Elon Musk Archives - Financial Planning in Surrey

What is Trust?

Dominic Thomas
March 2026 • 3 min read

What is Trust?

At the heart of every good relationship is trust; when it is broken, the relationship will struggle. Sometimes it is possible to repair it, often it is not. A recent event I attended in London for financial planners offered up a talk by Rachel Botsman, author of What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption (2010) a provocative title if ever there was, and more recently Who Can You Trust (2017) and more recently still How to Trust and be Trusted (2025). I have not yet read her books. She is a celebrated podcaster, lecturer at Oxford University and with a Fine Arts Degree, an artist. Significantly she is a “global authority on trust” though quite what this is based on is unclear to me.

Anyway, she provided an interesting talk, some challenges and posed the argument that managing risk is not the same as managing trust and many financial advisers think they are doing one, whilst actually doing the other.

She described these issues as two lenses – risk being about certainty, control, compliance and protection, whilst the lens of trust being uncertainty, confidence, empowerment and possibility. She made some really insightful points about what advisers might do to help our clients reduce or understand risk, whilst also improving trust. In essence, this came down to capability (competence and reliability) fused with character (integrity and empathy).

There were some good lessons that I shall think on and attempt to shape for your benefit. As ever, I tend to be circumspect about what anyone on a stage or platform tells an audience. I was perplexed when she posed a couple of questions. Firstly, she put up three logos – Tesla, Meta and ChatGPT and asked the conference hall delegates to applaud for which they thought was the most trustworthy of the three.

Then she put the images of the CEOs of the same companies (Musk, Zuckerberg and Altman – three white men) and asked us to boo for the one we felt least trustworthy.

I can only speak for myself, but none of these men strike me as remotely trustworthy. They are all billionaires and have well documented histories of breaches of trust and legality, seemingly appearing to be above the law. It may not surprise you that I booed rather loudly for Elon Musk, when Botsman returned to ask people why they had made their selection. As you can imagine, I had a few very choice words to say on the topic. There were a few tuts from my 400 peers (quite a lot of them are Tesla ‘owners’) and she simply said “I was hoping not to get political”.

Whether you agree with my opinion of him or not, I don’t think I brought the politics into the room, it was already quite deliberately there. Maybe I misunderstood the assignment (it wouldn’t be the first time). Anyway, I could have said – well I don’t like him because he bought Twitter and made it a mouthpiece for extremism. That he won’t disable or remove the ability of his AI Grok to turn pictures of you and yours into pornography. I could mention his funding of far-right political parties around the world and here in the UK, or his many misogynistic statements, or replacement theory, his involvement with Trump and short-sighted arrogance with his childish ‘slash and burn’ DOGE antics. He appears to use his own children as human shields and manages to persuade women to have more with him, treating them like transactions. There are questions about his technological involvement in elections and despite his vast wealth, he uses it simply to fund excess and rocket tests rather than solving real problems here on earth. He complains about immigrants, despite being essentially a white South African that never opposed apartheid and is now in permanent exile. No I don’t like him and his interference, lies and utterly inappropriate commentary about “the state of Britain”. Yes I did see him do a Nazi salute and refuse to pretend it didn’t happen. It seems that the biggest ‘sin’ these days is naming things (like racism) as they are rather than actually being so.

So, ok – maybe I did bring the politics to the forefront, but I didn’t bring them into the presentation.

But this is about trust and integrity right? I think the ability to challenge narratives with the aim of shining a light on truth wherever it leads and however exposing it may be, are part of having integrity.

Rachel offers up a number of tests that we can try out exposing how our search for familiarity may offer up inaccurate trust signals, but that these are foundational in our early development. We look for familiarity in others to help us trust, backgrounds and appearance (even looking similar to ourselves) all play a part in this and form an unhelpful confirmation and desirability bias that facilitates trust, without any ‘real’ information. This also goes to the heart of AI and the trust being placed in systems that regurgitate familiar, not necessarily truthful answers.

Interesting though. I wonder what you think? I’m genuinely curious.

Anyway, I will be adding to Rachel’s coffers at some point to read her work in more detail, it’s certainly interesting and relevant for the moment and she is an engaging communicator.

