I have no idea why an economist like Noah wants to reveal he’s so far out of his depth, but his recent defense of Elon Musk exemplifies exactly why criticism of the infamous snake-oilman is warranted – logical fallacies dance around ignoring the fundamental issue of a pattern of grandiose promises followed by systematic and dumb, really dumb, failures.

Noah’s horrible “clutching perils” (pun intended) analysis fails on three very basic levels: technological, historical, and – most surprisingly for an economist – fundamental financial evidence.

Cough. Fraud. Cough. The entire Noahpinion piece falls victim to surface narratives that are completely false.

• Accepting marketing claims without verification
• Ignoring documented operational failures
• Overlooking systematic deception
• Conflating financial success with actual achievement

The barrier to entry for fraud isn’t intelligence or cunning, it’s simply the willingness to do it and a context that enables it.

Let’s break down how Noah’s defense of Musk proves exactly what critics have been saying all along: intelligence isn’t the issue when there’s a systematic pattern of deceptive practices. When someone repeatedly takes money for products they never deliver, announces features that don’t exist, manipulates markets through social media, and uses new promises to distract from old failures, that’s not a question of IQ. Noah’s defense of intelligence is actually an own-goal because it works up a frothy nothing-burger about Musk while completely ignoring the well documented history of deceptive business practices that disprove it all. It’s like defending the integrity of the Enron CEO by arguing about his golf handicap.

FSD has been promised 8 separate times since 2016 and still can’t be trusted for a second. It literally just drove a brand new Cybertruck directly into a pole like on a suicide mission. Every missed deadline has been followed by a price increase, every lie has been doubled down with even more outrageous claims to never arrive. The “extreme survival” design fails within 1,000 miles and is less safe than a Ford Pinto. 17X less safe. Nobody should be distracted by discussions about this being about intelligence or not. It’s fraud.

Got your logical fallacy bingo cards ready? When a defense requires so many logical fallacies and yet still fails to address the fundamental criticism, it suggests Musk’s critics are really on to something.

1. Appeal to Accomplishment (Courtier’s Reply)

The article argues that critics can’t criticize Musk because they “couldn’t build SpaceX.” This is like saying you can’t criticize Lance Armstrong for taking drugs unless you can win the Tour de France. Or that you can’t possibly identify a Ponzi scheme and criticize it unless you could steal billions yourself. It’s a textbook logical fallacy that stupidly attempts to silence criticism by completely ignoring the most important substance. SpaceX is fraud. Why would we expect anyone to rob a bank in order to stop criminals from robbing a bank?

2. False Attribution of Success (Post hoc ergo propter hoc)

Noah attributes Tesla and SpaceX’s achievements solely to Musk, which is truly ignorant. There’s a saying in Silicon Valley that Musk has never built anything, which is true. He failed miserably out of every company he’s ever entered into, which isn’t to say he didn’t get rich. It’s to say he couldn’t hold a candle to the actual hard work by the thousands of real engineers and scientists, taking in billions in government subsidies and contracts, to work with existing technological foundations, delivering on favorable market conditions and timing, thanks to teams of managers and executives who handle daily operations. Are we calling Musk the only success after he just shows up and writes term sheets that give him massive speculative gains from laundering his parents’ apartheid blood money? That’s like calling Nazi Germany an achievement of one Swiss banker.

3. Moving the Goalposts

This fallacy practically defines the Musk experience. When confronted with failed promises, defenders shift from concrete deliverables to vague concepts like undefined “vision” and mystery “potential.” This childish sleight of hand transforms clear failures into nebulous successes:

• The promise of coast-to-coast self-driving cars by 2017? “Ambitious” fraud.
• Mars landing by 2018, with colonies by 2022? “Boundary pushing” fraud.
• Hyperloop to divert public transit funds to Tesla? “Inspiring” fraud.

The list of fraudulent statements to avoid admitting failure is practically endless at this point, which itself is ridiculous. If we have to give more than three, who is really listening?

