What is it like to be Elon Musk?

Grokking the Mind of an Eccentric Billionaire

tl;dr to understand how Elon Musk thinks: Given some action, is it good or bad for this manatee?

The Reason I’m Writing this Essay

You should not be proud of yourself for failing to understand someone else’s point of view. You should not be proud of yourself for thinking someone else is stupid, especially when they keep beating you in political battles. Even when you have vehement disagreement. Even when that person can only accurately be described as your mortal enemy.

That’s it. That’s the whole idea.

Political discourse has collapsed into self-congratulation not only for opposing your rivals but for claiming such purity that you can’t even understand them. This claim suggests you are so good that you can’t even imagine evil! This mistakes ignorance for virtue. We call our rivals irrational, brainwashed, or outright depraved never stopping to ask what genuine concerns might be animating them. We all do our best play-acting to suppose that tens of millions of people coordinate around an opposing idea for literally no reason whatsoever.

A strong country requires strong political parties in conflict. Strong parties require strong, honorable citizens. And an honorable citizen doesn’t lack the fundamental curiosity necessary to put him or herself in another person’s shoes. You don’t have to agree with your opponent, but if you can’t grasp why they think the way they do then you should see that as an enormous personal failure. It should be considered one of the most egregious forms of willful stupidity. Worse, it’s a recipe for continued failure!

Consider this quote from Saladin, a Muslim general in the midst of a war against Christian crusaders. Upon the death of his enemy, King Amalric I, he sent this message to Amalric’s son:

May he know that we are to him what we were to his father: unclouded affection, true profession of faith, love whose bond is firm in life and death, and a mind that judges with openness in this world, regardless of what contrasts exist in religion.

Compare that to how modern political leaders speak about one another.

I want you to step into the mind of Elon Musk. He’s in the news constantly, shaping industries, policies, and the public conversation. There have literally been a couple dozen controversies just since I started writing this piece.¹ Some see him as a genius. Others, a madman. Either way, he is one of the most influential people of our time.

If you support Musk, then understanding him will help you refine your own arguments. You’ll be able to convert people to the cause. If you oppose him, then understanding him is even more essential. You cannot fight an enemy you refuse to comprehend.

So let’s walk a mile in his shoes. Let’s think like he does. And by the end of this, whether you love or hate him, I want you to understand him as I believe he understands himself.

A Man, A Mission, a Messianic Complex

Elon Musk was born in South Africa during Apartheid. This was a very bad place to be born. I don’t dispute it was far worse for the black population than for a relatively well-off caucasian child. That’s not the point. Even today, when the problems are differently bad, very few people from the United States of any race would choose to live in South Africa. I mean, how many places can you live where people kill children for their medicinal properties?

It’s instrumental to consider that Elon, who can’t stop talking about civilizational risk, grew up in a country that more or less never quite got its act together. He’s from a civilization that repeatedly tried and failed to establish itself on the global stage and to this day often struggles to keep the electricity running. He lived through this turmoil and decline and it’s hard not to imagine it shaping his worldview, especially when he was born shortly after the collapse of Rhodesia. Americans are used to living in a world where it feels like nothing changes, but Musk lived through the fallout of major political upheaval and was raised around people whose country had failed. The reality of rapid political change was real to a young Musk in a way that it isn’t to most Americans.

Elon’s father’s, by most reports, is a nut job. A talented guy, but complex, and again just kind of nuts. I’ve seen interviews with Errol Musk and he definitely triggers my Looney Tunes sensor. He’s someone who can think, who can be normal, but who by default sees the world in a sort of funhouse mirror and has trouble making all the pieces fit together. By way of example, some years after Elon moved out, Errol Musk married his step-daughter. In interviews when he’s asked how this happened he tells a very compelling, but completely unrelated, story for about fifteen minutes, and then as an afterthought adds there was a situation of uncertain paternity so he married his stepdaughter. All the steps taken that caused him to end up in the same bed as his stepdaughter in the first place are completely absent. He also killed three people in self-defense, which is unfortunate but understandable when those people are also trying to kill you. However, Errol also insists he killed those three people with only two bullets while dodging over fifty bullets. This seems far less likely.

Elon and his father are at best in a strained relationship and at worst estranged.

