Elon Musk is an idiot. He has never accomplished anything himself in his life and has no competencies. He could be the most incompetent person on the planet. Like most rich people, he’s just lucky. And Luck Matters More Than Talent. He fell ass-backwards into big money, and our system protects big money. So it is impossible to have big money and not eternally gain more, no matter how stupid you are. Example: Donald Trump.

Musk, like Trump, hires people to do or invent things for him, and then takes credit when they succeed—or blames them when they fail (and they fail a lot more than you might have thought). And then he hoards all the profits. He did not invent Tesla. He just bought the company. He did not invent new rockets. He paid people to. He did not master a video game. He paid people to do it for him and then pretended he did it himself. And he did not invent PayPal. Someone else did; he just worked there (and if you thought otherwise, you were duped by his grift—congratulations!).

And when Musk tries to actually do something himself, literally everything he touches gets fucked up, from self-driving cars to Twitter to the government; even PayPal—that’s why they fired him. He was so bad at it that his own staff revolted and insisted he be canned. Indeed, nearly everyone who has ever worked for him says he is a shitty leader who has no business running companies. But alas, like other rich people who fail upwards, Musk’s contracted severance package for being axed from (what was then) PayPal for incompetence launched his entire career as a moneybagged gunknozzle.

And that’s the story of him.

How This Can Be Useful

All of that is true. And hardly news. But just this week I realized we finally have in Musk an example of someone so stupid that you can teach people how to think well using his best examples of thinking poorly. Because his best examples of thinking poorly are so starkly ridiculous that they bring into very clear relief what it means to think well. So today I am going use three examples of his intellectual gunknozzling to illustrate the most basic failure mode in human rationality: a complete disinterest in asking “Why?”

I realize now that I have been spending most of my time the past several years focusing on what are actually level two and level three failures of sentient thought. Level two (which I have been mistaking as level one) is realizing that you have to earnestly try to prove yourself wrong before you can ever be reliably confident you are right (The Scary Truth about Critical Thinking). This applies to anything whatever—literally anything, from how to clear a sink drain to how to unify Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. Level three (which I have been mistaking as level two) is then all the things you can build out of that basic principle—all the rules and principles that distinguish reliable from unreliable thinking.

I provide endless examples in my Critical Thinking category, but you can start with:

• Shaun Skills: How to Learn from Exemplary Cases
• A Primer on Actually Doing Your Own Research
• You Know They’re a [Good|Lousy] Philosopher If…
• And A Vital Primer on Media Literacy

It’s when you’ve mastered level three that you will be able to reliably determine whether aliens are invading Earth or demons exist.

Which is why whether someone is a progressive naturalist is a trusty litmus test for whether they are a reliable thinker: it’s where all reliable thinking ends up. So, if someone isn’t there, they cannot be a reliable thinker (at least, yet). Which can vary in degree (some people are only somewhat unreliable, some are hopelessly unreliable, and some are at various points in between), and in cause. It could be because they are lazy (they just aren’t interested in putting in the work to find out what’s true), or are busy (being too overworked by an abusive capitalist system to even have time), or because they are irrational. And being irrational doesn’t make them stupid in the sense of “unintelligent,” but rather stupid in the sense of being “foolish,” choosing not to apply their intelligence competently, perhaps trapped in a delusion that prevents them from applying their intelligence in a truth-finding way. A dupe, for lack of a better word. (For a quick breakdown on the difference between intelligence, rationality, knowledge, and wisdom, see my comment on how these are not the same thing.)

Which leaves this new level one of reliable thinking I had been taking for granted—and taking for granted on the assumption that people aren’t so stupid that they need this explained to them. But alas, Musk (and all his fans, insofar as he still has any) disproves my assumption. They need to learn this. So I need to put in some work here to explain level one and why it is essential to reliable thought. I’ll start with three examples, and then build out the general rule they all teach us in the end.

Planes Should Fly Straight (Says the Idiot)

This all struck me when I learned that Elon Musk actually thought planes should fly in straight lines. No, really. He said that…

What struck me about this is not merely how incompetent this shows him to be. This is really a no brainer. And yes, flight professionals pwned Musk on this, and even the original tweeter came back with the correct answer by doing the obvious thing: asking his pilot (a great example of curiosity driving a smart path toward an answer). But what struck me, rather, is that Musk didn’t do what a real genius does: correctly educate the tweeter.

