Podcaster and public intellectual Sam Harris has spilled the beans on his falling-out with former pal Elon Musk.
In a 1,700-word Substack post titled “The Trouble with Elon,” the Making Sense host revealed that a text exchange over COVID-19 led to the end of their years-long friendship.
Harris said he and Musk first met around 2008, when the billionaire tech entrepreneur was “teetering on the brink of bankruptcy” as he struggled to pay staff at Tesla.
“I have been quite amazed at Elon’s evolution, both as a man and as an avatar of chaos,” Harris wrote. “The friend I remember did not seem to hunger for public attention, but his engagement with Twitter/X transformed him.”
Harris disclosed that the fallout began when the coronavirus broke out in 2020.
“The coronavirus panic is dumb,” Musk tweeted at the time.
Harris said he privately reached out to Musk over the tweet, worried that it might “exacerbate the coming public health emergency.”
Hey, brother— I really think you need to walk back your coronavirus tweet. I know there’s a way to parse it that makes sense (“panic” is always dumb), but I fear that’s not the way most people are reading it. You have an enormous platform, and much of the world looks to you as an authority on all things technical. Coronavirus is a very big deal, and if we don’t get our act together, we’re going to look just like Italy very soon. If you want to turn some engineers loose on the problem, now would be a good time for a breakthrough in the production of ventilators...
Musk’s response was brief. “Sam, you of all people should not be concerned about this,” he said, adding a link to a page on the CDC website stating that COVID-19 was not counted among the top 100 causes of death in the U.S.
“This was a patently silly point to make in the first days of a pandemic,” Harris said in his post.
This led to an hours-long text exchange that culminated in a bet: Musk bet Harris $1 million for charity against a $1,000 bottle of tequila that the U.S. would not see 35,000 cases of the respiratory disease.
When the CDC logged 600,000 cases and 35,000 deaths from COVID-19 a few weeks later, Harris sent Musk another text: “Is (35,000 deaths + 600,000 cases) > 35,000 cases?”
“This text appears to have ended our friendship,” Harris wrote. “Elon never responded, and it was not long before he began maligning me on Twitter for a variety of imaginary offenses. For my part, I eventually started complaining about the startling erosion of his integrity on my podcast, without providing any detail about what had transpired between us.”
Harris left Twitter in 2022, but that hasn’t stopped Musk from calling him “mentally ill” and “an utter idiot” on several occasions.
“Any dispassionate observer of Elon’s behavior on Twitter/X can see that there is something seriously wrong with his moral compass, if not his perception of reality,” Harris said. “There is simply no excuse for a person with his talents, resources, and opportunities to create so much pointless noise.”
