This column is the second part of an investigation of who Elon Musk is.
The expression “character is destiny” is attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus and became the title of a book by John McCain. “The personal is political” is a truism that gained a great deal of popularity in recent decades, leading to an emphasis on “lived experience” over objective truth.
I want to say at the start that I do not use X as a social media site, and, in fact, I have not been closely following Musk’s latest activities in, as he sees it, making our government more efficient. (I cut back on my online activities for Lent, including news outlets. That has brought me some small measure of serenity.)
Instead, I want to write about the third of three books I read on Musk, “Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter,” by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac, to look just at what Musk’s character might be.
“Character Limit” provides a very detailed account of Musk’s acquisition and operation of Twitter, which he changed to X, after famously walking through the door of corporate headquarters holding a ceramic sink, and stating, “let this sink in.”
Musk is known for his quirky humor. He offered to buy Twitter for $54.20 per share — which includes the stoner code “420,” which is an allusion to marijuana.
He later tried to back out of the deal, because the value had dropped significantly, but Twitter sued him to complete the transaction. Since then, the stock valuation plummeted, only recently having attained the value when he bought it.
He used to pose as the champion of free speech. Prior to his purchase, Twitter tried to deal with people who posted incitement, mistaken information (misinformation) and outright lies (disinformation). Musk referred to himself as a “free speech fundamentalist.”
Later he banned terms like “cis” and “cisgendered” from X, saying they were abusive.
After acquiring the platform, he went about deactivating the accounts of journalists who were critical of him. He does not take kindly to criticism. He immediately descends to ad hominem attacks on anybody who disagrees with him.
He was incensed that his tweets did not get the attention he thought they deserved. When a subordinate in a meeting suggested that the unhinged and emotionally reactive tweets coming from Musk might be part of the problem, he fired the man on the spot.
He has a disposition to fire people and push the remainder to work harder, using his own manic work pace as an example and inspiration. He cut the Twitter workforce by 80%. Sometimes he invited back employees he had just laid off.
He sent an email to all employees titled “A fork in the road” offering to let them resign or else sign on to his program of intense work. As we know, he later used the same tactic on federal employees.
Twitter was losing money, and cutting jobs saves money. Corporations do it all the time, but not to this radical extent.
The reconstructed platform had a few glitches, but basically went on, though it gave up its fact-checking and misinformation detection efforts. Many people have complained that hateful language, racism and antisemitism and wacky conspiracy theories have gained a strong base in X.
I have trusted the advice of writers I admire and don’t go there, so I can’t tell you if it’s as bad as it’s alleged to be. Though he has handed over the CEO role at X to Linda Yaccarino, he still calls a lot of the shots.
Musk will often escalate disagreements, using abusive language. He’s fond of calling people “idiots” or worse. Outsiders have been surprised at his willingness to attack the intelligence and competence of highly successful corporate and military leaders.
After his transformation of Twitter into X, he continued the torrent of abuse. He also began a political transformation from a nonpolitical, generally libertarian Silicon Valley tech bro to become a major donor and now right hand man to Donald Trump.
As with any person’s transformation, there are probably several factors at work. The COVID epidemic shutdowns did not affect his Space X operations, because he had contracts deemed essential to national security, including launching spy satellites. His Tesla plant in California was different, and he railed against its closure.
He always denied the severity of COVID and the epidemic. His former friend Sam Harris got crossways over COVID. Musk predicted that there would not be 35,000 cases in the United States. When Harris later presented the data that there had been over 35,000 deaths out of 600,000 cases and asked if that was less than 35,000 cases, their friendship abruptly ended.
Musk also had a son who became a transgender woman. Elon says that his son Xavier was “killed” by the “woke mind virus.” She dropped the Musk name and is now Vivian Jenna Wilson, and she wants nothing to do with her father. She’s also a strong anti-capitalist.
Wilson says that Musk berated her for being feminine, and said “He was cold. He’s very quick to anger. He is uncaring and narcissistic.”
In 2021 on “Saturday Night Live,” Musk described himself as having Asperger’s Syndrome, a type of autism. He frequently shows social awkwardness, and he also has the ability to focus his concentration intensely and for long periods, another characteristic of some people on the autism spectrum.
Musk does not like being hemmed in by rules. The first half of his career he was able to sidestep many of the rules that have ossified the aerospace industry. When one of his engineers would point to a rule that hindered his projects, he would ask where that rule came from, and what evidence existed for it. If they couldn’t explain to his satisfaction, he would ignore the rules.
He also insists that everything must happen immediately in a frantic rush to move forward. He believes his personal intervention can make this happen.
He has great ambitions. The greatest of them is cosmic in scope — he wants to lead humanity to become a spacefaring multi-planetary species, which he hopes will make us more resilient to cosmic accidents. His accumulation of wealth is a means to an end. He got so wealthy in order to do other things. Like colonizing Mars.
He believes he can help humanity. Like other people I know who want to help humanity, he has trouble getting along with real humans. This might be unimportant in developing electric cars, satellites, and heavy lift rockets, but it comes up against the limits of his character when he tries to manage the conversations of millions of people, deciding who can speak on his platform, and which ideas are promoted, and which suppressed.
He makes grand gestures, like firing people and then having to invite them back. This is true of his most recent exploits with DOGE, the extraordinary, extralegal “Department of Governmental Efficiency” which is named, in Musk’s attempt at humor, after dogecoin, a crypto currency.
Instead of conducting research into fruitful areas for reducing the executive branch’s administrative apparatus, then cutting, Musk started chopping immediately, and then had to backtrack in many cases. Sometimes that was because of the intervention of federal courts who ruled that actions were illegal, like refusing to pay contractors for work already completed. At other times the firings were so obviously counterproductive that the administration backtracked.
Now he’s trying to use that money to gain influence and power over the nation. He spent $277 million to support Trump in the 2024 election. Groups affiliated with Musk have donated over $14 million to the Wisconsin Supreme Court race.
He has a high tolerance for failure, including his own, as indicated by his use of his own money to leverage his companies. He also has a high tolerance for the failure and pain of other people.
Unlike some people in public life, Musk sometimes admits he was wrong, and then he moves forward. Engineers who can point to facts in the face of Elon’s inquisition can persuade him, according to sources.
He owns car production facilities in China, putting Tesla at the mercy of the Chinese Communist Party. He also owns companies like SpaceX and Starlink that stand to get increased government contracts at home, making his foray into politics an avenue for personal enrichment. (I fear that we are at the start of an era of corruption not experienced in America since the late 19th century.)
The personal becomes political with Elon, and the reverse is true as well. A person’s character is the disposition to act in predictable ways over time. Musk is unpredictable, making it hard to understand what his character actually is.
Like his boss, Musk is erratic, temperamental, thin-skinned, vulgar, and rash. Unlike his boss, nobody elected him.
Nowadays he’s riding a roller-coaster of highs and lows. The Tesla brand has become toxic for many of his best customers. On the other hand, he shows up in the Oval Office, sometimes wearing a suit, as part of a duumvirate trying to dismantle the administrative state.
A duumvirate is the rule by two persons. The consuls of the Roman Republic were a duumvirate. A triumvirate is the rule of three, which is what the Roman Republic went through as it self-destructed and became an empire. The rule of one person is a dictatorship.
After reading three books on the man, I have come to give him credit for the work he did with SpaceX, Tesla, and Starlink. He has been a transformative figure. But it all seems to have gone badly wrong in buying Twitter, when he amplified his voice and his grievances with perhaps the biggest microphone of all time.
I think we’re still waiting for the mic drop.
This post was originally published on here
