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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.
As I said in the last thread, when you change add stuff to your platform that didn't used to be there, some people who liked the old platform will decide they don't like the new platform and depart. Others will support ANYTHING the party does, because loyalty to their tribe is all that matters. What's the next thing the Tucker Carlson fans are going to embrace? Are they going to take issue with chlorinated swimming pools? Whatever it is, I'm sure a large proportion of people here will embrace, ignore, or sanewash it. Other people will decide they don't feel like being Republicans anymore and get accused of "jumping ship" for not changing their minds.
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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.
Biden was never smart or capable, his first presidential campaign crashed because he lied about being first in his class and plagiarizing. Pretty poor on 'not sounding like a fool in speeches' and 'avoiding scandals' too. Elon can sometimes sound like a fool in speeches and he is scandal-prone but there are other redeeming qualities that are lacking with Biden.
I don't know what selection mechanisms exist in the Democratic Party for leadership material but the people that gave us Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are clearly not prioritizing skills and ability.
You can be successful without being smart. Clearly I erred in tying 'smart' and 'successful' together when I was primarily talking about the allegations that Elon broke his brain. Most of the time you need to be smart to be successful.
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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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This is only relevant if we think that Twitter followers or personal wealth are proportional to intelligence.
There is no doubt some correlation between intelligence and success at one's endeavours. Some. But it is not total, and so if we consider why Hanania isn't fabulously wealthy and followed by a lot of people on the internet, we might consider the very many relevant factors other than intelligence. For instance, Hanania is younger than Musk, Hanania has different personal goals and priorities to Musk, Hanania has a different personality profile to Musk, Hanania wasn't born into wealth the way Musk was, and that's all well before we even get to considering luck or arbitrary fortune.
Maybe you think Hanania is dumb anyway, and sure, maybe he is.
But I'm willing to bet that there are lots of people with fewer than Musk's 219 million Twitter followers who you and I would agree are smarter or more reliable guides than Musk. I'm also willing to bet there are lots of people with less net wealth than Musk's 225 billion that you and I would agree are smarter than Musk.
Likewise for other celebrities. Justin Bieber has 109 million Twitter followers and a net worth of around 300 million. That's a lot more than most people. Are you prepared to become a Belieber?
Be serious. Hanania may well be dumb and wrong, but this kind of sneering "he doesn't have as much money as Musk" is worthless.
There are absolutely people I agree with more often than Musk. There are some people online who I think are very wise and I agree with basically everything they say. Whereas I disagree with many things that Musk says, we clearly have different goals and understanding of the world. So there are people wiser than Musk.
But that doesn't mean they're smarter than Musk. If they're smarter, then why don't they simply implement their visions and smash every obstacle in their path? Musk wants to settle Mars, so he simply takes over the entire spaceflight market with SpaceX. The Democratic Party/decel culture gets in his way, so he moves to smash them with Twitter and Trump. AI coming up sooner than expected, looks like that's important? Why not simply start a frontier lab? Electric cars and robots as well!
These are impressive achievements! It is hard to create things, rather than merely performing a role for someone else like so many. Try starting your own business. It's hard on a wholly different level.
When Bieber demonstrates general-purpose creative ability (at maybe 10 or 100 times his net worth), as opposed to just being a one-trick pony in music/infatuating young women, then I'll defend his general ability. Taylor Swift does the same thing better than Bieber and has basically no political influence (her endorsement had minimal effect), Musk is on a totally different level.
The post you are replying to explained this. Intelligence does not straightforwardly equate to success like that - it is one of many correlates. Musk's wealth has multiple causes; a person of equal or greater intelligence might easily not be as successful.
Musk is rich and powerful, but that in itself does not show that Hanania is wrong, nor does it absolve Musk of any of his obvious faults.
Musk is not some baron or duke. His inheritance was by no means significant in him becoming wealthy.
