I appreciate you trying to relate to this guy somehow. And see him through the lens of his terrible childhood. Congratulations on a nuanced approach that accepts a great deal of his self-narration as fact.
To me, I see and have seen over the last 5 years, a drug addiction spiraling in its usual pattern. Something I’ve witnessed close at hand many times and it’s frightening to be honest. It’s impossible to separate the fact that he’s a drug addled lunatic who has no moral center and clearly is deluded to the point that he agrees with you that he’s “the smartest man in the world” (as if there were some way of adjudicating that). That’s never been a healthy perspective and most of the folks on the planet who have had this view have been exceptionally destructive to humanity and proud of their ability to wield power in a cruel way. Is he smart? Yes. What is the value of that intelligence if it is demonstrated to maximize contemporary harm even if he “see the future” and knows how to course correct and the cruelty is just an unfortunate outcome? To me, intelligence, disconnected from compassion is the definition of evil and I think Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed would agree with me. I’m also female, also highly intelligent without being particularly well educated in formal way and highly effective in the world I work and live in. My work has been often minimized or ignored or taken over by less intelligent men who take credit for my work as their own. This is a fact of life for highly intelligent females since the dawn of time (read Gerda Lerner’s scholarship on this matter) and this means that solutions to many problems of humanity arrived at by women are disavowed almost as certainly as they are recognized and this colors my opinions of how we valorize intelligent men.
I don’t doubt that he’s well into a ketamine addiction. I just think this is the thing pushing him there. But of course the world is always ending in some particular way and is always being saved in some particular way and I don’t think he believes that at all. And intelligence to me is a completely amoral attribute. That’s one of the big things I wanted to get across. Putin is highly intelligent. Sorry to hear about the career troubles. I don’t mean to do more but commiserate but I hope you find a way to gain some more power there.
Understood. Yet, the idea that “intelligence is amoral” doesn’t sound right to me but I’ll kick it around in my head a bit longer. As for me, I’m totally fine in my world these days. It was all just confusing as hell coming up. I have a good deal of power and want for little. But my self-reference was to illustrate that many real geniuses and prospective leaders that are not men are frequently minimized and undervalued and often don’t get the chance to create positive change. That’s all. I really found your piece provocative. Thank you.
There's a lot of this that I agree with (and occasionally try to explain to others with little success/impact). But there are a few missing pieces:
1. DOGE largely failed because Elon listened to people who were just making shit up, as you note. But there were also many, many people offering insightful solutions who were ignored. The fact that DOGE's chosen actions directly follow the far right ideal of eliminating career civil servants, even though they are a minor component of government spending, is deeply suspicious.
2. Elon almost certainly has type 2 bipolar disorder (see Gwern's review at https://gwern.net/doc/psychiatry/bipolar/elon-musk/index), and is correspondingly self-medicating with ketamine. This is necessarily accelerating any mental breakdown regardless of the underlying cause.
On one, agreed with a caveat. Career civil servants also oversee the spending increases. However it’s the incentive to do so that needed to be changed more so than the personnel. He just listened to people who made shit up though.
On two, I agree but I see that as a few levels up from root. He’s bipolar because he either thinks he’s succeeding or failing at saving the future.
This is a great read! Honestly, I'm not knowledgable enough about national debt to have an opinion on DOGE. I just try to remember that there's always more to the story than what I see in the media.
It's pretty miserable when you know your department is on the chopping block. I've been there. I empathize with anyone staring down unemployment, feeling like all their years of effort was unappreciated. It sucks.
And I also empathize with leaders who have to be the bad guy to keep the company afloat. Leadership is hard. If it were easy, we'd all be running successful companies.
About the AIDS babies in Africa...I don't know. I was raised with the idea that it is a good thing to rescue other people from suffering. Then I volunteered with Heifer, got a little older, read Toxic Charity, read Living on Half, and my thinking has changed. Charity is complicated. And we're probably measuring success in ways that make us (the givers) feel good instead of ways that solve big problems. Although in fairness, it is really really hard to solve big problems. You can think you're helping and end up making things worse completely on accident.
Great piece. I can always count on you for nuance.
I enjoyed the article. I wanted to say that there is a small error - you would want to show up at a golf course and be Happy Gilmore, not Billy Madison. Very understandable error to make since they are both Sandler movies from the same exact era (and released right after each other IIRC)
"Right now, over a quarter of your tax dollar is going toward paying interest on the nation’s debts."
It's more like 13%. And no GDP will grow at 10%. For a developed country a 3% growth rate would be amazing. But the thing about reserve currencies is that its a relative game. Even if US has high debt, what could replace it? All the possible contenders have serious problems of their own (a lot of which come down to aging populations and long term demographics)
Still not going to happen. “Transformative AI” can maybe, just maybe give us 5%. At height of Industrial Revolution, per capita GDP growth was like 1 or 2% (it was essentially zero before). Add in population growth to get total growth. Except now we’re looking at 0% pop or even negative pop growth. Internet? There’s still debate if that added anything to growth.
