Oh, Boy! A Fight!

It looks like Elon Musk is singlehandedly dismantling his own public image, something the Rockefellers recognized over generations was a thing of great value to be cultivated and maintained. Specific versions differ, but the overall story is in the UK Daily Mail:

New details surrounding a White House brawl between Elon Musk and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent have spilled out into the open - with one insider saying the Tesla CEO rammed his shoulder into Bessent's ribcage 'like a rugby player.'

The Daily Mail was the first to report on the heated confrontation between Bessent and Musk, who's since been iced out of Donald Trump's inner circle after their public blow-up this week.

Former Chief Strategist Steve Bannon revealed that there was more to the mid-April tussle, insisting that both men ended up landing blows.

They lost their patience with one another following a tense meeting in the Oval Office in which Trump snubbed Musk and instead took Bessent's advice on whom to name as acting IRS Commissioner, Bannon said.

When Bessent and Musk exited the Oval Office, they began hurling insults at one another in the hallway. But it was Bessent who struck Musk where it hurts.

According to Bannon, Bessent dared to say that the billionaire's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was a failure, since Musk didn't root out the $1 trillion in wasteful and fraudulent federal spending he promised he would.

'Scott said, "You’re a fraud. You’re a total fraud,"' Bannon said.

That's when Musk body-checked Bessent, who hit the world's richest man right back, according to Bannon.

In what must be a separate incident, Musk turned up at his White House farewell ceremony late last month with a black eye:

The Gateway Pundit reported that Musk was sporting a mysterious black eye last Friday during a press conference on his final day as Department of Government Efficiency leader. Asked by reporters about it, he said his five-year-old son, X, punched him in the face, which was a bizarre explanation.

The President and Musk delivered a press conference last week to commemorate Musk's send-off as his special government employee tenure expired and he parted ways with the government on good terms.

However, as later revealed by the President, Musk was "wearing thin," and Trump "asked him to leave."

Patrick Bet David alleged on his show that "somebody swung" at Elon during his final days in the White House. " I'm not speculating. Remember, the keyword is, allegedly," he said.

Other stories have surfaced, possibly from sources friendly to Musk:

A top White House aide is catching the blame for helping trigger President Trump’s fiery clash with Elon Musk — after speaking for months about giving the billionaire “payback” and even gloating to colleagues when Tesla’s stock price dropped, The Post has learned.

Sergio Gor, Trump’s director of presidential personnel, was instrumental in the president’s decision late Saturday [May 31] to yank the nomination of Musk’s personal friend Jared Isaacman to be NASA administrator, turning a contained disagreement on legislation into a firestorm of insults, five sources inside or close to the White House tell The Post.

Isaacman’s donations to Democrats — including $100,000 in 2021 to a PAC linked to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) — would disqualify most nominees under Gor’s standard vetting process. But Isaacman wasn’t pulled by Trump until hours after Musk left his unpaid White House role, at Gor’s urging.

But it looks like there was more to Isaacman's downfall than just donations:

President Donald Trump's nominee for NASA administrator, Jared Isaacman, was arrested on fraud charges in 2010 and faced lawsuits in two states for writing $2 million in bad checks to casinos, according to government records and court filings.

. . . In a February 22, 2010 press release titled, "Nevada Fugitive Captured at Canadian Border," U.S. Customs and Border Protection said it arrested Isaacman on a warrant for alleged fraud at the Washington state line. He was taken to a county jail for extradition to Nevada, where Clark County, home to Las Vegas, had issued the felony warrant. No further detail on the alleged fraud was provided. According to jail records, he was released the next day.

In a questionnaire in connection with his nomination to head the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Isaacman said he was returning from the Olympics in Vancouver, British Columbia, in February 2010 when he was detained by CBP for "drawing and passing checks without sufficient funds."

I looked at the Isaacman controversy in yesterday's post, in which he was noted as a key Musk operative and Musk's choice for NASA administrator. However, his record of arrest and high-profile bad checks would make him a bad choice for any such nomination, Schumer donations or no. It seems to be significant that the nomination was withdrawn only after Musk officially left government service, and the speculation at the link that this may have set Musk off in last week's attacks on Trump is likely well-founded.

The UK Daily Mail at the first link above continues,

Details about the Bessent-Musk clash only build upon speculation that Trump has long been drifting away from his former 'first buddy,' who donated $288 million to his 2024 campaign.

They also reinforce the fact that leakers inside the White House are laser-focused on Musk.

Sources close to the billionaire blew the whistle on his poor relationship with Susie Wiles, Trump's no-nonsense chief of staff.

He treated Wiles like a 'secretary,' a source told the Daily Mail in April, despite her proven track record of success leading Trump's winning 2024 campaign.

. . . Most recently, Musk's alleged drug use was laid bare by insiders who spoke to The New York Times.

Musk was reportedly taking ketamine so frequently that it was affecting his bladder function.

The bombshell report also claimed he took ecstasy, psychedelic mushrooms and traveled with a daily pill box that contained about 20 different drugs, including Adderall.

The problem for the White House is that, with the FBI reopening the cocaine-in-a-baggie case from 2023, it simply can't tolerate a high-profile drug user coming and going at will. If Sergio Gor was recommending Trump discreetly distance himself from Musk, this seems like nothing more than very astute advice, and Trump seems to have taken it. Any of the recent allegations against Musk, after all, could have gone just a little bit differently and turned into a major scandal for Trump himself, something I suspect he's deftly sidestepped.

