Sam Harris Says Elon Musk Reneged on $1 Million Bet, Describes Falling Out With Former Friend
Sam Harris has made no secret of the fact that he and Elon Musk had a falling out. But Harris was always loath to offer details as to why – until Wednesday.
In a Substack post, Harris explained that the beginning of the end of their friendship came in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Of all the remarkable people I’ve met, Elon is probably the most likely to remain a world-historical figure—despite his best efforts to become a clown,” Harris wrote. “He is also the most likely to squander his ample opportunities to live a happy life, ruin his reputation and most important relationships, and produce lasting harm across the globe. None of this was obvious to me when we first met, and I have been quite amazed at Elon’s evolution, both as a man and as an avatar of chaos.”
Harris recalled first meeting Musk in the late 2000s when Tesla was struggling to make payroll. According to Harris, Musk was living off loans from Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and was nothing like the person he sees in Musk today.
In March 2020, Musk sent a now-infamous tweet during the early days of the pandemic that drew Harris’s attention.
“The coronavirus pandemic is dumb,” Musk tweeted.
Harris recalled:
As a concerned friend, I sent him a private text:
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…
According to Harris, Musk replied:
Sam, you of all people should not be concerned about this.
After some additional back and forth, the two friends agreed to a bet:
Elon and I didn’t converge on a common view of epidemiology over the course of those two hours, but we hit upon a fun compromise: A wager. Elon bet me $1 million dollars (to be given to charity) against a bottle of fancy tequila ($1000) that we wouldn’t see as many as 35,000 cases of Covid in the United States (cases, not deaths). The terms of the bet reflected what was, in his estimation, the near certainty (1000 to 1) that he was right. Having already heard credible estimates that there could be 1 million deaths from Covid in the U.S. over the next 12-18 months (these estimates proved fairly accurate), I thought the terms of the bet ridiculous—and quite unfair to Elon. I offered to spot him two orders of magnitude: I was confident that we’d soon have 3.5 million cases of Covid in the U.S. Elon accused me of having lost my mind and insisted that we stick with a ceiling of 35,000.
Harris said that once the Centers for Disease Control reported 35,000 deaths from Covid in the U.S., he texted Musk with the figures. The billionaire never responded:
Is (35,000 deaths + 600,000 cases) > 35,000 cases?
…This text appears to have ended our friendship. 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 went on to note that he deleted Twitter/X after Musk acquired the platform in 2022, “having recognized the poisonous effect that it had on my life—but also, in large part, because of what I saw it doing to Elon.”
It was the second time this week that Harris hit back at his former friend. On Bill Maher’s Club Random this week, Harris said that when he asked Musk to stop “defaming” him on social media, the billionaire replied, “Go fuck yourself.”
