As part of my interest in electric vehicles, I have listened to 7 or 8 audiobooks on Elon Musk, EVs, and Tesla (Vance, Isaacson, Niedermayer, McKenzie, Slobodian, Higgins, Colias) including his takeover of Twitter (Schiffer) and time at DOGE (Enrich). I’ve not yet seen the Musk documentary but I think have a pretty good read on the man.

His public persona has morphed from world changing businessman to crazed empowered egomaniac. It’s hard to believe Musk went from the inspiration for Tony Stark to a Bond villain. (Here, I elaborate on a thread that I wrote about Musk on Bluesky the other day).

There is something nerdy and awkward about Musk who suffered intense bullying as a kid in South Africa. He has weird ideas about breeding and the human population (he has 14 kids with 4 different women). He self-diagnosed with Asperger’s, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that is actually true, given how he’s described with a hyperability to focus and disregard for other’s people’s feelings.

I think it’s fair to say that Musk’s worst instincts and desires have been indulged by shareholders and policymakers in ways that are ultimately dangerous for democratic governance, not just in the United States but the world over.

As we head into the midterm elections in which Musk has committed more than $446 million dollars (the most of anyone ever), it’s important to take stock of Musk who, like me, claims Austin, Texas as his home.

Musk as Technocratic Savant
What surprised me across listening to all of these books is that he actually has more technical acumen than I would have thought and isn’t just a hype man trying to puff up his companies. He has computer programming skills so his first two businesses as the dot.com boom took off were prescient applications, one which was a forerunner to MapQuest/Google maps and the other which eventually became PayPal.

While he initially joined Tesla as a funder, he took on more of a leadership role over time, including micro-managing the design details as Tesla tried to bring the Roadster to market. SpaceX has always been his peculiar baby (motivated by his desire for humans to be an interplanetary species and have a backup plan if Earth becomes uninhabitable).

He deserves a lot of credit for the renewed ability of the U.S. to send rockets into space. He’s had a good knack for turning big think ideas into profitable applications like Starlink. Throughout his various endeavors, Musk has thrown himself into the work, locating his desk on the factory floor, sleeping at the office, working tirelessly alongside his colleagues to get the product out, to save his companies from financial ruin, etc.

He has supported visionary ideas, some of which like electric vehicles I find admirable, even if his treatment of his employees left a lot to be desired. He also was able to save Tesla and SpaceX from near death on multiple occasions, sometimes with the assistance of the federal government but also a relentless drive to question habitual ways of making cars and rockets, producing breakthrough technological advances in both like battery packs, the gigapress, the gigafactory, and reusable rockets.

You can see a habit informed by his experience at Tesla and SpaceX to try to do more with less and see if products could be built based on human sacrifice (the workers going all in for the company), innovation, and stripped down production processes to that which was only essential. I think it was that ethos which informed his approach to Twitter and Doge. Could you unplug things and fire people and the process would still work?

It seems like this experimental approach had served Elon well in his commercial endeavors, where feedback allowed for course correction, if parts or staffing levels were cut too close to the bone. He might have been enboldened by his experience with Twitter where the service continued to work despite massive layoffs of the company and with an impromptu movement of data centers in 2022.

Musk’s Hubris and Mania
With respect to DOGE and the U.S. government, this approach did not work. Here, Musk’s hubris was on display as he careened into conspiracy theories informed by anti-USAID lunatics on Twitter.

Musk clearly thought you could fire a lot of people and cut funding and then restore them if any mistakes were made, though global public health is not like one of his companies where you could quickly restart programs and bring people back if an error was made. It’s not clear that Musk was prepared to hear truthful news about the impact of public health cuts by the time he made it to DOGE.

Musk’s right wing mania seems to have been fueled in part by his hostility to his trans daughter. He also seems to have become radicalized by social media. In his quest for an outlet to communicate directly to the people, Twitter became a favorite tool for him, but he gravitated to embrace a more extreme persona by indulging in anti-woke tropes.

His embrace of free speech seems to extend to whatever he thinks is fair game, but he seems pretty thin-skinned to actual give and take. When advertisers left Twitter in the wake of his takeover, he threatened to sue them.

Musk’s God Complex
I don’t think Musk thinks all that highly of Trump and seems to have a god complex of his own. Few people have successfully told Musk no, and he has repeatedly been able to get away with stuff. For example, in 2018, he called a guy who criticized his efforts to support the Thai kids trapped in a cave a “pedo guy.” Musk was able to fend off a defamation suit.

In 2018, the SEC came after him for his tweets about securing Saudi funding for taking Tesla private and Musk was supposed to have had his tweets screened as part of a settlement but Musk was able to wriggle out of that. When California tried to shut down Tesla factories during COVID, Musk insisted his companies would stay open and California backed down.

Musk has been able to parlay his ability with Tesla and SpaceX to escape death by becoming the richest person on the planet. I’m still amazed that shareholders rewarded him such generous compensation packages. Nobody should have as much money as Musk has, and he’s now in a position to throw his money around to support candidates and to create havoc in political systems.

I want to think my fellow Texans will not react well to his efforts to buy a Senator in Ken Paxton as well as a governor, to send his lawyer to Congress, or to buy a state park to expand SpaceX operations, but we shall see. Now that Musk is worth almost a trillion dollars, it’s not clear how if ever he’ll get his comeuppance.

I don’t know if he will ever be accountable for DOGE’s destruction of USAID and global health programs which likely are resulting in the deaths of millions. Musk is now considering a merger of Tesla and SpaceX, which might be good for Elon, less clear that it is either good for shareholders or society.

Despite all my negative feelings about Musk, I still support for his electric and solar dreams. I want companies like Tesla to succeed in converting the auto industry to EVs. That’s still a noble mission, though Tesla appears to have gone off the rails with the Cybertruck. I can’t tell if the company’s pivot to autonomous vehicles and lack of new models is throwing in the towel to Chinese competitors. Tesla’s Austin factory supports 16,000 workers and is a site to behold.

It’s a strange thing to wish his companies well but for Elon himself to finally have the world tell him no. But, that has to happen, sooner rather than later. The Tuesday November 3rd mid-terms will be our next great test.