Elon Musk’s Platform Labels His Argument ‘Objectively False’

Elon Musk’s social media platform labeled his own argument “objectively false” over the weekend.

A community note added to an X, formerly Twitter, post that Musk penned on Sunday blasted the X owner’s remarks about subways being more efficient than cars “objectively false.”

Why This Matters

Musk, who purchased Twitter in October 2022, replaced the platform’s previous efforts to combat misinformation with “community notes,” which X’s site says “aims to create a better-informed world, by empowering people on X to collaboratively add helpful notes to posts that might be misleading.”

What to Know

On Saturday, venture capitalist Shaun Maguire snubbed Musk on X, criticizing not only the social media platform, but also Grok, Tesla’s Roadster, Space X’s Falcon 1 rocket and Neuralink, Musks’ brain-chip company. Musk also owns Tesla and Space X. Grok is X’s proprietary AI bot. In his post, Maguire wrote, “Subways >>> cars.”

Responding to Maguire, Musk fired back, “The throughout in the Vegas tunnels is already better than an average subway btw. It’s a myth that subways are super efficient.”

But other users were quick to dispute Musk’s claims, adding a community note that pointed out that subways have far larger capacity of a road than cars. The note cited Sanjoy Mahan’s “The Art of Insight in Science and Engineering.”

The tunnel Musk referred to is the Las Vegas Convention Center Loop, an underground transportation system that uses Teslas to shuttle passengers among the system’s five stations. Some users also pointed out that while the loop in Las Vegas only served thousands of passengers each hour, individual subway lines in New York City serve hundreds of thousands in the same time frame.

This isn’t the first time Musk’s innovations have contradicted his claims. When asked who the biggest spreader of misinformation on X is, Grok’s response is Musk.

What People Are Saying

A community post on Elon Musk’s tweet said: “This is objectively false. Subways have more than 10x the capacity of a road for cars. The average capacity of a single roadway is typically ~2,000 passengers per hour while the average capacity of a subway line is closer to 50,000 passengers per hour.”

Andrew Miller, a transportation adviser and the co-author of “The Driverless Endgame: Policy and Regulation for Automated Driving,” tweeted Musk’s post on X with the caption: “Live by the Community Notes, die by the Community Notes.”

Sam Deutsch, a transit advocate and author of the urban policy Substack “Better Cities,” wrote: “This is a lie. the max throughput on the Tesla Tunnel is ~4,000 passengers/hr, and in reality probably is closer to 2,000 meanwhile the Lexington Avenue line of the NYC Subway can hit over 100k passengers/hr cars are simply an inefficient way to move many people.”

What’s Next

Social media platforms, like Meta, have increasingly embraced X’s community-based fact-checking approach over other misinformation programs.

In a video posted earlier this month, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg said, “We’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X, starting in the U.S.”