As many noted, curved paths are often “the pilot’s preferred route for multiple reasons,” for something “as simple as weather” or “avoiding busy traffic,” a concern “close to big international airports, depending on aircraft size and preferred flying altitude.” Some people pointed out that flat maps don’t represent the curvature of the Earth, and that could be a factor, but this tweeter already ruled that out. But imagine Musk had replied, “Is it the curvature of the Earth?” Then he’d still be wrong, but (a) he’d be admitting his actual state of knowledge (with a question mark, recognizing he could be wrong and is just proffering a plausible hypothesis) and (b) he’d be exhibiting a curious interest in what the explanation actually is.

That would put Musk’s intelligence at “Average Joe” and thus exhibit no genius but also warrant no embarrassment. But Musk couldn’t even hit that minimum bar. He just arrogantly implied that planes are making bad decisions and “should” be flying in straight lines (this coming from the guy who claims he knows how to “fix” the FAA and is actually de facto in charge of doing so—yet is too incompetent to even manage personnel there, literally the minimum skill of a CEO, but set that aside for a moment). What you should immediately be asking is, “Why wasn’t Musk at all curious to actually know why this plane’s path was diverted?” The answer: he isn’t curious at all. He lacks curiosity as an epistemic virtue. Yet that’s a virtue essential to a scientific mind, as I explain and document in The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire. It is in fact essential to any rational mind.

Here is how a rational person behaves (assuming they don’t have better things to do than reply to random science-question tweets):

• If they are a genius, they probably already know the answer, and would be happy to immediately explain it: planes have to conserve fuel and avoid uncomfortable or risky weather, which means their flight paths have to evade things like turbulence, storms, crosswinds, headwinds, updrafts, downdrafts, even other flight traffic (and sometimes actual no-fly zones); or, conversely, to take advantage of tailwinds (even jetstreams). Mountains and deserts and bodies of water create variations in these factors. And since curved paths are more fuel efficient, a path designed to avoid one problem or take advantage of another won’t signal this by sudden changes in direction.
• And if they are not a genius, or are but don’t know this one particular thing (as many a genius cannot be expected to, since it’s really happenstance whether you’ve ever asked this question yourself), this is what they will do instead: they will spend five minutes googling the answer and evaluating the information they collect (weighing sources by reliability, clocking answers that are independently corroborated, down-rating answers they see being questioned by real experts, and so on—all level three thinking). And then they will reply with what they found. Of course, the best, A-level, I-have-only-five-seconds-to-reply answer is simply the most obvious: “Have a flight attendant ask the pilot.” I mean. Duh.

So if Musk were a genius, he’d have answered this flight poster with an explanation of why planes can’t take direct routes. Even if Musk didn’t know, he would go, “Oh, that’s interesting. I wonder if there are reasons for that?” And then check. And then find out. And then answer with what he found. That would take all of five minutes to complete as a task. Because that is what a genius does.

But this requires having actual epistemic virtues. You have to actually have critical curiosity and baseline competence to know that this is the correct way to respond to questions like this. Musk’s reply proves he lacks even these basic virtues and competencies. And that explains nearly everything else about him. Which is why we should never, ever, entrust him with anything. His shareholders should fire him from every position. Congress should ban him from government service. But the epistemic lesson for us is: do the opposite. DDWMWD, “Don’t Do What Musk Would Do.” Musk does incompetence peak well. You can’t even write better examples of incompetence than his. So all you have to ask is, “What would Musk do?” And then do entirely the opposite of that. That will get you on the right track away from being an idiot.

It’s also more fun. Curiosity is a passion. And pursuing passions is pleasurable. It’s also how you become a genius. Or in any way smarter. In fact, it is the only way to.

Millions of 150-Years Olds Proves Fraud (Says the Idiot)

Musk stupidly claimed “millions” of people are receiving social security checks who are 150 years old, and “therefore” there is massive fraud in the social security system. Yeah. That happened. And it’s weirder than it sounds if you hadn’t already heard about it (most people have). For the whole story, see PolitiFact; but even FoxNews had to call out this one, as did even the self-proclaimed “fucking moron” Joe Rogan. This is Musk’s most embarrassing mistake yet. And it’s very educational.

