomplishment, and the empowerment of terrible people[2] Musk’s current focus.
So that leaves what he might do differently in future. For people optimistic his flirtation with Trump was a strategy to give him the ability to do amazing things that only being trusted with lots of government budget could achieve, the initial indications aren’t positive. There are no big space or cleantech or AI pledges: instead his “Manhattan Project” DOGE looks like a fundamentally unserious boondoggle generating memes about government waste (even if you think cutting government waste is the most important challenge of our time and Elon is an excellent choice to do it, it seems non-obvious that it will have much teeth or that it would operate significantly less effectively with Vivek Ramaswamy in sole charge. If you thought Elon in charge of NASA might lead to amazing advances… well he’s busy with other things). And he certainly doesn’t seem to be a moderating force around Trump, at least not outside very specific areas he cares about like H1-B visas and Chinese parts of the Tesla supply chain.
He has, of course, sounded sincerely interested in the topic of AI safety before and has legitimate criticisms of OpenAI, but his main contribution to the field of AI other than storming out of that company in a dispute over who would run it is to take more risks than others around autonomous vehicle control tech and build an LLM chatbot whose distinguishing feature is that it’s trained to be rude rather than polite. And it’s difficult to argue that a man who was talking about the need to become an interplanetary species not that long ago and is now getting bigger dopamine hits out of the responses to tweets about how the US should overthrow the UK government is heading in the direction of thoughtfulness and caution.
though losing SpaceX would significantly delay future launches...
if my politics were broadly aligned with the nativist, populist right here in the UK, I’d probably be even more disappointed with his selection of figures to promote and fights to pick.