Elon Musk's Tragic Flaw Of Egotistical Hubris
The appeal of splurging on a luxury car built by a workaholic CEO engineer with bold, futuristic dreams for humanity will not hold up when he spends his time being a bitch on Twitter.
Elon Musk’s impulsive decisions to buy Twitter and take up Donald Trump’s crown as the social media platform’s top bullying prima donna have been train wrecks.
Since launching his crusade to troll Democrats with his petty political conversion into an anti-Social Justice Warrior, Musk has lost $49 billion of his net worth, inspired a boycott of Tesla, plummeted Tesla’s stock price down 40% (which was the collateral for his Twitter deal), and been accused of sexual harassment.
The Twitter adoration he gets for being the next Trumpian blackhole of narcissistic attention has clearly gone to his head, and now he's conflating negative reactions to his egotism and personal behavior for victimhood like a true right-wing culture war fighter with a persecution-complex unfitting for the richest person on the planet. No one hates being trolled more than trolls, and narcissists hate when the image they've carefully constructed of themselves is smeared. They also can't admit it's their own fault.
So Musk is lashing out. He recently announced on Twitter that he’s “building a hardcore litigation department” that will report directly to him, that he’s “looking for hardcore streetfighters,” and that “there will be blood.” But don’t worry about his mental stability, because he claims his commitment is to “never seek victory in a just case against us, even if we will probably win,” and to “never surrender/settle an unjust case against us, even if we will probably lose.”
Right… because, historically, every narcissist who makes a public, theatrical production out of launching a massive legal crusade against his critics and enemies ultimately reveals himself as a great arbiter of what is just and unjust criticism. On Twitter he has infamously accused people of being pedophiles, he used the emoji of a pregnant man to call Bill Gates fat, and he’s describing his buyout goal as “owning the libs.” This is not a mature mindset.
Its like watching a Greek tragedy. Musk’s tragic flaw of egotism has lifted him too close to the sun and he’s going to force the world to watch his wings melt. The value and prestige of Tesla, SpaceX, and Musk’s net worth depend on people admiring him and wanting to contribute to his vision of the future. Tesla’s high stock price and Musk’s incredible wealth are relatively abstract projections unmoored to the reality of Tesla’s actual value as an automotive company facing severe long-term challenges staying competitive now that every automotive company is selling electric vehicles.
So why would Musk want to intentionally piss off half the political spectrum in America with stupid trolling, and shred his image as a genius engineer by getting into the weeds of endless Twitter squabbles, corporate litigation and legal battle royales, and personal attacks of critics? He’s basically flirting with the idea of killing Tesla’s retail sales, drying up stock enthusiasm, and burning his tech empire to the ground. It’s ironic that the Democratic and liberal-minded people he’s suddenly launching cultural war against are disproportionately the people interested in Telsa’s green technology and carbon reduction ideals.
The consumer appeal of splurging on a luxury car built by a workaholic CEO engineer with bold, futuristic dreams for humanity will not hold up when he starts spending his time being a whiny bitch on Twitter. Thankfully Musk is ineligible to use his proliferating grievances and grudges to run for president like Donald Trump did. Buying a Tesla vehicle is much more investment for Musk’s fans to show loyalty than buying a red, made-in-China hat and casting a free vote once every four years.
Yet with Trump off Twitter, the Internet’s trolls are happy to have a new shitposter. Some trollish Republicans are cheering Musk’s entrance into the culture wars, apparently oblivious to the fact that Musk being the richest person on the planet thanks to a manufacturing business means that no one has more of a personal incentive to suddenly turn Republican than a guy who in theory owes more in taxes than anyone else in the country, and who profits handsomely from his factories employing non-union workers.
Which kind of necessitates an asterisk when we discuss his business success. Tesla’s growth and development have been hugely supported with Americans’ tax dollars and the generosity of our corporate tax code. One of Barack Obama’s most controversial Election 2012 quips was “you didn’t build that,” arguing that rich companies and business people who get ahead do so in part because of the incredibly expansive, creative, interconnected, and governmentally supported American economy and society that allow ambitious entrepreneurs to thrive here more than in any other country on Earth. Also, the Federal Government sometimes directly underwrites your company’s growth. This is entirely true of Elon Musk.
The Obama Administration lended Tesla $465 million in 2009 to design their automotive battery packs and build the Model S because one of the reasons the American people voted for Democrats that year was to do something about climate change and jumpstart green technology. You’re welcome, Elon Musk. It would be nice occasionally when he’s preposterously accusing Democrats of being crazier than Republicans if he referenced the fact that Democrats helped Tesla be competitive in its early manufacturing years, and that Republicans would have opposed giving him any loans.
