You really jumped in here to defend a guy who begged Epstein to let him party at his island? He bought companies and made them “successful” primarily through government funding propping them up and moving money between them like a shell game. All that while also begging to go abuse children, and what’s crazy is that’s still not all of his skeletons. The fact that he’s being given air here is a disgrace.
How does his talking to Epstein have anything to do with his accomplishments or his ideas? If you think creating multiple trillion dollar companies is easy (with or without government funding) or cofounding OpenAI or Neuralink are negligible, you are a joke. Please save the hysteria for some breakfast club with Karens
Epstein is irrelevant to the conversation about tech being discussed also he never begged. Also government funding is a ridiculous argument to downplay Spacex's success. Do you think other companies didn't get government funding. Spacex gets money in the form of contracts because it is far more effective in launches compared than the competition.
Because those subjects aren’t where Dwarkesh has unique value to offer? Like don’t get me wrong I agree that there’s a ton that is objectionable about Elon Musk, but Dwarkesh can clearly get the most out of an interview with him by focusing on drilling into Elon’s visions of our technological future and, like him or not, he was and remains one of the most significant players in that space.
If Dwarkesh instead had decided to ask about Epstein, all that would happen is Elon would get defensive, interview would turn confrontational, and we probably wouldn’t even learn anything anyway so what’s the point?
He did ask about DOGE at least, but even there he quite reasonably found a balance of not being antagonistic while still asking interesting, difficult questions…I can think of several followups to Elon’s “baby pandas” response, since in fact there were obviously more serious objections to what DOGE was up to than that (see Kelsey Piper’s writing on the real impacts of cutting PEPFAR, I’m quite confident she was not just coming up with “heart-wrenching stories that are false” to defend fraudsters)…but I don’t really fault Dwarkesh for not pushing too hard there, aside from one question about the full value of claimed waste, I think he also took an angle at it that made sense from his perspective, basically asking Elon why going after government waste even matters in the first place within the longer term context of the grand future Elon talks about.
In my mental model, there are around three "Elon buckets."
Bucket 1: Amazing commercial/company building accomplishments (building Tesla, SpaceX, etc. into what they are now, with all the related caveats about founding status and whatnot)
Bucket 2: BS so pure you could use it to power a rocket to Mars (this comment about space data centers, FSD timelines, etc.).
Bucket 3: Random jackassery (DOGE, calling a cave diver a pedo for no reason, etc., etc.).
Man. Saying he'll use "physics and truth-seeking" to solve alignment is so much worse than saying he doesn't know. Just like, a really unserious understanding of the difficulty of the problem. Thanks for the interview, guys! Feel like you handled it well
I haven't listened to the podcast, but the statement in the title is completely ridiculous. There are massive problems with power generation and heat dissipation in space. Running data centers in space is completely unpractical and extremely costly. And never mind that Musk to this day has not demonstrated a fully working prototype of Starship that can make it successfully to orbit and back and can deliver the kinds of payloads required to install meaningful industrial capacity in space.
I was somewhat convinced by the “we can design GPUs to run much hotter” observation (heat radiation increases at the fourth power of the temperature differential or something, right?). Seems legit? They probably can?
He knows nothing about the subjects he is talking about, he is basically buying tech and claiming he knows what it does with the knowledge of the people who work for him! he is a cheap super villan. Who has more money than anyone else. The people who do the work for him should stop! homer Simpson in the episode with the super villian comes to mind!
Yes he knows money! With billions of dollars. I reckon I could build a rocket company and not even see the factory or even meet the people behind it. I would still have enough money to pay donnies ridiculous tariffs on importing materials for both my car industrial plant and my rocket ship company. Your comment is like sowing seeds on a stone path, they may germinate in the cracks, but they will go no further. Elon makes more money in half an hour than you will probably make in a year? Now go and educate yourself on how money works!
