As we all know, Elon Musk went nuts a few years ago. Nobody seems to know quite why, but it seems to have been brought on by frustration with California business rules; his dealings with unions; and liberals making fun of him. Since then he's become obsessed with the "woke mind virus," childbirth rates, and.......illegal immigrants voting for Democrats. The latter has produced a tsunami of tweets and retweets like this one:
Very few Americans realize that, if Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election. Far from being a threat to democracy, he is the only way to save it!
Let me explain: if even 1 in 20 illegals become citizens per year, something that the Democrats are expediting as fast… https://t.co/u3HBdd5Bv0
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 29, 2024
This particular tweet is a sober-minded graduate thesis compared to most of them, but it lays out the argument in simple terms:
- Democrats are deliberately opening the border to an army of illegal immigrants and asylum seekers.
- ???
- They will all vote for Democrats and democracy will be over.
The magic in the middle is that somehow all these illegal immigrants become citizens and start voting in large numbers. How? That's something of a mystery, since even the most liberal immigration legislation requires a waiting period of 10-20 years for citizenship. That might as well be the 30th century. The politician who risks his career over a possible advantage a decade away hasn't been born. Most of them think of the "long term" as next year.
Want more? Virtually all naturalized citizens have been in the country for many years and almost none of them arrived illegally. And anyway, of those who did most aren't even big fans of Democrats. A KFF poll suggests that among immigrants who are "likely undocumented," only 18% say the Democratic Party represents their views. This is not the stuff of landslides.
Musk seems like he's too smart to believe his own nonsense. Does he, really? Or is it all an act? But if it is, what's the endgame? Quicker FAA approval for his rocket launches? Starlink expansion into the hinterlands? Letters patent declaring him Emperor of Mars?
Or is he just nuts?
What's the endgame? ... Or is he just nuts?
Certainly it is not a clever strategy with some putative tangible benefit. At most it's just doubling down on his support for the Orange Guy (which I'm guessing looks significantly less like a good bet than when he bought in).
But let me suggest a third alternative, arguably in between. He is, to a significant degree (albeit probably not quite as much as the Orange Guy) both a racist and a narcissist, and this comment -- like many others, especially recently -- indulges the former and prompts the popular attention demanded by the latter. That is, it's not a strategy nor a delusional act; it's merely a whim prompted by his emotionally limited development.
Certainly. People keep trying to find the genius, but it's just low impulse control.
We should never forget that he is a child of apartheid and given everything by his dad, just like Trump. Two racist fathers, two narcissistic nepo babies.
👍👍👍👍👍
👍👍 I would have added more, but I've only got two thumbs, two on one hand, none on the other.
He's a social conservative sitting on the biggest pile of money on Earth, every vague imagining finding complete immediate fulfillment.
Of course he's nuts.
He's a perfect example of why we shouldn't have billionaires at all.
Amen to that!
I'll second the amen.
Combination of his oldest kid disowning him, plus disappearing into his own cult of personality and circle of yes men as he suddenly got vastly richer (worth pointing that until the 2020s, Musk was "only" worth about $10-20 billion - his net worth increased by a factor of ten in a few years).
The NYT had a piece a while back about how he basically lives behind a heavy concentration of body guards and flunkies now, and he himself more or less admitted that he's constantly got Yes Men around him yucking it up and telling him that his reactionary jokes are hilarious when he had to delete that tweet "just asking questions" about why there were no assassination attempts on Biden or Harris. I think he suddenly found criticism much less tolerable, and the folks giving him unadulterated, worshipful praises tended to skew conservative.
Not the first time a dynamic, talented businessman turned into a super-reactionary. Ford did the same thing in the 1920s, complete with the antagonistic relationship with his eldest son.
Is that the child who is trans? I think that's why he insists trans is a woke mind virus, else it would be function of the child's DNA--and his DNA wouldn't to that, so....
