Elon Musk and the Problem of Hubris

Also my new podcast episode with Selim Koru on modern Turkey and the far-right

People who have followed my commentary over the years are probably aware that I have not been very enamored with tech entrepreneur and political gadfly Elon Musk. My objections to Musk were never deeply ideological. In earlier years, I had a generally positive view of him as an innovator and businessman. My souring on the Tesla CEO began with his intervention to purchase Twitter, and his tragic mismanagement of a platform that had once been so valuable as a global public square. Its only been downhill since then.

This week, after a long string of other cringeworthy incidents, most of which alienated people on the center-left, Musk drew fresh attention to himself after appearing at the White House with a black eye, and then engaging in a social media spat with Donald Trump that culminated in him publicly accusing the president of being a pedophile. At the moment, the status of their relationship remains unclear. But Musk has now exited government after failing to deliver on his grand promises with DOGE, and amid calls for his investigation and even deportation by key figures in the MAGA movement.

Musk has certainly made himself a hard person to like over the past few years. Despite that, he is someone who still inspires intense devotion in a huge number of people, and its rare that someone like that can be all bad. As such, I’ve always wanted to steelman the case for Musk, especially when his behavior has been at its worst. Earlier this year, I read Walter Isaacson’s biography of him to study more about his personal life and career. While not changing my views of Musk’s recent activities, I was impressed with some of his undeniable accomplishments as an entrepreneur, and enlightened by the details of his troubled upbringing in South Africa and Canada.

The image I got of Musk from Isaacson’s book, which, if not quite a hagiography, was extremely laudatory of him, was of a person with an emotionally traumatic childhood, socially awkward, yet with a savant-like commitment to accomplishing certain ambitious business goals. This autistic singlemindedness, arguably a component of his generally awkward social persona, ultimately manifested in the creation of his crown jewels, Tesla and SpaceX. Musk could have made a killing with minimum stress by launching e-commerce and payment apps. But he chose the high road of building spaceships, satellites, and electric cars, and even made it profitable. These are impressive achievements for which he deserves credit.

But that does leas to the question, how can someone so impressive in a particular field be so inept, even embarrassing in others? Musk’s political interventions and commentary, which have made him far more controversial than he had ever been as an entrepreneur, belie a person who is simply out of their depth. This behavior, which has failed to accomplish the goals he claimed it would, is now resulting in personal humiliation, and even negative financial impacts on his companies. As Radoslaw Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister, whom Musk had previously attacked in public, commented on his recent meltdown, “You see, big boss, politics turned out to be more complicated than you thought.”

To me the answer for Musk’s political problems is pretty obvious. In the modern world, there is simply no such thing as an all-purpose genius. Musk has shown himself to be demonstrably talented at certain extremely important business tasks, and we can even be charitable and say that he has a proficiency with engineering. But the scale of human endeavor today is so broad and complex its simply impossible to be a master at all of it. In premodernity, there was the archetype of the polymath, who could teach philosophy, medicine, science, art, rhetoric, and mathematics to the highest degree, and even treat them all as part of one connected whole. But society has become far too complex. Modern knowledge is simply not like that.

That Musk can excel in one field and faceplant in another should be amply expected. Someone around him should have warned him that it was even likely for a person who has never once evinced a comfortable understanding of human nature and society. But due to the problem of the “Cult of Genius,” no one was really in a position to tell Musk his limits, or help his ego be contained in a manner that would probably have been good for both him and society as a whole.

There are things that I probably I know better than Musk, and can do better than him. But I would never dream of intruding into his world, and attempting to run his companies, or making asset allocation decisions for his future investments. It would end just as poorly for me as intruding upon the world of politics has been for him. And I say that as someone who believes that what Musk has previously done in business is rarer and more important than the talents of the vast majority of people, including myself.

On top of that, Musk’s visibly obvious and well-reported drug use and dissolute personal habits simply do not correlate with a person who is firing on all cylinders professionally. There are only so many hours in a day, and if you are spending the best of them high, drunk, or chasing extramarital affairs, there is no way that you are optimizing to do all the incredible things that your fans believe you must be up to. To do important things, most people cannot live like Johnny Cash. They need to have relatively conservative and ascetic personal habits. Musk clearly does not.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump and Musk patch things up. Despite their personal falling out, they are connected by a web of mutual interests that should rationally supersede their personal antipathy. But I hope that whatever happens we hear about Musk less in the future. A lot less. That will make it easier for me to believe that he is really engaging in the world-changing innovation for which he is so celebrated by his admirers.

Another thing

This week, I recorded a new podcast for Drop Site News with Selim Koru, author of New Turkey and the Far-Right: How Reactionary Nationalism Remade a Country. The book recently inspired an essay that I wrote on Substack about the apparently successful confrontation between global reactionary movements and liberalism. Selim is a thoughtful intellectual and his book is great. I hope the podcast offers a good window into the trends moving modern Turkey, as well as many other countries now defined by conservative nationalism.