Techbro Supernova
Ego gratification on a galactic scale.
Wintertime brings the gardener the delicious gift of time—time not just to rest after the past season and dream about the next, but also to engage with their other passions. In my case, that’s armchair psychoanalysis.
(If you’re just here to read about gardens, hang tight; I’ll have more of that in two weeks’ time.)
There’s one question on everyone’s mind these days: “What the f*** is up with Elon Musk?”
I haven’t seen a satisfactory answer explaining Musk’s extreme behavioral shift over the last few years. My favorite incisive political observer, Exra Klein, who can usually get to the bottom of things, spent an hour dissecting the topic on a recent podcast. Hypotheses included:
a vendetta against the Biden administration for excluding him from an EV summit.
frustration at government regulations
abhorrence at having a trans daughter
too much time spent in weird dark corners of the internet
“small dick syndrome”
While all of these are interesting, none feels like it hits home. They don’t account for the violence of Musk’s actions—the gleeful malice of his disembowelments. The problem is they’re all external, mechanistic reasons, assuming a rational cause and effect; they don’t probe the irrational world of the human unconscious.
Hmm, probing the world of the human unconscious—this seems like a job for . . . an armchair psychoanalyst!
In order to approach Elon Musk, I think it’s useful to study the psyches of techbros in general. What I find deliciously ironic about techbros, is that although they see themselves as entirely singular, in reality, if you read enough bios of these guys, you’ll find that they’re all exactly the same. In particular, there’s a class of techbros that I’ll call techno-messiahs who share the following traits:
a clear vision of the problem dooming humanity
a clear idea of the way to save humanity from that problem
a belief that they are singularly equipped to do so
a starving ego that can only find gratification at the scale of world salvation
What’s revealing about this techbro formula is that the emphasis isn’t on a world that needs saving, it’s on their unique ability to do so, showing that their mission isn’t altruistically motivated; it’s just a desperate play by a massive ego to find gratification.
This played out very clearly in the case of Sam Bankman-Fried and his FTX debacle. Bankman-Fried was obsessed by the idea of “effective altruism,” which proposes a rational way to determine the most bang for your philanthropic buck. For Bankman-Fried, money distributed by peons like you and me wasn’t going to cut it: only he was wise and smart enough to use money to save humanity, so he stole a whole bunch of it to do so. We all saw how that worked out.
In order to be the solution, Bankman-Fried actually created a problem.
The case of artificial intelligence is another good example of this bassackwards solution/problem approach. The technocrats had the idea for AI, the technocrats built it, the technocrats warned the world of its dangers, and now the technocrats are heroically donning their capes to save the world . . . from a problem of their own making.
OpenAI (maker of ChatGPT) is the most glaring player in this category. Its mission is to save the world from malicious AI, but the irony is that, according to some observers, OpenAI has exponentially accelerated the progress of AI, without meaningfully mitigating its harms. They’re like the bumbling bomb squad in the action movie who cut the wrong wire and the bomb’s timer drops from 10 minutes to 1.
Let’s get back to Elon Musk. Although his fame and fortune come from Tesla, all his biographies agree that his true passion is SpaceX, which is the vehicle for his personal mission: colonizing Mars. Musk couches this mission in grandiose humanitarian terms: human life on Earth is doomed, and in order to save the species and the grandeur of human civilization, we must diversify our planetary options, so let’s get onto Mars, stat!
There’s one little problem with this mission: it’s not popular. A YouGov poll found that “even with a safe trip guaranteed (which Musk himself has said is unlikely), Americans are not interested in going to Mars for the remainder of their days.” Personally, I have no desire to go to Mars. If I offered you a free ticket to Mars—or hey, 50 free tickets so you could bring your family and friends—would you take it?
Musk has created a way to save the world that fits the scale of his techno-messianic ego. The problem is that the world doesn’t want to be saved.
This puts Musk in the awkward position of grandiose technocrat with a solution in need of a problem. He’s running a lifeboat business and no one wants lifeboats. The ship might be sinking, but hey, the pumps are kicking in, and maybe the mechanic will patch the hole, and besides, I’m a strong swimmer.
The magnitude of Musk’s Mars mission has backed him into a corner. He has so publicly and grandiosely tied his messianic ambitions to Mars, that he can’t just limp along and get a couple of NASA contracts to gather some Mars dust and call it a day. No, he’s got to SAVE HUMANITY BY COLONIZING MARS. If he doesn’t do that, he’ll die a failure, with his ego writhing in agony. And so Musk’s ego has driven him to desperation.
There is a very simple way to get people en masse to buy into this whole Mars idea: all you have to do is turn Earth into a toxic hellscape. That’ll get people rushing to the lifeboats, and thinking you’re an awfully great guy for having the idea to make lifeboats—you’ve saved the world! Then the ego will finally feel warm and fuzzy.
Let’s run a thought experiment: pretend you’re an evil genius who’s just inherited a modest sum—let’s say $50 billion—from your revered great-grandfather, the patriarch of your noble clan of evil genii. You’ve already got a cool HQ in an island cave and a helicopter with lasers and 401k matching for your monosyllabic minions, so you decide to blow the whole inheritance on your diabolical plan of turning earth into a toxic hellscape. How would you go about it most efficiently?
You might do this:
Install a small, stupid, and impulsive man to lead the world’s largest economy and the world’s largest military (he’ll probably mess stuff up pretty good on his own, but bonus points if you can get him to be your puppet)
Control a massive international global media company to spread toxic and violent points of view around the world
Destabilize regional geo-political tinderboxes (bonus points for regions with lots of nuclear weapons)
Let fossil fuel interests go hogwild in a warming world
Behead the one thing keeping millions of people from unnecessary suffering and death
Etc.
The point is, if your goal was to make the world a toxic hellscape, you’d be hard-pressed to do it more efficiently than Musk is. Now, I’m not saying Musk is an evil genius who’s doing all this consciously. The evidence suggests that he’s a rich manchild with a severely underdeveloped psyche, who’s therefore in thrall to the impulses of his unconscious. He has a titanic ego that needs to save the world in order to find gratification. And he’s damn well going to save it, whether the world wants it or not.
In short, I don’t believe Musk’s lunacy is about money, power, or even transphobia. I think it’s about the deepest needs of the human psyche. Elon Musk seems to be willing to destroy the world, just so that he may be the one to save it.
As for me, my soul is earthbound. Deep greens and blues are the colors I choose—not red. If this particular Titanic is indeed going down, I think I’ll stick around, playing my little violin. The roses will be cellos, and the peonies pianos. The apples can play timpani. If our little orchestra makes any nice music, I’ll share it with you here.