Elon’s mother comes across as genuinely warm and caring in interviews, but for Elon’s childhood she was caught up in an abusive marriage and trying to find a way out. He has siblings with whom he shares good relationships but the two people he most needed to provide stability were not stable during his formative years. His parents divorced when he was ten years old. In many ways, Elon was alone.

If you’re liberal, none of the things you want to be true from this period of Elon’s life are true. The Musk family was in opposition to Apartheid although in Errol’s case this seems more… to use the word over and over, complex. To debunk a popular myth, they didn’t own an emerald mine. This story seems to come from Errol, in a tall-tale involving the sale of an airplane under strange circumstances, and even then he only claims to have been a re-seller. The rest of the Musk family denies this happened at all. Without some corroborating evidence, I have a hard time finding Errol a trustworthy autobiographer. The Musks were a reasonably well to do family from Errol’s engineering job, but they weren’t mega wealthy. They seemed at minimum to be uncomfortable with the racism of their society and Elon was making plans from the time he was a child to avoid having to enter compulsory military service.

I can tell you what this kind of bizarre family instability did to me and how I see it around the edges of Elon’s personality. I like to take what I know and extend it toward other people, looking for universals.² In the ugliest part of my mind, in parts of my personality that do not make me proud, I consider anyone who is not an abuse survivor to be a kind of eternal child. I dismiss people as blind, or I humor them and conceal my true feelings. Even in my most charitable up-top thinking, when I’m actively adjusting all of my biases, I’m still sometimes staggered by the average American’s inability to conceive of negative outcomes as actually possible realities. I know many other people from similar backgrounds who wrestle with similar feelings. I can see this same thought-pattern play at the edges of Musk’s personality.

There’s a temptation in this kind of formative childhood pain. You want to make it have a point. The point that is most readily available is that your pain left you with a special kind of knowledge that has been denied to anyone who hasn’t been left a bloody, quivering mess. You know something about the harshness of the world that makes you special. When you’re wounded and alone in the dark,³ you eventually have to find something in yourself to stop crying and get up no matter how much it hurts. The thing that lifts you up, the feeling that you’re on your own, is like a secret you can’t ever share with anyone else. Not even with these words right now, really.

By all accounts, Elon had to do this multiple times. Even apart from the other abuse he suffered, during his teen years he was pushed down a flight of stairs and beaten so badly at school that he had to be hospitalized. There are stories of a summer camp where the other kids beat him up every day. Errol was less than sympathetic during these events. Elon didn’t fit in from the start.

The other thing you have to know about Elon is that he’s autistic. It might be one of his tall tales, but Errol claims that a principal told him that Elon was mentally retarded so they had to switch schools. I think he’d probably jolt at the comparison, but my guess is that Elon inherited a difficulty understanding other people from his father. The reason he was pushed down those stairs is because he told a kid whose father had committed suicide that his father was an idiot. Or, again, so the story goes. Given other public adult Elon behavior, I don’t find spurts of that kind of staggering rudeness to be unbelievable as a child. Like the adult Musk calling a cave-diver attempting to rescue children a pedophile, my guess is at the time he had wholly convinced himself he was correct. His faith in himself to understand the truth was so strong the circumstances didn’t matter even as a child.

Elon’s IQ is estimated to be north of 150 and that pushes open doors, for all the quibbles we could make about autism and psychometrics. He coded and sold a game called Blastar at the age of twelve. During a computer coding competition he was tested to have the highest achievable coding aptitude on the assessment. His academic performance was a bright spot throughout his life.

He fell in love with science fiction during these formative years. He learned to leave the chaotic world around him and wrap his mind around the words on a page. He talks about this in interviews all the time. This is where I relate to Elon the most. I spent a lot of time hiding behind a freezer in the laundry room pushing my mind out into the future. I know exactly what this feeling is like. I think about the ultimate fate of the universe about as often as most men think about the Roman Empire. You can pick it up from his interviews that Musk spent as much of his mental time as possible on Middle Earth as a child and as little of it as possible in his immediate surroundings. This made him an idealist and a romanticist, and if you think I’m paying some kind of universal compliment then you’ve never lived with one.

