5 ms·

Honestly, I don't think Elon Musk can fairly be described as more evil than Dario Amodei or Sam Altman.

by MarsIronPI 2mo ago

deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
gordian-mind 2mo ago
[flagged]
- appplication 2mo ago
  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!
  - gordian-mind 2mo ago
    [flagged]
    - nullocator 2mo ago
      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.
      - Gigachad 2mo ago
        DOGE was the fox declaring they want to protect the security of the hen house. The stated mission on it's face was fine and needed, but the individuals involved had no interest in acting it out.
        gordian-mind 2mo ago
        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.
      - gordian-mind 2mo ago
        So now Elon is responsible for the waste in government? Yeah, it makes sense...
    - wahnfrieden 2mo ago
      It's estimated that DOGE cost the US government $21 billion in net loss. This is one reason for uncharitable skepticism of its mission statement.
      - gordian-mind 2mo ago
        I found this "estimate" in one second. In another second of reading it, I saw the 21 billion were payouts to let go of employees. Do you realize how silly it makes the report?
        wahnfrieden 2mo ago
        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.
        gordian-mind 2mo ago
        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: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/06/12/irs-tax-filing-season-beats-projections/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/06/12/irs-tax-f... 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: https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/happy-tax-evasion-day https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/happy-tax-evasion-day
openasocket 2mo ago
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.
- snackerblues 2mo ago
  [dead]
- harshreality 2mo ago
  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.
  - Gigachad 2mo ago
    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.
  - altcognito 2mo ago
    Proposing false dichotomies isn't really an argument. You've created a strawman. There is a balance to be struck.
shangofox 2mo ago
Didn't he go in to the US government and defund a lot of programs which ended up hurting a lot of people in USA and globally too? Not sure if the other two CEOs have done that
- infotainment 2mo ago
  [dead]
- jack_pp 2mo ago
  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
  - altcognito 2mo ago
    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.
sigmarule 2mo ago
Genuinely curious - what has Dario done, said, caused, etc that makes you view him as >= Musk on the evilometer?
- MarsIronPI 2mo ago
  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.
  - etc-hosts 2mo ago
    > More like I think Musk's proclaimed ambition are you talking about making the Moon and Mars livable?
    - lupire 2mo ago
      Or making the world racially pure? According to Elon Musk's public statements on his website Twitter, that's a higher priority.
  - sigmarule 2mo ago
    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.
dgellow 2mo ago
Musk is directly responsible for at minimum hundred of thousands of deaths, more likely in the millions See USAID
- Khaine 2mo ago
  Yeah, that is a garbage claim - https://hereticalinsights.substack.com/p/did-elon-musk-kill-millions https://hereticalinsights.substack.com/p/did-elon-musk-kill-...
atwrk 2mo ago
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. Edit: Here it is: https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(25)01186-9/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(25)01186-9/full... "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."
- Geee 2mo ago
  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.

Honestly, I don't think Elon Musk can fairly be described as more evil than Dario Amodei or Sam Altman.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

gordian-mind 2mo ago

[flagged]

appplication 2mo ago
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!
- gordian-mind 2mo ago
  [flagged]
  - nullocator 2mo ago
    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.
    - Gigachad 2mo ago
      DOGE was the fox declaring they want to protect the security of the hen house. The stated mission on it's face was fine and needed, but the individuals involved had no interest in acting it out.
      - gordian-mind 2mo ago
        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.
    - gordian-mind 2mo ago
      So now Elon is responsible for the waste in government? Yeah, it makes sense...
  - wahnfrieden 2mo ago
    It's estimated that DOGE cost the US government $21 billion in net loss. This is one reason for uncharitable skepticism of its mission statement.
    - gordian-mind 2mo ago
      I found this "estimate" in one second. In another second of reading it, I saw the 21 billion were payouts to let go of employees. Do you realize how silly it makes the report?
      - wahnfrieden 2mo ago
        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.
        gordian-mind 2mo ago
        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: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/06/12/irs-tax-filing-season-beats-projections/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/06/12/irs-tax-f... 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: https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/happy-tax-evasion-day https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/happy-tax-evasion-day

openasocket 2mo ago

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.

snackerblues 2mo ago
[dead]
harshreality 2mo ago
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.
- Gigachad 2mo ago
  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.
- altcognito 2mo ago
  Proposing false dichotomies isn't really an argument. You've created a strawman. There is a balance to be struck.

shangofox 2mo ago

Didn't he go in to the US government and defund a lot of programs which ended up hurting a lot of people in USA and globally too? Not sure if the other two CEOs have done that

infotainment 2mo ago
[dead]
jack_pp 2mo ago
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
- altcognito 2mo ago
  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.

sigmarule 2mo ago

Genuinely curious - what has Dario done, said, caused, etc that makes you view him as >= Musk on the evilometer?

MarsIronPI 2mo ago
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.
- etc-hosts 2mo ago
  > More like I think Musk's proclaimed ambition are you talking about making the Moon and Mars livable?
  - lupire 2mo ago
    Or making the world racially pure? According to Elon Musk's public statements on his website Twitter, that's a higher priority.
- sigmarule 2mo ago
  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.

dgellow 2mo ago

Musk is directly responsible for at minimum hundred of thousands of deaths, more likely in the millions See USAID

Khaine 2mo ago
Yeah, that is a garbage claim - https://hereticalinsights.substack.com/p/did-elon-musk-kill-millions https://hereticalinsights.substack.com/p/did-elon-musk-kill-...

atwrk 2mo ago

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. Edit: Here it is: https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(25)01186-9/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(25)01186-9/full... "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."

Geee 2mo ago
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.