Extreme right -wing Technic investor Peter Thiel sat for an interview with Ross Douthat of New York Times and talked about the billionaire’s recent political escapes and the future. Thiel also discussed his thoughts on Antichrist, a topic that The Times chose to highlight, giving the written version of the interview the lazy title, ”Peter Thiel and the Antichrist. ”
But it was Thiel’s thoughts about his friend Elon Musk, who were probably the most light for those of us who are interested in the current collision of politics, business and Te Techniko – especially since Thiel suggested that Musk does not really believe in much of what he says. Or that, or Musk is simply not very bright, another possibility that Thiel subtly suggested was on the table.
Ever since Musk debuted his “robot” in 2021, who was actually only a man in a robotic suit, the general manager of Tesla Hyping the idea that everyone will have a personal humanoid robot at home. In fact, Musk thinks that these robots will be so popular that there will be a billion of them in the United States within 10 years. But Thiel believes that if that actually happens, Musk takes care of the wrong things when it comes to his policy.
Musk is obsessed with budget deficits and held the US debt as one of the main reasons he supported Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election, throwing at least a quarter of a billion dollars into the race. Well, it was Musk’s debt and other passionate projects, how to demonize trans -people and immigrants. But the debt was definitely a high priority for Musk.
Thiel told the New York Times He thought that if Musk really believed in his robot revolution, the deficit would take care of himself.
I had a conversation with Elon a few weeks ago about this. He said we would have a billion humanoid robots in the United States in 10 years. And I said, Well, if that is true, you don’t need to worry about budget deficits because we will have so much growth, growth will take care of it. And then – well, he still cares about the budget deficits. This does not prove that he does not believe in the billions of robots, but it suggests that he may not have thought it or that he does not think it will be so transformative economically, or that there are big erroneous bars around it. But yes, there is some way in which these things are not completely considered.
Thiel’s point of view is actually quite common in Silicon Valley, though it is never fricted like that. The children on the all-in-podcast, for example, are all Friends with Musk Also and similarly talk about how growth will take care of budget deficits. The difference is that they talk about it as a way to rationalize their support for tax reductions, while insisting that they are deficit hawks. Trump’s so -called “big beautiful bill” will increase the deficit by $ 2.4 trillion, according to the non -party congressional budget office, largely because it gives tax reductions Stick to older people and rich. But all kinds of Bros believe that the growth in AI will repair it all, while also insisting deficits will bankrupt the economy.
But Thiel takes a slightly different angle about his version of our robot future, and it is one that is intellectually honest, has to take seriously. If robots really deliver this revolutionary productivity, a future, where we all just sit around while robots do the job for us, why are Republicans like Musk so worried about deficits?
Tesla’s version of the Humanoid Robot is called Optimus, and Musk tried to play capture with other robot companies like Boston Dynamics and a figure. Atlas of Boston Dynamics did Backflips almost a decade agoWhile Optimus is still tele-operated for Musk Smoke shows and mirrors.
In January 2024, Musk posted a video of Optimus Folding Laundry, but it was only revealed later that nothing was autonomous about any of it. If you looked in detail, you could see a hand slip into a frame, showing that a man did the real work that was imitated by the robot, ie Techniko around the middle of the 20th century.
The promise of robots doing all the work while people encompass a kind of leisure society about more than a century. It was extremely common in the 1960s for very serious people to predict that we would work anywhere from just 16 to 30-hour weeks on average By the year 2000. They believed that automation would make such a future inevitable. And Musk promised the same thing. He even suggested that people need to have some guaranteed basic income, because it will no longer work for people.
It’s all fantasy, of course. At least it’s a fantasy if you apply Musk’s version of politics to this future. And it is highly likely that Musk understands it as a fantasy. Even if humanoid robots have become frequent and have made most of the manual work in society, that does not mean that everyone gets a free salary. In fact, Musk fought against exactly that idea, insisting that alleged freshmen should not gain government benefits. And here Thiel is absolutely 100% correct. Musk does not understand the political implications of his own technology. It would need to engage in a radically different policy to give all universal basic income. Because in a world where productivity is radically increased, the wealth created will not be shared with the workers.
US productivity has improved radically since the 1970s, while wages have remained stagnant, relative to that growth. All we have seen is a transfer of wealth to the richest people in the world, while everyone else struggles. Over the past decade, the top 1% have seen their wealth increase by at least $ 33.9 billion, according to figures released today by Oxfam International.
It’s not just about robots where Thiel thinks Musk doesn’t understand his own technology. Thiel, who has known Musk since the 1990s, when both were at Paypal, also suggested during his interview with the times that Musk does not receive as this is valid for Mars. Thiel was a great bidder of Seasteading, the movement to build artificial island nations and create a completely new freedom world on the ocean. And Musk’s vision of Mars was not quite different.
As Thiel said to the times:
There is a political dimension to return to the future. “You can’t – this is a conversation I had with Elon back in 2024, and we had all these conversations. I had the Seastteading version with Elon, where I said: If Trump doesn’t win, I just want to leave the country. And then Elon said: Nowhere is it going. It’s nowhere to go.
And then you always think about the right arguments to do later. It’s been about two hours after we had dinner and I was home, which I thought: wow, elon, you no longer believe to go to Mars. 2024 is the year where Elon stopped believing in Mars – not as a senseless scientific technical project, but as a political project. Mars was supposed to be a political project; It built an alternative. And in 2024 Elon believed that if you went to Mars, the US government, the Woke Ai would follow you to Mars.
Musk has been obsessed with arriving at Mars, even with some high -profile Fucks from SpaceX in recent months. And it’s really interesting to hear Thiel discuss these topics because he is absolutely right. If Musk actually believed in the things he sells, his political point of view would be radically different. But he is inserted into this 20th century mode while dyeing his senseless scientific projects, as Thiel puts it.
Thiel, a fascist who does not believe that women must be able to voteis a very dangerous man. But he at least seems to understand the world he is trying to create. Douthat alluded to Thiel during the interview as a “corporate capitalist for politics”, a fun rebranding of the term oligarch. But Musk doesn’t seem to understand the world he creates. Whether this turns out to be better or worse for humanity is less clear.
