Skull-Measurers and Sock Puppets: The Creepy Eugenics Obsession of Elon Musk

When it comes to racism, he's bringing it back oldschool

Elon Musk has always been a little off about race. But that comes with the package of being  an “anti-woke” crusader. Just because he has the brain and social acumen of a 17 year old gamer doesn’t necessarily mean he burns crosses on the weekend.

However, Musk being funny about race seems to get worse as time goes on, which is usually the opposite of how it works when a white guy moves away from Apartheid South Africa and lives in Silicon Valley. But for an extremely wealthy white guy who surrounds himself exclusively with other extremely wealthy white guys, his opinion of an entire class of people he has zero interaction with sure does seem to be dropping at a bizarrely steep rate.

It has never been so obvious as this week when he went absolutely ballistic at fellow white gazillionaire Mark Cuban on Twitter. This was a notable event because usually Elon’s clear anger management problem doesn’t manifest unless he’s personally humiliated in some way, but this is the angriest I’ve seen him since he got booed by the whole audience at a Dave Chapelle show. Why this time? Because United Airlines is training black people to become pilots.

More specifically, this is part of an extended tirade against diversity and inclusion programs in professional hiring, and this particular outburst on that matter was fueled by the ousting of Harvard President Claudine Gay by a media hit job orchestrated by an Evil Mirror Dimension Ryan Gosling named Chris Rufo and Bill Ackman whose job description also just says trillionaire. The reason for the attack was ostensibly because Gay was a plagiarist, which was a cover story for it being because she was an antisemite, which was a cover story for it being because she was black.

And make no mistake, you can believe that Gay is antisemitic or crooked or any of the other things they presented to the media to make this whole thing palatable to the general public, but Chris Rufo is pretty unambiguous about his issue being her race. A black woman as president of Harvard is to him just a diversity hire in a dangerously influential position.

That’s where Elon Musk comes in because he has been super eager to take the heat off himself for his belief in the antisemitic “Great Replacement” theory and in the haunted circus of his mind the best way to deflect from racism to be more racist to somebody else.

Again, rest assured this is about race. You’ll be told all sorts of things about how it’s about colourblind meritocracy, but the clever (and absolutely hilarious, he thinks) analogy that Musk keeps using time and time again is putting Asian people on basketball teams. The only way this possibly makes sense is if he’s drawing a straight comparison between the absurdity of Asian average height in basketball and what he’s implying is the absurdity of black average intelligence in an aircraft cockpit.

But again, where is this coming from? Specifically his latest obsession with how race relates to IQ. It’s tempting to simply look at his origins in Apartheid South Africa, but that’s reductionist. It might have gone some way to inform his ideas initially, but as usual, if you want to understand one of the most credulous and malleable people on the planet you look at his friends.

Musk has a lot of very peculiar and specific interests that are shared by some very peculiar people. In August of last year, Musk became friends with Richard Hanania, the alt-right political commentator and former associate of white supremacist Richard Spencer, just one week after Hanania had been publicly outed by an investigative journalist for extreme literature he’d written for Spencer’s website.

The proximity of these two events can only lead us to conclude that he became interested because of these writings, and not because Hanania is, as economist Bryan Caplan bafflingly believes, the world’s greatest living essayist, something that could only be true if there was a spectacular catastrophe at the world’s largest essayist convention while Hanania was outside, I don’t know, taking a leak or kicking a homeless person or something.

What kind of writing does a guy like Hanania specialise in that would take the fancy of Caplan as well as billionaire venture capitalists and techbros like Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, Chris Best, and Peter Theil?

Hanania is a middlebrow eugenicist, basically someone who kind of reaffirms what pale rich white guys want to believe about the world—it all comes down to race, and guess what? Yours is the correct one. He’s a phrenology-launderer. A skull-measurer. An ethnic Palestinian who despises his own racial makeup and acts like he’s the sole barbarian who was granted the gift of intelligence and rushed back to warn the rest of us about his savage tribe.

One of Hanania’s key projects, for example, is trying to show that there is no link between crime and poverty. (And he seems to believe this holds for the entire vast umbrella of activities we call crime). That is an extremely comforting thing for the billionaire class to hear, that their efforts to maintain an underclass are not a contributing factor to any kind of civilisational upheaval.

Hanania does have a theory about what does cause crime. You can probably guess what it is and I promise it will not surprise you.

But Hanania isn’t the only Wormtongue whispering in Elon’s ear about skull bumps and IQ scores. Getting back to the black pilots controversy, one of the tweets he was raked over the coals for recently was agreeing with a user who sought to discredit the efficacy of black pilots by dropping alleged IQ averages from HBCUs (historically black colleges and universities) and judging them to be “borderline intellectual impairment.”

That guy, i/o or eyeslasho, is one of several alternate accounts of the same very prolific eugenics bro who goes by at least three different handles across social media, and probably more given the pattern. Much like Hanania, he claims to be some kind of centrist.

