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Richard Hanania continues his criticism of Musk, as a guest author for UnHerd. (Sidenote: On his own website, he wrote "I never thought I would write an article for Sohrab Ahmari, as we disagree on a lot and I’ve regrettably insulted him a few times, but he reached out after my recent piece on Musk and asked if I would like to write something for UnHerd.") It's a combination of criticism of Musk as an intellectual, criticism of DOGE, and contrasting the intellectual traits adaptive for business and non-business success. The closing paragraphs are interesting:
Who cares what Hanania thinks about human excellence? He has (generously) 1/1000th of Elon's following, maybe 1/100,000 of his wealth. Is Hanania running a viable AGI program? Is Hanania building huge rockets? Are Hanania's opinions relevant in world affairs, does he control key communications infrastructure used by armies? Is he doing anything of importance whatsoever? No. If anything he shot himself in the foot switching from 'I'm a smart tech-right policy guy' to 'let me sneer at all the right-wing retards who are now running the country and are in a position to implement policies'. He's the contrarian rat that jumps on board the sinking ship. What a fool!
Elon may indeed have lost some of his faculties, idk, I've never met the man. I doubt Hanania has either. Armchair psychoanalysis of extremely unusual people is basically just glorified name-calling.
Whatever Elon has lost, if anything, he still makes the rest of the world look like drooling retards. What did I get done in the last 3 years, since 2022? I certainly didn't start an AI company that's outperforming Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft. I didn't build the biggest datacentre on the planet at record speed.
It's perfectly reasonable for us to disagree with Elon's choices or think he should do something else. I disagree with Elon about many things, including his whole concept of what a state is for. But if people want to go around calling him dumb or saying that his brain 'broke', then we'd better have some serious achievements to prove that we know what 'smart' or 'successful' is! Certainly something better than 'I wrote a book rehashing Mearsheimer (nobody cares about it) and blew up my political career' like Hanania.
Why should anyone care what Hanania thinks about politics considering how bad he is at it? He was pivoting away from Trump while Elon pivoted towards Trump... I think it's clear who has better political skills and like everything else between them, it's an orders of magnitude difference.
So your heuristic is that we should just ignore less successful people when they criticize their more successful peers? So when some Republicans claim that Biden has dementia, we can safely ignore that because the ones making the claim are not a sitting president of the United States, but some congressmen at best?
For the career of Hanania, a political endorsement of Trump would have been a no-brainer: Trump might have offer him a job in his administration, while there is no way in hell Harris would have offered him a job. So either he was deluded into thinking that there was no way Trump could win (unlikely) or we must consider the possibility that he is driven by something other than opportunism. I think it is likely that he considered a Trump policy so bad that it would be net negative even if Trump implemented a few of his policy proposals.
Personally, I do not think that Musk turned into an idiot, and more that he turned evil or that he was always evil, but used to mask that fact through backing pro-social causes like electric cars -- that he faked being aligned to the thriving of humanity when it served his interests, and now he fakes being aligned to Trump's interests instead.
Granted, Musk backed Trump before the election (while the other tech billionaires mostly waited until Trump had won to kiss his ring), but this still does not seem an unreasonable gamble. Trump is very willing to use the federal government to harass companies which have offended him personally. The Democrats have certainly also leaned on tech companies in the past, but they might force SpaceX to hire a few more DEI, not blacklist them for government contracts because they hate Musk.
It's particularly jarring because the GOP is now the party whose voters have lower average income.
https://www.cnn.com/election/2024/exit-polls/national-results/general/president/0
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