He got out of South Africa as soon as he could by way of Canada, wiggled his way into America, and made his fortune. You can read more about that in his biography if you’re interested. My sense is that he might have had moderately more family support than he claims, but that this was still an insane thing for a teenager to do. He showed up at the door of some distant relatives without warning and just trusted that they wouldn’t turn him out. He was ready to take risks from a very young age. He dropped out of college to go start an Internet company called Zip2 even though it would imperil his visa. This has never been a man who sits by and waits for perfect circumstances to act. He just grasps whatever opportunity exists and moves. It’s a fundamental part of his character. Given any chance of success, Elon will make an attempt.

Some of this is speculation on my part, but I’ve seen in interviews that Elon understands science-fiction at a deep almost obsessive level. If you asked him to describe the relationship of the Landsraad to the Empire in the Dune series, he could probably write a five-page paper off the top of his head. Similarly if you asked him to write about the Three Laws of Robotics in the Foundation, he would probably immediately correct you that there are actually four. These were the myths of his childhood and he openly credits them as central to the formation of his character. These stories tend to revolve about some singular person with an important insight about the world they inhabit, or special relationship to that world, who then uses that power to create a new paradigm. Maybe Elon doesn’t think of himself in these terms consciously, but Elon the industrialist certainly seems to operate in the world like he views himself as a science-fiction protagonist. Real life is more complicated than that, of course, but if you map his actions to that understanding it tends to be predictive.

What would Elon do?

What would a science-fiction hero do?

What frictions would those actions create in the real world when there isn’t a science-fiction author somewhere in the background making everything stick together?

It’s very easy to be cynical and pretend that Elon doesn’t believe the things he says about putting people on Mars or saving the environment through electric cars. I find it harder to believe he could survive two biographers with full access to his daily life, thousands of interviews, and personal conversations but still keep this thread consistent. He believes it’s his mission to save humanity. I know you might think “well, he’s certainly not doing it” or “that’s delusional” but again we are speaking to his understanding of himself. This is a man who spent over a year sleeping in one of his factories because, and I quote, “If Tesla fails, the world is doomed.” Extend yourself into these situations, the way that I do. What would it take to make you sleep in a factory everyday for longer than a year? Like, actually do it. Not just pat yourself on the back about how you would totally be willing to do it if the exact right set of things happened. Maybe the idea that you alone have to save the world?

By the same token, this is the kind of faith you need to yell at employees or fire people in large numbers. Or do any other kind of weird off-the-wall thing. If you have a motivating belief, all kinds of non-normal behaviors become unlocked. This is the primary difference between Elon and other people. When he believes something to be true, he immediately puts down his chips and goes all in and everything from his wealth to his personal sanity are fair game.

I think everyone who has read a bunch of science-fiction and fantasy novels believes this to some extent, but Elon extra believes it. He grew up in a world that was collapsing, which probably had a lot to do with it.

The Most Intelligent Man in the World

Like most people, you probably have a really bad definition of what it means to be intelligent. I would argue the definition you think of most commonly has evolved to prevent you from achieving things in your life by short-circuiting your reward signals. I am sorry if you have a very high IQ and I am the first person to be explaining this to you.

You have probably been brainwashed by schools to think that intelligence means something like “ability to do well on tests” or “attainment of high and exclusive credentials.” This is wrong. Those are things that point toward intelligence, but they are not intelligence itself.

Intelligence, better defined, is the ability to identify an aim and move across time so that you accomplish that aim. You want to make a billion dollars? Okay, lay out a strategy, execute it, and adapt along the way until you reach the end goal. You want to manage multiple companies? Okay, figure out the governance and command structure to make that happen then execute it. The better you are at doing this versus other people, the more intelligent you are. Some people call this agency, but to me they’re closely tied. It doesn’t matter how “smart” you are on paper if you can’t turn that into action.

I’ll share with you the most common failure mode to understand this that I’ve ever seen. Lawrence O’Donnell, a news anchor on MSNBC, had a viral clip about how Putin is not an intelligent man because he never attended an elite university and he holds no elite credentials. The fact that Putin, at a young age, was able to enter into the KGB and then wind up as the dictator of Russia and keep that position for decades in a dangerous country, was to O’Donnell not an accomplishment that indicates high intelligence. To O’Donnell intelligence is the ability to do well in school. To Putin, it’s the ability to consolidate power in the real world.