4. Appeal to Authority

This is a strange one for two reasons. First, authority is relevant if speaking within expertise. Second, IQ is injected into conversations by defenders of Musk (a Red Herring). So when Musk’s biographer, an actual authority, says he finds no evidence of IQ tests only a lot of evidence that it’s 100… that’s not some random voice. That’s an authority. Yet somehow Noah decides he can respond on this point by appealing to far lesser authorities if ones at all. He goes with SAT scores from decades ago, selective quotes from friendly biographers and testimonials from invested business associates. Marc Andreessen? That’s like asking Goebbels if Hitler tells the truth. None of these IQ points address the actual criticism about failed delivery and lack of accountability, which speak more realistically about someone’s intelligence. If Musk has an IQ over 100, why would he constantly tell lies and fail so badly at his promises? That’s not intelligent, it’s fraud. If you’re fooled by his advance fee fraud, or somehow made rich too by engaging and enabling in it, that doesn’t make him smarter.

5. False Equivalence

Need I even say why someone comparing Musk to Genghis Khan or Henry Ford has jumped the shark with false equivalences? Let’s just ignore vastly different historical contexts, conflate different types of achievements, misrepresent the nature of modern technological development, and totally bypass the role of teams and institutions. Elon Musk is a worse form of Ford, if anything, with the flamboyant racism and affinity for Nazism not to mention the habit of taking credit for ideas he stole. Musk’s tweet about Genghis Khan is a concerning red flag, like when he compares himself to Alexander the Great or Napoleon (Historian protip: Musk echoes megalomania topics of the AWB – Nazi party of South Africa – which he grew up with).

The “illiterate man on a pony” defense is particularly weak when discussing modern corporate leadership. Mongols had oral culture such that any lack of writing was completely normal and expected for their best leaders. An obvious ethnocentric perspective, claiming that people operating within powerful oral traditions somehow should illustrate to us their intelligence was underestimated at the time, is some true ahistoric bullshit that only demonstrates the profound ignorance of Noah.

Genghis Khan wasn’t operating at some cultural disadvantage that needed to be overcome, he was fully equipped with the most advanced and sophisticated training and tools for leadership and organization. It’s logically incoherent to use him as one of the greatest minds leveraging advanced tools at massive scale in order to defend Musk operating outside organizational competencies and repeatedly failing. Remember when he announced his factories would be robots and then catastrophically backtracked, trying to cruelly laugh it off as “underestimating human worth” before landing in court from widespread racist abuse of his workers? This demonstrated the most fundamental misunderstanding of well-known manufacturing processes that other automakers had spent many decades documenting. Tesla can’t keep a general council in its toxic culture for more than a year or two, right? Is it any wonder Noah falls victim to Musk fraud, if he can’t comprehend such basic modern history or philosophy.

Suggesting that because once upon a time there was a “great man” who shaped history before (like Genghis Khan), somehow that means Musk’s current position and actions could somehow should be characterized as equivalent? Once again I’d say he’s far more like a racist Ford who steals’ ideas. There’s the equivalence. Ford was a horrible, horrible person who did much to damage America (don’t get me started on WWI taking money to build tanks and then never delivering them because he wanted Britain to fail). History will likely show Musk has always been on the wrong side and will stay there, given his long-time adherence to repeatedly promoting Nazism. You think Tesla puts “88” all over its car marketing as a coincidence? Sure, and the “SS” merchandise and Hitler salutes definitely aren’t related to rebranding Twitter with a swastika. Yeah, equivalence fallacy is a cruel road that goes the exact opposite direction Noah expects if he really wants us to engage in it.

6. Ad Hominem

I’m sad to report this seems inevitable in these defense jobs circulating around Musk. Rather than addressing critics’ arguments, the defense tries to sling a bunch of mud as “cope” and “class resentment”, or being “unwise people”. The substance of the criticism remains unaffected. Class resentment? What class of fraud is Musk, exactly? Is it the Madoff class or the Epstein class? Seems worthy of resentment either way.

7. Bandwagon

Suggesting that because Musk has repeatedly “made his hecklers eat their words,” his critics must be wrong now? If anything Musk has been the one eating his words more than anyone. Remember when he said if you tried to warn people his driverless didn’t work he would blame you for all the deaths he caused? It was a lethal bandwagon fallacy that threatened accurate reporting with retaliation. Now he’s not only admitting he never had driverless, that it never really worked while many dozens or more were killed, he’s switching to say everyone who already paid a premium to be grandfathered in (and wasn’t killed) is expected to pay more advanced fees… while there’s still no evidence it will ever work.

