Which is worse, trying to cut govt costs or trying to create a godlike entity subservient to you? I'd say their ambitions are far more evil even if they don't achieve it. To them cutting govt costs is to us like mowing the lawn before the tornado comes
You are arguing in bad faith. He wasn't just trying to cut costs, he was cutting oversight of himself, and actively destroying projects that saved lives.
More like I think Musk's proclaimed ambition is actually important and achievable, unlike Altman's and Amodei's. Whether or not any of the three will actually accomplish their ambitions remains to be seen; but of the three I think Musk's is most beneficial to humanity.
Musk's proclaimed ambition is a superset of Amodei's, no? While both are racing towards AGI, only one is also trying to "back up" humanity to Mars, make their fully self-driving cars finally fully self-drive, dabble with a little human brain implant side project, datacenters in space, wars against fake mind virii, political kingmaking, something about tunnels, humanoid robots... His aggregate ambition is undoubtedly _less_ achievable by orders of magnitude.
This does, in all fairness, also imply that he has a higher upper bound for future possible "importance" / "benefit to humanity" - but in even more fairness, it is entirely irrelevant to my question, which was you believe Dario is >= as evil as Musk. An evil man doing good deeds is still an evil man; swapping "good deeds" with "ambition that enriches himself and may possibly help the rest of us in the future" doesn't make things any better. "Higher likelihood of his ambition ultimately benefiting humanity" does not make one less evil. (Neither does expressing clear disdain for a subset of humanity, thoughtlessly cutting hundreds of millions of dollars in humanitarian aid, cruelty towards your own child, etc).
A parting point: somebody who genuinely wants to save humanity and somebody who genuinely wants to be heralded as a savior of humanity are two very different types of people with very similar outward signals. A savior complex and a messiah complex look the same from the surface.
> His aggregate ambition is undoubtedly _less_ achievable by orders of magnitude.
Leaving out the political ambitions, which would be a separate discussion, I think space bases are _way_ more realistic than machine consciousness (which is what I understand AGI to be). In fact, I can visualize what technology space habitats would require today, whereas I wouldn't even know how to determine whether a machine is conscious.
> An evil man doing good deeds is still an evil man; swapping "good deeds" with "ambition that enriches himself and may possibly help the rest of us in the future" doesn't make things any better.
I'm not sure that saying Musk wants to enrich himself is very fair. AFAICT he doesn't use his wealth in ways that most people would expect a billionaire to. Based on what I can tell of how he spends his money, he seems to genuinely believe in his ambition. So I would argue that any enrichment of himself, in his mind, is for his ambition and therefore for humanity's good.
I think a lot of Musk's actions can be understood as someone who wants to focus on getting humanity to Mars, and who gets tangentially distracted by other things (such as AI, possibly) and who deals with what he considers obstacles (such as the government).
He's quite literally responsible for more deaths than Pol Pot, there's a paper in the Lancet estimating the amount of casualities directly resulting from the sudden cancellation of USAID funds.
"Forecasting models predicted that the current steep funding cuts could result in more than 14 051 750 (uncertainty interval 8 475 990–19 662 191) additional all-age deaths, including 4 537 157 (3 124 796–5 910 791) in children younger than age 5 years, by 2030."
They only cut the funding where they couldn't show where the money is going, e.g. the money never helped anyone, but went somewhere else. Obviously whoever got the money is claiming that a lot of people are dying.
The Lancet's model is a forecasting model and it isn't accurate at all. No excess mortality has actually been recorded.
Oh no! He was really just waving and it only looked like a Nazi salute to the liberal media! Elon’s really a good guy, since he got involved in our federal government I’m amazed at how much measurably better all our lives are and how much less fraud there is in Washington!
Because the fraud and waste were coming from inside the house (The Whitehouse, and Elon's). So yes now adults in ~2 years will have to come in and and try and salvage what they can after the travesty of DOGE and this Administration.
DOGE was met with worldwide media outrage in the first weeks of its creation, and scorched earth legal tactics by the opposition. The people involved, even the lowest employees, got worldwide scrutiny, including character assassination articles in the biggest publications.
To get out of this saying they "had no interest in acting it out" is bizarre.
