Elon Musk

Elon Musk is the clearest case for my central claim on this show, that motivated reasoning explains more than malice does and can do just as much damage. His arc runs from a 2020 Biden vote, through the Twitter purchase and the 2023 DeSantis launch, to endorsing Trump about an hour after the Butler shooting. Then came DOGE, a public blow-up over the tax bill in 2025, and the thaw I described on the show. Underneath it I see three stacked layers: sincere civilizational fear, personal fear that the other side would come after him, and plain spite.

On USAID I was blunt. The claim that most of the money never reached anyone traces back, as far as I can tell, to a localization statistic, not an audit, and he still treats it as settled. As I discussed on air, he dismissed published mortality estimates and conceded only a cancelled Ebola program. What he regrets is the theater, not the policy. He engages with critics, not with evidence.

I don't think he knows he's wrong. People who see themselves as the last line of defense experience motivated reasoning as urgency, not dishonesty. The blind spot is structural. Rockets give you physics feedback in seconds, while politics gives you applause. And many of the people who might have corrected him have left or learned what disagreement costs.

Credit where it's due: he has built things nobody else could, he gives to charity, he clearly loves his kids, and he believes he's doing good. That combination is exactly what makes the blind spot dangerous.

What would move me: him engaging with the audit data or the mortality modeling on the merits, even once. If he read this, I suspect he'd half-agree and then discount the source.

In our October 23 evening conversation (Starshield, Iran & the Anthropic Mirror), we examined the Wall Street Journal report that SpaceX quietly capped military Starshield terminals at roughly 100 mph over Ukraine starting October 13, blinding jet-powered interceptor drones until Trump called Musk on Wednesday. It is almost a mirror image of the Pentagon's case against Anthropic: Anthropic got blacklisted as a supply-chain risk over hypothetical refusals, while Musk's company throttled a live military system mid-war and got a phone call.