Don’t be fooled by that into confusing these guys for moderates or centrists in the milquetoast liberal sense. A right winger who rejects the aesthetic of the mainstream GOP and even perhaps assimilates a couple of leftist ideas is pretty much the definition of “alt-right,” a movement that Hanania helped establish along with his associate Richard Spencer.

Through their recognition of some of mainstream conservatism’s intellectual failings, these self-styled centrists are able to try to smuggle racial pseudoscience into the conversation by using the language of liberalism. If climate deniers, vaccine deniers, and evolution deniers are “science deniers” then it follows so too are those who deny the race hierarchy and strict gender roles!

I can’t say I know where eyeslasho first landed on Musk’s radar except that Musk has been into him for longer than he’s been into Hanania—at least since the beginning of 2023. I had grand plans of doing a kind of investigative journalism piece about this but research is difficult when you are looking into people who all tweet three hundred times a day. Twitter has rate limits and I have limits on both time and ability to absorb massive radioactive chunks of racism at a time. Digital footprints are all these people have, they all delete past tweets on the regular, and you don’t know how often they slide into each other’s DMs.

But I have been able to tie the old red string around a few corkboard nails in search of Racist Pepe Silvia. One of the bizarre skull shape claims Musk was roundly mocked for recently was this one in response to a guy going by the name Crémieux Recueil:

Crémieux, also very unlikely to be a real name, is another account that Musk interacts with fairly regularly. He’s another stats and graphs guy with a particular interest in race, IQ, heritability, and yes, skull measurement.

He, like Richard Hanania, has a Substack publication, and the two of them follow and read and reference each other—as two people who share the same specific interests of course would. Crémieux also lays down arguments that extremely wealthy white people would like very much to stuff into their ideological toolkit. Here he is talking about why you should oppose non-white immigration even if the immigrants are smart and skilled, an argument that seeks to knock down the “skilled labour” defense against the “low value low IQ” accusation levied toward immigrants. Here’s another one seeking to bust the apparent myth that Nigerians are intelligent, as retweeted by his friend eyeslasho:

We know that Elon Musk filters who he interacts with based on whether they have a blue tick and a certain threshold of followers. It’s likely that whichever of the skull-measurers he discovered first led him to the others through retweets and cross-mentions. But where the hell did all these people come from? Both eyeslasho and Crémieux look to have appeared on the internet at roughly the same time, middle-to-late 2022, and amassed a bunch of followers quickly.

Richard Hanania is the only one of the three who has a distinct personality. But he himself has admitted to trolling and spent the first years of his career writing pseudonymously as Richard Hoste. The whole mess of a thing smells like a bunch of dumb groyper shit that you need a lot more understanding of 4chan culture than I do to fully understand.

Then there’s another name that just kept appearing while I tried to learn about these people’s strange online world. It’s not someone who appears to have direct dealings with Elon Musk as far as I can tell, but he sure as hell has a lot going on with these three guys and others in the same sphere.

Steve Sailer doesn’t have a Substack, but he does have a presence on the newsletter platform and likes all of our friends.

He’s a white supremacist in just about any way you can cut it, one of the most influential figures in so-called race science despite having zero science education of any kind. He has coined cheeky euphemisms like “human biodiversity” and “noticing,” the latter of which is the name of his book of essays. Aporia, a Substack newsletter associated again with Crémieux among others, uses the “noticing” buzzword thus:

The problem with attacking progressivism without promoting race realism is straightforward. Because race is a conspicuous social fact and because races have different traits and tendencies, race disparities will remain stubborn and salient. Those who notice and discuss disparate racial outcomes are not just mischievous anons, professional racists, or progressive activists. They are normal humans with normal brains, for it takes no special training to notice patterns of variation in racial performance. In fact, it takes special training not to notice. (One might notice that honesty about noticing is heretical these days.)

For Elon Musk to be even just a constellation in Sailer’s orbit is really not much different to if he was one degree of separation from David Duke, and that should be a concern for everyone.

I do not have any background in any of the sciences that are referenced by these people to make their points, so the job of debunking is out of my wheelhouse—but none of these people seem to have much if any background in sciences either, and I don’t need such a background to be highly skeptical of people who use the language of science from behind veils of anonymity. That’s just cargo cult science.

More importantly to all this: Elon Musk doesn’t have this scientific background either. Not in genetics or heredity or whatever obsolete crypt of debunked woo these people dug their dusty phrenological mummies out from. The boy king, like every other interest he attaches to, sees graphs and instantly enters a fugue state.

It’s important to remember that arguments like these, or anything really, always appear more persuasive and of a higher academic quality the more they reaffirm ideas that you already believe and want to believe harder. And it’s through that lens that you need to understand when someone like Bryan Caplan calls somebody the world’s greatest living essayist.

And it’s just another exhausting example of why we need to disentangle childlike malleable techbros from the extraordinary amount of power we’re giving them over society and politics. If anyone needs their skulls measured and judged, it’s them.