Properly understood, Elon is the most intelligent man on the planet. I’m sorry, he just is. If he wasn’t, how did he accomplish all the things that piss people off so much? A lot of people confuse intelligence with moral virtue, which is silly, but whenever I see someone call Elon stupid that is unfailingly the framework they are operating under.

Consider:

Elon wanted to be an American, and as a seventeen year old with limited resources he became one.

Elon wanted to become wealthy as an entrepreneur, and he did it multiple times.

He wanted to start a rocket company, he now launches more payload to orbit than the rest of the world combined.

He wanted to start an electric car company, the Model Y is the best selling car in the world.

He wanted to curb the spread of what he calls “the woke mind virus,” he bought twitter and well… what happened then?

The government started to put pressure on his business, he supported an opposition candidate and that candidate won.

He controls the world’s only global satellite internet network. He controls the world’s only reusable rockets. Pretty soon, he will have the only launch vehicle capable of delivering a payload to any location in the solar system. If this was so easy, even taking Errol’s wildest claims about how much help he gave to his children to start out in life as true, how come there aren’t a bunch of rich kids roaming the world doing all of this? Why hasn’t China done this? Why hasn’t Europe? Or NASA?

This is the bitter pill I want my liberal friends to swallow. Stop flattering yourself every time Elon makes a mistake, or makes a dumb tweet, or a stupid joke. Ask yourself, if Elon performs an action what goal is that action likely to further? If a magician keeps throwing his right hand in your face and makes an object in his left hand disappear, how many more times are you going to fall for it before you realize you’re being played like a fiddle?

I am not at all saying that Elon is some all-wise, all-knowing, ultra-Machiavellian character who turns every single one of his actions to a higher and hidden purpose. That is stupid. What I’m saying is that he bifurcates when he wants to be stupid and when he wants to get something done. He doesn’t let his Twitter bullshit get in the way of the rest of his cognition, although more on this below. The disconnect is that everyone will stop and stare at the twitter bullshit instead of asking what kind of factory purchases he’s making.

If Elon is given a task, he breaks it down into parts, hires people who can accomplish each of those sub-tasks, and tracks progress until the task is complete.

If one of Elon’s enemies is given a task —even when I agree they are in the right in that circumstance and the goal is worthy, please for the love of Christ get this through your fucking head— they write a long post, or have a television appearance where they talk about what a good person they are.

Which strategy do you think is going to come out on top?

Elon, An Impractical Idealist and a Practical Businessman

There’s a learned practicality alongside Elon’s idealism. He started an electric car company and a reusable rocket company and both of them worked out, even though neither of those kinds of companies had ever existed before. He must know that wasn’t all his own talent. No one is that smart. Part of why he’s winning is positional advantage.

It seems like having a good and worthy goal is a magnet to good engineering talent, so he has to know that it helps him enrich himself even as he dares things that seem impossible. He found a working strategy and then kept using it to build wealth.

This is the formula:

Create a place for the worthiest possible goal within a field to become a business.

Attract the best talent pool to fulfill that goal.

Do all the mind-numbing, painstaking shit to make the company profitable enough to be self-sustaining.

Enormous Profit.

There’s a lot of pill-based terminology in our society, but I’m going to drop a new one. Allow me to give you the “project-pill” or “an understanding of what it actually takes to get something accomplished in the real world.” Elon might be the greatest project manager who has ever lived. In terms of actually getting things done in real life, whether you love him or hate him, he’s the best living. This is as ludicrously indisputable to me as someone claiming that Michael Jordan sucked at basketball because they disapproved of his gambling habit.

Again, let me extend myself into this situation and then try to map my mind to Elon’s so I can help you understand. The most people I have ever directly managed is six. Usually, because my teams are over product that means we end up directly impacting a fairly large group of people. I have a pretty broad ownership and one of the questions I always have to ask myself when entering into a situation is, “Should I even let my attention get drawn into this?” or “is this detail critical enough that it needs my direct supervision?” Even then, I’m probably in the top one-percent of product managers for “in-the-weedsness.”

Apparently, Elon never really asks himself this question. When he goes to his start-ups, he just has every employee in the company come and give him an update on what they’re doing. Then he makes sure it all fits together. Anytime someone tells him they can’t do something, he goes and figures out how to do it himself. And then does. Usually, this is by moving resources around. I call this the “Coordination Super Power.”