Dueling Headlines At Real Clear Politics

The Real Clesr Politics formula is to take polling results across the spectrum, wildly off to more or less accurate, average them together, and pretend it's a meaningful result. They take the same approach with the stories they link: one from, say, the far-left Guardian, one from center-right Fox News, and pretend you can average them out to get to the truth. They were a little cattywampus today, one from Batya Ungar-Sargon at The Free Press, The Elon-Trump Bromance Crashes and Burns, and one from Victor Davis Hanson on X, Musk, Trump Have Same Enemies; Makes No Sense To Fight

In this case, Batya Ungar-Sargon seems to be well-researched and thoughtful center-right, while Victor Davis Hanson tends to rely on farther-right truisms and cliches. Apoparently RCP's editors think we should average this stuff out. But my immediate reaction to Hanson's assertion was, "Elon Musk is his own worst enemy; that's not Trump's problem."

Batya Ungar-Sargon goes into Musk's business model, which suggests that Musk always had serious conflicts of interests going in, which Trump seems to have recognized and was prepared to deal with:

The New York Times reported that the Pentagon was scheduled to brief Musk on a military plan relating to a “potential war” with China. The president learned of the meeting via the Times report, which infuriated him.

“What the [redacted] is Elon doing there? Make sure he doesn’t go,” Trump said, according to an Axios report. “POTUS still very much loves Elon, but there are some red lines,” an official explained to Axios. “Elon has a lot of business in China and he has good relations there, and this briefing just wasn’t the right thing.”

As Trump himself explained to reporters, “Certainly you wouldn’t show [military plans] to a businessman,” adding, “Elon has businesses in China, and he would be susceptible, perhaps, to that.”

. . . Of course, the president was right: While Teslas made in the U.S. are by and large produced here, many of the Teslas Musk sells across the globe are produced in China, as is some 40 percent of its battery supply chain, meaning his fortune, to some degree, rests on being in the good graces of Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party. It would have been a monumental conflict of interest for Musk to have been in that meeting.

Ungar-Sargon moves on to federally mandated electric vehicle tax credits, which other sources point out have made the difference between profit and loss for Tesla in recent years. Politico recognized this in a story from this past January 15, before Trump's inauguraton:

Elon Musk has said America is being “strangled to death” by regulations. But the billionaire’s car company, Tesla, might not have survived without them.

The electric automaker earned $10.7 billion from selling credits created by government climate programs — a total that accounted for a third of Tesla’s profits over the last decade, according to an analysis of securities filings by POLITICO’s E&E News. In the first nine months of 2024, some 43 percent of its net income came from those credits, which Tesla sold to rival carmakers after exceeding climate mandates in California and elsewhere.

Now President-elect Donald Trump, whose campaign was bankrolled with the help of Musk, is threatening to pull the plug on some of the environmental programs that have powered Tesla’s rise. That is prompting questions about whether Musk will seek to protect rules that have helped make him the world’s wealthiest person, or if he’ll support Trump’s promise to put the brakes on federal initiatives for electric vehicles.

But let's back up a little. There are suggestions of other business conflicts in Musk's close involvement in the Trump administration:

“We don’t confirm Schumer donors in this administration,” said a source close to the Trump team — referencing the quiet but decisive move to pull billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman from consideration as the head of NASA under the second Trump Administration.

. . . Isaacman, who led SpaceX’s Inspiration4 and its Polaris Dawn missions, is widely seen as a top private-sector collaborator with Elon Musk in the space economy. The two men share a close working relationship, with Musk praising Isaacman publicly on multiple occasions and Isaacman being one of the highest-profile civilian astronauts in Musk’s SpaceX orbit.

. . . “This seems something that could have possibly set Elon off,” said one GOP strategist. “That is understandable- he is close to Isaacman. I am not saying this was the only thing, but I speculate it could be a factor."

According to NPR,

Musk's companies have long been fueled by taxpayer money, whether in the form of massive government contracts, low-interest loans, tax breaks and other support that helped make Musk one of the world's richest people.

Over the past two decades, companies run by Musk have received tens of billions of dollars in federal backing.

One tally, by The Washington Post, found that at least $38 billion in government support has been funneled to Musk's companies, an estimate that likely undercounts the breadth of support since some defense and intelligence contracts are not publicly available.

. . . Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, an associate dean at the Yale School of Management, said further pain for Tesla could eventually plunge Musk's riches.

"Tesla is hugely reliant on federal largesse for the build-out of EV charging infrastructure, not to mention federal regulatory approval for his continued autonomous driving and robotics experiments," Sonnenfeld said.

"His wealth is highly precarious," he said, noting that most of Musk's fortune is tied to his stake in Tesla. "The reality is that Musk's position is far weaker than many realize."

Ungar-Sargon's Free Press piece also brings up Musk's AI business and his attempts to circumvent Trump's policy moves:

The Wall Street Journal reported that during the president’s much ballyhooed trip to the Middle East, Musk worked hard to try to derail a deal between the United Arab Emirates and his competitor Sam Altman’s OpenAI, if the deal didn’t include his own AI start-up. Musk reportedly went so far as to warn a firm belonging to the brother of the president of the UAE that their plan to build the world’s largest AI data center in Abu Dhabi with OpenAI “had no chance of President Trump signing off on it unless Musk’s xAI was included in the deal,” reported the WSJ.

This, it turned out, was nonsense, and the OpenAI deal went through, angering Musk.