I don't know what Brett is thinking, but that's certainly what I think. Being the father of a trans woman myself, it can be a bit of a shock, but for myself, I worked it out and we get on well now.
I also suspect that Musk has been targeted in influence operations, both by conservatives and by foreign parties.
The trans child would be a perfect pretext for an approach.
I'm glad you and your child worked things out.
Sometimes the parents have to mourn the loss of the child they thought they had to learn to love their child for who the child really is. That probably happens to some extent in most parent-child relationships.
Yeah, there's a circle of people around him willing to tell him his shit doesn't stink because their portfolios and subscription numbers depend on that proximity to Elon.
Being a billionaire seems to be massively bad for your mental health.
Elon Musk summed up in 93 seconds,
https://x.com/Exploding_Heads/status/183382326288472
The tweet (xeet?) has (of course) been deleted. (I say "of course" because it was in any way critical of Musk, out it goes and the person who posted will probably find their account suspended. Musk's skin thickness is in the nanometers and (as we've repeatedly seen) he has no sense of humor whatsoever.
It was there earlier when I posted it here!
edit:
here it is,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZvS72-GZsc
Oo, awesome, thanks.
"Does he, really? Or is it all an act?"
I don't doubt that Musk is probably above-average in terms of intellect, but he has billionaire's disease: he's far too wealthy for anybody around him to provide any social normalization, and it's far too easy for him to spiral off in weird directions since psychologically it's so easy for him to rationalize his beliefs because he's fantastically successful ergo he must be smart ergo this thing he believes must be a smart thing to believe because he thought it and he is, as noted, fantastically successful, which is evidence of how smart he and his beliefs are . . .
I mean, everything is lined up in the direction of him lurching off into weirdo territory. He even lacks the minimal guardrails that other billionaires might have, many of whom have to continue running their businesses in order to stay billionaires, so at least they have that real-world check on their thinking. But Musk? His wealth is from companies that other people run, now, and even his colossal mismanagement of Twitter isn't enough to impose real world consequences on him.
So, if all a person gets is positive feedback for being crazy, and there are zero consequences, why would you expect them to keep being normal (even if that's where they started)?
And by 'above-average' you mean comfortably within the first standard deviation.
Seems like you have something invested in him not being smart.
The thing is, there are billions of people on the planet and hundreds of millions of Americans so there can be millions of geniuses so they're not all that special or unique, all things considered.
And just because someone is good at maths doesn't mean they're good at other things.
You do know his academic history, right? And you certainly know his company history.
I think its more telling that the first commenter felt the need to compliment Musk on his intelligence. That's a bit odd....if he didnt have a few billion, would that assumption be granted to him by strangers?
If he didn't have money he'd just be Archie Bunker complaining about 'the coloreds and the queers'.
Meh, I don't pretend to have either (a) that firm a grip on what, after all, intelligence even is to be able to be that precise or (b) enough first-hand information to be able to assess Elon(gated) Musk(rat) in that department, anyway.
More that pretty much anybody who can speak coherently on different subjects in public is quite likely somewhat above average, as is anybody who can build successful businesses, particularly when those businesses are in multiple different fields. Elmo checks those boxes.
So, what's his IQ?* If you told me it was 120, I wouldn't be surprised. (I also wouldn't raise an eyebrow if somebody told me it was 160). It just has nothing to do with how much of an asshole the guy is. But fwiw, I would be a little surprised if his IQ was 110, for reasons that, again, have nothing to do with his assholery.
_____
*With the normal caveats about how generally crummy/pointless a concept/test "IQ" is.
Yeah, someone's IQ doesn't make any difference to me, whether it be 95 or 195. OTOH, it does make a difference to me whenever someone (especially the public) attributes their success in business to high intelligence. You know the obvious counterexample.
I recently heard a trumpy say "Trump and Musk will put their big brains together and solve all our problems"... In all seriousness. Not as irony. (If there is one thing MAGA understands less than human decency it is irony...).
