Elon Musk thinks we live in a simulation

For better or worse (but I am leaning towards the worse), Elon Musk is one of the most talked-about personalities of 2022. But a year of headlines, scandals, censures and questionable tweets has by no means gone unpunished; the consequences are all there, on the balance sheet, in the form of a colossal failure. Bloomberg reports that the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter is officially the first person in history to lose $200 billion of his net worth. This is a precipitous drop in his fortune, following Twitter's dramatic 56% drop in value. And yet, looking at the latest stolen snapshots showing the (now former) richest man in the world according to Forbes lightheartedly in Qatar with Trump's son-in-law Jared Kuchner and the wife of Kremlin banker Andrei Kostin, in what looks like some kind of reunion with the horsemen of the apocalypse, one wonders: does he really care? To venture an answer, one has to take a step back and analyse the value system that guides the actions of a man who wants to colonise Mars and has the makings of a madman, as well as a worldview that has much in common with the Matrix.

When asked if he believes that human existence is part of a "larger simulation", Musk gave an unexpected answer in an interview at CodeCon 2021: «My heart says no and my brain says yes». Add to this not only statements on the subject in several American podcasts, but also the words of author Devin Gordon Elon in the BBC documentary series The Elon Musk Show, according to which the tech mogul allegedly believes that his former partner Grimes is a 'simulation' created in his head. «She [Grimes] has told me several times that Musk has this theory about her. He believes that she's not real - Gordon said - that she's a created simulation and that she exists in his cerebral cortex as some kind of perfect mate for him. It sounds a little crazy and maybe even a little creepy, but she agrees. She said she felt like a simulation created especially for him.»

But even though the simulation theory sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie or the product of a ghost under the influence of potent psychotropic substances, every scientist in the world has at some point faced the same problem. A concept that in itself dates back to 2003, on the theories of the Oxford philosopher and futurist Nick Bostrom, and based on observation of current technological developments, from virtual reality to attempts to map the human brain. The argument rests on two premises, both debatable but not unreasonable: the first is that consciousness can be simulated in a computer, with logic gates replacing the brain's synapses and neurotransmitters; The second is that advanced civilizations will have access to truly amazing amounts of computing power. It is plausible that such an advanced civilization could use this power to run an "ancestral simulation", a powerful version of The Sims but with ontological pretensions. The creation of a single such simulated world may seem extraordinary to us, but Bostrom speculates that thousands or even millions of ancestral simulations could be run by a single computer in the future. Well, assuming this scenario is true, what remains of morality, ethics, destiny, and life itself in the face of the paradox of simulated existence? What is the value of our actions? The thrill of conquest is marred by the possibility that it has all already happened: even if Musk manages to colonise Mars, he will not be the first to do so, even if his ventures fail there will be other simulations in which they will are successful. Because for Elon, life is much more like a video game than everyday reality.