A particularly American personality
Robert Reich points out that it’s a bad idea to let raging narcissists have a lot of power.
Like Donald Trump and Elon Musk for example.
First is Elon Musk, who last Friday fired half of Twitter’s 7,500 employees, including teams devoted to combating election misinformation – and did it so haphazardly and arbitrarily that most had no idea they were fired until their email accounts were shut off.
This was after he fired Twitter’s executives to avoid paying them the golden parachutes they’re owed. And after posting an article suggesting without evidence that Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, was in a drunken fight with a male prostitute.
Attention: the fox is inside the chicken coop.
But this has been his MO all along.
Taunting opponents. Treating employees like dung. Bullying adversaries. Demeaning critics. Craving attention. Refusing to be held accountable. Attracting millions of followers and gaining cult status. Spreading misleading information. Making gobs of money.
Impetuous. Unpredictable. Ruthless. Autocratic. Vindictive.
I don’t know anything about any of this because I’ve never paid attention to Elon Musk. I have no idea how he made those gobs of money – I know it’s to do with a car, but why that one car=richest guy in the known universe I have no idea (and don’t care).
Reich says he’s not Trump 2 but he is all too similar.
But both represent the emergence of a particularly American personality in the early decades of the 21st century: the wildly disruptive narcissist.
That’s unfortunate, because narcissists are horrible even if they’re not wildly disruptive. Why are they? Because they’re focused on self. That’s never a good thing. Self is small and the world is big – there are far more important things to focus on than self. Self just doesn’t matter that much. It matters; we wouldn’t be able to survive and get something done with no sense of self; but it doesn’t matter that much. And another thing about it of course is that it doesn’t matter to anyone else as much as it matters to its owner. Self always looms large and that’s a distortion that we have to learn to correct for. I don’t suppose we can correct completely, but we can do better than the trumps and musks of the world.
Both wield sledgehammers to protect their fragile egos. Both are utterly lacking in empathy. Both push baseless conspiracy theories (such as the one cooked up about Paul Pelosi).
Zero empathy is a weird spectacle. I wish we hadn’t been forced to spectate so much of it over the past seven years.
One of the few things that I know about Musk is that a friend of mine who’s an extreme TRA and wokester has a high opinion of him (he called him “a billionaire good man with a big ego”, or something like that).
Musk founded a software company that was subsequently bought for several millions. He used those millions to create an online bank which then merged with another company to form PayPal. eBay bought PayPal for several billions and that is how he ended up in his current situation. The car and the space company, among others, came later and were essentially toys for a bored rich man.
It is unfortunate that he is such a prick because he seems to have a talent for finding clever people and giving them enough time and money to pursue great ideas.
@GW
GW, I wouldn’t take that as definitive. Most Wokesters hate him. They’re threatening to quit Twitter in droves because Musk supports more freedom of speech on the platform (i.e., no banning women for “misgendering” the likes of Yaniv.)
At this point I’ll come to Musk’s defence (since I think Reich’s article is ridiculous). Musk does indeed have bad points as well as good points (who doesn’t?). But both Tesla and SpaceX are magnificent achievements (I do get that this isn’t due to him alone). Is he anything like Trump? No, that’s a silly comparison (Musk is highly competent in many ways and has built up multiple successful companies). Is he a raging narcissist? Probably no more so than any other driven entrepreneur who builds up major companies.
He does “think aloud” on his Twitter feed (along with many jokes), which may not be an optimal strategy and gets him criticised. His Tweet about the Pelosi thing was indeed (IMO) mis-judged, but in posting the link his Tweet explicitly said that there was “a tiny possibility” of something like that being true. Taken literally, that “tiny possibility” was, at the time, a fair enough comment.
Too often, initial media reports have turned out to be utterly wrong (Jesse Smollett, claims of racial taunting at colleges matches that are not supported by video, Covington kids, Kyle Rittenhouse, and literally dozens of more examples, as documented by, e.g., Wilfred Reilly) such that we should all be sceptical of news reports. (I still think this Tweet was misjudged.)
I don’t think Musk bought Twitter out of self aggrandisement, I think he bought it because he considers it important to the world, and thinks he can make it better, and, in particular, politically neutral. He may well do that, we’ll see, we can hope. (He really does consider that his companies, Tesla, SpaceX, Boring company, Neuralink, are there to benefit the world; and he has a strong argument!)
It is reported that he started thinking about buying Twitter when Twitter locked out the Babylon Bee account over the Rachel Levine “Man of the Year” satire. If he returns Twitter to a more politically neutral stance (and ends the ban on “misgendering” people, aka “correctly sexing” them) then good.
The woke hate him since he is anti-woke and since he’s too big to shut down (cf. JKR). We need to distinguish between fair criticism of Musk and woke people sounding off.
Forgot one other point:
It is standard in a tech company that, when firing someone, you first lock them out of the computers. That is not acting “haphazardly and arbitrarily”, it is, fairly obviously, so stop them being able to retaliate and damage the company. Reich doesn’t know what he is talking about. Or maybe he does and is just trying to denigrate Musk anyhow.
I don’t think there’s a method of firing 7500 people via an in-person chat with a line manager. (Note also that most analysts agreed that Twitter was way over-staffed, and that many major tech companies had been too optimistic and over-expanded their payroll, cf Meta/Facebook firing 11,000 people this week.)
Having worked for several software companies, and having been laid off from one, I’d say that Reich is correct. None of the firings I’ve seen, other than where someone was being malicious, involved cutting someone off from the computers. Usually people had some time to get things in order before leaving.
I agree with Coel. Sure Musk is flawed, but he has some major positive achievements as well as some errors.
I doubt one could find someone who has done nothing bad or nothing good.
If I looked hard I might find a positive achievement by Trump.
I bet you wouldn’t.