What Is Actually Going On With Elon Musk? – CleanTechnica

Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!

---

I just had a long chat with a good friend who was basically an OG in Tesla world. We talked about all kinds of Tesla topics trying to understand where Tesla would be going in 2025 and beyond. We covered a variety of topics, pros and cons, opportunities and risks. It was an interesting conversation. One thing that came up was “betting on the jockey” versus “betting on the horse.” Without a doubt, a lot of people believe in Tesla almost entirely because they believe in Elon Musk, in part because of previous successes and in part because of how things have gone at Tesla. Incidentally, I was also on the verge of writing this story, because of how odd — and interesting — Elon Musk has been lately. So, let’s get into a little look at the jockey.

I’m going to bring it around to Tesla matters in a little while, but we have to start with other matters. To get rolling, we’ve got the video game story, which actually goes from weird to weirder.

An Extremely Odd Video Game Saga

It was revealed a few weeks ago that Elon Musk was a top-level player globally of the video game Path of Exile 2 (PoE 2), a free-to-play action role-playing game (RPG) that was recently released. It was shocking and confusing. With everything else Musk has going on, how does he have time to log hundreds of hours playing a new video game? Or if he is spending hundreds of hours playing videos games, how much time is he putting into multiple companies he runs (not to mention political campaigns)?

I didn’t spend much time learning about this game or Musk’s connection to it, but then I saw a headline pop onto Google News, “Elon Musk Throws Tantrum After Being Exposed by Gamers, Leaks YouTuber’s DMs and Seemingly Takes Away His Checkmark,” and it got me to click. What the heck was going on? My goodness — things got weird. The article got me to click a video from a YouTuber who I’ve never heard of but who has 3.29 million subscribers on YouTube. I thought I’d watch a few moments of the video, but I learned one reason this guy has so many subscribers, he pulls you in a bit and the editing is great (I’ll come back to that). Here’s the video if you want to check it out:

In the video, he discusses some oddities in Musk’s livestreaming of himself playing the game, including clipping snippets of other top gamers commenting on these oddities. Let’s just say it up front: it’s all weird. I don’t want to spend too much time on the video game part of this itself, even thought that’s what the story is about, but here are a few key notes:

• Musk would have had to put in an enormous number of hours playing this new game to get to the level he’s at.
• Livestreams of him playing the game show him doing some things in weird and sometimes super basic ways, or not really understanding sometimes the values of things he has or could pick up while playing.
• Nonetheless, he is adamant that he’s a master of the game, he indicates that he plays it a lot, and he’s apparently not been willing to say he pays other people to play it for him in order to jack up his ranking.

It seems apparent that, even if he does play the game a lot, he has been paying others to master the game for him. This is one of the most baffling things of the whole story for me. Why is he so concerned with mastering the game that he pays others to do it for him? And even if he has a reason for that, why doesn’t he just admit he’s done that? Lastly on this story, why is Musk so eager for people to believe that he spends hours upon hours playing video games? I don’t have many good ideas for the answer this last question, but I will propose some answers at the end of the article. I’m marking this down as Q1 and will return to it at the end.

Oh, wait, before we move onto another story, note that this story did get even weird. Musk got into a DM chat with this video game streamer, Asmongold, at some point. After Asmongold made the video above, Musk was not happy about how things had gone, and he tweeted out a screenshot of the chat:

There are a few interesting — and, again, odd — things to add here:

• Musk violated X terms of service by tweeting this out.
• Musk somehow took this to mean Asmongold was under the editors in rank … apparently so locked into a mindset based on traditional media systems that he doesn’t understand the editors work for Asmongold. Don’t believe me? Musk said, “Asmon behaves like a maverick ‘independent’, but in reality has to ask his boss for permission before he can do anything. He is not his own man.” Seriously.
• Going further, Musk apparently removed his verification badge on X.
• To Asmongold, the whole saga reminded him of the behavior of “an angry ex-girlfriend.”

Needless to say, a lot of people in the gaming world see Musk as nuts, ignorant, and a special kind of weird after all of this. There are many more videos about it, but I’m doing my best to not get sucked in and read another one.

Oh, also, this apparently isn’t the first game that Musk has pretended to master despite obviously not having mastered it:

There are just really odd things in there.

An Odd & Embarrassing COVID-19 Saga with a Friend

I had actually totally forgotten about one of the most infamous public claims about COVID-19 from the early days of the pandemic. It was one of the first really baffling things I saw Musk tweet or say. But there’s even much more along the same lines that happened behind the scenes.

Regarding that first reference, as a refresher, in March of 2020, Musk tweeted, “Based on current trends, probably close to zero new cases in US too by end of April.” As we all know, there were far more new cases at the end of April than on March 19, and definitely not “close to zero.”

One could say that, well, no one really knew in March what would happen with the virus. Except that’s not true. It was obvious what was happening and what was going to happen. It was Spring Break here in Florida, and it was obvious COVID-19 was spreading rapidly and we were in for a long, challenging pandemic. I did not understand at the time how Elon Musk could not understand that. I did not understand how someone with so much wealth didn’t have an expert team of advisors making sure he understood what was going on. I didn’t understand how he didn’t register the math and the science of this all.

But it wasn’t just one random public tweet.

Apparently, longtime friend Sam Harris, a neuroscientist, philosopher, author, and podcast host, had a disagreement with him on COVID-19 predictions. You may recall that Musk tweeted “The coronavirus panic is dumb.” At the time, the question was, was his point that panic is dumb? Or was his point that the coronavirus was nothing? Well, Harris reached out in private and said, “You have an enormous platform, and much of the world looks to you as an authority on all things technical,” and noted that he thought the tweet was irresponsible and risked damaging his reputation.