The confidence of people who haven't actually started a company or done anything exceptional in their lives is astonishing. Not even confidence, really, but delusion. Delusion is fine as long as you can back it up, but you can't. First of all, when Musk started SpaceX, he wasn't worth billions of dollars. Next, there have been many billionaires who have tried similar pursuits but haven't come close to being as successful. You have no idea how money works or how to run a business, for that matter. People like you hate to see success and have to cope with their, at best, mediocre lives. Now, before you start bringing up the subsidies argument against SpaceX, you should know that SpaceX gets most of the money people criticize about from real contracts, not subsidies. In contracts, you need to provide a service. The reason why SpaceX has had contracts for years is because they have proven they are better than the competition. Look at what happened to Boeing's Starliner. You tried to look educated here, but failed.
Yes ! Numerous scientists and engineers have both pointed out obvious gaps in his knowledge, identified episodes of complete BS and have taken him to court for inserting himself into the role of creator rather than investor.
Who founded Spacex? Easy thing to search up. Also ofc he will have gaps in knowledge when he is basically the only person running multiple companies in vastly different sectors.
Extremely unimpressive responses by Elon on most of these issues. His explanation for evidence of fraud at DOGE was oarticularly laughable, a tautological answer that “obv there’s fraud so there must be a lot of fraud”, yet a total deflection when it came to pointing to actual evidence.
I'm no engineer, but no mention at all of one of the hardest problems with space data centers? Heat dissipation in a vacuum is basically impossible. This is Elon talking his book to hype the SpaceX IPO.
I’m no engineer either, but I think the heat the dissipation problem will be one of the close to impossible problems to tackle in this project. From what I'm reading, it looks like the heat dissipation radiators that would have to be attached to a data center, such as the one Elon is proposing, would have to be larger than 300 football fields. They would need to be kept in darkness to successfully dissipate the heat, which directly contradicts the benefit of having these in space to collect solar power. As Elon said, "It's always sunny in space." That's the exact problem that will make heat dissipation nearly impossible. I recall hearing that engineers at SpaceX feel like they have a deal with Elon. He is supposed to be the hype man to go out and just generate funding by talking to people about things they don't understand but want to invest in. The engineers will handle the rocket science, but that Elon doesn't very deeply understand much of the engineering.
This is officially the best conversation with Elon on record. No nonsense, hype, baited questions, distraction, or chit chat. Just a pure stream of quality talking points, focused direction, great follow-up, clever, often comedic insights, and good faith interest all the way through. Big picture, gory details, and every shade in between. Thank you, @Dwarkesh Patel. You’re epic.
Expecting an interestingness-maximizing AI to preserve humanity is legitimately insane. This was a chillingly weak defence of his AI safety strategy and it made me question how it could be in any human’s best interests to invest in SpaceX/XAI.
I really hope they’re serious about that interpretability research that he mentioned, or other ways of guaranteeing honesty. That’s a much more reasonable approach to safety. If you can solve honesty, you pretty much get safety from that.
The fact that people still think Elon is a highly intelligent individual worth listening to might just be his greatest accomplishment.
Yeah all those companies were created through his being charlatan alone! Great negatively polarized take!
You really jumped in here to defend a guy who begged Epstein to let him party at his island? He bought companies and made them “successful” primarily through government funding propping them up and moving money between them like a shell game. All that while also begging to go abuse children, and what’s crazy is that’s still not all of his skeletons. The fact that he’s being given air here is a disgrace.
How does his talking to Epstein have anything to do with his accomplishments or his ideas? If you think creating multiple trillion dollar companies is easy (with or without government funding) or cofounding OpenAI or Neuralink are negligible, you are a joke. Please save the hysteria for some breakfast club with Karens
Did he go?
Epstein is irrelevant to the conversation about tech being discussed also he never begged. Also government funding is a ridiculous argument to downplay Spacex's success. Do you think other companies didn't get government funding. Spacex gets money in the form of contracts because it is far more effective in launches compared than the competition.
It's surprising to me that people can't seem to see that Elon today is very different from Elon of 10 years ago.