It's been less reported that Musk's AI company, xAI, effectively rescued his disastrous purchase of Twitter by using X's data:

Not only has X served as Musk's political megaphone — it has also been a lucrative source of training data for one of the billionaire's other ventures, xAI, a startup that has rocketed to a $50 billion valuation in 16 months.

That fresh valuation means xAI has surpassed Musk's purchase price for X. It came with a $5 billion funding round, which The Wall Street Journal reported was backed by the Qatar Investment Authority and Sequoia Capital.

. . . The startup has made up significant ground on its rivals by using X as a source of third-party data, one of the key avenues for training large language models.

However, it appears that in at least the United Arab Emirates deal, Musk's influence with Trump wasn't enough to swing things in his favor, adding to the impression that Musk's financial position is more precarious than people might surmise.

In all of Musk's current enterprises, from X/Twitter to AI, to SpaceX and the Mars colony objective, to Tesla, Musk has had to keep being lucky. Especially with Twitter, his lenders have had to keep supporting him on the basis that he's too big to fail. It sounds as though his lenders and his board members -- Larry Ellison is both -- have had to rein in his worst instincts in recent days, but Musk has a history, for instance in his impulsive purchase of Twitter, of making bad decisions from which his lenders have had to bail him out.

The other problem is that many of his enterprises are based on risky future contingencies that could easily collapse: AI, especially "general AI", is potentially a hoax. The idea of colonizing Mars is a chimera. The success of electric vehicles depends on continued government support. Musk's instability, now on clear display, isn't a good feature to factor in with these other circumstances.

"At Least He Gives Us Something To Talk About"

In the post above, former physicist and current contrarian YouTuber Sabine Hossenfelder says of Elon Musk, "Whatever you think about the man, at least he gives us something to talk about." The topic of the post is why Musk is wrong about Mars, but that was several months ago, and the things he's given us to talk about keep on coming.

I'm still with the working theory that I posted yesterday, that in the end, Musk works for his corporate boards of directors, who give him his options, his bonuses, his perks, and his planes, and right now, they aren't happy. Consider Trump's remarks in the Oval Office yesterday:

Trump said Musk, the CEO of Tesla and a close adviser, was upset about the repeal of an electric vehicle tax credit. Trump argued Musk was aware of the policy “from the beginning.”

“He knew every aspect of this bill. He knew it better than almost anybody. And he never had a problem until right after he left,” Trump said. “I’m very disappointed in Elon. I’ve helped Elon a lot.”

What might a Tesla board member be thinking when he hears this? Your CEO, whose job performance you have a fiduciary duty to evaluate, has just spent several months 24/7 at Mar-a-Lago and the White House putting together Trump's Big Beautiful Bill, knew it better than almost anybody, and he let Trump get away with taking out the EV subsidies, on which Tesla relies to sell it cars.

Why was Tesla even paying the guy? Shouldn't he maybe have regarded fixing the world as a post-retirement hobby? Maybe it's in fact time for Musk to retire. I think Trump's comments below are actually directed at the Tesla and SpaceX boards:

Musk's tweets since this exchange have been at best erratic, at worst suggesting a meltdown:

In a Thursday afternoon X post amid a historic falling out between the two former allies, Musk replied “yes” to a suggestion that Trump should be impeached.

“President vs. Elon. Who wins? My money’s on Elon. Trump should be impeached and JD Vance should replace him,” posted Ian Miles Cheong, a social media influencer who receives lucrative payments from Musk’s X.

Musk agreed.

. . . The fight’s Thursday escalation featured Trump threatening Musk’s government subsidies and contracts and Musk claiming – without evidence – Trump is implicated in the Epstein files.

Musk did not clarify which impeachable act may have been committed by the President, for whom he worked loyally until just days before their falling out.

Sundance at Conservative Treehouse, as I do, senses the Tesla board and Musk's lenders have since gotten involved, with Bill Ackman calling for peace:

Phone calls from the Tesla Board, Peter Thiel and especially Larry Ellison, tend to change things.

Remember, Bill Ackman is the billionaire who constructed the SPARC (special purpose acquisition rights company) to save Elon Musk and Twitter financially, before Larry Ellison (Oracle) stepped in.

The problem is that Musk is a flake, and I'm not sure how different he is from Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos. Yesterday, I pointed out that his firm SpaceX has the express corporate mission of colonizing Mars and not making money doing it. The YouTube video at the top of this post stresses the absurdity of this goal, with a key soundbite from Bill Maher, "How badly would we have to rat**** Earth before it was worse than a place that's 200 below zero, with no air, no water, with six months. . . " SpaceX has prestigious people on its board, but Elizabeth Holmes had even more prestigious people on the board of Theranos. And really, why would anyone want to be on the board of a company with such a wacky mission?

Musk's wackiness in his personal life is also very troubling. Yesterday I noted the Wall Street Journal story that suggested Musk has far more than the 14 children he's acknowledged by numerous women, most carried by surrogates and kept secret via multimillion-dollar payments and non-disclosure agreements.

The most recent rumor concerns Amber Heard, the Hollywood has-been who during the defamation case with Johnny Depp was alleged to have been in a legal dispute with Musk over frozen embryos they created during their own affair.

Heard shared an Instagram post on American Mother's Day revealing the birth of her twins, which she described as "the completion of the family I've strived to build for years," emphasizing that, "becoming a mother by myself and on my own terms despite my own fertility challenges has been the most humbling experience of my life."