When I heard this, I was especially shocked. Not because I had some false belief that Musk is supposed to be smart (I was never duped by that con). But because the one competency—literally the only competency—Musk is supposed to have is coding. I don’t imagine he was ever particularly good at it. But I assumed he had to have at least the bare minimum of competence in that one skill, enough to at least get an entry-level coding job. But, alas, now we know. He couldn’t even get hired for an entry-level coding job. Which finally prompted me to check. And yep. Real coders doubt Musk has even basic coding skills. The only independently verifiable case I could find of him actually coding something was in BASIC, an extremely simple language that has been dead for decades. In every other case of fawning propaganda, Musk could be taking credit for his partners’ and employees’ work, or even just lying—just as he does with his “video game proficiency.”

But let’s look at it this way. Imagine this. An entry-level coder comes in for a job interview. They have some training, a relevant degree, but no job experience. You have to decide whether to hire them. So to test them, you pose them this conundrum: “You are auditing the United States Social Security database and find millions of persons recorded there who were all born on May 20, 1875, which would make them 150 years old. What do you do?” If “what they do” is announce to the public that millions of people are fraudulently receiving social security payments (or even just “Call the FBI to investigate!”) you would immediately stop the interview, put their name on a “no hire” list, circular-file their application, and politely ask them to leave.

Any minimally competent coder would immediately see that the problem must have something to do with the code. While it is certain that there are always some people still collecting social security checks on people who have died (and there are government personnel tasked specifically with finding them out—though Musk fired a lot of them, so, there’s that), it is not even remotely likely that any of these frauds are collecting checks on millions of people born specifically on the same day exactly 150 years ago. For millions of people in a database to all have exactly the same strange birth date screams of coding error. And indeed, that’s what it was: May 20 was the day ISO 8601 was established, the coding standard for the Social Security database, which defaults every file to “May 20, 1875” when no date is entered for it. So a competent coder would say, “Let’s find out what’s going in the code.”

But this isn’t just a measure of expertise in a specific skill. It is that. But it’s bigger than that. Because even someone with zero coding knowledge would be curious here and behave far more intelligently than Musk. This failure again illustrates the single most important thing that distinguishes a reliable person from a complete idiot: he never asked why. With “millions” of 150 year olds showing up in his tables, any non-idiot’s very first question would be, “Why is that?” And then, of course, he’d find out. And maybe then their next question would be, “Are those people actually being sent checks?” And then, of course, he’d find out the answer is no.

Obviously a non-idiot would expect this database to be complete. So it should contain everyone who has ever had a social security number—millions of whom, needless to say, will have to be dead. “There are dead people who had social security numbers, therefore there is massive fraud” is a frighteningly irrational line of thought. But any curious person would have found out first. And what they’d find is that millions of those marked as dead were entered without a registered date of birth, probably because they were already dead when the computerization occurred, and thus to save time and money, no effort was spent tracking down every dead entrant’s birthdate.

But notice that this rudimentary human competency requires curiosity. You have to be impelled by your nature to ask, “Why are so many 150-year olds in this database?” Rather than immediately invent a reason in your head and then confidently announce it to hundreds of millions of people, thus exposing your stupidity to epic ridicule. Only the most profoundly stupid person does that. Which is how we know Elon Musk is profoundly stupid. Everyone else asks “Why?” first, and finds out, and then…well, they found out. So they won’t make that stupid claim. They will simply note the oddity, and maybe assess whether it’s worth the bother of doing anything about. If your mission is saving money, though, (and you’re not an idiot) you probably would say, “No, it’s not worth the cost of entering millions of birthdates on obsolete files.” Since none of them are receiving checks. So…who cares? Which is of course exactly the decision process of the people who built that database in the first place.

A genius would admire that efficiency decision and maybe even muse about it online. An idiot would go on full public panic mode about billions of dollars of vampire checks. And then get pwned even by “fucking morons.”

