Obviously we theorists working on supersymmetry are playing for big stakes. We're talking about dark matter, the origins of mass scales in physics, unifying the fundamental forces. You have to be realistic: if you are playing for big stakes, very possibly you're not going to win.But he is wrong. He is not playing for big stakes. Helping the poor, avoiding that children die, making people happy: those are the big stakes. Supersymmetry has no relation to such big stakes.
Superymmetry is a diagnosis: it is a specific delusion common among particle physicists. Indeed, Ellis admits that most likely he will die before admitting that supersymmetry is wrong:
After you've run the LHC for another 10 years or more and explored lots of parameter space and you still haven't found supersymmetry at that stage, I'll probably be retired. It's often said that it's not theories that die, it's theorists that die.Ellis is hammering it in: he is suffering from supersymmetry delusion.