Ref: https://www.rachelbotsman.com/

https://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/about-us/people/rachel-botsman

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Elon Musk is going to end me

Dominic Thomas
May 2024 • 3 min read

Elon Musk is going to end me

We have all marvelled at the advances made in technology and scientific breakthroughs. Most of us will have seen at least a handful of dystopian films about the end of humanity as we know it as the robots rise to power. Our screens and media in all forms are predictably full of alarm, after all – nothing grabs attention quite as well as fear.

Mr Musk or let’s just call him Mr X, a reductionist term that he appears to enjoy. It is hard to ignore the fact that he aspires to be a rival for a Bond villain with his odd sense of over importance and world domination. Anyway, Mr X thinks that financial advisers need to be worried about the threat of AI. There are many in my field who agree.

I am mindful of not wanting to take the Kodak approach to life, ignoring the rapid changes in consumer demands as technology improves and changes the landscape. Indeed I welcome it, from improvements to efficient data gathering and report writing, to better and clearer understanding of issues and options. To reduced operating costs and greater transparency. I am all in favour.

So am I to believe that a series of prompts from a cyborg will replace me? Well I suspect that s/he will be better looking, be able to perform some tasks much more quickly, but in terms of time spent with you and for you, that remains to be seen. I struggle to believe that empathy is little more than coding.

I am not fool enough to believe that change is not coming (some is already here) but I would like to remind you of some basic truths that, despite our enormous advances in technology, continue to frustrate and make life worse rather than better.

I wonder if you have tried to pay for a parking permit with a London Borough lately? Or attempted to get the NHS appointment system to operate? Tried to call a telecom company to discuss the problems with your line or change an error on your pre-flight check-in? To have had your mobile phone lost or locked and successfully restored all your data and applications, especially the authenticator. To book tickets online for an event in the milliseconds after they go on sale or simply try to check your National Insurance number when your surname or suffix has altered and are shocked to realise that you do not exist, perhaps we are living in the Matrix after all. Perhaps you have an old-style pension with an old-style pension company and you simply cannot obtain the right information, or you are an employee trying to retire and your employer’s pension scheme administration is, well… stuck in what seems to resemble something out of spoof BBC series from the 1980s Allo, Allo.

The commonality with these examples is that they are instances where technology has been deployed and is utterly hopeless – and they are all very common experiences. Your call definitely is not as important as you are being told, otherwise someone senior would have done something about it. As for the virtual assistants on most banking sites, well forgive me if I scream and wish for the mortal failure of swathes of the Banking sector. Yet these are all rather straightforward instances where simple technology really ought to be delivering the changes promised by the Consultants that sold them for multimillion sums, yet fail every single day.

The basics of scheduling, such as a routine, repeat order (anything from pet medication to your wine club) really should not be quite so hard to amend. A refund from the DVLA who collect your road tax each month from your bank account by direct debit yet insist on sending an oversized cheque that your banking app cannot cope with, so you have the joys of finding a local branch of your bank to deposit it the ‘old-fashioned way’. Perhaps that train ticket that you bought online is wrong and it’s too onerous to change or you now struggle with touch screens due to a medical condition that you cannot even book a ticket without joining the queue at the ticket desk now operated by someone who clearly thinks that online capability means there is now no requirement for the excesses of any human interaction.

When Amazon manage to master packaging an item into an appropriately sized box or when the next DPD driver asks if you are over 18 and if you could provide your date of birth (why?). When your washing machine, fridge, doorbell, health tech all are savvy enough to appreciate that you really couldn’t care less if they have finished their task and can dispense with the notification of the mundane. When the weather forecast is right or indeed the economic one, or a politician says what they mean rather than what they believe you want to hear.

I imagine that you assume that we use technology here at Solomon’s, and that we do so with thought and regard. I know it isn’t perfect and we all get fed up repeating some of the exercises. I also assume that you want to speak to a human who can help you grapple with sometimes dull, sometimes painful, sometimes stressful, sometimes embarrassing (really?) and sometimes joyful elements of helping you figure out how to make the most of your time and money and the relationship between them.

Whilst I do agree technology offers the possibility of enormous benefits, I respectfully remain unconvinced that either utopia or dystopia are arriving anytime soon.

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