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The Techno-Futuristic Philosophy Behind Elon Musk’s Mania, The New York Times, May 30, 2025, Credit…Photo illustration by Pablo Delcan

The End Of Civilization As We Knew It, Part Twenty-Eight

Update, June 5: So the “explosion” between Trump and Musk has come today. Changing nothing about the damage they have caused to the country and the world before this. Make no assumptions on where this will go. We will be back with further comment shortly.

. . .

Elon Musk has purportedly left the White House and his orbit around Trump has changed back to around other planets of various sorts. Behind the scenes, in the front scene, he’ll be around and is always around everything that concerns money and power and obsession and addiction and whatever he feels like next. He’s the richest person in history with all the power that by definition is attached to this, no matter how detached from reality or concern for others he may be. He was the perfect pick for Trump to carry out his government destruction cum savings plan as the past and prospective donor and the co-gangster with Trump (as David Brooks has described him and his entourage) who appears to deliver in return with government contracts (although Musk had already positioned himself as the only real option in many such situations–more on that to come).

Is it possible that anyone listens to and repeats in media as if it is anything but peformative for someone at the bottom of the public opinion heap, that Elon Musk would suddenly become fiscally concerned about the irresponsible spending bill he helped set up and suddenly discover what’s wrong with it, including the things he wants for himself–directly and indirectly? He and Trump could go to war and it would be meaningless and performative as well because their interests are alligned in the end. They are by definition competitors for the most powerful person on earth, so by definition the relationship has explosiveness built in, plus personal issues that make everything unpredictable. But in the end, no matter what happens, its all a game.

They’ve already done more damage to the world, to human beings, than could ever have been imagined even the day before Trump was innaugurated.

The rules say Trump owns the damage. Reality says they both do. And every enabler around them, really most of humanity (yes, including many liberals who voted against him, all part of the larger context of the increasingly narcissistic, nihilistic, dumbed-down context of inequality and corroded morality we’ve been writing about for many years) that has brought us to this. And again, this is not a political statement. It is the reality that any decent human is required to speak and act on.

The man who beat Obama in the election and tonight posted a conspiracy theory beyond lunacy that Biden had been executed in 2020 and replaced by a robotic clone (he said he beat Obama and many other mentally intergalactic things before the vote, but it was crowded out by the speculated cognitive decline about the man who actually knows history still, but had physically slowed down a lot and clearly couldn’t successfully run after the debate) after being disgraced by two impeachments in his first term, felony convictions, civilly held liable for sexual abuse and so on, again was the leader of the most powerful nation on earth, but with a plan to be unrestrained by a democratic constitution. Everyone knew when Biden beat Trump in 2020 that Harris might need to succeed him at any time. She was vetted by the country for that in 2020. Old news. But the hill to beat Trump was probably too steep for anyone when a president stops running and is replaced as a candidate 14 weeks before the election for the first time in history. And the economy and inflation and the migrant issue and perceptions of such and sexism and racism, etc. Still, as we noted before, The Wall Street Journal pointed out the day after the election that the stay-at-home Democrats turning out would have completely reversed the results of an election that was still close. The reasons for that are many and have been covered, but at the core, there is something that hasn’t been focussed on nearly enough and we are going to do that here.

Everything has changed.

Everything since God created us or we crawled out of the ocean or a spark lit up the universe or whatever you believe began existence as we have understood it.

It was previously impossible for anyone much less leaders in the spotlight to speak or act as we have seen happen now. That was true in 2016 and before increasingly, but nothing close to like now. We would have dropped everything and risen up in absolute outrage that our children would see and hear anything like this, and the consequences would have been swift and absolute. The dynamics of voting for or buying from anyone who acted in such a way would have stopped it and the about-facers of all times would have about-faced again before you could blink.

The damage in weeks to democracy and human rights and to the basic needs of everyone (those who haven’t felt it yet, will) has been unspeakable.

One example will suffice.

We’ve focussed over the years on our efforts to end hunger as the origin of our work. That work along with many others had changed history in the trajectory of millions of deaths from hunger and disease, millions more physically and cognitively harmed from birth.

In a day, the American policy since the end of World War Two (and before) of helping those around the world who suffered from hunger, disease, poverty, the innocents from the desruction of war, who barely survived through no fault of their own (and children never do), was ended.

As the most powerful and richest country in the history of the world, America was the number one provider, the glue that held civilization together.

Then, programs to feed the hungry, treat disease and other maladies of the impoverished were just stopped.

Since then, at least 300,000 human beings have died from starvation and disease, mostly children, and countless others having diseases like AIDS not treated, as it re-emerges to become perhaps one of the angels of death to revisit and bring consequence to the rest of us. Other diseases not being checked will for certain. Covid will look like a picnic. But before all this happens, the conflicts in various ways caused by America the stabilizer gone in an instant, will engulf the world. The one that has thermonuclear weapons in it as per the last issue of the week.

But that’s not even the point. The trajectory for tens to hundreds of millions to die from hunger and disease is set. Brought to you by the red, white and blue. A global slaughter of humans. History will record this as a unique atrocity. Not based on racial or gender or ethnic or national targeting per se, (although Africa will be most impacted at first, but it is in Asia, Latin America–and in terms of national programs gutted–in the US as well). Based on being purely anti-human.

For the sake of saving a pittance, in the name of the biggest lie ever told about saving money, while the next biggest tax cut of trillions for billionaires and millionaires is being prepared, which will all but destroy America financially.

Something different than ever before is happening. This is not the hell of butchery at many other times in history. There has never been a time in history when the globe was one as now with weapons of mass destruction and mass destraction in hand.

Trump gave the orders, but Musk, the richest person in history, is the architect and the trigger-puller. So we start here by focussing on him. Two lengthy, far beyond riveting articles that are really too incomprehensible to quickly absorb in some ways from the cover story in the Sunday New York Times to maybe the most mind-blowing piece imaginable in the business section bring the architect and the content of new unreality into the light. Then an opinion piece on the cost written about above.

In the end, however, our situation as humans is not the making of any one person or group of people, although as with all people in history, they should be held to account, and ultimately will be.

Our situation is the corrosive virus of anti-empathy infecting us and projected out of us and the entire social, moral, physical rot that has come to define us.

In some ways we are already a dead species, with technology at the core of course (the advances didn’t have to come at this cost, but that’s part of the point), as it subsumes us all while we hover between being willing consumers and a species of addicts on a new level.

In the past several years, we have watched the internet used as a tool to sexually abuse and torture hundreds of millions of children and babies.

There is no world where that ever could have happened or we would ever have allowed it to happen before.

How is there ever any coming back as sentient beings from that?

Everything has changed. Completely.

After the following reflection on a recent journey that bears on all this in our experience of next level epiphany about it, the articles from The New York Times are posted.

. . .

