The article is interesting but it just adds to the long list of erratic, megalomaniacal behavior by Musk that I assume most people here are already familiar with.
My uneducated guess is that he’s mentally ill. Some sort of chronic mania or psychosis, perhaps as a result of bad luck but perhaps as a result of drug use or severe, long-term sleep deprivation. Then even in his lucid moments, he’s the bad kind of perfectionist (the kind that can’t bear to have flaws) and too proud to recognize that he has a problem or that he made a mistake.
It is impossible for someone to have his level of wealth, his lifestyle, and not begin to exhibit signs of mental illness. First, the wealth. Nothing has value to him. Why would it? Very few things have carry a dollar amount he can’t swallow. Seriously, we’re talking like aircraft carriers!
Second, look at the other triple-digit billionaires. They’re focused on what they do. Bezos runs Amazon and all the stuff it does. Schmuck runs Meta and all that. Thiel is pretty focused on Palatir. Meanwhile Musk “runs” how many companies? And people legit believe that he’s actually running them. Professional journalists will say he’s a super genius while reporting on the absolute bat-shit stuff he does and says. Oh, and don’t get me started on all the times he’s publicly bragged working his employees to the bone as if that’s a sign of good leadership! All of this is to say, he’s believing his own press.
I grew up around the wealthy. They are all insane, the wealthier they are the crazier they get.
I believe that the correlation has to do with a sort of mental miscalibration. I think that the human brain uses feedback from its community to calibrate it’s judgment of what’s real and what’s not and what’s right and what’s wrong. The rich don’t get honest feedback from their community. The people they spend the most time with either work for them or want something from them, so no one is honest to their faces. Not really. They say crazy shit and get feedback that it’s wisdom, from people who fully know that it’s crazy. They act in inappropriate ways and everyone behaves like it’s fine. They lose the ability to judge their own behavior, beliefs and self-awareness, and because they’re constantly treated like the smartest person in the room, they start to believe that they are, even if they know consciously that they’re not.
Meanwhile, their peer group is undergoing the same thing, so they are all insane too. My experience is that they mostly don’t actually like each other that much, because another known fact about the human brain is that it’s able to detect delusions in others, but not itself. The rich are fully aware that the other wealthy people around them are delusional, and on top of that that many of those delusional people are in competition with each other. And yet they will socialize with each other and act like everything is hunky-dory and friendly (just like the drama drama drama in every other community). I’ve watched wealthy people, more than once, socialize with other wealthy people and just be totally cool and friendly, only to just spew the most venomous crap as soon as the other person is gone. Also, there’s a pecking order. The dude who’s worth $20 million usually want something from the guy who’s worth $120 million, and that guy usually wants something from the lady who’s sitting on $3.2 billion. So it’s not like they can even get honest (but crazy) feedback from each other.
If it sounds like “hey, that would make people paranoid and isolated” it DOES! Being wealthy is super toxic for the mental health of the wealthy person, we are living in the consequences.
he pulled an oldpeoplefacebook@lemmy.world I think
He’s old, and spends too much time on social media. Then he spent 50 billion making his favourite social media platform worse and continued to spend way too much time on it.
Be careful with your mental health, please
Hey Musk, since you want me to like you so much, why did you make it abundantly clear that you are a huge fool and asshole? At this point the only value you have as a human being is that you are somebody that everybody else can laugh at.
He outright said it. I can’t find the tweet just now, it was from quite a while back. But essentially, he said the left was mean to him so he went all in on conservatism. I think it was not so much “mean” as “willing to call him out for obvious lies and weird nonsense” like the time he called a guy who rescued children from a cave a pedophile. I also don’t think he was really as left as he claimed to begin with, he was just following what seemed to be the trend to get people to like him.
When you get called out, you can learn from it or you can double down. He doubled down harder than anyone in history, and somehow it has yet to come back and bite him like it would most. Here’s hoping it does sooner than later.
Honestly, most of his turn to the far right had felt like he’s largely LARPing and sort of just trying it out (not that it doesn’t have real consequences, of course, but it’s felt more like someone trying to join a clique than a serious ideological conviction).
I don’t know how to describe why but it has a certain trying-out-a-new-hobby approach to it. Maybe it’s the way he goes to the very extreme, immediately. His endorsement of the Alternative for Germany party felt like pushing boundaries or, “Let me see how far I can get (in terms of influencing things, like he did with America).” His Nazi salute felt like he’d been rehearsing it because he thought it’d look so cool or he wanted to try it out for the first time (again, to test boundaries).
I could be wrong but it’s all felt…unserious (in terms of his intentions; definitely not the consequences).
I think that’s just a general discomfort with himself. A pretty normal autistic trait, and he’s said before that he’s on the spectrum. Either way, I don’t think it matters. I don’t think I can say what the practical difference would be between “actual Nazi” and “person doing all the Nazi things just to troll people.”
Definitely could be; the husband’s autistic (and was very surly the first time Musk said as much) but it didn’t feel like that. In any case, just a theory, more than anything.
Oh, of course. Like I said, the consequences are the same.
Ketamine
He’s a fascist.
He literally cannot make it much more obvious.
