While leading the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, billionaire Elon Musk oversaw massive spending cuts that have rattled the scientific community to its core.
He stood unblinkingly by the side of president Donald Trump, a climate change denier who has been carrying out a ruthlessly anti-science agenda after championing environmentalism for years.
And while the unlikely pair no longer see eye to eye following a chaotic falling out, the damage has already been done. Musk has been enormously harmful to science — something that researchers aren't likely to forget any time soon.
As The Guardian reports, the Royal Society, the UK's national scientific academy and the oldest institution of its kind in the world, has called for Musk to resign his fellowship. The news comes after the mercurial CEO was elected a fellow of the academy in 2018 for his contributions to the electric vehicle and space industries.
Seven years later, Musk's reputation on the world stage has taken an absolute beating. The billionaire's deranged embrace of far-right extremist ideologies has left a bitter taste in people's mouths, going as far as to alienate the investors of his many businesses.
He's alienated Democrats and Republicans alike. Even leaders in the AI industry have been disgusted by his AI chatbot, which recently started calling itself "MechaHitler" while spewing racist and antisemitic vitriol.
His ruthless gutting of government agency budgets, while at the helm of DOGE, has also rattled the scientific community.
The Trump administration's actions against the institutions of science have been nothing short of catastrophic. According to a Nature poll earlier this year, the vast majority of scientists said they're now considering leaving the United States given the greatly diminished role of research and evaporating funding.
Experts are warning Trump's outright anti-science agenda could have devastating knock-on effects for anybody looking to make a career in the sciences.
Even NASA, which allowed Musk's SpaceX to both survive and thrive, is standing at the edge of a precipice, with the Trump administration planning to deal its science directorate a devastating blow.
His cabinet members have made a mockery of the scientific community, with anti-vaccine crackpot Robert Kennedy Jr. bungling public health policy amidst the largest measles outbreak in the US since it declared the preventable disease eliminated in 2000. Newly elected leaders at the Energy Department are known for rejecting an overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change, as the New York Times reported earlier this month. Trump's health officials are still furthering contested conspiracy theories that the COVID-19 pandemic was caused by a lab leak in China.
In short, that kind of blatantly anti-science agenda flies in the face of the Royal Society's role of promoting science and fostering international cooperation.
In an email sent to the fellowship, revealed this week by The Guardian, president-elect Sir Paul Nurse said that he had warned Musk in March of the "extensive damage" Trump had inflicted on science, asking the entrepreneur to "step in and reverse this tragedy."
Of course, that's not what happened — far from it. In May, Nurse followed up, asking that he consider resigning his fellowship.
Musk never bothered replying until Nurse and current president Sir Adrian Smith warned him the correspondence would be publicized to the fellowship.
However, despite "sharp and opposing" differences of views, Musk "remains a fellow of the Royal Society," as a spokesperson told The Guardian.
The humiliating warning highlights just how far Musk has fallen from once being seen as a pioneer in the electrification of cars and developing reusable rockets that could allow humanity to build out a sustainable presence in space.
But now that's ancient history. Musk has sent a clear message to the scientific community: as always, he's slamming the door behind him.
More on Musk: OpenAI and Anthropic Are Horrified by Elon Musk's "Reckless" and "Completely Irresponsible" Grok Scandal
Share This Article