8. False Dichotomy

Presenting the only options as either accepting Musk as “the single most capable man in America” or being foolish. This ignores the vast spectrum of reasonable positions between these extremes, such as Musk being assessed as the most prolific liar in the history of American business.

9. Cherry Picking

Selecting specific successes is not a strong position. SpaceX’s unsafe numbers of failing satellites injected into space hastily are already falling apart, which will prove to be a disaster some time in the near future rather than today. Any attempt to downplay or ignore the past and current disasters or problematic areas for Musk isn’t going to fly for long because there are far too many problems in too many areas. We usually call this tech-debt and he has more accumulating than the entire history of tech. They simply can’t be avoided, no matter how fast and far he tries to run from the tsunami of mistakes he created. He literally threw himself into Roman-era concubine problems, just to show how deeply disturbed and unworthy of leadership roles he is across multiple levels. Honestly I’m surprised anyone wants to still hunt for cherries in the rotting soggy botulism tech-pies he tosses around.

10. Strawman

Noah characterizes critics’ positions as calling Musk “stupid” or focusing on IQ, when many criticisms of Musk are mainly about his racism, sexism, irrational decision-making, leadership style, and degrading impact on institutions… just to get started. The man has more issues than the Library of Congress.

11. Survivorship Bias

Noah completely ignores all the failures and abandoned projects like Twitter being converted from a business into a state-financed Russian propaganda megaphone, all the Tesla recalls and crashes being far higher than average, charging station maintenance nightmares, the robots that aren’t coming, HyperLoop and Boring disasters… let alone the FSD fiasco.

• Tesla solar roof: $5B+ write-off
• Hyperloop: $0 in actual transportation delivered
• Twitter Blue: 99.98% subscriber rejection rate
• Boring Company: 0 cities served as promised

When you need nearly a dozen different logical fallacies to defend someone’s record, it suggests you’re trying to hide something substantial.

The Snake-Oil Pattern of Sell Lies and Skip Town

Every few years Tesla rips out all their driverless fraud technology and starts over, just to throw critics off the trail. Version what? None of it works, but you’re supposed to wait and see until they rip it out so you have to wait and see again. What makes Noah’s long-winded intellectually devoid defense particularly revealing is how it exemplifies the very problem critics identify. Consider this pattern:

1. Grandiose promises
2. Missed deadlines
3. Redirected attention to new promises
4. Attack of critics
5. Rinsed and repeated

If those are the rules of success in business, who can’t do it? Any toddler can fail to deliver and throw a tantrum. What kind of person wants to lower the bar of success so far that it ceases to have any meaning at all other than someone pays dearly for it?

• 2016: Promise full self-driving by 2017, Mars landing by 2018
• 2017: Miss deadlines, announce Roadster by 2020
• 2018: Miss deadlines, promise everything by 2019
• 2019: Miss deadlines, announce Cybertruck by 2021
• 2020: Miss deadlines, redirect news to Twitter purchase
• 2021-2024: Missed deadlines, Cybertruck safety 17X worse than Ford Pinto, still no self-driving or Mars landing because FRAUD

The Musk defense never addresses the central question orbiting around his IQ claims. Why should someone who consistently fails to deliver on promises, in the most fraudulent ways possible including taking millions of up-front payments for nothing, be considered highly competent?

What seems to really be going on is some people love to celebrate stock market performance over actual delivery and confuse marketing with technical competence. Worse, they treat simple wealth accumulation as proof of capability, seemingly to justify ends-justifies-means crimes. Fundamentally, Noah’s defense of Musk completely ignores the pattern of overpromising and underdelivering in a way that can only be described as fraud.

This is highly problematic because such an illogical, fallacy defense undermines accountability in business leadership. We should not confuse financial success with actual achievements because it sets a dangerous precedent for corporate responsibility. A personality cult does not substitute for demonstrable, measured and transparent results.

Perhaps instead of asking why critics call Musk’s competence into question, we should ask why his defenders show such blindness and incompetence in addressing the actual criticisms: consistent failure to deliver on promises, a systemic pattern of fraud.