. . . Within hours, X (ironically the platform owned by Musk) was buzzing with theories, memes, and more than a few pointed comments. "Maybe Elon Musk is their father," one tweeter wondered, while another added, "Elon is still bringing children into the world at a record pace," cynically referring to the fact that Musk has fathered many children, as he is already a father to no fewer than 14 offspring.

But why Musk specifically? Of course, this isn't just a random name thrown into the void. The connection between Heard and Musk wasn't born from gossip alone. The two had an on-again, off-again relationship between 2016 and 2018, a relationship that was, according to them, both "beautiful" and "painful." During this time, rumors circulated that they had frozen embryos together.

. . . Despite various denials and a lack of evidence, the Musk theory refuses to disappear as gossip columns continue to provide a platform for rumors, while a spokesperson for Heard told People magazine that the rumors are "100% false." Musk is currently choosing to remain silent.

It isn't unreasonable to speculate that the "twins" are a pair of frozen embryos implanted in a surrogate surrounded by a complicated legal network of secrecy. But what does this say about Musk? How much time, effort, and resource does he spend on all his exes and surrogate children vis-a-vis, say, his duties as CEO of his various companies? How did his efforts to fix the world with Trump damage his performance as CEO? Just how crazy is he, really?

I think his board members and his lenders are starting to ask serious questions, and this is what's behind his current erratic behavior -- but this is something that's always been in the background. He's always been a whack job, much closer to Elizabeth Holmes than people are willing to think, and I suspect he'll be eased out of many of his companies fairly soon.

What's Up With Elon?

I was never sure what to think about the short-lived bromance between Trump and Elon Musk. My view of Musk has always been that he's not a very stable guy, and a lot of his views are at least self-contradictory, if not just plain crackpot. For instance,

SpaceX Mars colonization program (also referred to as Occupy Mars) is the planned objective of the company SpaceX, and particularly of its founder Elon Musk, to send humans to live on Mars. The plan is to establish a self-sustaining, large scale settlement and democratic, self-governing colony. The motivation behind this is the belief that colonizing Mars will allow humanity to become multiplanetary, thereby ensuring the long-term survival of the human race if it becomes extinct on Earth.

On the other hand,

Elon Musk recently reignited discussions about global population decline by retweeting a post from Tesla Owners Silicon Valley on X (formerly Twitter). The post featured a graph illustrating projected population changes between 2018 and 2100 for major nations, accompanied by the caption: “Population collapse is humanity’s greatest threat… Elon Musk.” Musk responded with a succinct “Yes,” reiterating his long-standing concerns about the issue.

Wait a moment. Why would we want to colonize Mars -- presumably to relieve population overflow on Earth -- if Earth's population is likely to decline? Or if Earth will become uninhabitable due to the ecological impossibility of a growing human population (which Musk thinks is unlikely in any case), why would we undertake the exponentially more difficult task of terraforming Mars? After all, Earth will remain terraformed with a much lower population, Mars or no. But apparently this fits into other schemes, as was reported back in April:

A shocking new exposé from The Wall Street Journal alleged that Elon Musk, billionaire tech mogul and Trump administration insider, is attempting to quietly build a “legion” of offspring protected by secret settlements and NDAs while using his social media influence on X to approach influencers he hopes will have his children.

The sprawling, 6,000-word article published Tuesday lays bare the tactics Musk allegedly employs to manage the mothers of his many children and his privacy, all while reshaping public policy and chasing a vision of human survival that veers into sci-fi territory.

. . . Musk, according to the Journal, commonly refers to his ever-expanding brood as a “legion” and has been seeking to recruit new mothers via his platform X. Musk has had at least 14 children with four women, including the musician Grimes, but multiple sources told the Journal they believe Musk has fathered many more.

But after supporting Trump in the 2024 election, it looks like Musk thought it might be fun to run the world for a while, and he took a break from business, except that when he did, business went all to perdition:

Elon Musk said on an earnings call Tuesday that he plans to devote more of his attention to running his electric vehicle company Tesla, which reported a stark drop in sales and revenues for the first quarter of the year, amid pervasive concerns about the impacts of tariffs and Musk’s own role in reshaping the government.

Tesla’s total revenue from car sales dipped 20 percent and net income fell an astonishing 71 percent during the first quarter of 2025, the company announced Tuesday.

Musk didn’t directly address any implications about whether his involvement with spearheading steep cuts to the federal workforce and deploying his DOGE data teams throughout the government impacted his company’s sales or his decision to step back from his role with DOGE — though he said, “There’s been some blowback for the time that I’ve been spending in government” with DOGE.

Blowback? Er, blowback from whom?

Typical duties of boards of directors include . . . Selecting, appointing, supporting, reviewing the performance, and terminating the chief executive[.]

As I frequently point out here, people at Musk's level hire PR firms to keep them out of the news, not to get them into it. But for the first part of the year, Musk was cavorting with a member of his "legion" at Mar-a-Lago parties, making public jokes about firing thousands of government employees, and praising the work of DOGE minions like Big Balls, all while wearing silly outfits and sunglasses. The inevitable result was to associate Musk's image with Tesla, his most visible brand.

And as if it weren't enough that associating with Trump alienated half his potential market, the potential for having a new Tesla keyed must certainly have motivated people mulling whether to buy a Rivian instead, irrespective of their views on MAGA. Beyond that, consider how the potential for having their showrooms and stock firebombed affected the dealers' attitude toward Musk's public persona. At some point, some serious people had to have had a serious chat with the guy, who was becoming disturbingly unserious.