Ten weeks ago, the author of this post was in Ireland, accompanied by the primary camera person and co-producer in documentary film production for Planet Earth Foundation. We arrived in Dublin on the Ides of March. On reflection this was a prophetic day to arrive. The day Julius Caesar was assasinated in the Roman senate, the Roman republic ended, the Roman empire began, lasting more than a millennium in its various iterations, and the world was utterly changed.

Arriving that day in Ireland, foreshadowed epiphany to come shortly about how the world has changed utterly now, and how it will continue to in unthinkable ways.

This trip to Ireland was long hoped for but somehow missed, for one reason or another, in many years of global travel and work. It had taken on a mystical sense of reason for not happening until then that was not yet revealed. It was the land of the author’s ancestors and beyond that a primary part of the author’s historical soul and compulsion to activism to change the world, because of the history and soul of the place itself.

From unspeakable oppression by the English for centuries, by hunger and deprivation for the great majority of people–mainly landless farmers–long before the Great Famine, by the resistance culminating in the Easter Rising and following War of Independence, then the Troubles in Northern Ireland culminating in the Good Friday agreement, the child sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church first being confronted there, the majority of Irish, mostly Catholic, voting for the right to divorce, abortion and marriage equality, and policies providing a signifcant degree of economic security, with political rights and civil liberties respected and defended, Ireland has evolved into a remarkable nation as a liberal democracy.

The first place the author went to in Dublin was Glasnevin, Ireland’s national cemetary, where many of Ireland’s most prominent historical figures are buried. Most prominent among them is Michael Collins, commander of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) who led the Irish in the War of Indepedence from the British with strategic brilliance and extraordinary courage, then negotiated the treaty that the majority of represenatives of the Irish people ratified creating Ireland as a free state in 1922, supported by the great majority of the Irish public.

The six northern counties constituting Northen Ireland were not included (26 counties in the rest of Ireland were included) because they were predominantly Protestant at the time and the British government (and the local power dynamics) would never agree to a free state including these six counties (16.75% of the land and 27% of the population). The fierce fighting decades later between the oppressed minority (at the time) Catholics and majority Protestants known as the “Troubles” was inevitable, but there was no other way to a free Ireland without far more bloodshed for years to come with no clear outcome. (Although ironically as head of the Irish Free State, Michael Collins, who strategicaly accepted partition only as a temporary measure, secretly started an effort by the IRA to liberate the north, which with the greatest twist of tragic irony was hobbled when the anti-Treaty forces started the civil war in large part because the north had been excluded, and doomed the effort with the assasination of Collins).

Nonetheless, the great majority of the Irish people understood the essential fact that no treaty meant no Independent Ireland at all and endless violence throughout all of Ireland instead of a free state for the first time in Irish history as a foundation to build on. A very small minority still appear not to, the remnant of seeing first through the eyes of the politics of the anti-Treaty perspective at the time, then later the Troubles, rather than the irrefutable reality on the ground.

Eamon de Valera, the leader of Sinn Fein, the political arm of the Irish Republican Army, who had asked Michael Collins (who dutifully served under de Valera) to negotiate the Treaty, broke with him over the result. A short civil war followed the creation of Ireland as a free state, with the pro-Treaty forces led by Michael Collins winning decisively.

However, during this conflict, Michael Collins was shot and killed in an ambush by anti-Treaty forces on August 22, 1922.

He is the most beloved hero in Ireland. The man who defeated the British after centuries of longing for it through immeasurable suffering, then attempted to end centuries of violence, and delivered a free Ireland, sought for nearly a millennium. He was 31 years old when he died. Half a million people came to his funeral in Dublin, more than the entire populatuon of the city.

His grave is by far the most visited in all of Ireland to this day, in a cemetary fillled with luminaries, including de Valera, who after independence served a number of terms as head of government and head of state, and said of Collins:

 “It’s my considered opinion that in the fullness of time history will record the greatness of Collins and it will be recorded at my expense.”

Michael Collins’ grave is set apart from the rest of the cemetery, adjacent to the vistor center, within feet along the side of it, making it the central focus in many ways. The fact of its simplicity, a relatively tall stone cross with a small rectangular garden not much longer than the height of the man (he was very tall, but as a gravesite, it seemed small) always filled with fresh flowers, made it all the more moving. It only has his name and the date he was killed at the base of the cross, in Gaelic and English. There is a story behind that (for another time of a more in depth focus, or look it up yourself), and the fact that when the tombstone was erected in 1939, there was no ceremony or public knowledge of the event. But any attempt to make his memory less visible was delusional. Every moment since he passed into history has just made him bigger. The ceremony has happened every day since, as noted, with far more visitors honoring his site wih their presence than any other in Ireland. It is surrounded by memorials with the names of other of his fellow freedom fighters buried there as well.

For a sense of the man and the times, Neil Jordan’s 1996 film, Michael Collins (played by Liam Neeson, best actor, Golden Globes, Evening Standard British Film Award and Venice Film Festival, the latter giving it’s top film award to Jordan, and winning many other awards, including Oscars for cinematography and score, and Bafta for Alan Rickman as best supporting actor), does a good job of taking you there.

Back to Glasnevin.

It was the author’s birthday, standing next to the grave, staring at the tall grey stone cross, which turned into a collage of colors, then came out of body waves of images from throughout history. Then snapped back.

Something enormous had changed in real time experience. It wasn’t clear what it was.

The next day, St. Patrick’s Day in Dublin, we joined half a million people in the streets. The parade was spectacular. It was a primal communal celebration, all day and night (and the night before where everyone at the Old Mill Pub, tables smashed up against each other, sang “Happy Birthday” at the top of their lungs to a stranger). The Catholic face of a saint as a symbol of a people (whose attandance at church had dropped precipitously since the child sexual abuse crisis and for other reasons of an institution still barring women and gays from the altar and as a departure more and more from what had been a state religion of rigidity and intolerance) was imbued with something as ancient as the culture it represented. Too much alchohol aside (mainly at night by the younger crowd, including a fair number from other parts of Europe and beyond come for the holiday), everyone who should have been crushing each other managed not to, but rather seemed to be engaged in a massive dance of primitive connection of body and soul. It was joyous.

Then the journey to the author’s past the following day. To the town and burial ground of ancestors of the author’s paternal grandmother, a unique maternal figure to the oldest grandchild of the next generation. After consulting with more than one geneologist, we found ourselves in Barrow Track Cemetery, known also as The Old Graves, in Carlow, the town in County Carlow about an hour and a half by drive southwest of Dublin, where generations back, before her family emigrated to America just before the Great Famine, her ancestors were buried.

And the author’s.

Local Catholics had been buried here since the early 1600’s. The cemetery lies on the east bank of the River Barrow, Ireland`s second-longest, adjacent to the former Grand Canal Company town path on which horses walked pulling the canal boats, which was the root of the name Barrow Track.