Thanks, I shared the wrong estimate, I was looking for the one that included estimated loss due to IRS cuts. You can find the references from Wikipedia:
> Another independent analysis estimated that DOGE cuts will cost taxpayers $135 billion;[33] the Internal Revenue Service predicted more than $500 billion in revenue loss due to "DOGE-driven" cuts.[34] Journalists found billions of dollars in miscounting.[35][36] According to critics, DOGE redefined fraud to target federal employees and programs to build political support;[37] budget experts said DOGE cuts were driven more by political ideology than frugality.
That’s interesting, because this is another clear case of total fabrication.
I will skip the $135bn figure, produced by an influence NGO and once again counting paid leave, to focus on the more serious and important alleged $500bn loss from IRS cuts.
Firstly, the statement that “the Internal Revenue Service predicted more than $500 billion in revenue loss due to DOGE-driven cuts” is fraudulent. There was no official IRS prediction of such a loss. The Washington Post reported an anonymous short-term forecast. Its exact wording was:
“Treasury Department and IRS officials are predicting a decrease of more than 10 percent in tax receipts by the April 15 deadline compared with 2024, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share nonpublic data. That would amount to more than $500 billion in lost federal revenue.”
So, did this happen? It did not. By April 2025, collections had risen 9.5% year over year to about $850 billion, rather than falling by more than 10%. This came after a roughly 25% reduction in the IRS workforce between January and May 2025. Over the whole of fiscal year 2025, revenue increased by 6%.
Here is a follow-up Washington Post article lamenting that DOGE unfortunately failed to lower tax revenue:
Wouldn’t that make the original claim dishonest, given that it was presented without any meaningful uncertainty? Apparently this distinction is unclear to them.
This entire sequence was absolute bullshit. You can read articles like this with a smile, knowing that they may be completely wrong and that the authors do not care enough about the truth to revisit their claims before basking in their own righteous certainty:
Elon Musk is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, thanks to the dismantling of USAID and US foreign aid. Not hypothetical deaths in the future, people who have died in the last year because Musk cut off their supply of medication and nutrition.
Sure, you could argue it was going to be dismantled anyway under this administration. But I think that’s pretty close to the “just following orders” excuse. Which falls especially flat when it was a task he volunteered for!
And I don’t want to understate the harms of other AI CEOs, but in terms of direct, quantifiable deaths, Musk is pretty clearly the most evil.
We're killing a lot more people than that; if we'd just tax the rich at 80% and send all that money abroad, we'd save millions more. Failure to do that is mass murder, the same as decreasing foreign aid funding; that is your thesis, right, that it's mass murder?
Doing less to save people in other countries that have no legal demand on our treasury is not "being responsible for [their] deaths." It's tragic, and it may even be a bad policy decision, but there's no responsibility (in the "duty to prevent harm" sense) or evil there.
The deaths happened because the funding was yanked immediately without time to reorganize and re-source funding elsewhere. Rather than being slowly wound down with with enough warning time.
Elon Musk's actions killed hundreds of thousands of people. While not resulting in any savings at all for the government.
I think it's pretty likely it would have been mostly left alone if not for Musk. No one was asking for PEPFAR to be killed, for example - it's one of the few things in Washington with near unanimous bipartisan goodwill and it was actually a point of pride and prestige for Republicans.
Lots of R's were really angry. It was eventually spun up again, now under the direct control of the State Dept, but the sudden interruption did ungodly amounts of damage in the interregnum.
I remember the day Elon became evil. It was so clear. He stopped supporting my political preferences and worldview. In fact, he actively campaigned against them! I'll never forgive him.
Ah yeah I remember that day. It was when he went on stage and started popping off sieg heils with the intensity and ferocity of someone who really meant it.
For me it was when he called the cave diver a pedo for disagreeing with him. While (unknown to us at the time) begging Epstein to invite him to the island.
His moral compass was shown on that day and so far he’s just leaned further in to the point his actions have actively killed children. Lobotomising Grok to randomly go on racist tangents is just another action in a long line at this point.
People have different beliefs about whether they will personally benefit from supporting some political cause. Therefore telling people that they shouldn’t support causes that are against their interests is a waste of time. It’s like telling someone “listen to good music”, or “do whatever you think best.”