'Personality type' is just a different way of saying intelligence in this context. 'I am smart but lazy' is an excuse, not an explanation. It doesn't matter at all if you're smart in some esoteric way that has no relevance in the real world. Whatever mental ability Musk has that lets him wield great effects on the world, he has a lot of it and so his brain isn't broken.
Criticizing faults is fine but it is bizarre and question-begging for people who are in virtually every way less competent to criticize the ability of far more capable people.
I would say that one's personality may shape one's goals and priorities?
For example: I would say that Thomas Aquinas was devastatingly intelligent by any fair standard. He chose a path of life that committed him to both celibacy and poverty. By the standard you've given, though, he cannot be intelligent. He did not achieve worldly power, office, or glory.
I conclude therefore that your standard is a bad standard. It does not measure intelligence. There are extremely intelligent people who do not achieve "great effects on the world", at least in the sense that you've given. In Aquinas' case this seems to be a result of his choice not to seek that type of success. He sought something else.
Likewise "Whatever mental ability Musk has that lets him wield great effects on the world, he has a lot of it and so his brain isn't broken" is a non sequitur. It is entirely conceivable that a person might have great effects on the world while having a brain that is, in some sense, broken. You just cannot get from "Musk has influenced the world" to "Musk has no significant faults". The claim is fallacious.
Thomas Aquinas was definitely intelligent, we are still talking about his books centuries after his death. He absolutely had impact and significance. Most of what he writes is basically nonsense but that's the nature of theology.
Maybe you can be intelligent and not do anything significant. But doing something significant requires intelligence. Given that we can't read minds and analyse them perfectly, we should assume that those who do great things have greater faculties than those who merely claim to be intelligent.
So I find it disgusting for a nobody like Hanania to go 'oh I listened to him on a podcast and read some tweets of this guy, so I can look down on his intelligence, his basic mental faculties'. That's what I'm upset with.
Furthermore, how is Hanania in a position to judge? Does he know anything of significance? What operations has he overseen? What high-performance organization has he built?
If you're down-rating Elon Musk's intelligence in favour of 'luck or arbitrary fortune', where is your reasoning that it's actually straightforward to build a rocket company or start a leading AI lab (which he did while Hanania thinks his brain was broken)? Is NASA too busy huffing airhorn gas to make cheap rockets? Is Meta AI full of dribbling retards? Did Jeff Bezos just roll bad dice with his space company? Obviously not! It's the special competence of this one man, with secrets that we don't understand regarding management, motivation and so on.
How is Musk broken if he achieves massive successes in science, engineering, business and politics?
I think it would make your argument vastly more succinct if you just said "Musk is more powerful", rather than arguing back and forth on the relative value of wisdom, smarts and factual accuracy, as well as whether Musk possesses all of those. Musk has power, Hanania doesn't, therefore Hanania's criticism is groundless and impotent. That appears to be the real gist of what you're saying.
But suppose Hanania really doesn't have the right to speak on Musk. In that case, why do you care enough to correct the public mottizen opinion on Hanania and urge people to not listen to him? Shouldn't his lack of influence be self-evident?
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I did say that I believe intelligence correlates with success. It just doesn't do so absolutely or reliably - there are successful idiots, and unsuccessful geniuses. I think Musk's business success is a data point in favour of his being clever, but it's not the only consideration, nor is it decisive in itself.
As it happens I do think Musk is reasonably clever. I don't go quite as far as Noah Smith, but I think Smith is directionally correct, and people who sneer and declare Musk a moron are being foolish.
Is Musk smarter than Hanania? I don't know. I think Hanania is evidently a reasonably smart person as well - his high standard of written expression and analytical ability show that, even if I do often think he's wrong - but I wouldn't make a general comparison. I don't know either of them in person in the kind of detail that I think I would need to in order to make a credible comparison. Fortunately "is Musk smarter than Hanania?" is the kind of question that never needs to be answered. It's a silly question - in practice, in any disagreement between Musk and Hanania, I have ample ways of resolving it without going down that rather pointless tangent.