COVID Panic Is Dumb (Says the Idiot)

I needed a third example for this article so I googled “dumbest thing Elon Musk ever said” (no, seriously, I did). That “the internets” then provided hundreds of top-ranked examples (entire florilegia of Musk stupidity can be found at Byline Times, The Guardian, The Daily Guardian, The Crucial Years, Sky News, Mother Jones, Politico, The Drive, even Quora, and beyond) is of course its own indictment of the man. But I was interested in a suitable example for teaching. So I looked through the endless options and picked one I had already blueskied:

Sam Harris: “I sent Elon the following text:Is (35,000 deaths + 600,000 cases) > 35,000 cases?”This text appears to have ended our friendship.”= Sam Harris finally discovering Elon Musk is a delusional nutcase with no competencies. samharris.substack.com/p/the-troubl…

— Richard Carrier, PhD (@richardcarrier.info) 2025-01-17T16:15:06.820Z

Which links to Sam Harris’s account of Musk’s scientifically illiterate covid nuttery and his refusal to admit he was wrong or even be honest about it. Which also illustrates that Musk has no honor or moral character. Though one could write a heavily sourced article on just that fact using well beyond this one example, here I am interested only in the epistemological question this exchange illustrates. Although among the examples I reviewed, I did also think it was interesting that Musk is so incurious (and science illiterate) that he actually thought his car was orbiting Mars. But an apologist could claim Musk was lied to by his own engineers who launched it (though I doubt that, who knows). Here, however, there is no such escape: Musk made a scientifically illiterate statement; Harris called him out on it with vast data; and Musk did nothing. He did not update his beliefs.

You can watch every step of Musk’s idiocy, documented by Harris, and observe how it represents a failure to act like a critical thinker. For example, Harris starts with quoting Musk’s attempt to convince him COVID was unserious (as he declared on March 6 of 2020): Harris says that when Musk answered him with “proof” he “included a link to a page on the CDC website, indicating that Covid was not even among the top 100 causes of death in the United States,” which as Harris notes “was a patently silly point to make in the first days of a pandemic.” Note the lack of curiosity: Musk did not ask himself, “Is this statistic a relevant indicator of the seriousness of the COVID pandemic?” (Which would have, in five minutes of thought and time, proved to be “No.”) He just fished around for anything that vaguely resembled a proof of his point and confidently sent it to Harris, without any critical thought whatsoever. Defending Musk’s belief was more important than checking if it was right. Which is the most dangerous failure mode in human thought (it characterizes literally all popular religions).

Although kudos to the latest reply (as of today):

Likewise, that Musk still has not deleted this Tweet (despite deleting a ton of his other embarrassing mistakes there) signifies his irrational commitment to the false belief it expresses. But there is a darker reason this matters than the mere fact that Musk “turned out” to be catastrophically wrong: Musk was provably wrong even then.

As Harris points out, he argued with Musk for hours, presenting tons of data and analysis, concluding in the end that “if I hadn’t known that I was communicating with Elon Musk, I would have thought I was debating someone who lacked any understanding of basic scientific and mathematical concepts, like exponential curves.” Of course, Harris is making the same mistake as Musk here. He should have realized this meant Elon Musk was “someone who lacked any understanding of basic scientific and mathematical concepts, like exponential curves.” Harris should have updated his beliefs—and didn’t. He was more obsessed with maintaining his belief that Musk was an informed genius, than in checking if that belief was even right. (It of course was wrong.)

Harris points out that before Musk’s tweet Harris had been doing what a reliable thinker would do and looked for relevant bellweathers (not irrelevant data), and found one in particular: “Italy had already fallen off a cliff.” Indeed, the Lombardy region of Italy began the first Western lockdown just two days after Musk’s tweet; the entire country would follow just three days later. Between the first case there on February 20 and Musk’s tweet on March 6—not even two weeks—nearly two hundred people had already died of the disease in Lombardy alone. That’s terrifying. The pace slowed after because of the ensuing measures (lockdowns and eventually vaccines and every other mitigation procedure everyone hated—yet that saved countless lives), but still Italy lost over 70,000 lives to COVID that year alone (and lost almost 200,000 to the four-year pandemic altogether).

Just now I did a time delimited search of the internet up to March 6 of 2020 and can confirm the materials available to Musk were abundant, detailed, and alarming—which is the point Harris made to him at the time. And yet, even after all that…

Elon bet me $1 million dollars (to be given to charity) against a bottle of fancy tequila ($1000) that we wouldn’t see as many as 35,000 cases of Covid in the United States (cases, not deaths). The terms of the bet reflected what was, in his estimation, the near certainty (1000 to 1) that he was right. Having already heard credible estimates that there could be 1 million deaths from Covid in the U.S. over the next 12-18 months (these estimates proved fairly accurate), I thought the terms of the bet ridiculous—and quite unfair to Elon. I offered to spot him two orders of magnitude: I was confident that we’d soon have 3.5 million cases of Covid in the U.S. Elon accused me of having lost my mind and insisted that we stick with a ceiling of 35,000.

