The one surefire way to defeat Elon Musk
If there are any chess nerds out there then you probably know the name Hikaru Nakamura. I met him once. Ten year old Nakamura made a surprise appearance at my chess club in New Jersey back in the 90s, sneered at a game I was playing (and rightly so!) and walked over to another board, his mother in tow. These days, as an adult, he enjoys a career as a Grand Master and has a popular YouTube channel.
About a year ago, Nakamura featured a video of a comment from Elon Musk. Hikaru got another chance to sneer. Musk made the absurd comment that chess is a “simple game.” Musk used to play, he claimed. He also claimed that he never lost a game.
Nakamura, who holds the tenth highest Elo chess rating in history, and has lost many games, knows that no serious chess player can make the claim they’ve never known defeat. Either they have played very little or they never played anyone who is any good. Or they’re lying. And no one who knows anything at all about chess thinks it’s a “simple game.” The game never ceases to surprise me with its cosmic complexity — and I have been playing for more than fifty years.
Then there’s the time Elon Musk released his new “Cybertruck.” Maybe you’ve seen the video. Musk engaged the actual designer of the truck — Musk never designs anything of importance — to throw a steel ball at one of the windows to demonstrate the vehicle’s imperviousness. The window shatters. He has him throw the ball at another window. It also shatters.
The very idea that a self-anointed “engineer,” one who probably thinks of himself as the engineering equivalent of a Hikaru Nakamura, would make such an important demonstration without beta testing it first, is laughable. Testing is what engineers do. It’s how they take care not to make complete idiots of themselves. That Musk didn’t understand this at the time was inexcusable. He still seems not to understand it.
When Musk made the silly proclamation that 150 year old people were still receiving Social Security payments, he apparently didn’t know that the legacy software known as COBOL used 150 year old default date fields for unknown dates. That date is currently 1875, because the original programmers knew that nobody would be dumb enough to think anyone 150 years old would still be collecting social security. Remember the Y2K millennium bug? That was a COBOL legacy software feature too, because it didn’t recognise any dates past 1999. Musk should have known all that, and he should have known it a LONG time ago.
The fact that Musk is ignorant of the quirkier features of COBOL, doesn’t bother to test his Cybertrucks against high velocity missiles, doesn’t know that chess is complicated and that every player worthy of the name occasionally loses, yet still thinks he’s a “genius,” is what is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities.
I don’t want someone as incompetent, as greedy, as stupid, as hubristic a Dunning-Kruger specimen as Elon Musk fiddling around with my Social Security. Period. Do you? Well that’s what he’s doing. An unelected foreign billionaire with absolutely no credentials and no business doing so has exclusive access to the entire Social Security administration. And there’s no one there to stop him.
I suspect, I hope, that some of the guardrails inside the Social Security system and the courts and Congress will prevent Musk from wrecking the system. But if he could he would do to Social Security what he’s trying to do to USAID and the CFPB. Musk would use a wrecking ball on Social Security if he could get away with it.
Elon Musk is NOT a genius any more than Trump is a great businessman. We need to learn that a person’s IQ is not measured by the size of their wallets, and we need to learn it RIGHT NOW. There is no secret to making a lot of money if you are a determined sociopath. These people aren’t geniuses. They’re vermin.
What’s more, money is an addiction, just like alcohol and food are for some people. And it’s never enough. That’s why people with obscene amounts of money, people who could use that money to ease the world’s poverty burdens, almost never do. How many heroin addicts like to give away their stash? None that I’ve heard of. Just ask Bobby Kennedy.
I think we should take a page from Hikaru Nakamura. We should sneer at Musk. We should stop calling him a genius. He didn’t found Tesla, he stole it. And he didn’t design Tesla’s cars and trucks. Tesla engineers did. Musk didn’t design the rockets at SpaceX either, the actual engineer Tom Muller did. Like Trump, Musk isn’t a genius businessman, he’s a parasite.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.