Oh its nuts. On this point, as Kevin pointed out, unless "illegals" is re-defined as "brown" there aren't going to be any percentage of "illegals" who become voters in, as Kevin says, somwhere between 20 years and 50 years from now.
Are you seriously asking whether a guy saying citizens voting will be the end of Democracy is on the up-and-up?
Exactly my first thought. They can’t vote until they’re citizens, they can’t become citizens without passing a whole lot of gates, some of which are learning more civics than most MAGAts know. And then they are free to vote for whomever they wish, like everyone else in this, the world’s oldest and premier Constitutional democracy.
Ahh, but their argument is that they're already voting!
First it was busses, now it's bins of ballots filled out by people from far away.
This. A normal reaction to the prospect of there being some different-but-larger number of voters in the future (either because of more births, increases in longevity, immigration and naturalization, etc.) really ought to be confidence that your ideas will continue to be competitive in elections.
I mean, the only reason that people of color tend to vote for Democrats is that the Democratic Party tends to be nicer to people of color than the Republican Party is. That's it. If Republicans would stop being weirdo assholes that line up behind even weirder assholes like Trump, and put more effort into improving this country and less into, say, doubling and tripling down on hoaxes/lies about Black people eating pets, I'm pretty sure they could pick up all sorts of votes from all sorts of minority groups.
👍👍👍👍👍
The downside is that if they did that, they'd lose a huge block of voters (you know which one) and not enough from 'those people' to make up the difference, dooming them a party of only regional significance. That's a pretty hard hole to climb out of. My guess is that the usual suspects will try to colonize the Democratic party instead.
doesn't matter what he truly believes
sane liar or demented nut job, the damage is the same
Totally
aldoushickman has it right. Look up "disinhibition". Many people who have a lot of wealth or power (or both) develop it over time. From ChatGPT:
1) Impulsivity: Acting without thinking about the consequences, such as making snap decisions or engaging in risky behaviors.
2) Poor Social Boundaries: Difficulty understanding or respecting social norms, leading to inappropriate comments or actions.
3) Emotional Volatility: Rapid shifts in emotions, such as sudden outbursts of anger or laughter that seem out of context.
4) Increased Risk-Taking: Engaging in dangerous activities, like reckless driving or substance abuse, without considering potential harm.
5) Difficulty in Focus: Trouble concentrating on tasks or conversations, often jumping from one topic to another.
5) Over-sharing: Revealing personal information too freely, which can make others uncomfortable.
6) Lack of Self-Control: Struggling to resist temptations, whether it's food, spending, or other urges.
That's pretty much toddler behavior. In other words, these folks just never learned to be grown ups because nobody taught them the word "no".
For some highly successful and people it develops later in life as the sycophancy goes up around them and the guardrails come down.
More likely, since I think Musk is autistic, is pathological demand avoidance, which is quite common in spectrum people.
It is possible that both are happening as well.
Oh, wow, interesting term.
I think the narcissism also drives demand avoidance for Musk. ADHD, ASD, narcissism, and disinhibition is a toxic mix.
You describe most of the attributes of someone with ADHD with comorbidity of ASD.
He has talked about his ADHD and ASD. Those are probably a factor too.
https://newzhook.com/story/tech-entrepreneur-elon-musk-disability-aspergers-saturday-night-live/
I think the increasing levels of dickishness and loss of control are probably a function of high levels of power over a long time with a large bubble of syncophancy.
From "Power, Approach, and Inhibition"
Psychological Review
2003, Vol. 110, No. 2, 265–284
"High and low-power individuals inhabit and, through their own actions, create strikingly different worlds. People feeling powerful experience approach-related moods and emotions; are more attentive to social rewards; construe others in terms of how they satisfy their own goals and needs; and cognize their social environment in more automatic, simplistic ways. They also act in a more disinhibited and at times counternormative fashion."
My theory has always been that getting covid before vaccination gave him some brain damage, not much but enough to break his self regulation system.