It was a convergence of spirit and nature that went back forever. Thousands were buried here until the late 1800’s, from not long after the middle ages. Huge worn stone Celtic crosses and smaller ones, gravesites of various kinds with the smallest stone markers to crypts you could walk into. Grass of various shades of green and tan up to five feet tall in many places coverd the entire cemetery, with the afternon sun creating glasslike panes of golden light through the blades. You could always see and hear the rushing waters of the river. Venturing over large markers turned sideways by centuries, or through the one central dirt path, marker after marker appeared. To get the oldest within reason that you could see that were partly exposed, since most of the thousands of older ones were buried themselves, you had to dig with your hands to see what was written on them, and dig we did a few times, as we had been told it was fine to do so. Where this had happened you could see it soon was covered by earth again.

Our guide told us that when people came here, if their relatives were buried here, they could feel it. Sounded simplistic of course. Or simply true. The author could feel it, perhaps seemed to as representing a feeling associated with the situation. A stone celtic cross beckoned. The author stared at it and drifted, as at Glasnevin. The green, tan grass and the worn grey stone and the dark blue water and light blue sky melted together. Time did not stand still. It disappeared. On the ground was a family of parents and children emaciated from starvation. A scene from the Great Famine. Then time snapped back. The author’s heart was sinking. Then grateful. Filled with a sense of timeless life and the call of ancestors to the work of a lifetime.

Then a sense of dread of looming change. It couldn’t be defined past that. Not yet.

Next stop, the train from Dublin to Belfast, a city the author had been waiting to visit since the Troubles had dominated the headlines in his youth. He had met with a member of Sinn Fein at the time of the Troubles, touring America for support, the political arm still of the IRA, but a new IRA now, born of and reacting to events in the North, where the civil rights and human rights of Catholics were violated regularly. The Sinn Fein member knew Bobby Sands, IRA member who was world-famous on hunger strike in British detention, from which he died. The situation in Northern Ireland was also complex. Eventually Protestants and Catholics alike sought an end to the violence that was too often imposed on them by the groups doing the fighting. And in 1999 the Good Friday agreement brought that, and a possible path at some point to reunification with the rest of Ireland, by democratic means only.

On the train we spoke of the constant refrains we heard from the Irish people we spoke with everywhere. At first a hesitation to feel out where we stood. Then, “what in the name of God has happened to America?” This became predictable, from everyone. We would talk about inequality, a small percent having the great majority of everything, even the many who seemed secure being always close to not being, personal and community corrosion, technology, the internet, the deteriorization of regulation and the tax rate gone from taxing the rich to benefitting them, all over about four decades accumulating and creating other divisions, that the same thing had happened in parts of Europe that were supposed to be liberal democracies too, that the global issues were at a breaking point, and so on. “Yeah,” they said. “But you guys were supposed to be the brakes. You preached it. You had the most power to do it. Now you are the problem. What is going to happen to the world?”

Good question, we would answer. We hoped for the best. “So you believe in miracles,” one shot back (with characteristic straightforward Irish wit). No, we laughed with gallows humor, we just hope for them. We told people about the thousands we interviewed at Jimmy Carter’s funeral waiting in the freezing weather to say goodbye at the Capital Rotunda, at a time, we added ironically, we didn’t know Trump would be inaugurated on the same spot in weeks. The people, all races, genders, nationalities, ages and class, this was the America that gave us hope. What we didn’t say was that it didn’t give us nearly the hope it once would have.

We looked at each other as we sat on the train, and spoke virtually simultaneous versions of “Have you noticed that breathing is different here?” Yes, we could breathe, had been able to breathe since we left the US, as if we’d been holding our breath for years.

The breathing was free.

To be contiinued.

. . .

The Techno-Futuristic Philosophy Behind Elon Musk’s Mania

From the White House to Mars, the tech billionaire has his sights set on the long term.

Listen to this article · 18:45 min Learn more

By Matthew Purdy, Business section, The New York Times

Published May 29, 2025, Updated May 31, 2025

Leer en español

As Elon Musk prepared to make a less than triumphant exit from Washington, he told the Fox News host Jesse Watters earlier this month that his rampage through the bureaucracy had made “significant progress” in cutting waste and fraud. But there was no hiding that the man whose rockets can gracefully return to earth standing tall on their launchpads had made a bit of a crash landing.

His projected cut of $2 trillion from the federal budget had shrunk on paper, at that point, to $165 billion. Tesla stock took a nosedive along with his personal wealth and popularity. And, as he rewrote Silicon Valley’s mantra into “move fast, break things and get out of town,” no one was urging him to stay.

Prompted by Watters, Musk shifted the interview seamlessly from eradicating waste to another obsession: the looming eradication of life on earth. “The sun is gradually expanding, so we do at some point need to be a multiplanetary civilization because earth will be incinerated,” Musk said.

“I’m hearing this for the first time,” Watters said, bemused.

“We have several hundred million years, so don’t hold your breath,” Musk assured him.

Say what you will about Elon Musk, the man thinks ahead.

Over the past couple of decades, Musk has devoted himself to three grand engineering projects, all with the long-term mission of sustaining humanity far into the future. The goal of his rocket company SpaceX is to establish a city on Mars. Tesla is accelerating the transition to sustainable energy, autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots. Neuralink aims to eventually wire artificial intelligence into human brains so people can keep pace with machines.

“The guy is our Einstein,” Jamie Dimon, the JPMorgan Chase chief executive, said two days after President Trump’s inauguration.

That was before Musk etched a new image for himself — a hyped-up man all in black with dark sunglasses, strutting before a roaring crowd, punching the air with a chain saw, declaring it “the chain saw for bureaucracy.”

Musk embraced Trump after a MAGA conversion, motivated by his fear that regulation was choking innovation and his vow to “destroy the woke mind virus” after one of his children underwent a gender transition. But Musk split with the president on tariffs and the budget bill and the billionaire buddies formally fissured on Wednesday night. Musk took to X to thank the president for allowing him to serve and indicated that he was permanently moving on.

Musk’s tumultuous four-month adventure shifted his gaze from the long term to the ultimate short-term arena — politics. The wild ride through the halls of official power perhaps fed his taste for drama, celebrity and the adolescent heroism of comic-books and sci-fi.

But there is another strand that runs strong in Musk, a techno-futuristic philosophy that might help explain how the man who has fancied himself Batman on a mission to save humanity could also play the dark jokester — the world’s richest man who gleefully proclaimed the demise of aid for the world’s poorest with a callous quip about how he and his DOGE troops had “spent the weekend feeding U.S.A.I.D. into the wood chipper.”

That philosophy emerged from the world Musk now returns to full time, a world of engineers and utilitarian thinkers and tech billionaires, who seem to have designs on everything — past, present and, especially, future.

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Existential Threats, Technological Solutions

In 2022, Musk reposted a link to a 2003 paper by Nick Bostrom, a philosopher who was then at Oxford, with the line, “Likely the most important paper ever written.”