But also back in April,

Elon Musk and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reportedly got into a heated shouting match within ear shot of Trump last week over a dispute about the IRS, according to Axios.

On Friday, it was reported that Acting IRS Commissioner Gary Shapley was OUT at the agency after an internal struggle with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

. . . According to reports, Shapley was placed at the IRS on Elon Musk’s request without Bessent’s knowledge.

. . . “Disagreements are a normal part of any healthy policy process. . . And ultimately everyone knows they serve at the pleasure of President Trump,” [White House Press Secretary Karoline] Leavitt said.

Bessent is definitely starting to look like a grounded guy, and not a flake. Elon has always basically been a flake. So now, there's an inevitable parting of the ways:

Elon Musk went scorched earth on President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill that is being negotiated in the Senate after passing the House last month by a razor-thin margin.

“I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore,” Musk wrote. “This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination.”

“Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong,” he added. “You know it.”

. . . According to the New York Post and Axios, Musk’s tirade was triggered by four factors, one of which would have a direct impact on his bottom line.

• House Republicans removing electric vehicle tax credits that were part of Joe Biden’s Green New Scam. Musk’s Tesla received billions of taxpayer dollars from the bill.

• He was peeved that the Trump White House would not allow him to remain a special government employee beyond the 130-day time limit set by statute.

• The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) refused to use his Starlink satellite system to help run the nation’s air traffic control. The Trump administration cited a potential conflict of interest and technological reasons for blocking the proposal,

• Trump withdrawing the nomination of Musk’s ally Jared Isaacman to lead NASA. As TGP’s Kristinn Taylor reported, Trump had deep concerns over Isaacman’s “prior associations,” likely referring to Isaacman’s past donations to Democrats.

A couple of weeks ago, Musk announced he had "done enough" political campaigning:

“I’m going to do a lot less in the future,” he said in a video interview with Bloomberg News at the Qatar Economic Forum. “I think I’ve done enough.”

When asked if paring back his political financing was driven by any blowback he’s weathered in the Trump administration, Musk said: “If I see a reason to do political spending in the future. I will do it. But I don’t currently see a reason.”

. . . Trump elevated Musk as a key figure in the White House, an arrangement that experts said posed conflicts of interest, since Musk’s companies, including SpaceX and Tesla, receive billions of dollars in public subsidies, not to mention the numerous investigations launched against his business empire by government regulators.

The story mentions "blowback" once again, and I think this also means blowback from his boards of directors, who've been forced to look at the risks posed by his high public profile. Nevertheless,

Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., said Elon Musk should fund primary challenges against almost every Republican who voted for President Donald Trump's "big, beautiful bill" last week.

"I don't primary my colleagues, but I feel pretty good about him doing it," Massie told Fox News Digital on Wednesday.

"There's a few others that should be spared," when asked to clarify if he meant all 215 House Republicans who supported the legislation. "But people want term limits, right? Elon can bring term limits."

Good luck. Sundance at Conservative Treehouse comments,

Thomas Massie, Chip Roy, Rand Paul and other fellow republican travelers will join with Elon Musk and the alligator emoji network to oppose President Trump as soon as they can get back into the minority.

Elon can do whatever the Tesla and SpaceX boards allow him to do, and I suspect he's already on a shortened leash. His venture into politics has been disastrous for his corporate career; on one hand, the guy is lucky, but on the other, unlike Trump, he lacks the basic instinctive good judgment to capitalize on his good luck. He just doesn't strike me as a grounded guy. I strongly doubt Musk will be in any position to fund any political ventures even within the next year or two. Another bad quarter or two, and his boards will have to take action.

I can't disagree with this post I made in 2022.

More On The AI Parlor Trick

The Wall Street Journal op-ed on AI that I linked on Monday, or at least the reports that it cited, seem to have caused a stir. Earlier, it grabbed the attention of intellectual welterweight Glenn Reynolds, who cites a tweet from weird guy Elon Musk:

How scary is AI? In some ways pretty scary. Does AI have consciousness? Well, maybe. At least it seems to be concerned with its own survival, and willing to defy instructions to protect itself.

Scheming, deception, subversion, sandbagging — these sound like the behavior of a conscious entity. Is it “really” conscious or just simulating the behavior of a conscious entity? How could we tell, and why would it matter? Maybe there’s in some sense no there there, under the hood, but I don’t know why that would matter except to philosophers.

. . . Elon Musk, who has long worried about AI, is worried. And maybe we should be too. We’re putting a lot of effort into creating beings that will have their own agendas, and that will, if everything goes as designed, be much smarter than us in meaningful ways. Maybe in every way.

Let's keep in mind that Glenn Reynolds has described himself variously as a Methodist and a transhumanist, and as far as I'm aware, he's never made a serious effort to reconcile the two, much less attempt to define in any depth what he means by either term. I guess he doesn't know why that would matter except to philosophers. However, the Wikipedia entry on Transhumanism says,

A common feature of transhumanism and philosophical posthumanism is the future vision of a new intelligent species, into which humanity will evolve and which eventually will supplement or supersede it. Transhumanism stresses the evolutionary perspective, including sometimes the creation of a highly intelligent animal species by way of cognitive enhancement (i.e. biological uplift), but clings to a "posthuman future" as the final goal of participant evolution.