I think many people targeted by the statement “stop supporting politics against your self interest” either sanctimonious or a meaningless platitude, depending on how they interpret it.
Also, arguably[1] voting based on your self interest is immoral and irrational. So it’s perhaps neither an effective argument, nor a sound one.
> People have different beliefs about whether they will personally benefit from supporting some political cause.
The key word there is "belief". They are often wrong.
Your linked blog post is backwards and inconsistent with itself. You have two primary arguments: Irrational and Immoral. You argue that voting is irrational because its unlikely to have any impact, and that voting for your own interest is immoral.
A) The statements are mutually exclusive. An act that has no impact on others can not be immoral.
B) It assumes that what is best for the individual is worse for the group. Life is not a zero sum game. That's the Conservative's delusion. Economic and political transactions do not always have a "loser" and a "winner". In fact, it's relatively rare that they do if you think more than zero steps into the future.
C) The only version of this that actually works is the opposite.
C1) It is irrational not to use whatever influence you have to effect you environment for the better, even if the expected value is low because the opportunity cost of inaction may be disasterous. It's similar to your odds of dying by meteor strike. The probablity is higher than you expect because the death toll would be enormous if it did happen. Outlying events with large impacts skew the numbers.
C2) It is immoral to vote against your own interests, because what is best for the group is also what is best for members of the group. Any other belief is just an incorrect belief based on imperfect knowledge. Again, your argument makes sense at step zero, but not at step 'n'. If what you're voting for seems bad for some members of the group, but good for you, it just means you have imperfect knowledge of what's actually good for you in the long term.
> It assumes that what is best for the individual is worse for the group. Life is not a zero sum game. That's the Conservative's delusion. Economic and political transactions do not always have a "loser" and a "winner". In fact, it's relatively rare that they do if you think more than zero steps into the future.
If there’s no difference between self-interest and what’s best for everyone then the whole discussion is meaningless - why even bring up self-interest in that case.
In fact there are many cases where the interest of some individuals conflict with the greater good - eg. Jones Act, sugar quotas, upzoning popular urban neighborhoods, military base closures, coal plant closing, countless others. And anyway framing this as an issue that only affects liberals or conservatives is incorrect, all of those examples cut across partisan lines.
> argue that voting is irrational because its unlikely to have any impact
The post (I’m not the author) actually argues that voting can be rational if you care about the impact on others. The low probability of being the deciding vote is multiplied by the huge impact on the nation as a whole by the better candidate winning. If you only care about yourself, the low probability of vote matters multiplied by the impact on yourself yields an effect that’s too small to care about in expectation.
> If what you're voting for seems bad for some members of the group, but good for you, it just means you have imperfect knowledge of what's actually good for you in the long term.
An 58 year old worker at a military base may be genuinely correct that closing the base is bad for him personally in the short and long term, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad for the public overall.
No. That’s not my position, it’s a ridiculous metaphor here, and even if it weren’t, the logic doesn’t follow. I am not obligated to stop using a product because someone associated with the product did a bad thing once. Literally no product passes that test.
Your position is “why bother protesting when all models are biased.”
First, your premise is false. Only one trillionaire is has stated he will tune his model to eliminate the woke mind virus (his words not mine).
2nd, You are right, you are not obligated. Nobody said you are. Protest is personal. Each of us makes the choice to do the right thing. But your reasoning comes from mental laziness and willful ignorance arrived at by fallacy. you are scared to take a position because it might be a slight inconvenience or you might get made fun of. I have encountered this position many times it is cliche.
Quit shifting the goal posts. Musk is a Nazi. Or fascist human garbage if you prefer. xAi is low hanging fruit on the “don’t give money to terrible people” tree. The guy is such an easy target for boycotting.
I refuse to use Chinese models because I don't trust that they won't backdoor them for geopolitical reasons. I don't trust OpenAI or Anthropic either, for what it's worth, but at least I know they're profit driven. I don't want to do business with a company like xAI that seems to care more about its political aspirations than it does about my money. I don't think that's super radical. Just the same paranoia I've been rocking since the 90's.
