Comments
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.
Great response! I'm not clear whether "still" includes everything he has done to date, or whether it only includes what he does from now on in. I was considering the first, if it is the second like you say I agree with you
Yep. I agree it can be interpreted in other ways and would agree with you that taking everything into account he's probably had more impact at the margin on the positive stuff than the negatives, so far. There was certainly a bigger shortage of people with the means and the motivation to take on EVs and commercial space in the early 2000s[1] than peopl willing to spout stupid stuff on social media in the last three years.
I think battery and photovoltaics were coming down in manufacturing cost over the last decade regardless, but you don't automatically get complex products out of that...
Oh, I meant it to include everything, sorry for the confusion. So, he's done a bunch of net-good stuff but now he's doing a bunch of net-bad stuff, is the former still larger than the latter? How should I express it in the title so that it is clear?
And actually, since some time I tend to think that he's probably been vastly less net-good in the past than I previously thought. Not really because of him, but because Chinese companies are beating everyone, including Tesla, with their EVs (and I don't think he's had any influence in China betting hard for EVs, though I might be wrong here); so if Tesla would have not existed, the adoption of EVs would just have been only delayed for few years (and mostly only in the west). So his net-positive contribution -for me and now- seems much lower than it seemed before.
"Has he been net positive for humanity overall" would be be clearer that it's looking at everything he's done so far
But I actually think it's more interesting if it's an ambiguous question. The stuff he's done so far is significant but not necessarily aligned with what he's doing now and what he might do or intend to do in future. The trajectory he is on now is... not upward. The influence that he has now isn't necessarily more than when few people knew who he was, and he sounded more strategic as well as more amicable then. And the stuff he may or may not do in future is speculation.
Ok, thanks. I leave it like this, then. Then everyone will have answered to the same question :-)