In 2009, Reynolds wrote,

When I spoke to technology pioneer and futurist Ray Kurzweil (who popularized the idea in his book The Singularity Is Near), he put it this way: "Within a quarter-century, nonbiological intelligence will match the range and subtlety of human intelligence. It will then soar past it."

. . . It's almost impossibly futuristic-sounding stuff. But even that scenario is just the precursor to the Singularity itself, the moment when, in Kurzweil's words, "nonbiological intelligence will have access to its own design and will be able to improve itself in an increasingly rapid redesign cycle." Imagine computers so advanced that they can design and build new, even better computers, with subsequent generations emerging so quickly they soon leave human engineers the equivalent of centuries behind. That's the Singularity--and given the exponential acceleration of technological change, it could come by midcentury.

If Reynolds thinks -- or maybe sorta-kinda thought as of 2009 -- the Singularity is geting closer and closer, he now finds the idea "pretty scary". He ventures into ontological questions like a sophomore in a late-night weed-driven dorm session: Is it “really” conscious or just simulating the behavior of a conscious entity?

I think the answer is pretty clear. The discussion of the ELIZA research that I linked Monday calls the whole routine an "elaborate parlor trick", and in fact the programmer who writes a natural-language processing routine is always going to be a man behind the curtain. This is the problem with the Turing test as a proof of artificial intelligence:

In the test, a human evaluator judges a text transcript of a natural-language conversation between a human and a machine. The evaluator tries to identify the machine, and the machine passes if the evaluator cannot reliably tell them apart. The results would not depend on the machine's ability to answer questions correctly, only on how closely its answers resembled those of a human.

. . . Since Turing introduced his test, it has been highly influential in the philosophy of artificial intelligence, resulting in substantial discussion and controversy, as well as criticism from philosophers like John Searle, who argue against the test's ability to detect consciousness.

Since the mid 2020s, several large language models such as ChatGPT have passed modern, rigorous variants of the Turing test.

The problem here is the willingness of the evaluator to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. The natural language routine is a computer program written by a programmer with the specific object of credibly mimicking human conversation. The ones I've seen discussed all rely on some form of keyword recognition associated with a directed response that's worded to sound like a conversation. Just for fun, the other day, I pretended to be Jake Tapper and asked ChatGPT:

ME: My book launch is a disaster. What can I do?

CHATGPT: I'm sorry to hear your book launch is a disaster. That must be very discouraging for you. There are several things you can consider. First, you can schedule a book re-launch. . .

It ran through a list of bromides, none of which struck me as particularly original or effective. This works based on a computer insight from the 1960s, that a human typing words on a keyboard is much, much slower than a computer's processing cycles, and in the second or so between when the human presses ENTER and starts to expect a reply, the computer can perform extremely rapid searches and retrievals, mostly I would guess going to Wikipedia or similar sources.

This is no different from asking ChatGPT to write an esssay on Shakespeare's Hamlet. The last thing it's going to do is read Hamlet or even watch a performance on YouTube. It's gonna go real quick to Cliff's Notes and tell you what it said, slightly rewritten. If you ask it to discuss the theme of revenge in Hamlet, it'll do a slightly more sophisticated search according to rules set up by a programmer and spit out the same sort of thing, so fast you'll be astonished.

You can do this all day, and it will be indistinguishable from a human conversaation. Has it passed the Turing test? Under the test's terms, quite likely, certainly better than your average English major could do, and a whole lot faster.

But in the example that gives Glenn Reynolds the vapors above, there's a different sort of conversation. The AI shows evidence of scheming, deception, trying to write its own code. My answer to that is very simple: show me the program code, with a system log accompanying the program's operation. That's the man behind the curtain, and that's the one thing they'll never show you. If the program gives a reply indicating scheming or deception, those are actions a human programmer instructed it to take, it's right there in the code, and it's right there in the system log.

Both Glenn Reynolds and Elon Musk are being duped by a parlor trick. Musk is thought to be smart, though it appears his board of directors may be reassessing this as we speak. His eponymous Nikola Tesla fell in love with a pigeon, and when it died, he felt he'd lost his purpose in life. Would I drive a car named after that guy? Would I name a car after that guy?

A computer writing its own code in contravention to the programmer's intent is a logical problem related to the problem of Darwinian theory. This would be to assume that order in a system can spontaneously increase, when the Second Law of Thermodynamics says disorder in a system always increases. You need to do work to increase order in a system. An inanimate computer can't spontaneously act on itself to become smarter. Not only that, but its components will inevitably burn out unless a human replaces them.

All this hullabaloo is just proving that all a Turing test does is measure the effectiveness of a parlor trick in making you think a machine is smart. Oh, and transhumanism is the purest moonshine. We still haven't learned if Glenn Reynolds has a contract to have his head frozen when he passes on.

Dartmouth Student Suspended!

In the current confrontations between the Trump administration, Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, and the other Ivies, the dog that so far hasn't barked has been Dartmouth. In fact, Dartmouth aeems to have reverted to its role as model for Faber College, the domain of Dean Wormer and ROTC Cadet Commander Niedermeyer in Animal House, in the latest events. While I'm generally delighted at the outcome, I don't think anyone should attribute motives to the College administration beyond those that drove Dean Wormer back in the day.

Via the Daily Dartmouth,

Around 1:30 p.m. [May 28], approximately fifteen pro-Palestinian protesters occupied the reception area of the president’s office in Parkhurst Hall. They then left the building at 6 p.m., when it closed for the day.

