Why Sam Harris and Elon Musk are no longer friends.

Did a $1 million bet lead to the beginning of the end for their relationship?

When Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 (now ‘X’) I had doubts as to how exactly he would make good on his promise to deliver absolute freedom of expression and still maintain a profitable business. You see, X’s main source of income appears to come from advertising revenue, which ‘X’ has continued to hemorrhage since Musk took over.

I've no doubt that a number of advertisers flounced for ideological reasons. But I'm sure a number of them waited to see what sort of platform X would become and decided they didn’t particularly want to place ads for their products alongside variations of “cope, you faggot kike niggertard”.

None of this has been helped by the fact ‘X’s CEO is one of the worst offenders for obnoxious trolling behaviour and spreading dangerous falsehoods on the platform.

Musk’s blatant X addiction and desire to be the main attraction has surely been a PR disaster for the platform. I can't help but feel a smarter move would have been for him to silently pull the strings from behind the scenes—rather than repeatedly remind people that a man-child is running the show.

Elon Musk also happens to be the richest man in the world and has been appointed by the President-elect to lead the Department of Government Efficiency. It has been said that “if you want to test a man's character, give him power”, which brings me to the very public falling out Elon Musk has had with Sam Harris.

It was known that Harris and Musk were friends, but seemingly without rhyme or reason Musk started attacking Harris in rather vitriolic terms via X. The latest volley was to accuse Harris of being a “mentally ill clown”.

Harris left ‘X’ a number of years ago, but he has used his podcast to speak critically of Musk’s behaviour.

So, what happened to get us here?

Well, thanks to a post over on Sam Harris’s Substack titled ‘The Trouble with Elon’, we now have a better idea as he breaks the silence on the death of their friendship.

Apparently, in March of 2020 at the start of the COVID pandemic Musk decided to tweet that “The coronavirus panic is dumb”. Harris, concerned by the implications of this sentiment sent Musk the following text message:

Hey, brother— I really think you need to walk back your coronavirus tweet. I know there’s a way to parse it that makes sense (“panic” is always dumb), but I fear that’s not the way most people are reading it. You have an enormous platform, and much of the world looks to you as an authority on all things technical. Coronavirus is a very big deal, and if we don’t get our act together, we’re going to look just like Italy very soon. If you want to turn some engineers loose on the problem, now would be a good time for a breakthrough in the production of ventilators...

Musk dismissed these concerns and pledged to donate $1 million to charity if more than 35,000 cases of COVID would be documented in the USA. That's cases, not deaths.

Harris describes on his Substack how he text Musk a few weeks later to deliver the bad news:

A few weeks later, when the CDC website finally reported 35,000 deaths from Covid in the U.S. and 600,000 cases, I sent Elon the following text:

Is (35,000 deaths + 600,000 cases) > 35,000 cases?

This text appears to have ended our friendship. Elon never responded, and it was not long before he began maligning me on Twitter for a variety of imaginary offenses.

Sam goes on to outline a number of other issues with Musk’s behaviour in his Substack—but I think he gets to the heart of the problem many of us have noticed with Musk’s way of operating here:

The problem with Elon, is that he makes no effort to get his facts straight when discussing any of these topics, and he regularly promotes lies and conspiracy theories manufactured by known bad actors, at scale.

There are endless examples of Musk amplifying the claims and profile of notorious conspiratorial cranks and racists. Just yesterday Musk promoted a loathsome individual named ‘Peter Sweden’ to his 212 million followers and legitimised the idea that Sweden is a credible source of news media:

However, a quick search of Sweden’s output will reveal a plethora of Holocaust denial, anti-Semitism and claims that ‘The USA & Israel did 9/11’. So, I'll probably just stick with the BBC for now if it's all the same.

Elon Musk also has a habit of spreading unverified and often false information on very serious topics—to millions of people.

He’ll often ask "is this accurate?" when doing so as though it demonstrates a commitment to truth and due diligence. But it's anything but that.

Someone genuinely dedicated to truth and reason would verify incredibly serious claims before spreading them to millions of people. It's like thinking it's fine to lob a bowling ball into the sky above the town square just so long as you shout “catch!”.

Furthermore, this way of operating does not take 'the primacy effect' into account, whereby people are likely to remember the first piece of information they encounter rather than any later information that debunks it.

There’s a saying that predates social media by hundreds of years, but it may as well have been coined in tribute to it: "a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes”.

It's been especially nauseating to witness a cult of personality form around Musk with a surplus of unhinged characters hanging on his every word. These are the types that decry the ‘satanic’ nature of ‘elites’ at every turn whilst refusing to tolerate a bad word said about the richest man on the planet and the influence he has on our politics, news cycle and culture.

Not to mention the terminal case of cringe one contracts when witnessing the endless stream of content creators and online personalities competing for Musk’s attention.

The landscape has obviously changed. The currency of truth and personal responsibility doesn't buy you much in the online battle of ideas anymore. No, it's all about those sick memes, owning the libs and winning those clicks at any cost.

I long for the day when serious adults manage to find their way back into the room. It's all fun and games until it isn't.