In the paper, titled “Astronomical Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological Development,” Bostrom took a stab at calculating the potential lives lost by delaying the development of technology needed to survive “in the accessible region of the universe” for millions of years. “The potential for over 10 trillion potential human beings is lost for every second of postponement of colonization of our supercluster,” he wrote.

Such pie in the sky calculations urging the colonizing of space might seem like unusual territory for a philosophy professor — even one with advanced degrees in physics and computational neuroscience. But Bostrom is among a group of philosophers and technologists that promotes a strain of thinking clunkily labeled longtermism. It’s a worldview that aligns with — and supports — Musk’s futurist, sometimes fantastical, vision.

Longtermism is deeply entwined with effective altruism, a more widely known movement. Effective altruism, which developed from ideas put forth by the philosopher Peter Singer in the early 1970s, argues that well-off people and societies are morally obligated to combat poverty, even far from home. It encourages a strict, utilitarian process for calculating how philanthropy can do the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Insecticide-treated bed nets that protect against mosquito-borne malaria in remote regions on the other side of the world, for example, are far more “effective” when it comes saving lives than donations to a local food bank.

The longtermists radically changed the equation by asserting that we have a similar moral obligation to the well-being of our brethren yet to come, those thousands or even millions of years in the future. Of course, there are potentially many, many, many more future people than there are current ones, particularly when you throw in the possibility of nonhuman sentient beings, which some longtermists do.

So, simply by the numbers, the case can be made that ensuring the existence of future human civilization by preparing for species-ending risks like a massive asteroid strike or global nuclear annihilation outweighs addressing poverty or starvation for a few hundred million current people.

For longtermists, the most pressing threats are often existential, and technology is almost always the cure.

This is Musk’s sweet spot. The focus of so much of his technology — rocketry, humanoid robotics, even his tunneling company — is intended to converge on making “human consciousness” multiplanetary, an urgent mission he complains is frustrated by rules and regulators. He calls colonizing Mars “life insurance of life collectively.” Like an insurance salesman, he has his pitch down.

“For the first time in the four-and-a-half-billion-year history of earth, it is possible to extend consciousness beyond our home planet,” he said on Joe Rogan’s podcast in February.

“We have to see this as a race against time,” he said. “Can we make Mars self-sufficient before civilization has some sort of future fork in the road where there is either like a nuclear war or something, or we get hit by a meteor or simply civilization might just die with a whimper in adult diapers instead of with a bang?”

Musk took his first step toward Mars in 2001 when he donated $5,000 to the Mars Society, which was started by Robert Zubrin, an aerospace engineer who had written the book “The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must.” The next year, Musk started SpaceX.

Coincidentally or not, this was around the same time Bostrom published a paper titled “Existential Risks: Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards.” It looked at a range of threats: a meteor strike; global disease; runaway artificial intelligence; even the admittedly slim possibility that a future society created a simulated reality that we were now unknowingly living in and which could be turned off. Musk has occasionally invoked this “simulation theory,” which hearkens back to “The Matrix,” one of his favorite movies.

“The balance of evidence is such that it would appear unreasonable not to assign a substantial probability to the hypothesis that an existential disaster will do us in,” Bostrom wrote, adding later in the paper, “With technology, we have some chance, although the greatest risks now turn out to be those generated by technology itself.”

Whether or not Musk read the paper, he has echoed Bostrom and other proponents of longtermism, including the philosopher William MacAskill. MacAskill became something of a celebrity intellectual among technologists and financiers, to whom he preached an “earning-to-give” approach to philanthropy. Sam Bankman-Fried, the now disgraced crypto magnate, was one of his biggest acolytes. Musk touted MacAskill’s 2022 book, “What We Owe the Future,” saying on X — the social media network that he owns — that the explication of longtermist thinking is “a close match to my philosophy.”

Not surprisingly, Musk, who did not respond to a request for comment, does not explicitly identify himself with any movement defined by anyone else — or didn’t before falling in with MAGA. Bostrom takes no credit for Musk’s long view, saying in an email, “My impression is that Musk is not a follower of any one particular school of thought but is rather inclined to do his own thinking and to reach his own conclusions.”

But it is unmistakable how frequently Musk warns of existential threats, usually arrived at via a “fork in the road.”

In 2023, he said artificial intelligence becoming “far smarter than the smartest human” was “one of the existential risks that we face, and it’s potentially the most pressing one.”

In February, referring to “the woke mind virus,” he said in a post on X “the biggest existential danger to humanity is having it programmed into the A.I.” He claimed that some A.I. platforms (although not the one he owns) will answer that misgendering someone is worse than thermonuclear war. “The existential problem with that extrapolation is that a super powerful A.I. could decide that the only 100 percent certain way to stop misgendering is to kill all humans,” he said.

In 2022, he posted that “population collapse due to low birthrates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.”

Earlier this year, wielding his celebrity and money unsuccessfully to swing a Wisconsin Supreme Court election, he told a crowd of supporters: “I feel like this is one of those things that may not seem that it’s going to affect the entire destiny of humanity, but I think it will.”

And last August, in a conversation with Trump on X, he said he was endorsing him for president because “I think we are at the fork in the road of destiny of civilization.”

‘Civilizational Suicidal Empathy’

There appears to be a tautology to Musk’s longtermism: If Musk is battling a threat, it is, by definition, existential.

“Musk is a hero in the Homeric sense, in his mind and in his action,” said Zubrin, of the Mars Society. “He is someone who is striving to do great deeds to earn eternal glory. He has done some. Just as in Homer, this sort of motivation also has a pathological side.”

For Musk, countering existential risks gives him broad license. Fathering 13 children by several women is Musk combating the societal risk of falling birthrates worldwide. “If you don’t make new humans, there’s no humanity,” he said in a live interview last fall with Peter Diamandis, an entrepreneur and a Musk associate. “I do have a lot of kids, and I encourage others to have lots of kids.”

In a long-running legal battle between Musk and Tesla shareholders over his projected $55.8 billion compensation package, an email emerged that he wrote to a company lawyer in 2017, explaining that: “The added comp is just so I can put as much as possible toward minimizing existential risk by putting the money toward Mars if I am successful in leading Tesla to be one of the world’s most valuable companies. This is kinda crazy, but it is true.”

From that perspective, one can see why it makes sense for Musk to feed tens of billions worth of government programs for the global poor into the “wood chipper” while, two months later, $5.9 billion in government contracts was fed into Musk’s space company.

Like many donors to Trump, Musk has gotten a return on his investment in the election. Trump promoted a Mars mission in his inaugural address. A close Musk associate was nominated to be the head of NASA (although on Saturday, The New York Times reported that Trump would pull the nomination). Before the election Musk complained that because of the profusion of regulations, it would “eventually become illegal to do very large projects, and we won’t be able to get to Mars.” Now many of Musk’s governmental annoyances are melting away.