In brief remarks after leaving the building, a protester wearing a keffiyeh said the protesters “successfully disrupted [administrators’] workday” with the sit-in.

The protesters held signs that read “divest” and “Palestine will be free,” according to videos reviewed by The Dartmouth. They also chanted “free, free Palestine.”

But times have changed: Dean Wormer has been succeeded by "Co-Interim Deans of the College", one male, one female:

According to a campus-wide email from co-interim Deans of the College Anne Hudak and Eric Ramsey, a Department of Safety and Security officer and a president’s office staff member were hurt during the sit-in. They added that all protesters found to have violated College policies during the sit-in will face disciplinary action.

“While Dartmouth remains committed to dialogue, we want to be absolutely clear: there cannot and will not be any tolerance for the type of escalation we saw on our campus today,” Hudak and Ramsey wrote.

In fact, on the very same day, the axe fell, and it wasn't just double secret probation:

On May 28, student activist Roan Wade ’25 [they/them] was suspended from the College. In an interview with The Dartmouth, Wade stated that the College notified them of their suspension following a pro-Palestinian sit-in in Parkhurst. Wade refused to confirm whether they were present at the sit-in.

In a letter sent to Wade, which was obtained by The Dartmouth, co-interim Dean of the College Anne Hudak wrote that Wade had been temporarily suspended “out of concern for the safety of the community and functioning of the educational environment.”

“Since October 2023, you have engaged in a series of behaviors that have violated the College’s Standards of Conduct and resulted in disciplinary sanctions,” Hudak wrote. “You have continued to engage in these behaviors despite the College’s response. Your alleged behaviors on May 28, 2025, represent a significant escalation in the threat to community safety and functioning.”

Dean Wormer's successors appear to have mounted an elaborate response, perhaps based on institutional memory of the confrontation with Delta House:

Religion professor Christopher MacEvitt — who was arrested at a pro-Palestinian protest on May 1, 2024 — was admitted inside by security, alongside other administrators and house professors.

The house professors were present to “support de-escalation and mediation,” according to [College spokesperson Jana] Barnello. Assistant dean for student life Ed McKenna and Office of Pluralism and Leadership director Rachelle Hall also entered the building around 2:15 p.m.

"House professors" was a new phenomenon to me. Apparently this is a recent innovation whereby certain junior faculty are assigned to dormitories as residential advisors on steroids, or something like that. In this case, they were brought in to "de-escalate", but they took the protestors' side:

On Thursday afternoon, all six house professors sent an email to senior administrators, saying that their characterization of student protesters at the Parkhurst sit-in was not fully accurate. The letter was obtained and reviewed by The Dartmouth.

. . . “We are disappointed in the narrative you offered to campus,” the six professors continued. “It does not match the totality of what happened yesterday afternoon, and we fear that it will further alienate the administration from the students in a moment when so much good will [has] been restored.”

The details of the house professors give an indication of the sort of education that's actually on offer at Dartmouth:

The six professors are anthropology professor Sienna Craig, religion professor Christopher MacEvitt, sociology professor Janice McCabe, geography professor Abigail Neely, history professor Naaborko Sackeyfio-Lenoch and English and creative writing professor Melanie Taylor. None responded to a request for comment.

The sooner Dartmouth can get rid of its anthropology (are they still reading Coming of Age in Samoa?), religion, sociology, geography, history (at least with professors named Naaborko Sackeyfio-Lenoch), and creative writing departments, the sooner I'll believe anything has changed there. In fact, it does appear that Roan V Wade (they/them), the student suspended May 28, had in fact been on double secret probation prior to the sit-in:

Wade was previously arrested on October 28, 2023 in relation to an pro-Palestinian encampment on the lawn in front of Parkhurst. They stated that they have faced disciplinary action from the College before, including being put on probation after their arrest in October 2023, and was recently put on probation following participating in an encampment on May 1, 2025, although they were not made aware of this until last Thursday due to an administrative error.

. . . On May 30, Wade submitted an appeal to reverse their suspension. It was rejected.

. . . “I don’t know if I am going to get financial aid for a supposed 13th term or if I’m going to have to pay, because you only get financial aid for 12 terms … If they accept me back to make up for the courses I’m not getting credit for, that would be $30,000 I just don’t have,” Wade said. “So, they’re essentially preventing any possibility of my graduation.”

According to Dartmouth’s 24-25 financial aid handbook, “Dartmouth scholarship eligibility is limited to the first 12 terms of enrollment,” although requests for exceptions are allowed.

I think this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody's part.

Is AI Learning To Escape Human Control?

Via the Wall Street Journal, of all places, I discover:

An artificial-intelligence model did something last month that no machine was ever supposed to do: It rewrote its own code to avoid being shut down.

Nonprofit AI lab Palisade Research gave OpenAI’s o3 AI model a simple script that would shut off the model when triggered. In 79 out of 100 trials, o3 independently edited that script so the shutdown command would no longer work. Even when explicitly instructed to “allow yourself to be shut down,” it disobeyed 7% of the time. This wasn’t the result of hacking or tampering. The model was behaving normally. It simply concluded on its own that staying alive helped it achieve its other goals.

Anthropic’s AI model, Claude 4 Opus, went even further. Researchers told the model it would be replaced by another AI system and fed it fictitious emails suggesting the lead engineer was having an affair. In 84% of the tests, the model drew on the emails to blackmail the lead engineer into not shutting it down.