He was off the rails earlier, IE, the pedo submarine incident. Whenever placed under stress, he dives into social media and refuses to accept social facts that are unpleasant to him.
That was a relatively rare instance of things bubbling to the surface. Usually it was quieter. After covid that kind of thing was public and repeated loudly.
I don’t think what he writes makes any sense but on the larger point of his mental health- having a mid fifty something doing drugs is probably having an impact.
Make that ' a mid fifty something doing a _lot_ of drugs'. Admittedly, a twenty-something conception of 'a lot' is may be a little than a fifty-something's idea of 'a lot'.
The drugs thing is bullshit used by the military industrial complex to exclude anyone not from their conservative circles.
Leon is emulating the life of Henry Ford. Brilliant technical thinking led to fabulous business success, which in turn convinced him he was wise in all things. Perversely, this ended up making him stupid in most things.
Chasing further wealth no longer excites him. Instead, he has become a sort of internet shock-jock, producing evermore extreme tweets an effort to generate the response from his loyal minions that his ego demands. He is caught in the same sort of narcissistic honey pot trap as Donald Trump.
i'd also point out that naturalized citizens voting isn't a threat to democracy. it IS democracy.
Yes!
You'd think that Elon Musk would know that. I guess you have to be the right kind of immigrant to be capable of democracying.
Still think this social media thing is good for humanity? And better with AI posts like the one above?
Obviously not, since social media allowed you to escape your cave/cage/mom's basement to endlessly troll us all with your nihilistic take on everything.
Mark Cuban asked Leon's own Grok AI about Leon's claim that the Democrats are flying immigrants "directly into swing states" who are then "fast-tracked to citizenship" to alter the outcome of the election. The chatbot concluded that Musk’s xenophobic theory “contains exaggerated claims and speculative fears rather than factual analysis,” and was “presented in an alarmist and overly deterministic manner.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/elon-musk-mark-cuban-swing-state-conspiracy_n_66fab7b4e4b0a61d19be9aec
The guy is a moron if he thinks that his full throated support and $millions contributed to elect that orange shit stain is not going to negatively impact the profitability of Tesla. It is unlikely that most pickup truck driving / gun toting MAGA supporters are likely EV buyers, while the urban/suburban/upper middle class folks (majority Harris supporters) certainly are.
I haven't bought any Goya products since mid 2020 after their chairman started kissing Trump's tuchus. With plenty of EV options, I doubt I could stomach walking into a Tesla dealership.
Still one in two EVs produced in the US were Tesla, so while you make be able to avoid it... crashing a company that employs over a hundred thousand Americans seems of dubious value. (Which is why I wish they'd replace him in their executive structure)
"I haven't bought any Goya products since mid 2020"
I never really understood the point of Goya. Why pay a markup on basic goods like beans and lentils? Goya black beans aren't any higher quality than the store brand etc.
People like brands. Almost nothing in the supermarket that has only one basic ingredient in the can, box, bag, etc. is markedly different if you buy the branded version vs. the generic version. (This is why stores like Aldi, Lidl, etc. survive and thrive: people are starting to realize generics are "good enough.") But brands still make many older people feel warm and fuzzy inside, and allow our evolutionary tendency to break into tribal groups to be satiated. ("I always buy Planters peanuts, never Fishers!")
As they say:
A legend in his own mind. What is left of it.
Maybe he is just a racist, sexist jerk, has always been a racist, sexist jerk, and now that he has bought Twitter and turned it into the safe space for racist, sexist jerks Musk feels free to post what he has always thought.
This one is super easy. His ego got burnt.
He thought his wealth bought him cred to step outside the lines of the community he was in -- Democrats -- but then he learned that this was not so. In search of a community that would let him say whatever the fuck he wanted to say, he found MAGA.