I suspect that if I had even half of Elon‘s energy level and access to all the same drugs, and about 1% of his money, my life might look somewhat similar to his.
This all makes a lot of sense to me. When I was just out of school, I was in a situation where I was managing a few people, and I was a jerk to them because I just felt panicked all the time because the project was failing. That didn’t make my behaviour ok, it was just the pathway my brain fell into. I’m grateful to have learned this about myself early on and in a relatively low-stakes way - I’ve stayed away from management since. I can easily imagine a situation where it was a little easier and more successful, and those pathways could have baked in. (I’m not flattering myself - I wouldn’t have been Elon Musk. But the point is we all have an ego, and the call of the catastrophe void is strong.)
I think there is a lot of resistance to accepting this kind of interpretation because we don’t want to believe that exceptional outcomes are so highly correlated with antisocial behaviour. Obviously exceptional people can learn not to be jerks, and great results don’t justify awful actions. But the effort to teach high-variance people social behavior has to work with the neural wiring that comes built in with those people, otherwise you lose them altogether
I think you've got this exactly right. Regarding the bulk of the comments, the way I would place it within your framing is not "addiction" because that's not the right word. Rather, people who operate at this level of intensity frequently self-medicate, and that is a hard thing to keep in balance. It does seem clear that the wheels have recently come off a bit in that respect.
The type of personality you described in this article, doesn't seem like the sort of personality that would take the time to convince the US voting public that long-term fiscal stability will require entitlement reform, raising taxes, and cutting spending. If Mr. Musk had used his considerable resources to build broad public support for the idea that we should take the bitter financial medicine now, for a better future later I would have completely supported that effort. For all the hard things that he has accomplished, I don't think he's done anything as difficult as getting Americans to vote for people who will enact entitlement reform.
I appreciate you trying to relate to this guy somehow. And see him through the lens of his terrible childhood. Congratulations on a nuanced approach that accepts a great deal of his self-narration as fact.
To me, I see and have seen over the last 5 years, a drug addiction spiraling in its usual pattern. Something I’ve witnessed close at hand many times and it’s frightening to be honest. It’s impossible to separate the fact that he’s a drug addled lunatic who has no moral center and clearly is deluded to the point that he agrees with you that he’s “the smartest man in the world” (as if there were some way of adjudicating that). That’s never been a healthy perspective and most of the folks on the planet who have had this view have been exceptionally destructive to humanity and proud of their ability to wield power in a cruel way. Is he smart? Yes. What is the value of that intelligence if it is demonstrated to maximize contemporary harm even if he “see the future” and knows how to course correct and the cruelty is just an unfortunate outcome? To me, intelligence, disconnected from compassion is the definition of evil and I think Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed would agree with me. I’m also female, also highly intelligent without being particularly well educated in formal way and highly effective in the world I work and live in. My work has been often minimized or ignored or taken over by less intelligent men who take credit for my work as their own. This is a fact of life for highly intelligent females since the dawn of time (read Gerda Lerner’s scholarship on this matter) and this means that solutions to many problems of humanity arrived at by women are disavowed almost as certainly as they are recognized and this colors my opinions of how we valorize intelligent men.
I don’t doubt that he’s well into a ketamine addiction. I just think this is the thing pushing him there. But of course the world is always ending in some particular way and is always being saved in some particular way and I don’t think he believes that at all. And intelligence to me is a completely amoral attribute. That’s one of the big things I wanted to get across. Putin is highly intelligent. Sorry to hear about the career troubles. I don’t mean to do more but commiserate but I hope you find a way to gain some more power there.
Understood. Yet, the idea that “intelligence is amoral” doesn’t sound right to me but I’ll kick it around in my head a bit longer. As for me, I’m totally fine in my world these days. It was all just confusing as hell coming up. I have a good deal of power and want for little. But my self-reference was to illustrate that many real geniuses and prospective leaders that are not men are frequently minimized and undervalued and often don’t get the chance to create positive change. That’s all. I really found your piece provocative. Thank you.
There's a lot of this that I agree with (and occasionally try to explain to others with little success/impact). But there are a few missing pieces:
1. DOGE largely failed because Elon listened to people who were just making shit up, as you note. But there were also many, many people offering insightful solutions who were ignored. The fact that DOGE's chosen actions directly follow the far right ideal of eliminating career civil servants, even though they are a minor component of government spending, is deeply suspicious.
2. Elon almost certainly has type 2 bipolar disorder (see Gwern's review at https://gwern.net/doc/psychiatry/bipolar/elon-musk/index), and is correspondingly self-medicating with ketamine. This is necessarily accelerating any mental breakdown regardless of the underlying cause.