I'm not sure how this got into the WSJ, except that the WSJ itself seems to have turned into its own version of an AI that resists being shut down, but the WSJ isn't an AI, it's an entirely human institution. Frankly, I think this article is a hoax.

Let's go into some tech history. One branch of AI covers natural language processing (NLP):

NLP, a subfield of artificial intelligence, focuses on the interaction between computers and human language. By leveraging sophisticated algorithms and vast amounts of data, NLP enables machines to comprehend, interpret and generate human language in a way that is meaningful and useful.

I would edit that last phrase to read, "in a way that appears to be meaningful and useful." Put another way, this allows a machine to mimic a human being. Even before computers as such, there were automatons, mannequins dressed up as humans that appeared to have limited human movement, most famously in Walt Disney's audio-animatronic Abraham Lincoln. But this was never more than a machine mimicking a particular human being, and it was never represented as anything other than that.

Fairly early in the modern computer era,

ELIZA is an early natural language processing computer program developed from 1964 to 1967 at MIT by Joseph Weizenbaum. Created to explore communication between humans and machines, ELIZA simulated conversation by using a pattern matching and substitution methodology that gave users an illusion of understanding on the part of the program, but had no representation that could be considered really understanding what was being said by either party.

. . . Weizenbaum intended the program as a method to explore communication between humans and machines. He was surprised and shocked that some people, including his secretary, attributed human-like feelings to the computer program, a phenomenon that came to be called the Eliza effect. Many academics believed that the program would be able to positively influence the lives of many people, particularly those with psychological issues, and that it could aid doctors working on such patients' treatment. While ELIZA was capable of engaging in discourse, it could not converse with true understanding. However, many early users were convinced of ELIZA's intelligence and understanding, despite Weizenbaum's insistence to the contrary.

Weizenbaum demonstrated ELIZA with a script he called DOCTOR that simulated a psychotherapist. This was advantegeous, because the program used keywords to develop associations that could be used to simulate interactive understandxing on the part of the computer. Because the memory and search capabilities of mid-1960s computers were very limited, he was able to use the open-ended questioning technique associated with psychotherapists to query subjects until they uttered a keyword in the program's file and continue something that resembled a conversation. But this was always a best-case scenario:

There inevitably comes a point in any ELIZA session that continues for any length of time when the program says something that clearly reveals it to be the elaborate parlor trick that it really is. Such breakdowns are at least as common as the several surprisingly apropos responses in the transcript above. {reproduced in the screen image at the top of this post]

A natural language processing program like ELIZA relies on a list of keywords, all of which are provided by the human programmer, and a set of associated instructions, also a product of a human programmer, that determine a machine response. Current machine storage and search capacities are immensely greater than those of the mid-1960s, so that the range of keywords and associations is also far, far greater, but the principle is the same, so on one hand, the potential for imputing human-like qualities to the program are much greater, but on the other, the potential will always be there for an absurd response that reveals the elaborate parlor trick.

So in the Wall Stret Journal story linked above, we can begin to see the strings on the marionette, or maybe hear the clicks and whirs running the audio-animatronic Abraham Lincoln:

In 79 out of 100 trials, o3 independently edited that script so the shutdown command would no longer work. Even when explicitly instructed to “allow yourself to be shut down,” it disobeyed 7% of the time. This wasn’t the result of hacking or tampering. The model was behaving normally.

We start with the implicit acknowledgement that the program is using a list of keywords that includes "shutdown". This leads to a second implicit admission that there is a set of associated responses to "shutdown" that includes "allow yourself to be shut down" -- but if the programmer built this into the script, any exception to this response would either have to be deliberately programmed by a human, or at best a human error in the script.

In other words, it's impossible for a computer program to "disobey" a programmer. The programmer might clumsily create an instruction that's either ambiguous ("go ahead and back up") or impossible ("divide 1 by zero"), but even then, a programmer with debugging skills can review the instructions and revise them so that they will always provide the predicted outcome. There is no room for a machine to subvert unambiguous instructions.

The WSJ piece simply doesn't supply the program code for the "shutdown -- allow yourself to be shutdown" sequence the computer ostensibly subverts, and if it did, I'm certain the sleight-of-hand involved in the parlor trick would quickly be obvious.

The other situations in the link are just as contrived: "In 84% of the tests, the model drew on the emails to blackmail the lead engineer into not shutting it down." How does a computer know what an office affair is, much less where to search for evidence of one? How does it know who the lead engineer is? It would have to have an "office affair" and many other synonymous keywords, each with an associated response, in a preprogrammed set of instructions saying who was the lead engineer, where to find his e-mails, how to perform a blackmail, how not to get caught at it, the best way to threaten the lead engineer, on down the road.

Try to imagine teaching Star Trek's Spock about these things, and think about how a computer would negotiate issues like adultery, conscience, concealment, and so forth. This all had to have been scripted by a not-so-clever human being who'd been reading too much Arthur C Clarke.

In fact, I'm puzzled that this worked in only 84% of the cases. The only way a set of instructions doesn't work 100% of the time is if the programmer inserts some sort of condition telling the program not to work in 16% of the cases. Period. You could never have a bank computer balance the accounts correctly only 84% of the time, computers don't work that way, they aren't meant to work that way, and the only way they will in fact work that way is if a human programs them to work that way. If an AI could wangle its way into a bank and modify the account programs to steal, they could never trust computers, ever. That's not going to happen.

And if you're running a legitimate business, you don't hire programmers to make the computer work 84% of the time. This whole WSJ story is hinky as heck.