What I find bizarre in your comments, though, is this:
I find this strangely defensive? You almost sound offended! Suppose for the sake of argument that Musk is in some objective sense smarter than Hanania. So what? Hanania is not a peasant bowing and scraping before his lord. People are allowed to criticise people smarter than them. If Person A has an IQ of 140 and Person B has an IQ of 150, it is still permissible for Person A to criticise Person B. Indeed, it is wholly conceivable that Person A might criticise Person B and be entirely correct in those criticisms, because IQ is not a measure of correctness, either factual or moral.
So even if for the sake of argument Musk is objectively more intelligent than Hanania, that would not make Hanania's argument incorrect. It would be a red herring.
This seems like an obvious case of proving too much to me. "People can never criticise their intellectual superiors" is a fake rule we never apply to anything else. Maybe Musk is much better at starting tech companies than Hanania. Bully for him. So what?
And I suppose as far as disgust or moral offense goes, for what it's worth I'm morally disgusted at the idea that the plebs should never criticise their supposed betters. There is nothing that Musk has done that confers on him a right to not be a target of criticism by others. Maybe Hanania's criticism of Musk is mistaken, but if so it's mistaken because of its actual merits, not because Hanania dared to lift his eyes to look upon the god-like mien of the shining Musk.
I'd assert that Musk's various achievements are in no way incompatible with him being pathological in some other respect.
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I understand that this line was not core to your point, but to correct the record - Musk’s family was middle class, turbulent, and abusive. His father’s financial success was very up and down, and he is now completely broke (Musk used to support him, but cut him off after he repeated slept with and attempted to sleep with younger family members.)
Musk arrived in Canada at 17 with $2000 to his name and never received substantial financial support from his family after that. His mom would sometimes send him $100 for groceries. There is no evidence that he ever received a large cash infusion from his parents. Of all the excuses for why Musk is more successful than you, “rich parents” has to be the worst.
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Following this logic, who are you to contradict Hanania?
What's your actual argument here? Elon is a super successful businessman so he can't be wrong about Zelenskyy being a dictator with a 4% approval rating who started the Russian-Ukraine War?
Is wondering if Elon has gone a little nuts "glorified name-calling" or is it... wondering if Elon has gone a little nuts? I guess it could be the former, but it seems like the OP is being earnest and I'm pretty sure the rules here say something about arguing with people in good faith.
Uh, is it? According to your logic, I feel like it's not:
But whatever.
What if I asked, "Why should I care what Elon Musk thinks about politics considering how bad he is at it?" In fact, I am asking that. How is Elon Musk good at politics? He genuinely seems terrible at it. He's more unpopular than ever. DOGE is a mess. What has he achieved? He publicly supported Donald Trump? That's not good politics, that's just expressing preferences. Having actual moral objections to someone isn't the same thing as not having "political skills."
How much political influence does Elon Musk have in the US? Politics isn't about popularity. Taylor Swift is pretty popular. Is she good at politics? No.
Tweet accuracy does not determine whether someone's brain is broken. Advancing a message in accordance with one's goals is more important than factual accuracy. Trump does this all the time, he blows up every number 2-5x. Doing that has no relation to his political ability, it is beyond doubt that his political ability is immense.
If your brain is broken, then you'd be saying things like Biden did: "And now I want to hand it over to the President of Ukraine, who has as much courage as he has determination, ladies and gentlemen, President Putin". That is what having a broken brain looks like, when you're not on-message, when you're so far off-message that you're supporting the other side.