“Elon’s response was jarring: ‘Sam, you of all people should not be concerned with this.’ The billionaire linked to a page on the CDC website indicating that COVID was not among the top 100 causes of death in the US,” Futurism reports

“‘This was a patently silly point to make in the first days of a pandemic,’ Harris wrote on his Substack.

“After hours of texting, neither saw eye to eye. But they did agree on a bet. Musk bet donating $1 million to charity against a $1,000 bottle of tequila that COVID cases in the US would not exceed 35,000.

“‘The terms of the bet reflected what was, in his estimation, the near certainty (1000 to 1) that he was right,’ Harris said.”

So, yeah, Musk had no understanding of the coronavirus trend, scientifically or medically, and genuinely thought it was going nowhere.

The summary point from Sam Harris on his Substack was that “his engagement with Twitter/X transformed him.” There’s “something seriously wrong with his moral compass, if not his perception of reality,” and Harris thinks much of that stems from being obsessively online and essentially getting tricked by the massive misinformation tsunamis that swirl around on social media constantly.

In the end, Harris texted Musk “Is (35,000 deaths + 600,000 cases) > 35,000 cases?” a few weeks later when the CDC reported 35,000 COVID-19 related deaths and 600,000 cases.

Big question #2 (Q2) that I’ll come back to: what does this story have in similar with the gaming story above?

An Axe Murderer Terrorizing Twitter HQ?

While reading one of those stories on Futurism, I saw a recommended related story: “Elon Musk Claims Axe Murderer Targeted His Employees, Cops Say They Have No Idea What He’s Talking About.”

WHAT?!

Nothing should surprise me at this point, but this one did again nonetheless.

“Tough-on-crime crusader Elon Musk claims that there was an axe murderer on the loose in the city of San Francisco who tried to kill several of his employees, with the authorities doing nothing to catch the assailant. The key word in all of this being ‘claims.’

“‘About a year ago, a guy tried to kill three X employees with an axe outside the former Twitter HQ in SF. They reported it to the police, but nothing was done,’ Musk tweeted, responding to the account End Wokeness (a favorite of his). ‘He later killed someone with that axe.’

“If this is true, the city has become so utterly lawless that the cops never got wind of the grisly murder. On Monday, local police said they could find no records supporting Musk’s story, the San Francisco Chronicle reports — evidence that, once again, Musk may be simply be fibbing or falling victim to preposterous rumors.

“‘Based on the information provided, we cannot find any incident that matches this description in that location in 2023 or 2024,’ Evan Sernoffsky, a San Francisco police spokesperson, told the Chronicle.”

Even further, Musk has apparently told this story a few times now with different details — different weapons (a machete in at least one case), differences on whether Twitter employees reported it, differences on how many people this murderer reportedly went on to kill.

It’s all just … weird. The cops don’t know what he’s referring to.

What is going on here?

Tesla Stuff

Okay, now let’s get to something that actually matters in the cleantech scene. What does all of this mean when it comes to Tesla?

Musk has made numerous claims regarding Tesla Full Self Driving (FSD) and robotaxis that have proven wrong over the past decade. He has also made a number of projections based on simple math and trend lines, some of which have proven wrong, and some of which are about the future and thus can’t be determined right or wrong yet. For example, the company’s sales were supposed to be growing 50% a year through 2030, reaching 20 million sales in the year 2030. That’s now five years away and the company’s sales would need to increase more than 10 times over.

Frankly, if Musk has a habit of making big uninformed decisions in other fields and doubling down on them, why should we assume he doesn’t also do this at Tesla on important Tesla matters? Why should we assume this isn’t what he’s been doing with regarding to Autopilot and Full Self Driving for 10 years? Yes, the technology has improved, but if you spend billions of dollars on improving it and have thousands of people working on improving it, you can be sure it’ll improve. The question is whether the base assumption and long-term forecast is really a smart thing to bet on.

Is the jockey as great as he’s been made out to be? On a side note, has Musk always really been the jockey, or was JB Straubel the real jockey in the company’s critical years?

Returning to the video game story, it seems obvious that Musk is eager to be the jockey publicly even when he’s not the one doing the work. I don’t see any other way to explain that story. He is happy to take the credit and reputation boost from someone else doing a ton of work (or, well, gaming), and will even double down on the idea that he was the one doing it all along. Regarding Q1, “why is Musk so eager for people to believe that he spends hours upon hours playing video games?,” the only thing I can come up with is that he wants people in the gaming world to respect him and think he’s a great gamer. I can’t find any other reason for this. And if he’s so desperate to claim the credit of mastering this game, how desperate has he been to claim the credit for other successes adjacent to him or accomplished underneath him that really aren’t about the work he’s done or how smart he is? Again, was he the super-jockey he brought Tesla’s big successes, or was that someone else — or multiple other people — no longer engaged in critical operations at the company?

Regarding Q2, what that gaming story has to do with the COVID-19 story, the point is that he wants people to think highly of him. He wants people to think he’s right even when he’s not. He has apparently never acknowledged to Harris or others that he got this story wrong. Instead, he has gone into some pretty extreme directions on COVID-19. He’s been more focused on getting people to think he’s right than on being right. From my perspective, that’s a concern. When it comes to Tesla leadership, it worries me. Others disagree, obviously, but each passing week brings another shocking story that makes it very hard to trust this jockey.

What do you think?