He has lost his good sense and his moral compass, but he remains relevant because of his extreme wealth and his need to impose himself on everyone.
We'll be on Mars any day now … and we'll be making $30k electric vehicles. Oh and Grok will be AGI next month….yup
Doesn't help that Dwar is a Nazi sympathist, proving once again that pretending to be intelligent is basically the only important MAGAot value
What does your company do?
Elon is a characterless.
He has access through contracts to DARPA tech so…
Did you ask Elon about his Epstien connection and why he is appearing so many times in the released files .
If you didn't ask , care to explain, why?
Because those subjects aren’t where Dwarkesh has unique value to offer? Like don’t get me wrong I agree that there’s a ton that is objectionable about Elon Musk, but Dwarkesh can clearly get the most out of an interview with him by focusing on drilling into Elon’s visions of our technological future and, like him or not, he was and remains one of the most significant players in that space.
If Dwarkesh instead had decided to ask about Epstein, all that would happen is Elon would get defensive, interview would turn confrontational, and we probably wouldn’t even learn anything anyway so what’s the point?
He did ask about DOGE at least, but even there he quite reasonably found a balance of not being antagonistic while still asking interesting, difficult questions…I can think of several followups to Elon’s “baby pandas” response, since in fact there were obviously more serious objections to what DOGE was up to than that (see Kelsey Piper’s writing on the real impacts of cutting PEPFAR, I’m quite confident she was not just coming up with “heart-wrenching stories that are false” to defend fraudsters)…but I don’t really fault Dwarkesh for not pushing too hard there, aside from one question about the full value of claimed waste, I think he also took an angle at it that made sense from his perspective, basically asking Elon why going after government waste even matters in the first place within the longer term context of the grand future Elon talks about.
Lack of courage and character.
He could talk about Epsteins obsession with transhumanism and consciousness
Absolutely
Yeah and it would also be trivial to cut $2tn of waste from the federal government. Still waiting for the DOGE checks btw.
In my mental model, there are around three "Elon buckets."
Bucket 1: Amazing commercial/company building accomplishments (building Tesla, SpaceX, etc. into what they are now, with all the related caveats about founding status and whatnot)
Bucket 2: BS so pure you could use it to power a rocket to Mars (this comment about space data centers, FSD timelines, etc.).
Bucket 3: Random jackassery (DOGE, calling a cave diver a pedo for no reason, etc., etc.).
Why are people platforming this child rapist, nazi, wants to be a cool kid, loser illegal pos?
No need to describe yourself there.
Man. Saying he'll use "physics and truth-seeking" to solve alignment is so much worse than saying he doesn't know. Just like, a really unserious understanding of the difficulty of the problem. Thanks for the interview, guys! Feel like you handled it well
I haven't listened to the podcast, but the statement in the title is completely ridiculous. There are massive problems with power generation and heat dissipation in space. Running data centers in space is completely unpractical and extremely costly. And never mind that Musk to this day has not demonstrated a fully working prototype of Starship that can make it successfully to orbit and back and can deliver the kinds of payloads required to install meaningful industrial capacity in space.
I was somewhat convinced by the “we can design GPUs to run much hotter” observation (heat radiation increases at the fourth power of the temperature differential or something, right?). Seems legit? They probably can?
https://open.substack.com/pub/dwarkesh/p/elon-musk?utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=210746659
The best place to put Elon is in space
He’s already in his own space 🥸
yeps all freaks should be sent to space.
Souls go for cheap when there is big money to be made.
You hit the nail on the head .
Mark my words, the most compelling place to put Elon is in space.
He knows nothing about the subjects he is talking about, he is basically buying tech and claiming he knows what it does with the knowledge of the people who work for him! he is a cheap super villan. Who has more money than anyone else. The people who do the work for him should stop! homer Simpson in the episode with the super villian comes to mind!
“The only laws are the laws of physics.”
DOGE & politics are not physics.