Critics of longtermism say it appeals to wealthy tech moguls precisely because it adds a sheen of morality to their masters-of-the-universe projects. They also say that the moguls’ ultimate goal is a utopian civilization of humans, biological and robotic, all A.I. enhanced.

Mollie Gleiberman, an anthropologist at the University of Antwerp who has studied the rise of effective altruism, highlights a paradox of the futuristic tech moguls: Some of the same people warning of the dangers of superintelligent A.I. are also developing A.I., like Musk himself. It’s another tautology — technological risk necessitates a technological response. “The vivid articulation of a fear conjures the thing to be feared into existence,” she wrote in a 2023 paper.

Take humanoid robots, for example. During an interview with Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, earlier this year, Musk was asked how real the prospect was of killer robots annihilating humanity. “Twenty percent likely,” he shot back.

But given his belief that robots will unleash never-before-seen levels of productivity, Musk reassured Cruz that, barring human annihilation, it is “80 percent likely we will have extreme prosperity for all.”

At a Tesla promotional event last year captured on video, Musk’s robots were on the move, serving drinks, posing for pictures and dancing. “It can do anything you want, so it can be a teacher, babysit your kids, walk your dog, mow your lawn, get the groceries, just be your friend, serve drinks,” Musk told guests. “I think this will be the biggest product ever of any kind.”

Max Tegmark, an M.I.T. physicist and A.I. researcher, said he bonded with Musk a decade ago over a shared belief that “A.I. was going to hit us like a tsunami.” Tegmark said Musk distinguishes himself among business leaders by his devotion to not just thinking long term, but acting on it. “He makes money now and spends it on making the long-term future good,” Tegmark said.

Regardless of whether his ultimate goal is reached, the ambition births breakthrough creations along the way for the here and now — reusable rockets, electric cars, a satellite-based internet service, a human-computer link aiding people with neurological damage.

Tegmark is president of the Future of Life Institute, which is devoted to the safety of technology, bioengineering and nuclear weapons. Musk, an adviser to the group, donated about $10 million to the institute, which used some of the money to help fund a now-shuttered center at Oxford founded by Bostrom called Future of Humanity Institute.

“People can quibble about his methods and politics,” Tegmark said. But he said Musk’s focus on the long-term future and protecting against threats has remained unchanged. Committed longtermists aren’t convinced that Musk has it right, though. “Longtermism isn’t about ignoring present-day suffering in favor of speculative futures,” MacAskill, the philosopher, wrote in an email, adding that the best way to safeguard the future is by “maintaining the international cooperation needed to address global risks — not dismantling the very institutions that make such cooperation possible.”

Singer, the retired Princeton professor whose 1972 essay “Famine, Affluence and Morality” was the initial spur for the effective altruism movement, is similarly skeptical. “If you were altruistic at all, you would have paid more attention to the impact that you are having on hundreds of millions of people by the cutback in U.S.A.I.D., or the freeze in U.S.A.I.D., plus the many other things that are happening as well,” he said.

Musk is now headed back to the future. Days ago, SpaceX launched another test flight of its supersize Starship. The spacecraft spun out of control and wound up as a debris field in the Indian Ocean. But Musk claims he still plans to shoot for Mars next year.

Even Zubrin, the Mars Society president, thinks Musk’s Mars colonization plan is “nuts.” He wants the United States to pursue Mars for the challenge and for science. And he worries that Musk’s short-term dive into politics has hurt the long-term goal, since the Mars mission might now be seen as a Musk project and become prone to political turbulence.

In February, still deep in the turbulence of Washington, Musk regaled Rogan, the podcast host, with tales of waste from the federal budget. Like the U.S. Agency for International Development, the care and feeding of migrants was a particular DOGE target. It’s plausible a tough, careful audit could find money poorly spent, but Musk also came to a more ominous and more predictable conclusion: He had found a new existential threat.

“We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on,” he told Rogan. “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They are exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response. And I think empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot.”

A correction was made on May 31, 2025: An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the leadership of NASA. President Trump had nominated a close associate of Elon Musk, Jared Isaacman, to head the agency, but he had not been confirmed. The White House said on Saturday that Mr. Isaacman’s nomination would be withdrawn.

Excerpts of Comments (there were approaching a thousand comments when the comment section was closed, after being open only on the day of publication online.

The futuristic fantasies promoted by this puer aeternus of arrested development are just distractions from the fact that he and the other billionaire Silicon Valley techbros are destroying peoples lives here and now. Their social media lie factories are destroying our democracy. And their concentration of technological power and the ability to propagandize and psychologically control human behavior is the immediate threat to our future. The use of the word altruism in their mouths is obscene. The irony is that what we think and do today does have a great effect on the future survival of our race – but not through technology. Through morality.

A “philosophy” behind Musk’s hyperactive illegality? Please. The warmed-over authoritarian cliches of a Curtis Yarvin, perhaps?

Yeah, let’s run the numbers on the deaths he’s responsible for with his program cuts. https://www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?view=table&sort=title&order=asc

It may seem comforting to ascribe a “philosophy” to people like Elon Musk or Donald Trump, his nominal boss. Their philosophy really is “I’m smarter than you because I’ve made more money in the game of life. And of course I only play by my rules.” They are paragons of short-sightedness and irresponsibility in terms of directing other human beings to develop collectively beneficial goals.

I had been of the opinion that Jamie Dimon was a fairly intelligent and well-informed individual. After reading what he was reported to have said about Musk in Purdy’s article I may have to re-assess that view. There are several possible parallels one might draw with Musk and his ‘reputation’ and intellect – none of them would involve Einstein.

I think everyone’s a bit tired of Elon Musk at this point. Honestly, I don’t particular care about this fear of existential threats to humanity thousands of years from now. He’s done incredible harm to human beings that are alive today, or at least were alive before he took over Doge and fed USAID into the wood chipper. He may try to backtrack now, and with the help of articles like this, remake his image into some kind of technofuturist prophet or whatever, but he’s done irreversible damage to his reputation and his company’s brands. Personally, I’d be quite happy to never hear from him again.

Hook, line, and sinker. I don’t know how credulous journalists still print this kind of hagiography about someone as destructive as Elon Musk. All of his nonsense about the future and “extending the light of human consciousness” is transparent, bad faith justification of all of his illegal behavior.

I suspect Musk’s actions are mostly based on delusion and grift. I’m not convinced that any of these “philosophies” are the driving force behind his actions. At any rate, the real question is why people are psychologically inclined to accept his babble (or Trump’s, for that matter) as some kind of messianic insight or Truth.

How about some more stories about all the tens of thousands of federal workers who have had their lives disrupted, their families frightened for them, when they were unfairly and stupidly fired for no reason other than Trump and Musks’s outrageous desires to “shake things up” in our federal government. Why? What possible reason could they have? You should remind readers every day that Musk’s tens of BILLIONS in government subsidies have made him rich as his companies used our taxpayer money, even has he sought to throw our federal agencies into disarray just because he likes breaking things (and the President enjoys the chaos too). No savings come from firing necessary workers, American workers at that! But we could save some money not funding Tesla, Starlink, Musk’s exploding rocket company, and his other ventures, or maybe having sone tax laws that don’t benefit billionaires like him. Why did I, a school teacher, pay more taxes than Elon Musk? That’s what readers might like to know.