You might be objecting here, and I’ll answer some of the most common ones.

“Uh dude, he just hires people to figure all of this out for him.”

Okay. You have no idea what you’re talking about. That’s the dumbest thing you could have possibly said. I’m sorry. You just don’t even understand the levels of ignorance you exposed by making that point. It’s like saying evolution can’t be true because there are still monkeys. If you went into any elite group of people who have to build stuff and make sure it actually works and said that, people wouldn’t even laugh at you. They’d just completely dismiss you as a serious person. They’d just think, “Oh, a regular person who has never built anything before or had to hire someone.”

Do you think it’s easy to attract the best talent, determine who the best talent is, and then coordinate that talent with everyone else? This doesn’t just happen. At minimum, Elon has an ability to determine who possesses real skill across an incredibly broad knowledge base. He has to go into a room to talk to people, about a technology that doesn’t even exist yet, and figure out if the person he’s talking to can make that technology real. If you think that’s easy, I promise you that means you definitely can’t do it. This is as stupid as watching golf and thinking “you just have to hit a ball into a hole, how hard could it be?” then showing up at a golf course expecting to be Happy Gilmore.

If you this were easy, why doesn’t every company succeed?

“Well, he misses the deadlines all the time.”

Consider what he’s attempting to do. Self-driving cars for one. If I left you alone with all the resources in the world and asked you to build a self-driving car how long would that take you? Where would you even go to start hiring people?

Same with reusable rockets. Nobody thought he could make that work. People laughed him out of boardrooms. He literally went sorting through hobbyist rocket groups until he found a guy named Tom Mueller, figured out that Tom actually knew what he was talking about, then sat down and read rocketry textbooks until he knew enough to be the chief architect at the company because Tom had to spend all his time on the engines. Elon tried to hire someone else to do it, but none of the skilled people would join the company. So rather than hire substandard talent, he literally taught himself.

You can dislike him. You can say he’s lost his mind. But you can’t say he doesn’t know how to execute.

“Whatever dude, he’s a billionaire who is hoarding wealth.”

Elon probably works about a hundred hours a week, minimum. You can say he’s building wealth, but he definitely isn’t wandering around some lavish estate surrounded by peacocks and geese. His most natural environment in this world is working in a place of business. Taking him off a production floor is like taking a fish out of water and asking why it’s gasping and acting weird. Over the years he has become hyper-optimized to do just that and I would argue it’s at the cost of literally everything else.

What Happened at DOGE?

Suppose you arrived at a company that was getting caught in a debt spiral. You probably don’t know what a debt spiral is, so I’ll take a second to explain. A debt spiral is what happens when a company has so much debt compared to its revenues that they can no longer refinance the debt at interest rates low enough to keep making their payments.

Deep Dive: What’s a Debt Spiral?

Let’s say your company owes $1 million in debt. You make $100k per year in profit. When the interest rate on the debt is 3% per year, your total interest payment on that debt is only $30k. Plus some amount extra amount to go toward the principal balance. In this example your business makes $100k a year so that’s easy for you to cover!

Now balloon that up to a 10% interest rate per year and you owe $100k a year before you even touch your principal balance. You’ll work all year to make no money! Worse, you’ll be losing money because the bank still needs you to pay down the principal.

Every company keeps some amount of money in reserve to care for situations like this. Accidents happen. You hit unexpected expenses. You can take a bad year or two and keep going.

Now, let’s say you were in the middle of expanding so you started to take out an unusual amount of debt, when suddenly the interest rates spike. Your cash reserves are lower than normal. You no longer have enough money to make the payments and you can’t afford to keep expanding to make more money. It’s a recipe for disaster.

You’re running lower and lower on cash to make ends meet.

To stay afloat, you try to borrow more money in order to get through the rough spot until the interest rates drop or your revenues increase. Except now you’re a bad bet for the bank so you have to borrow at higher and higher interest rates which makes the problem worse and worse. Each time you go back to the bank the terms are worse and worse. More and more of your money goes to paying interest and less and less can be used to maneuver your company to a better position. The hole gets deeper and deeper.

Eventually, unless revenues increase or debt is reduced, the company runs out of money and goes bankrupt.