Elon knows more about the war in Ukraine than the entire Pentagon. Not because he knows the ins and outs of every calibre of artillery, not because he pores over every inch of satellite intel and reads every single powerpoint slide... but because he appreciates the basic strategic dynamics of the situation and adjusts his stance accordingly: 'if military victory is not cost-efficient, use diplomacy to minimize losses'. And if getting rid of Zelensky helps this, then he'll move in that direction with 'get rid of Zelensky' rather than getting bogged down in juvenile narratives like 'Putin is a bully' like our prestigious, military expert class who work day and night bungling everything they touch. Note that Elon started off super-pro Ukraine, donating them hundreds of millions worth of military aid in Starlink. He changed his stance to match the situation. Appreciating the key facets is better than racking up debating point trivia.
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Do you really believe that someone leading a for-now successful business precludes them undergoing mental decline? If anything, why not take a look at recent developments in contrast to past performance as more relevant evidence than the simple fact of a successful business existing? Tesla stock not doing so hot these days.
Should we assign truth value to people's opinions based on their wealth and following? I don't see how your comments about Hanania's global strategic positioning have anything to do with the veracity of his opinion.
You also seem to think...people are dumb for not following Trump even if they don't believe in his goals or execution? It seems extremely plausible that Hanania simply did not want to be a sycophant for Trump, which says nothing about how 'bad' he is at politics. You seem to be invoking some assumption that Hanania was clearly angling for some political gain that he fumbled by not supporting Trump, and that doesn't seem much more plausible than other explanations.
Hanania said he was anti-woke, he made all these posts about it. He was seemingly angling to be a public intellectual and influence US policy in various respects before flip-flopping and burning his bridges.
In that scenario, it makes sense to not come out and sneer at Trump. It's called tact, diplomacy, political skill. Or is Hanania just an internet troll with a substack?
Furthermore, I am highly confident that Elon Musk has demonstrated a high level of business ability and 'making things happen' in the last 3 years. Tesla is just one of his businesses. Tesla is exactly where it was in July 2024 or November 2024 in stock price. It's a 700 billion dollar company manufacturing goods in competition with China, which is extremely difficult. Maybe Elon can't be expected to run Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter and GrokAI at a world-class level simultaneously, while also rearranging US politics? Maybe he can only keep 3 or 4 balls in the air at once, he's still pretty good at juggling. People who have never juggled aren't qualified to sneer at the abilities of the best jugglers, that's my point.
Again, you seem to be squashing a lot of plausible complexity into a very simple categorization of Hanania being 'antiwoke'. Does being antiwoke preclude one from disagreeing heavily with other antiwoke people to the point you publically break from them? I don't see why it would. It COULD be the case that he thought this was best for his career and this is some massive error on his part in sensing what his audience wants, but it's just as convenient an explanation that he disagrees with Trump on policy to such a degree that simply being on the antiwoke team is not enough to garner a blind eye.
I think there's a country mile between cynically falling in line behind 'your guy' and being an internet troll. Was Sanders trolling when he ran against Clinton? Or is it more likely that people on ostensibly the same wing of politics sometimes do things that hurt others in the same wing because they have different beliefs?
If you don't accept that people who don't run successful businesses can't provide insight on those who do, then I struggle to see how you manage to derive value from any comments on this forum, where anonymous internet randos constantly comment on the goings-on of high profile business and government leaders who are usually, by every public metric, very successful. A sneer (or criticism, or observation) is just as good as the argument it presents, no more no less. People who are successful may have on average better insights into others that are as well, but you can still always judge the critique on its merits no matter who submits it. In this case, to refute Hanania's comments a good response would be to cite Musk's recent successes, as you've done. The comments on Hanania' lack of business success don't really address anything directly. (And in fact, I find it likely that he is, by this metric you've chosen, more successful than most commenters here, the forum you elect to participate in.)
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No one shall care about Hanania, but you should care, if you care about world's affairs at all, if man who does all these things, destroys his brain with drugs and gets all his information from xitter and 4chan shitposters.
If he's doing those things, then is he destroying his brain with drugs? What about Meta, what have they been doing? Has Zuckerberg been destroying his brain with drugs throwing $20 billion into VR with zero returns and with Meta AI getting defenestrated by Grok 3 and Deepseek, not to mention kowtowing to Trump after he won the election rather than supporting him before, like Elon? Running these huge organizations is difficult. There are ups and downs.