Musk is ultimately advocating elitism and inequality. All of his longtermism philosophy talk is just a way to obfuscate the world views of another two bit philosopher called Ayan Rand, which he and his other techno feudalists are already actively trying to establish in the here and now.

This article seemed to have missed the real Musk that I have been studying for at least 10 years now. He actually does not care about the long-term survival of earth or humanity. He only cares about feeding his childhood fantasies of going to Mars, feeding his pocketbook via Tesla stock, and feeding his ego. He was only an early investor but not a true founder of Tesla according to many sources. My studies have revealed that he is a selfish, egotistical maniac and a flimflam man. Just look at some of his biggest failures, the Hyperloop and The Boring Company. He consistently over promises and under delivers or does not deliver at all like with the New Tesla Roadster car that he promised was being made right now 8 years ago in 2017. What about all the CO2 he is creating by flying around the world in his jet. That is not reducing global warming, it’s increasing it. What about all the CO2 from his rockets? What about all the CO2 created to run the 35 natural gas generators to power his xAI project in Memphis. That is not long-term thinking, that is short sidedness.

The suicidal empathy line is a the most amazing case of let me close the gate now the horses have fled logic ever. I have too much money, too many kids, too many tax breaks, too many advantages – but the big problem to keep in check is too much empathy. We could add too little irony.

1. Mars will not be colonized by humans. AI powered Robots will be sent there to build habitats a human could potentially survive in, if the robots allow it. 2. “If we have the ability to turn Mars into Earth, we have the ability to turn Earth into Earth.” Neil DeGrasse Tyson. How about all these big brains work on that problem, rather than building artificial sentient beings that may one day replace us. 3. Never mind…that might require some degree of empathy…without with, we doom ourselves.

Musk is convinced that some extra-planetary event is likely to destroy earth and we need to colonize Mars . But what if that event were to destroy Mars instead, and earth escapes unscathed? Just a bad calculation by errant AI?

I envy the young because they will outlive all the lunatics like Musk, Trump, Putin, Netanyahu and so on , who are trying to turn this world into a divided dystopian madhouse, with promises of going to Mars, dating robots and accumulating non tangible cryptos. Musk will most likely end up like Howard Hughes, his closest psychological doppelgänger.

It’s frightening to see the harm done to people in Africa. By cutting off HIV drugs to people who need them, you allow HIV to mutate into something worse (and harm the planet for all.) By allowing Malaria to spread without addressing how we can protect vulnerable people from it and as the planet gets hotter there will be more mosquitoes in new places killing new populations of humans, USAID was fairly cheap to protect us all from global disease. It’s unfortunate that Mr. Musk can’t see through the forest and just flies above it. Empathy is an important trait of human beings and it is what will save our human species from short term destruction. It is what will be carried on into the species we evolve into.

You know, E=mc2 right? Musk didn’t see this: Einstein did. The Uncertainty Principle? Heisenberg. The undecidability formula? Godel. “Principia Mathematica”? Russell and Whitehead. “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus”? Wittgenstein. Musk has a knack for operationalizing other people’s ideas, but he does not come up with the ideas himself. His mind is not built that way. Nothing wrong with that; just don’t mistake one thing for the other. (Or, as we used to say in graduate school, don’t mistake gymnasium for magnesium). And as far as “existential” concerns: anyone who destroys USAID has failed the test for humanity. Add the cruelty of firing thousands or people without batting an eye and you have earned a certificate of inhumanity. Of course, you may argue that he was ordered to do so by Mr. Trump: the Nazi trials at Nuremberg exposed the fallacy of such a defense. In short, Mr. Musk is a brilliant technologist with a warped moral sense. His preaching marks the end of the world.

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On the Campaign Trail, Elon Musk Juggled Drugs and Family Drama

As Mr. Musk entered President Trump’s orbit, his private life grew increasingly tumultuous and his drug use was more intense than previously known.

Listen to this article · 15:07 min Learn more

By Kirsten Grind and Megan Twohey

The New York Times, Sunday cover story, Published May 30, 2025, Updated May 31, 2025

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As Elon Musk became one of Donald J. Trump’s closest allies last year, leading raucous rallies and donating about $275 million to help him win the presidency, he was also using drugs far more intensely than previously known, according to people familiar with his activities.

Mr. Musk’s drug consumption went well beyond occasional use. He told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use. He took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. And he traveled with a daily medication box that held about 20 pills, including ones with the markings of the stimulant Adderall, according to a photo of the box and people who have seen it.

It is unclear whether Mr. Musk, 53, was taking drugs when he became a fixture at the White House this year and was handed the power to slash the federal bureaucracy. But he has exhibited erratic behavior, insulting cabinet members, gesturing like a Nazi and garbling his answers in a staged interview.

At the same time, Mr. Musk’s family life has grown increasingly tumultuous as he has negotiated overlapping romantic relationships and private legal battles involving his growing brood of children, according to documents and interviews.

On Wednesday evening, Mr. Musk announced that he was ending his stint with the government, after lamenting how much time he had spent on politics instead of his businesses.

Mr. Musk and his lawyer did not respond to requests for comment this week about his drug use and personal life. He has previously said he was prescribed ketamine for depression, taking it about every two weeks. And he told his biographer, “I really don’t like doing illegal drugs.”

At a news conference with Mr. Trump on Friday afternoon, Mr. Musk was asked about The New York Times’s coverage. He questioned the newspaper’s credibility and told the reporter to “move on.” He later said on social media that he did not use drugs. That evening, President Trump told reporters outside Air Force One that he was not aware of regular drug use by Mr. Musk. “I’m not troubled by anything with Elon,” he said. “I think he’s fantastic.”

As a large government contractor, Mr. Musk’s aerospace firm, SpaceX, must maintain a drug-free work force and administers random drug tests to its employees. But Mr. Musk has received advance warning of the tests, according to people close to the process. SpaceX did not respond to questions about those warnings.

Mr. Musk, who joined the president’s inner circle after making a vast fortune on cars, satellites and rocket ships, has long been known for grandiose statements and a mercurial personality. Supporters see him as an eccentric genius whose slash-and-burn management style is key to his success.

But last year, as he jumped into the political arena, some people who knew him worried about his frequent drug use, mood swings and fixation on having more children. This account of his behavior is based on private messages obtained by The Times as well as interviews with more than a dozen people who have known or worked with him.

This year, some of his longtime friends have renounced him, pointing to some of his public conduct.

“Elon has pushed the boundaries of his bad behavior more and more,” said Philip Low, a neuroscientist and onetime friend of Mr. Musk’s who criticized him for his Nazi-like gesture at a rally.

