Musk's Functional Stupidity Demonstrates Billionaires Are a Social Blight

Elon Musk is functionally stupid.

The above comment is, believe it or not, not a comment on whatever native intelligence he might or might not have. How intelligent he would be in a normal setting has no bearing on his functional intelligence. Because Musk, and many rich and powerful people, do not operate in the normal space that you and I do. And as a result, many of them have become, functionally, morons.

Elon Musk is the richest man in the world, and arguably, given the illegal and unconstitutional power to decide whether or not to spend money congress has allocated he has taken for himself, the most powerful. Musk has been beyond rich for years, having the kind of “fuck you” money that insulates people from the consequences of their actions. In those environments, people tend to be surrounded by either people who want something from them — money, power — or who are afraid to lose what they have. If you find yourself in that situation, it is very easy to never hear anyone tell you that you are wrong.

If you do not cultivate an environment where people can look in the eye, tell you that’s the dumbest fucking idea they have ever heard — in precisely those terms — and not only not suffer for it but be rewarded? Then chances are you will never find out your ideas are, in fact, the dumbest ideas anyone has ever heard. You will become functionally stupid, because you will lose connection with the concept of right and wrong. Preventing this is possible — many businesspeople and politicians are aware of this danger and do in fact have the “fuck you, that’s stupid” people in their inner circle. Emergency responders and the military have entire protocols designed to ensure that the people who say “this is the dumbest fucking idea ever” can be heard and listened to.

Elon Musk, on the other hand, might be the most functionally stupid person on the planet.

There are lots of examples of this. Musk thinks that playing poker by simply going all in on every hand until his opponents run out of money makes him good at playing poker. At Tesla, Musk fired an engineer who pointed out a safety flaw in the design. Musk fired twitter engineers who criticized him or told him, correctly, that he was wrong. When a data engineer at twitter quit and told Musk to his face that his repeating of Paul Pelosi conspiracy theories was incredibly unintelligent, all Musk could manage was a “Fuck you”. Musk obviously cannot handle being told no. I want to look at one recent incident to highlight how this happens and what can be the consequences.

Recently Musk tweeted that there were 150-year-olds getting social security payments. Why did he think that? Well, someone gave him access to least some of the Social Security data and some of those records had a birth date listed as in May of 1875. Fraud, right? No, of course not. First, to believe this is fraud you’d have to imagine that no one over the years, despite regular audits, picked up on it or corrected it. That may be the caricature of government employees that the right wing likes to pretend to believe, but everyone knows that human beings do not work like that. At a minimum, there would have been whistleblowers running to Fox News well before this.

What happened here is pretty obvious to anyone who has worked on computer systems. When I encounter something unbelievably strange in data or operations, my first response is to wonder what edge case or system limitation we have stumbled into. Anyone who works with computers is familiar with their tendency to default to stupidity when encountering a situation they cannot handle. Sure enough, it took about two minutes of searching to discover that the Social Security payment system runs on COBOL — a computer language older than computers (dates not necessarily accurate) — that defaults to May 20 1875 when dates are not present.

Obviously, Musk did not know this, and just as obviously, Musk neither checked this on his own (why would he — he is always correct!) nor had anyone around to tell him that his fraud idea was blatantly false. I assume, probably correctly, that his merry little band of Dunning-Krugerites does not understand the need to check anything either and just run with their guts.

Okay, so Musk is functionally an idiot. Obviously bad, but what has this to do with the existence of billionaires? Pretty much everything.

Musk only has power, despite his obvious functional stupidity, because he is richer than entire nations. Because the Supreme Court acts as if corruption and bribery do not exist, Musk was able to spend a quarter billion dollars getting Trump elected. Because he has so much money is forever isolated from the consequences of his actions. That means that he can elevate politicians who will let him do what he wants — like cutting FDA employees who were investigating one of his companies. His obscene wealth means that his functional stupidity will not matter to him, but will harm the rest of us, even above and beyond the unconstitutional and illegal nature of his actions.

Musk has become both functionally stupid and incredibly powerful only because of his wealth. If billionaires were taxed more appropriately, if there was a constraint on the amount of money and how they could wield that money, then his functional stupidity would matter only to the companies he runs and his family. But because we allow unrestricted wealth hoarding and put no limits on how that wealth can be used to accrue political power, Musk’s functional stupidity is all of our problem.

It is very hard to ensure that wealth and power do not create functional stupidity. If we don’t want to be ruled by functional idiots, then, we must either curtail the hoarding of wealth, so that all people remain subject to the consequences of their actions, or we must ensure that wealth is not allowed to achieve political influence. Otherwise, we end up with a government by the functional morons, for the functional morons.