On one, agreed with a caveat. Career civil servants also oversee the spending increases. However it’s the incentive to do so that needed to be changed more so than the personnel. He just listened to people who made shit up though.
On two, I agree but I see that as a few levels up from root. He’s bipolar because he either thinks he’s succeeding or failing at saving the future.
This is a great read! Honestly, I'm not knowledgable enough about national debt to have an opinion on DOGE. I just try to remember that there's always more to the story than what I see in the media.
It's pretty miserable when you know your department is on the chopping block. I've been there. I empathize with anyone staring down unemployment, feeling like all their years of effort was unappreciated. It sucks.
And I also empathize with leaders who have to be the bad guy to keep the company afloat. Leadership is hard. If it were easy, we'd all be running successful companies.
About the AIDS babies in Africa...I don't know. I was raised with the idea that it is a good thing to rescue other people from suffering. Then I volunteered with Heifer, got a little older, read Toxic Charity, read Living on Half, and my thinking has changed. Charity is complicated. And we're probably measuring success in ways that make us (the givers) feel good instead of ways that solve big problems. Although in fairness, it is really really hard to solve big problems. You can think you're helping and end up making things worse completely on accident.
Great piece. I can always count on you for nuance.
I enjoyed the article. I wanted to say that there is a small error - you would want to show up at a golf course and be Happy Gilmore, not Billy Madison. Very understandable error to make since they are both Sandler movies from the same exact era (and released right after each other IIRC)
Fuck! Updating.
One of your best, SG! That is saying a lot! If you are 80% correct, you know more about Musk than anyone else on the planet.
Thanks and thanks for sharing
This is really good but just to be pedantic:
"Right now, over a quarter of your tax dollar is going toward paying interest on the nation’s debts."
It's more like 13%. And no GDP will grow at 10%. For a developed country a 3% growth rate would be amazing. But the thing about reserve currencies is that its a relative game. Even if US has high debt, what could replace it? All the possible contenders have serious problems of their own (a lot of which come down to aging populations and long term demographics)
In a word, GOLD.
Let me double check numbers after kids go to bed.
10% is in a world with AI being transformative enough to be a panacea without killing us all
Still not going to happen. “Transformative AI” can maybe, just maybe give us 5%. At height of Industrial Revolution, per capita GDP growth was like 1 or 2% (it was essentially zero before). Add in population growth to get total growth. Except now we’re looking at 0% pop or even negative pop growth. Internet? There’s still debate if that added anything to growth.
What is your explanation for why he faked his diablo and path of exile stats? That one baffles me.
Ego. He can’t take those instances in which he is not the ultimate hero.
This is brilliant. Fabulous explanations and analogies.
Thanks for helping me understand the difference in intelligence.
Thank you
This is fascinating, thank you
Fascinating read! I’m Harrison, an ex fine dining line cook. My stack "The Secret Ingredient" adapts hit restaurant recipes for easy home cooking.
check us out:
https://thesecretingredient.substack.com
I suspect that if I had even half of Elon‘s energy level and access to all the same drugs, and about 1% of his money, my life might look somewhat similar to his.
This all makes a lot of sense to me. When I was just out of school, I was in a situation where I was managing a few people, and I was a jerk to them because I just felt panicked all the time because the project was failing. That didn’t make my behaviour ok, it was just the pathway my brain fell into. I’m grateful to have learned this about myself early on and in a relatively low-stakes way - I’ve stayed away from management since. I can easily imagine a situation where it was a little easier and more successful, and those pathways could have baked in. (I’m not flattering myself - I wouldn’t have been Elon Musk. But the point is we all have an ego, and the call of the catastrophe void is strong.)
I think there is a lot of resistance to accepting this kind of interpretation because we don’t want to believe that exceptional outcomes are so highly correlated with antisocial behaviour. Obviously exceptional people can learn not to be jerks, and great results don’t justify awful actions. But the effort to teach high-variance people social behavior has to work with the neural wiring that comes built in with those people, otherwise you lose them altogether
I think you've got this exactly right. Regarding the bulk of the comments, the way I would place it within your framing is not "addiction" because that's not the right word. Rather, people who operate at this level of intensity frequently self-medicate, and that is a hard thing to keep in balance. It does seem clear that the wheels have recently come off a bit in that respect.
The type of personality you described in this article, doesn't seem like the sort of personality that would take the time to convince the US voting public that long-term fiscal stability will require entitlement reform, raising taxes, and cutting spending. If Mr. Musk had used his considerable resources to build broad public support for the idea that we should take the bitter financial medicine now, for a better future later I would have completely supported that effort. For all the hard things that he has accomplished, I don't think he's done anything as difficult as getting Americans to vote for people who will enact entitlement reform.