And some women are challenging Mr. Musk for control of their children.

One of his former partners, Claire Boucher, the musician known as Grimes, has been fighting with Mr. Musk over their 5-year-old son, known as X. Mr. Musk is extremely attached to the boy, taking him to the Oval Office and high-profile gatherings that are broadcast around the world.

Ms. Boucher has privately complained that the appearances violate a custody settlement in which she and Mr. Musk agreed to try to keep their children out of the public eye, according to people familiar with her concerns and the provision, which has not been previously reported. She has told people that she worries about the boy’s safety, and that frequent travel and sleep deprivation are harming his health.

Another mother, the right-leaning writer Ashley St. Clair, revealed in February that she had a secret relationship with Mr. Musk and had given birth to his 14th known child. Mr. Musk offered her a large settlement to keep his paternity concealed, but she refused. He sought a gag order in New York to force Ms. St. Clair to stop speaking publicly, she said in an interview.

A Ketamine Habit

Mr. Musk has described some of his mental health issues in interviews and on social media, saying in one post that he has felt “great highs, terrible lows and unrelenting stress.” He has denounced traditional therapy and antidepressants.

He plays video games for hours on end. He struggles with binge eating, according to people familiar with his habits, and takes weight-loss medication. And he posts day and night on his social media platform, X.

Mr. Musk has a history of recreational drug use, The Wall Street Journal reported last year. Some board members at Tesla, his electric vehicle company, have worried about his use of drugs, including Ambien, a sleep medication.

In an interview in March 2024, the journalist Don Lemon pressed him on his drug use. Mr. Musk said he took only “a small amount” of ketamine, about once every two weeks, as a prescribed treatment for negative moods.

“If you’ve used too much ketamine, you can’t really get work done, and I have a lot of work,” he said.

He had actually developed a far more serious habit, The Times found.

Mr. Musk had been using ketamine often, sometimes daily, and mixing it with other drugs, according to people familiar with his consumption. The line between medical use and recreation was blurry, troubling some people close to him.

He also took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms at private gatherings across the United States and in at least one other country, according to those who attended the events.

The Food and Drug Administration has formally approved the use of ketamine only as an anesthetic in medical procedures. Doctors with a special license may prescribe it for psychiatric disorders like depression. But the agency has warned about its risks, which came into sharp relief after the death of the actor Matthew Perry. The drug has psychedelic properties and can cause dissociation from reality. Chronic use can lead to addiction and problems with bladder pain and control.

By the spring of last year, Mr. Musk was ramping up criticism of President Joseph R. Biden Jr., particularly his policies on illegal immigration and diversity initiatives.

Mr. Musk was also facing federal investigations into his businesses. Regulators were looking into crashes of Tesla’s self-driving cars and allegations of racism at its factories, among other complaints.

“There are at least half a dozen initiatives of significance to take me down,” he wrote in a text message to someone close to him last May. “The Biden administration views me as the #2 threat after Trump.”

“I can’t be president, but I can help Trump defeat Biden and I will,” he added.

He publicly endorsed Mr. Trump in July.

Around that time, Mr. Musk told people that his ketamine use was causing bladder issues, according to people familiar with the conversations.

On Oct. 5, he appeared with Mr. Trump at a rally for the first time, bouncing up and down around the candidate. That evening, Mr. Musk shared his excitement with a person close to him. “I’m feeling more optimistic after tonight,” he wrote in a text message. “Tomorrow we unleash the anomaly in the matrix.”

“This is not something on the chessboard, so they will be quite surprised,” Mr. Musk added about an hour later. “‘Lasers’ from space.”

After Mr. Trump won, Mr. Musk rented a cottage at Mar-a-Lago, the president-elect’s Florida resort, to assist with the transition. Mr. Musk attended personnel meetings and sat in on phone calls with foreign leaders. And he crafted plans to overhaul the federal government under the new Department of Government Efficiency.

Family Secrets

Mr. Musk has also been juggling the messy consequences of his efforts to produce more babies.

By 2022, Mr. Musk, who has married and divorced three times, had fathered six children in his first marriage (including one who died in infancy), as well as two with Ms. Boucher. She told people she believed they were in a monogamous relationship and building a family together.

But while a surrogate was pregnant with their third child, Ms. Boucher was furious to discover that Mr. Musk had recently fathered twins with Shivon Zilis, an executive at his brain implant company, Neuralink, according to people familiar with the situation.

Mr. Musk was by then sounding an alarm that the world’s declining birthrates would lead to the end of civilization, publicly encouraging people to have children and donating $10 million to a research initiative on population growth.

Privately, he was spending time with Simone and Malcolm Collins, prominent figures in the emerging pronatalist movement, and urging his wealthy friends to have as many children as possible. He believed the world needed more intelligent people, according to people aware of the conversations.

Mr. Collins declined to comment on his relationship with Mr. Musk, but said, “Elon is one of the people taking this cause seriously.”

Even as Mr. Musk fathered more children, he favored his son X. By the fall of 2022, during a period when he and Ms. Boucher were broken up, he began traveling with the boy for days at a time, often without providing advance notice, according to people familiar with his actions.

Ms. Boucher reconciled with Mr. Musk, only to get another unpleasant surprise. In August 2023, she learned that Ms. Zilis was expecting a third child with Mr. Musk via surrogacy and was pregnant with their fourth.

Ms. Boucher and Mr. Musk began a contentious custody battle, during which Mr. Musk kept X for months. They eventually signed the joint custody agreement that specified keeping their children out of the spotlight.

By mid-2023, unknown to either Ms. Boucher or Ms. Zilis, Mr. Musk had started a romantic relationship with Ms. St. Clair, the writer, who lives in New York City.

Ms. St. Clair said in an interview that at first, Mr. Musk told her he wasn’t dating anyone else. But when she was about six months pregnant, he acknowledged that he was romantically involved with Ms. Zilis, who went on to become a more visible fixture in Mr. Musk’s life.

Ms. St. Clair said that Mr. Musk told her he had fathered children around the world, including one with a Japanese pop star. He said he would be willing to give his sperm to anyone who wanted to have a child.

“He made it seem like it was just his altruism and he generally believed these people should just have children,” Ms. St. Clair said.

Ms. St. Clair said that when she was in a delivery room giving birth in September, Mr. Musk told her over disappearing Signal messages that he wanted to keep his paternity and their relationship quiet.

On election night, Ms. St. Clair and Mr. Musk both went to Mar-a-Lago to celebrate Mr. Trump’s victory. But she had to pretend that she hardly knew him, she said.

He offered her $15 million and $100,000 a month until their son turned 21, in exchange for her silence, according to documents reviewed by The Times and first reported by The Journal. But she did not want her son’s paternity to be hidden.

After she went public in February, ahead of a tabloid story, she sued Mr. Musk to acknowledge paternity and, later, to get emergency child support.

