Elon Musk's 'Hunger for Public Attention' Changed Him During the COVID-19 Pandemic, Podcaster Sam Harris Claims as He Details the Text Message That Ended Their Friendship

Political podcaster Sam Harris revealed how Elon Musk's ego and stubbornness led to a falling out between the two online personalities.

Harris recently shared a post on his Substack titled, "The Trouble with Elon," where the online intellectual discussed a text exchange he had with the Tesla billionaire over COVID-19, which led to the end of their years-long friendship.

Harris disclosed that the fallout with the 53-year-old tech bro began in 2020 when the coronavirus started to spread like wildfire across the world.

"I have been quite amazed at Elon’s evolution, both as a man and as an avatar of chaos," Harris wrote. "The friend I remember did not seem to hunger for public attention, but his engagement with Twitter/X transformed him."

It all started when Musk tweeted, "The coronavirus panic is dumb."

Harris revealed how he privately reached out to the tech billionaire over the tweet, worried that it might "exacerbate" the coming public health emergency surrounding the virus.

Harris wrote to Musk: "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."

Musk responded: "Sam, you of all people should not be concerned about this."

He also shared a link to a page on the CDC website stating that, at the time, COVID-19 was not counted among the top 100 causes of death in the U.S.

The podcaster wrote: "This was a patently silly point to make in the first days of a pandemic."

Musk bet Harris $1 million that the U.S. wouldn't see more than 35,000 COVID cases.

A few weeks later, the CDC logged 600,000 cases and 35,000 deaths from COVID-19.

Harris sent Musk another text asking: "Is (35,000 deaths + 600,000 cases) > 35,000 cases?"

"This text appears to have ended our friendship," Harris wrote. "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 eventually left Twitter in 2022, long before Musk bought the platform and rebranded it to X, but that hasn’t stopped the founder of SpaceX from calling him "mentally ill" and "an utter idiot" over the years.

"Any dispassionate observer of Elon’s behavior on Twitter/X can see that there is something seriously wrong with his moral compass, if not his perception of reality," Harris wrote. "There is simply no excuse for a person with his talents, resources, and opportunities to create so much pointless noise."