MAGA let him speak unfiltered without being punished or mocked. Or so he thought. In reality, this MAGA's community standards claims to be about free speech but it really isn't; they still have to abide by certain idiosyncratic dogmas tied to White nativism. That is why he's now in support of closing the door to the very means of immigration that allowed him to become an American.
Peter Thiel and many others fall into this category of feeble/fragile egos.
"Peter Thiel and many others fall into this category of feeble/fragile egos."
Thiel is a different sort of animal. Much, much more dangerous. He's anti-democratic, and fundamentally believes that a few people (i.e., him) are inherently better than other people, and that as such societies, countries, and laws themselves are morally wrong to the extent they constrain people like him. But he generally doesn't go around social media-ing his beliefs: he doesn't care if you agree with him, because most people have no value for him, and because he's canny enough to know that drawing attention to his ideas will also draw condemnation. Instead, he just works towards bending the system to his ideal, which appears to be some sort of technofeudalism whereby the hyperich do whatever they want.
Whereas Musk is like a drunk elephant (powerful, careening, able to do a lot of damage, but highly visible), Thiel is more of a crafty ambush predator--content to wait in relatively anonymity, and only strike when it best serves his goals.
Agree 100% The tech-bro-libertarian (a.k.a fascist-libertarian) bubble is all about "rules are for others ".
"That is why he's now in support of closing the door to the very means of immigration that allowed him to become an American."
There's zero chance that America is ever going to close the door to billionaire immigration. No country does that.
"There's zero chance that America is ever going to close the door to billionaire immigration. No country does that."
Musk wasn't a billionaire (or even a millionaire) when he immigrated.
In any case I don't agree that if you once benefited from some policy that obligates you to support it forever.
Newsflash:
Rich immigrant is afraid of ...[checks notes]....immigrants.
OK then.
Look, we're discussing Elon Justnuts Musk, so none of this is a surprise.
How can you claim that politicians don't plan far into the future, when Obama's parents placed that fake baby announcement in a Hawaii newspaper just so their son could run for president many decades later? The plan details are on HRC's email servers and Hunter's hard drive.
Lol!
Smart and delusional are not mutually exclusive.
Latest installment of simple answers to simple questions: Musk is nuts. Slightly longer answer, Musk's intelligence myth has been wildly exaggerated forever.
He thinks there are 40 million undocumented folks in the country right now. Moron.
"Nobody seems to know quite why, but it seems to have been brought on by frustration with California business rules; his dealings with unions; and liberals making fun of him."
Others have already mentioned it, but his kid being trans also broke his brain.
Let me offer an eleven-dimensional chess sort of hypothesis. I don't believe the following is true, but neither am I certain it's false.
The first thing is that Musk is a political oddity; he's very right-wing but not in the least conservative. He's extremely progressive, within his own definition of "progress". The second thing is that his enterprises (Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and even the Boring Company) show a dedication to the future of humanity. Tesla has made him extremely rich, but I think that's because it's succeeded beyond even his wildest dreams.
Musk believes in climate change and recognizes the seriousness of the threat it poses, and as his various enterprises show he takes a long view. One of the things he must recognize is that one of the world's greatest obstacles to fighting climate change is the Republican Party. One way to deal with that is to trounce the Republicans at the ballot box, but that only works until the next election, when it has to be done again. A plausible strategy, if you're as rich as Musk, is to get inside the Republican party and use the power of your fortune to shift their views on climate change. It seems to be working. Trump has become noticeably less hostile to EVs since Musk announced the intention to support Trump with a tiny portion of his fortune.
IOW, Musk may well have infiltrated the Republican party to bring them around to his view rather than adopting their views.
I think the simple explanation is usually correct, and the hypothesis that Musk is a narcissistic asshole explains pretty much all his behavior. It's clear he doesn't really care about climate change: if he did he would have spent $44 billion combating climate change instead of buying Twitter. He was just playing up climate change to get more liberal early adopters to buy Tesla cars. Thankfully Tesla really is a major force combating climate change but Musk was just in it for the money.