The elite, prestigious sources of information have discredited themselves. They go on and on about climate change (nothingburger) and demand extremely costly and ineffective fixes. They came up with DEI and globalized the whole US race obsession. They swept Rotherham under the carpet and brought us the summer of Floyd. They've damaged relations between the sexes considerably. They cheered for the retard wars in the middle east. They spurred political division by blundering obsessively and then screeching misinformation when anyone tried to point out their inadequacy.
The damage caused by the narratives they put out far exceeds anything Musk and far-right anime profile pics have done.
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This is sneering.
Or rather, it's the kind of sneering that people like Hanania indulge to salve their egos.
I am not ashamed to say that I am of origin a 4chan shitposter. I, of course, cannot speak for an amorphous group of internet trolls. But I'd like to think that people like me and people who think like me have no pretensions of gatekeeping the culture or its discourse. But despite this, our little internet sect - if it can even be called that - is upstream of so much of the current political moment that we are either incredibly prescient of the degeneration of propriety or we masterminded its fall and decline. The American president is a living, breathing meme. He trolls the world! And in some insignificant yet important way, we are a part of it.
Or it could be all a big coincidence. It would be just as funny.
No one outside of Hanania's little circle cares about his opinions. He's no thought leader. Not even a secret king. Trump may be master of the media cycle, but he is a boomer and ultimately of their generation. Elon is one of us. At times he may be based and other times he will be a lolcow, but the Extremely Online Right Wing Weirdos have broken into government and there is nothing the bow-tied Buckleyites can do about it.
Hanania is a former white nationalist who wrote for Counter-Currents.
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I'm not sure what any of this has to do with anything?
Analysing the tribe that Hanania belongs to may be great sport, but it is, surely, completely inconsequential to the points he makes, which the top-level post presumably wanted to discuss?
In short: he's coping and seething because he is not the court philosopher of the people in power.
In the long: it's no longer 2012. You don't get points for Noticing, no more than you get credit for being a geocentrist in this day and age. Whether Hanania likes it or not, Elon Musk has actually accomplished things. What has he done? Suffered in the desert of barely acceptable discourse for a decade, and when he emerges he isn't treated as a prophet, with respect. He's a nobody, a has-been. Elon brute-forced his way into the president's cabinet to dictate policy, while Hanania snipes at him on a substack. Who is he to say about competence, about anything? Sure, it's not debate club rules, but writing furious tracts on how Elon is a drug addict that is crashing out isn't exactly gentlemanly, either.
Even if Elon is a tenth of the man he was when he started up SpaceX, he's still vastly more influential and powerful than Hanania was on his best day. In the real world, this matters. There is a long history of intellectuals waging personal grudges in the public discourse against their enemies. Nearly all of it is uninteresting.
I'm just going to repeat myself - what does that, even if true, have to do with anything?
I haven't speculated on Hanania's private motivations, in the depth of his soul, because I don't care about them. He's a guy who commentates on politics, and he's provided commentary here. Either that commentary is true and useful, or it isn't, and in neither case does it matter what you think his private dreams and aspirations might be.
Hanania has commented negatively on Musk's character and behaviour. As far as I can tell those comments are well-grounded in observable evidence. What more do you need?
Yes, Musk is "vastly more influential and powerful than Hanania". This is true. This is, in fact, the whole reason why it is appropriate to write articles in Unherd about Musk's character, addictions, changing behaviours, etc., and would not be appropriate to publish similar analyses of Hanania. Musk's character, behaviour, choices, etc., affect vastly more people in the real world, and therefore it is both fair and necessary to subject Musk to closer scrutiny.
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The question is why discuss anything Hanania has to say at all? If it's not inherently interesting (and I don't think it is), it would have to be because Hanania is someone to pay attention to. And IMO (and I said this some months ago), he's not.
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