Mr. Musk sought a gag order, claiming that any publicity involving the child, or comments by Ms. St. Clair on her experience, would be a security risk for the boy.

‘No Sympathy for This Behavior’

Some of Mr. Musk’s onetime friends have aired concerns about what they considered toxic public behavior.

In a January newsletter explaining why their friendship had ended, Sam Harris, a public intellectual, wrote that Mr. Musk had used his social media platform to defame people and promote lies.

“There is something seriously wrong with his moral compass, if not his perception of reality,” Dr. Harris wrote.

Later that month, at a Trump inauguration event, Mr. Musk thumped his chest and thrust his hand diagonally upward, resembling a fascist salute. “My heart goes out to you,” he told the crowd. “It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured.”

Mr. Musk dismissed the resulting public outcry, saying he had made a “positive gesture.”

Dr. Low, who is chief executive of NeuroVigil, a neurotechnology company, was outraged by the performance. He wrote Mr. Musk a sharp email, shared with The Times, cursing him “for giving the Nazi salute.”

When Mr. Musk didn’t respond to the message, Dr. Low posted his concerns on social media. “I have no sympathy for this behavior,” he wrote on Facebook, referring to the gesture as well as other behaviors. “At some point, after having repeatedly confronted it in private, I believe the ethical thing to do is to speak out, forcefully and unapologetically.”

The next month, Mr. Musk once again found himself under scrutiny, this time for an appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington.

As he walked onto the stage, he was handed a chain saw from one of his political allies, Javier Milei, the president of Argentina. “This is the chain saw for bureaucracy!” Mr. Musk shouted to the cheering crowd.

Some conference organizers told The Times that they did not notice anything out of the ordinary about his behavior behind the scenes. But during an onstage interview, he spoke in disjointed bouts of stuttering and laughing, with sunglasses on. Clips of it went viral as many viewers speculated about possible drug use.

Julie Tate contributed research.

Kirsten Grind is an investigative business reporter for The Times, writing stories about companies, chief executives and billionaires across Silicon Valley and the technology industry.

Megan Twohey is an investigative reporter at The Times. Her work has prompted changes to the law, criminal convictions and cultural shifts.

. . .

Elon Musk’s Legacy Is Disease, Starvation and Death

May 30, 2025

Listen to this article · 5:45 min Learn more

By Michelle Goldberg

Opinion Columnist, The New York Times

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There is an Elon Musk post on X, his social media platform, that should define his legacy. “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” he wrote on Feb. 3. He could have “gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”

Musk’s absurd scheme to save the government a trillion dollars by slashing “waste, fraud and abuse” has been a failure. The Department of Government Efficiency claims it’s saved $175 billion, but experts believe the real number is significantly lower. Meanwhile, according to the Partnership for Public Service, which studies the federal work force, DOGE’s attacks on government personnel — its firings, rehirings, use of paid administrative leave and all the associated lack of productivity — could cost the government upwards of $135 billion this fiscal year, even before the price of defending DOGE’s actions in court. Musk’s rampage through the bureaucracy might not have created any savings at all, and if it did, they were negligible.

Now Musk’s Washington adventure is coming to an end, with the disillusioned billionaire announcing that he’s leaving government behind. “It sure is an uphill battle trying to improve things in D.C., to say the least,” he told The Washington Post.

There is one place, however, where Musk, with the help of his minions, achieved his goals. He did indeed shred the United States Agency for International Development. Though a rump operation is operating inside the State Department, the administration says that it has terminated more than 80 percent of U.S.A.I.D. grants. Brooke Nichols, an associate professor of global health at Boston University, has estimated that these cuts have already resulted in about 300,000 deaths, most of them of children, and will most likely lead to significantly more by the end of the year. That is what Musk’s foray into politics accomplished.

White House officials deny that their decimation of U.S.A.I.D. has had fatal consequences. At a hearing in the House last week, Democrats confronted Secretary of State Marco Rubio with my colleague Nicholas Kristof’s reporting from East Africa, documenting suffering and death caused by the withdrawal of aid. Rubio insisted no such deaths have happened, but people who’ve been in the field say he’s either lying or misinformed.

Atul Gawande, an assistant administrator for global health at U.S.A.I.D. in Joe Biden’s administration, told me that during a trip to Kenya last week, he visited the national referral hospital. There’s been a major increase in the number of patients with advanced H.I.V. symptoms, a result of losing access to antiretroviral medication. At refugee camps on the border of South Sudan, food aid has been cut so severely that people are getting less than 30 percent of the calories they need. “It is not enough to survive on, and that has caused skyrocketing levels of severe malnutrition and deaths associated with it,” said Gawande.

Musk apparently did not anticipate that it would be bad P.R. for the world’s richest man to take food and medicine from the world’s poorest children. The Post reported that he hadn’t foreseen “the intensity of the blowback to his role in politics over the past year.” He’s been doing a series of interviews that Axios called an “image rehab tour.”

If there were justice in the world, Musk would never be able to repair his reputation, at least not without devoting the bulk of his fortune to easing the misery he’s engendered. Musk’s sojourn in government has revealed severe flaws in his character — a blithe, dehumanizing cruelty and a deadly incuriosity. This should shape how he’s seen for the rest of his public life.

Musk sometimes refers to people he holds in contempt as “NPCs,” videogame-speak for characters who aren’t controlled by players and thus have no agency. More than just an insult, the term, I think, reveals something about his worldview. He either doesn’t view most other people as entirely real or doesn’t see the point of treating them as such. As he told Joe Rogan this year, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,” referring to the emotion as a “bug” in our system.

Yet even as he prides himself on dispassionate rigor, Musk has proved remarkably uninterested in figuring out how the government that he sought to transform really works. Samantha Power, head of U.S.A.I.D. under Biden, told me she tried to speak with members of the new administration, hoping to convince them there were elements of U.S.A.I.D.’s work that they could leverage for their own agenda. But aside from one meeting with transition officials, her outreach was ignored.

Instead, Musk seemed to derive his view of the agency from conspiracy theorists on X. There, he called U.S.A.I.D. a “radical-left political psy op” and amplified a post from the right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos smearing it as “the most gigantic global terror organization in history.”

It would have been easy for Musk to take his private plane to a country like Uganda to see for himself the work U.S.A.I.D. has done providing medicine to people with H.I.V. or feeding refugees from South Sudan. Instead, he drew on the counsel of internet trolls and staffed DOGE with lackeys who were similarly ignorant. “If you heard the conversations U.S.A.I.D. staff had with the DOGE people, there is no word in any language that captures the level of obliviousness about what U.S.A.I.D. actually did,” said Power.

This kind of intellectual carelessness should make people re-evaluate their faith in Musk’s brilliance. “Being president doesn’t change who you are; it reveals who you are,” Michelle Obama has said. The same is true, apparently, of being the president’s best friend, even fleetingly. 

Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment. 

. . .