This is what is meant by a debt spiral.

You take a look at the facts on the ground and figure out you can’t solve this in any realistic way through raising revenues. In this example, the market opportunity just isn’t there because you’re already as expensive or more expensive than your competitors. Besides, you could 10x your revenues and it wouldn’t even touch the debt. This company has been borrowing for a long time. The only move left is to slash expenses, rapidly.

You’re coming in as part of new management. Everyone else at the company is entrenched and hostile because they know the changes you are mandated to bring could cost their jobs. This organization is also huge. It would take years for you to understand the full operations of this company. If you try to be too careful in your cuts you won’t ever be able to get the debt down before the debt spiral starts.

What’s the first move you make?

You make sure you have tight control over the payments systems and the budget books. This is the single greatest point of leverage over the whole company. It’s like taking control of the company’s heart.

You halt all payments so everyone has to show up and make their case to you why they are critical. This is the way you get immediate action from all the people you need. Do this differently and everyone will drag their feet for months. Everyone who was reluctant to explain their precise value now has to do it or their whole division rams into the ground and they’re out of work anyway.

You make sure everyone tells you three things. What do they do that generates money? What do they do that is legally required for operations? What is the chain of events that would lead to a lawsuit if they stopped working?

Everything that you aren’t required to pay to keep the organization going you don’t pay, and you make people fight to pull the money out of your hands. It’s a question of survival. If you legally have to pay something, then you let the courts drag it out of your hands after however many delays you can put in the way. You have to be wary of lawsuits when doing this and damages, and you won’t do it perfectly, but you’re in a desperate situation. The longer you hold the money even if you end up paying it later, the safer you are from the debt spiral.

Everyone at the company hates you for doing this but if you don’t do this there won’t even be a company anymore.

Now let’s say you have a very temperamental board you have to serve. The way in which you do your cost cutting, your outward attitude, becomes important. You have to show wins early on so you will be allowed to keep going. You have to start places you can make the cuts and get away with it before moving to the places with higher resistance. This way you build momentum and gain support instead of using up your strength in the first go around.

There are quibbles I have with all of this, but I think this is what Elon believes he was doing with the Department of Government Efficiency. Right now, over a quarter of your tax dollar is going toward paying interest on the nation’s debts. The company in this scenario is the government and Elon believes that what he’s doing is saving the government from driving itself into the ground. In this case, the disastrous outcome would be something like the United States no longer being the reserve currency of the world. That means, other countries would stop using our money to settle debts and our money would be worth a lot less overnight. This is a lot more complicated because a business is not a country, so we’ll do another breakout box for the curious:

Changing World Order

You’ve probably never heard of this guy, but Ray Dalio is one of the most successful investors to ever live. He called the mortgage crisis in 2008 for those not in the know. He’s one of a handful of institutional investors to consistently beat the market. Elon definitely knows who he is. One of Elon’s friends, David Freiberg, quotes Dalio on this stuff all the time. Dalio has been predicting a decline of the United States as the world’s leading power for a few years now. I can’t summarize it into a few paragraphs but basically, civilizations tends to follow a certain track where they grow and acquire debt. Then, when the debt is no longer sustainable, they collapse. Dalio believes we are in danger of entering the collapse phase.

For what it’s worth, I agree with large parts of what Dalio says on this except that I think this kind of crisis is inherently reflexive, meaning that people knowing about the crisis causes rapid changes in behavior. We also have AI ramping up, which could flip the whole game board. None of what Dalio believes will hold in a world where United States GDP grows 10% per year.

There are more complicated things people would point to, like the Federal Reserve Bank doing something to “financialize” the debt, but most of the ways available for them to do that would result in massive inflation. When you’re playing financial games against the people who control the money supply, it’s a bit like playing a game against someone who has the authority to change the rules of the game while you’re playing. You can’t ever win but what is less obvious is that they also can’t change those rules so much that everyone else refuses to play. A country collapses when it starts bending the rules on its currency so much that nobody else wants to keep playing games with their money. I’m by no means an expert here so feel free to sound off in the comments.