So, when he’s not doing technical work he is lawless? 😱
Knows nothing but somehow made the largest rocket company. He is doing something right. What do you know?
Yes he knows money! With billions of dollars. I reckon I could build a rocket company and not even see the factory or even meet the people behind it. I would still have enough money to pay donnies ridiculous tariffs on importing materials for both my car industrial plant and my rocket ship company. Your comment is like sowing seeds on a stone path, they may germinate in the cracks, but they will go no further. Elon makes more money in half an hour than you will probably make in a year? Now go and educate yourself on how money works!
The confidence of people who haven't actually started a company or done anything exceptional in their lives is astonishing. Not even confidence, really, but delusion. Delusion is fine as long as you can back it up, but you can't. First of all, when Musk started SpaceX, he wasn't worth billions of dollars. Next, there have been many billionaires who have tried similar pursuits but haven't come close to being as successful. You have no idea how money works or how to run a business, for that matter. People like you hate to see success and have to cope with their, at best, mediocre lives. Now, before you start bringing up the subsidies argument against SpaceX, you should know that SpaceX gets most of the money people criticize about from real contracts, not subsidies. In contracts, you need to provide a service. The reason why SpaceX has had contracts for years is because they have proven they are better than the competition. Look at what happened to Boeing's Starliner. You tried to look educated here, but failed.
Yes ! Numerous scientists and engineers have both pointed out obvious gaps in his knowledge, identified episodes of complete BS and have taken him to court for inserting himself into the role of creator rather than investor.
Who founded Spacex? Easy thing to search up. Also ofc he will have gaps in knowledge when he is basically the only person running multiple companies in vastly different sectors.
Extremely unimpressive responses by Elon on most of these issues. His explanation for evidence of fraud at DOGE was oarticularly laughable, a tautological answer that “obv there’s fraud so there must be a lot of fraud”, yet a total deflection when it came to pointing to actual evidence.
I'm no engineer, but no mention at all of one of the hardest problems with space data centers? Heat dissipation in a vacuum is basically impossible. This is Elon talking his book to hype the SpaceX IPO.
And it’s working
I’m no engineer either, but I think the heat the dissipation problem will be one of the close to impossible problems to tackle in this project. From what I'm reading, it looks like the heat dissipation radiators that would have to be attached to a data center, such as the one Elon is proposing, would have to be larger than 300 football fields. They would need to be kept in darkness to successfully dissipate the heat, which directly contradicts the benefit of having these in space to collect solar power. As Elon said, "It's always sunny in space." That's the exact problem that will make heat dissipation nearly impossible. I recall hearing that engineers at SpaceX feel like they have a deal with Elon. He is supposed to be the hype man to go out and just generate funding by talking to people about things they don't understand but want to invest in. The engineers will handle the rocket science, but that Elon doesn't very deeply understand much of the engineering.
Why would you believe anything he says in terms of timelines and expectations?
Name 3 products he has ever delivered within 5 years of what he advised..
True. But at least we can use Elons predictions to have a upper limit of what will definitely not be reached in that time frame.
They are drinking Guinness 🍺
This is officially the best conversation with Elon on record. No nonsense, hype, baited questions, distraction, or chit chat. Just a pure stream of quality talking points, focused direction, great follow-up, clever, often comedic insights, and good faith interest all the way through. Big picture, gory details, and every shade in between. Thank you, @Dwarkesh Patel. You’re epic.
Expecting an interestingness-maximizing AI to preserve humanity is legitimately insane. This was a chillingly weak defence of his AI safety strategy and it made me question how it could be in any human’s best interests to invest in SpaceX/XAI.
I really hope they’re serious about that interpretability research that he mentioned, or other ways of guaranteeing honesty. That’s a much more reasonable approach to safety. If you can solve honesty, you pretty much get safety from that.
My full thoughts (more nuanced, includes some simulation-theology): https://open.substack.com/pub/themap/p/elon-on-dwarkesh-exposed-some-issues