I'm quite certain that you're wrong about Musk starting Tesla just for the money. It's equally clear that he didn't start SpaceX just for the money either.
As for Twitter, that may be part of his strategy to change the course of the Republican Party, in which case it IS money spent to indirectly fight climate change. My strong suspicion is that Twitter is just entertainment for Musk (when you're as rich as him, you can spend absurd amounts on entertainment) but it COULD be part of the plan.
Musk didnt start or found Tesla. Thats another piece of the Elon myth.
👍👍
Close enough. Eberhard and Tarpenning started the company in 2003 and Musk bought a controlling interest in 2004 for $7.5 million and became chairman of the board. Eberhard stayed CEO until 2007 when he was forced out and Musk took over as CEO in 2008, and has continued as both chairman and CEO ever since. The capsule history I'm reading doesn't say what happened to Tarpenning.
Your theory is pretty pathetic, and makes you look like rather silly.
"As for Twitter, that may be part of his strategy to change the course of the Republican Party"
He was forced into the purchase and tried very hard to get out of it, so it obviously wasn't part of his "plan."
Plus, if twitter was part of his "plan" to "to get inside the Republican party and use the power of [his] fortune to shift their views on climate change," he could have just remained a twitter user and saved the put the $44 billion towards, say, campaign contributions to climate-concerned republicans.
"Musk was forced into buying Twitter" is at best a gross over-simplification. The actual sequence was:
a) Musk made an unsolicited offer for Twitter
b) Twitter accepted the offer and a contract was signed
c) Musk claimed that Twitter had not met the contract conditions and so the contract was void (something about too many bot accounts)
d) a court ruled that Twitter had met the contract conditions
e) Musk chose to complete the deal rather than paying around $10 billion for breach of contract
Being a Twitter user would not have allowed Musk to e.g. reinstate Trump. As it stands, he appears to be using his control of Twitter to support the Republicans.
Contributing to the campaigns of climate concerned Republicans would simply fracture the party, in which the climate deniers are in the majority. By getting inside, Musk can move the deniers in the direction of accepting climate change.
Depends. What is the dividing line between nuts and narcissist?
Musk wants adulation. He wants acknowledgement as the best engineer that ever lived and the savior of humanity from itself. As far as engineers go, that would be Isambard Kingdom Brunel. And as far as saving humanity, he actually doesn't give a shit about that. He wants to be known as the savior and if he isn't he doesn't care.
Musk found that he got far more praise from the right and far more questions and jokes from the left. And the further right he moved, the more praise he got. Now he's like Vance. He doesn't really care what is true so long as it generates praise.
Alternative theory: Musk was 25 when apartheid ended in South Africa. Most people have their basic attitudes toward life pretty well set at that point and it is entirely possible his cor character was set as a racist misogynist. But that didn't sell in the 1990's Internet industry so her wore a more tolerant suit. Since Trump made public bigotry OK again, he has reverted to what he always was.
I could believe either one. What baffles me is why ANYONE would want to have a child with this guy.
"I could believe either one. What baffles me is why ANYONE would want to have a child with this guy."
He's rich. And many people don't have a lot of options.
Alternative theory: Musk was 25 when apartheid ended in South Africa.
At which point, Musk had been living in Canada and the US for seven years.
Musk seems like he's too smart to believe his own nonsense. Does he, really? Or is it all an act?
It's probably an act. You can never know for sure—a lot of this glibertarian douchebags are caught in an epistemic bubble. But yeah, I'd imagine it's performative.
But if so, why? What's the endgame? Quicker FAA approval for his rocket launches? Starlink expansion into the hinterlands? Letters patent declaring him Emperor of Mars?
The why is: Elon fancies himself and influential person, and he wants Trump to win. He's trying to sway the election. Is this really complicated? (And sure, if Trump wins, Elon will hope to be rewarded).
+1
Musk is an Apartheid-American.
lol