One of the most notable things you mention in the article is his lack of moral character. He grossly exaggerates his achievements, fantasizes about unlimited success and power, thinks he’s special, has difficulty handling criticism, has difficulty admitting he’s wrong, has a documented history of interpersonal clashes with coworkers, has a history of highly defamatory conduct, and he has a notably long list publicly documented failed romantic relationships, divorces, and affairs. Not to mention a history of dubious lawsuits that reflect poorly on him, his willingness to lie in support of his political ambitions, policy changes he made at Twitter in support of disinformation, and both a willingness and desire to be associated with Trump. In other words, he has strong Narcissistic and Antisocial traits, very similar to Donald Trump, though probably not nearly as severe as Trump. These personality traits are critical to understanding how someone like this operates since they indicate a well researched pattern of behavior. Difficulty acknowledging your own shortcomings and lack of knowledge is going to make it hard for anyone to achieve Level 2 on your scale, and impulsivity combined with a lack of need to work due to wealth will make the intellectual curiosity of Level 1 difficult.

One of the most remarkable things about reading your article is that it is a reminder of how well lying can work, even Big Lies. When you only hear an highly exaggerated or false narrative, it often takes more than just a few bits of contradictory information before you realize that you are looking at a house of cards and should question everything you thought you knew. Case in point: even Harris had difficulty realizing that Elon Musk’s reputation for being scientifically and mathematically literate was really an outward facade of falsehoods and gross exaggerations.

It might be nice to do an article on recognizing lies, in particular Big Lies, and identifying when you’re dealing with Narcissistic Conmen. Humans don’t usually encounter large scale deception directly impacting their daily lives, so recognizing it can be difficult.

One last thing worth commenting on, I thought it was really odd that Elon Musk ordered all the software engineers at Twitter to send him examples of their code for him to review, on paper, to be used as the basis for firing over half the company. Even if he were a competent coder or understood how software engineering projects work, I don’t see how this exercise could possibly be a good use of his personal time or a good strategy for determining who to lay off, as evidenced by the fact that he was forced to face palm hard and publicly admit a need to rehire notable numbers of workers.

Even the straight flight example, or Musk calling a guy a pedophile for pointing out that his contribution was worthless, matches an ideology of aggressive, performative muscularity and masculinity. “He speaks off the cuff and calls it quick”. The fantasy of being able to get away with being that stupid and to bend reality to your will speaks to a lot of people.

(This is why I think the fake gamer thing actually really helps illustrate that Musk really is stupid: that looks weak as well as stupid . His insecurities really got exposed on that one).

And, of course, the 150 year olds and the COVID stuff is all just part of a firehose of lies. People have realized that motivated reasoning means that you can just say whatever you want and some portion of people who need the things you say to be true will rationalize their way to it being true. In that environment, lies that are obviously incompetent actually work just fine.

Really, a lot of this reads like scammers intentionally never fixing their English because they only get people who will be inattentive or gullible enough to fall for the scam that way.

To be clear, I do think that Musk is in fact phenomenally stupid, but the point is that, as long as stupidity is rewarded, tactical stupidity and actual stupidity will be difficult to distinguish. The world is now in Poe’s Law.