We of course had well over a hundred million cases, and over a million deaths. Cases exceeded five million before even 2020 ended—and exceeded one million the month after Musk’s stated disbelief. Harris, by contrast, was spot on: in March of 2020 he had concluded from a review of the data that U.S. deaths (not cases, deaths) would exceed a million within a year. They did. Why was Harris able to be so prescient and Musk so not? Because Harris doesn’t fail at level one. He was curious to know how bad the disease really was, and looked around for all the best data and analysis he could find, and vetted them, and thus updated his belief. His curiosity was fundamental here: he really wanted to know, and accordingly actually looked, and critically weighed what he found because he really wanted to know. He looked for all the steel men. He also understood basic science and math, so he could tell when he was being snowed (as Musk was doing) or informed (as the scientists Harris consulted were doing).

This is a basic skill. You need to not only be curious enough to learn how to tell the difference (between being snowed and being reliably informed about something), but also, of course, curious enough to regularly employ that skill. “Is what I’m thinking correct? Is what I am being told correct?” To be able to competently answer those questions starts with actually asking them—you have to start with being curious enough to even want to know these things. Otherwise, you’ll never even develop that skill, much less reliably apply it. And if you don’t have that skill, you are functionally an idiot. And if you have it and don’t use it, you are functionally a fool.

Musk doesn’t even have this skill. He is not even interested in having this skill. As is proved by all the other evidence I’ve linked to here. Musk is catastrophically unreliable. And his disinterest in developing this skill—and the lack of curiosity that explains that disinterest—explains why Musk always fucks everything up, never knows what he is doing, and is routinely wrong about things.

What We Should Learn from All This

The kidding-on-the-square show Some More News already nailed my level one point here: what unifies all these catastrophic failures is a stalwart lack of curiosity. Elon Musk is never interested in knowing why something is as it is or is going the way it goes. He just barrels through on pure arrogance, not even wanting to learn how to play a video game well—it doesn’t even interest him to know how. He just wants to be perceived as awesome; and not ever actually be awesome. Because the latter requires work—as well as the curiosity that drives it. Musk has no real curiosity. And consequently, he never learns anything, and thus makes endless bad choices (that SMN video even documents his catastrophically bad poker playing, illustrating my point here in a way John Nash would have taught classes with). But of relevance to today is that this fundamental lack of curiosity stunts Musk’s intellect. It is what makes him an intellectual idiot. This defines a level one failure in critical thinking: not asking why.

Notice the difference in behaviors that I outlined in all three examples: one option is to just blurt out and run with what you think, with no care for whether it is correct, but only the arrogant assumption that it must be; another option is to ask and inquire, to find out before declaring a conclusion; and the more that things still don’t make sense, the more you keep asking and inquiring until they do. The next step would then be to burn-test your conclusions: try earnestly to prove them wrong, and only believe them when you earnestly fail to. That’s step two, and thus level two good thinking.

But Musk isn’t even hitting step one. No one qualifies as a genius who isn’t hitting level 3. And no one qualifies as even competent who isn’t hitting level 2. And Musk isn’t even hitting level 1. In anything. And I suspect the resulting metrics will be something like this: failing at the first step is “dunce” category. It means over half your ideas are going to be wrong, and over half your projects will fail. Failing at only steps two and three is an “Average Joe” category. Maybe a fifth to a third of your ideas are going to be wrong, and maybe a fifth to a third of your projects will fail. Failing instead at only step three is “Journeyman” category, what you might call “entry level competence.” Your failure rate will be, say, only ten percent or so. But nailing all three steps is “Master” category. Your failure rate will ballpark around one percent. That’s genius-level achievement. Musk is not even genius-adjacent.

If you want to train at level three, and start learning all the common fallacies and cognitive biases we all fall into, and thus how to recognize them when they are happening, and start mitigating them and thus thinking like a master, join my monthly Critical Thinking Class. It’s an online correspondence course, self-directed, but with the chance to pick my brain in forums every day for a month, on any question about critical thinking you ever had, and get substantive responses the whole way through.