Musk’s new Republican friends view this type of governmental subsidy as an inefficient and pointless political intervention into the free market to alter people’s economic choices, but it’s hardly the only reason Musk owes his success in part to the American people. States across America (particularly the Democratic ones) give automotive consumers big tax credits for buying electric cars. The federal government itself offers a whopping $7,500 tax credit for buying electric cars. This has allowed Tesla to be more cost-competitive with other brands, which has been the biggest obstacle for the electric car industry all along. You’re welcome, Elon Musk.
Without these extremely generous tax subsidies Tesla would have sold far fewer cars, and might have even gone bankrupt, something that almost occurred several times throughout Tesla’s history. There is also the issue of Musk’s extreme wealth, which is only possible through the generous (i.e. absurd) loopholes in the US tax code that allow the rich to avoid paying taxes on unrealized stock gains even if they can paradoxically use those unrealized gains to buy things for themselves, such as Twitter.
But Musk’s troubled effort to take over Twitter continues to suggest he’s straying far from his expertise. It’s an example of the Dunning-Kruger effect, and an embodiment of society’s dumb idea that just because someone is successful at one thing (i.e. hiring and leading great engineers) they must automatically be good at other things, like political punditry or moderating a social media platform. Genius can often be siloed in one field or study and not be broadly translatable to other fields, and Musk is damaging his reputation for being a wise polymath.
Musk once humbly told Joe Rogan that you wouldn’t want to be him because his mind is like “a never-ending explosion” of ideas, yet he was unable to think about how complicated turning Twitter into a free speech utopia might be before offering an absurd $44 billion for it to which he doesn't even actually have easy liquid access.
In his pronouncements about his plans for Twitter it’s not clear Musk understands the legal intricacies of free speech in the US, let alone every other country on Earth that doesn’t have a judicially honored, constitutional equivalent to our 1st Amendment limiting governmental infringements on speech. The free speech ideas he has offered so far are fascinatingly half-baked, apparently ignorant of how exhaustively crafted Twitter's behavior rules and moderation practices already are with complex compromises balancing openness, safety, tolerance, legality, and user experience in ways that obviously can’t possibly please every user everywhere.
Musk’s Wild West vision for Twitter doesn’t seem to acknowledge how awful its user experience would become. Who would want to continue tweeting when everyone’s feed fills up with hate speech, harassment, scams, graphic violence, terrorist recruitment, sex solicitation, child pornography, drug and weapon sales, etc.? If Musk started a new moderation framework from scratch for shielding the platform from filth and the Internet’s Pandora’s box of legal liabilities he’d inevitably wind up with 99% of Twitter’s existing framework and rules. And this is only in America, where moderating Twitter is relatively easy!
The EU in general and individual European nations in particular have much stricter content rules that Musk would be forced to abide by. You can legally have a Twitter account devoted to Nazi sympathies, symbols, and Holocaust denialism in America, but not Germany or a plethora of others. And problematic individual users are far from the only moderation problems. Autocratic governments around the world love forcing their propaganda and censorship ideals on social media companies. Countries like China could conceivably blackmail Musk and refuse to allow Tesla sales in China unless Twitter bans anti-Chinese sentiments on the platform. Tesla’s brand new $2 billion factory in Shanghai could be closed down or potentially nationalized if Twitter users in Musk’s free speech utopia criticize President Xi.
For such a workaholic struggling to make Tesla competitive long-term and send humans to Mars, it’s pretty dumb that Musk would want to add the blackhole headache of policing a social media platform to his “never-ending head explosions.” It’s also bad business. Musk paying $44 billion to reverse the tiniest aspects on the far margins of the platform’s otherwise legally necessary content moderation is not genius. Twitter’s profit last quarter was $513 million. Unless Musk is able to drastically increase the company’s revenue, it would take approximately 20 years for this deal to make Musk any money. And this quarterly profit would likely plummet unless Musk continues to heavily moderate the platform in America and other countries. Even if he starts charging people or businesses to use Twitter, what company wants to pay to have an account or buy advertising when the comments on their posts fill up with racist calls for genocide, sexist harassment of female users, prostitution solicitation, or recruitment drives for Boko Haram?
So is Elon Musk losing his mind? Everything he’s doing now is dumb, needlessly antagonistic, cringey, bad for business, terrible for Tesla’s branding, and personally destructive in hubristically embarrassing ways.
The more that Musk obsessively wastes his time wading into every dumb political and culture war controversy du jour the less he looks like a super genius the world would want to respect, and the more he looks like a narcissist from a rich family who got a lot more money from the government to make a temporarily ahead-of-its-time electric car before wasting his money, time, and legacy to be a litigious Internet troll.
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