Elon bungled DOGE in many ways. The primary of which is that he listened to people who were more or less pulling things out of their ass. He’s highly culpable for this because, as discussed above, he is very good at picking talent. That means he deluded himself into believing people who said things like that there were millions of fake people receiving social security benefits. Most of the federal budget is for entitlement programs people would be very upset to lose. The second mistake is that he never bothered to explain himself. Elon doesn’t believe in Public Relations. Tesla and SpaceX famously do not have public relations departments. Elon’s error here was mistaking the citizenry of the United States, the board which controls the government, as consumers who don’t want to be bothered with details. The third, and most alarming, mistake is that Elon didn’t course correct when he realized he couldn’t win this way. In the past, he’s been much better about taking his lumps and changing his approach.

For instance, a program called PEPFAR which provides AIDS medications to literal babies in Africa was a small line item of USAID. Everyone in America should feel proud for paying for AIDS medication for literal babies in Africa. If you saw the babies your tax dollars are saving you would feel rightly proud. Elon viewed this expense to be cut instead of a cudgel to be wielded. A young and wiser Elon would have picked up PEPFAR and said, “Well, obviously we can’t cut this. This is the most important program. Look at all these other programs I have to cut so that I can save this one? Who could even argue? Do you want babies to die?”

This tactic is at the center of the Venn diagram of “Obvious” “Moral” and “Cynical.” Instead, Elon cut it with very little explanation, did very little by the way of assuring people it was turned back on, and probably some babies died for it. I only say probably because I have very low trust in the media especially about anything political, but in terms of things that seem well reported, this reporting seemed to stand up pretty well to my immediate bullshit detection.

Another failure point was that Elon couldn’t let anyone else be the hero of the story. Multiple members of the Senate and Congress approached Elon asking for him to bring cuts to the floor so they could be voted on. Elon apparently made no attempt to do this. He wanted to go in as the sole hero and be the champion who saved the United States government. He behaved as if there was no time to take a more sustainable route and as a result seems to have made many enemies and ultimately failed.

Was he right act with this kind of urgency?

This is where I’m a bit more sympathetic to Elon than others. How often has he been right about something everyone else said was wrong? My guess is that he actually is wrong, not only in the way he went about making the changes but with the urgency as well. This is hard not to read as the first major blunder of his business career.

Time will tell.

Yes, Elon is Crazy and it’s Getting Worse

I’m embarrassed to admit that I thought he would do a better job containing this than he has, but Elon is very publicly going crazy. He’s never been normal. Normal people don’t live like he does, or accomplish the things he does.

Let’s go through an analogy to explain what I think is happening.

Imagine you’re in the cockpit of an airplane. There’s a war going on outside and the plane has taken damage. The airport where you were going to land has been destroyed. There’s another one, farther away, but all the dials and gauges are spitting out one ugly fact. You don’t have the fuel to get there.

The worst part of your situation is that it’s not hopeless. If you are willing to do the unthinkable you might survive.

You go through the plane with a wrench and you start stripping out everything you possibly can. Out the door it goes. The luggage first. The seats. The overhead storage bins. Some of this stuff you can afford to lose, but it’s not enough to get where you’re going. All the easy, trivial decisions are made early.

Out goes the floor paneling and back-up systems. Wires and conduits and casing. Gauges for everything you don’t need, like all the gauges blaring at you about all the things you threw out the door. You have to stand up in the cockpit because your pilot chair is gone. Even most of the life support systems are out the door because if you can’t get to the other airport you’re going to die anyway. The windows were critical to keep the plane aerodynamic but as long as you can shiver you don’t think you’ll freeze to death so your coat went out the window as well. Same with all the systems keeping the air comfortable in the cabin, so now you’re gasping just to stay standing.

Everything you’re doing is life or death. Every decision.

This is the relationship that Elon has with his own psyche. Oh, it’s not a perfect analogy but this seems close enough to me. There’s some chicken and the egg questions here for me, but consider the missions he’s chosen. All of them involve the long-term survival of humanity. Every last one. Tesla is for making energy and therefore civilization sustainable. SpaceX is for making life multi-planetary. Even the Twitter purchase was because he feared that the Woke Mind Virus would tear down the United States. He tweets constantly about fertility collapse and… uh… well, he’s certainly had an interesting response to that problem. If he didn’t choose those missions because he has a life-or-death way of looking at the world, he certainly seems to have acquired that outlook after the decades leading those companies.

This makes sense when you consider the extreme lengths he’s willing to push himself to in order to succeed. In his own mind, he’s the only thing that stands between mankind and oblivion. He’s repurposed every part of his mind that doesn’t serve the missions he’s selected. Except, of course, no human mind could bear that kind of weight. You can try, and Elon has tried, but you will inevitably fail.

He manages several enormous and complex companies. No normal person could do that, so how does he do it? Think of what he doesn’t have. Deep, vulnerable relationships. Real hobbies. A personal, non-public life. All the stuff he’s involved with other than running his companies looks like brain death. Explain the contrast between SpaceX and his X posting any other way! There’s almost nothing left of Elon apart from his companies. Just video games and twitter. All activities where you don’t have to show up as a fully incorporated human being. Family? Put it this way, he certainly isn’t going to win any father of the year awards. By all accounts, he doesn’t go on vacation. The only times I’ve ever seen him appear natural are when he’s interviewed at one of his businesses about things that are happening at that business. That’s the only time I’ve ever seen him in an interview where I didn’t get the sense that something was wrong.

Elon’s attempt to sacrifice his own soul to his work isn’t perfect because it can’t be. That’s what we are seeing now. Elon is human and humans can’t do to themselves what Elon is attempting to do to himself. We are not machines and we need things like family, friends, and fun to stay sane. You can no more operate without these things in the long-term than a large piece of industrial equipment can operate without a cooling system. It’s part of what you need to function.

Maybe you can fly an airplane indefinitely with only one of the back-up systems removed. What are the odds you’re going to face that one specific error? Pretty low, I bet. But what are the odds you are going to need at least one of those back-up systems? What are the odds you’re going to face an error? Elon once lamented that he wished there was a way to just inject nutrients into his body so he didn’t have to stop working long enough to eat. That’s how deep the cutting into his own mind has gone. And you can’t live by that ethos. You just can’t.

Your human genes want you to have a family unit. You feel comforted by the sight of your family. Except Elon threw away his first wife because it was too hard to deal with her drama while trying to run two companies at the same time. If you don’t think he’s a romantic trying to fill a hole, he married his second wife twice. Do you know how love blind you have to be in order to do something like that? He’s been trying for decades to cut it all away! Now the “I need a wife and kids” alarms are blaring. It’s an emergency! This is a human need the same way that a big bandsaw needs to be water-cooled. His psychology will collapse if he doesn’t do something. So he knocks-up Ashley St. Clair and sends a DM to Tiffany Fong asking her if she’ll have his child.

He needs friends except he doesn’t have any. Not really. The closest thing he has to friends are people like Sam fucking Harris trying to make “gotcha” bets while his companies are burning down during a pandemic he was hoping wasn’t real. That’s worse than having no friend at all. Everyone around him wants something. It’s all business with a smile. Some of those people are nice enough, but do any of them show up to tell him to slow down and take care of himself? Do any of them say that it looks like he’s going nuts? He didn’t have the time to cultivate something deeper. Not while running all those companies. So what does he do? He spews forth his id on social media because the notifications and replies are almost like having friends. Aren’t they? Almost?

Put yourself back in the cockpit of the plane.

You tell yourself that none of it matters even if part of you knows that some of your behavior is despicable, because you have to land the plane. All of humanity is on the plane and they’re counting on you to make it to the next airport. You can justify it all away because humanity needs you, and just you, to save it.

Maybe you’ve gone crazy, but everyone else is worse off.

People come into the cockpit to tell you how much better they would do at flying the plane than you. Except none of them take the wheel. None of them even dream of taking the wheel.

You try to reason with them, explain your actions, tell them about the dangers, but all they do is say it doesn’t seem so bad. The plane has always flown. They don’t even look at the gauges. The plane has always flown! Just leave the cockpit and come back into the cabin. It’s nice back there. You won’t have to look at all those troubling gauges!

So what do you do if that’s how you see the world?

I think you do what Elon does.

I think you go nuts trying to keep the plane in the air.

1. I wrote the bulk of this a few months ago and then said, “You know, maybe there has just been too much Musk content in general.” I was wrong.

2. I also do this for things that aren’t even human, like ChatGPT.

3. I wasn’t alone, of course. I can see that now. But my guess is that Elon considers himself too smart to believe in God.