Why Elon Musk Is The Worst Human On The Planet

0:00Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

0:14Elon Musk. Elon Musk. Elon Musk. Elon Musk. The richest person on the planet. The first trillionaire in human history. Elon Musk is responsible for the deaths of anywhere from hundreds of thousands of people to millions of them. Musk gets involved with Doge. The conservative estimates that say the cuts to USAID should amount to something like 500 ,000 excess deaths this year. They have cut 80, 90 % of the life-saving programming going on overseas. It is a holocaust of starvation and suffering and death. Musk has a real talent for burying all of his most repulsive scandals by creating new ones.

0:54So much of what Musk deals with is like self-inflicted. This guy who was famously good at thinking from first principles now falls for like conspiracy theories and anti-Semitism.

1:09One of the things I love about reading the Stoics or the ancients is how they were always taking the lives of great men and women and putting them up for review. Right. You hear Seneca talking about Cato, what he did well and what where he fell short. You see Plutarch talking about Alexander the Great and Demosthenes and Caesar. They would look at the people who moved history, who changed the world, and look at what they did well, and look at where they fell short. Look at their virtues and their vices, right? And they did this not so much to judge, not to feel superior, but in fact, to see, to discuss, to make clear what a good life and a bad life looked like.

1:46I thought it'd be worth maybe doing that with someone who's actually my neighbor in Bastrop. I'm talking about someone maybe some of you work for or admire, talking about Elon Musk, who is decamped to Bastrop where I live. And there's no question Elon Musk is a great man in that sense, right? He has dented the universe. He is a modern figure straight out of the pages of Plutarch. But as Plutarch would remind us, right? Great and good, very different things. That it's possible to be quite successful and not virtuous. Possible to be quite virtuous and not successful. Like I would argue looking at Elon Musk, it's very clear that all the money in the world can't buy virtue, clearly.

2:23But I thought we could look, Again, the lives of the greats, of the big figures, the ones we know about whose exploits we follow, either with admiration or horror, allow us a way to look at some of these virtues from another angle. And so like courage, we can start with courage, right? I think it takes an incredible amount of moral courage to start a company, to challenge the status quo, to bet your fortune on an idea that you have, and to do it multiple times. And so I don't think we should discount the courage of entrepreneurs in this way, it matters. We would be in a worse place if people like that didn't do things like that.

2:58But I do think it's worth talking about courage in the sense that Aristotle talked about it. He talked about the golden mean. He said the opposite of courage wasn't cowardice. He said courage was actually in the middle between two different vices. Cowardice being one, but recklessness on the other hand. Courage is the golden mean between these two. His friends say he's actually a terrible poker player because he just goes all in constantly. and you know eventually you do that and you blow up or you're just the luckiest person in the world so the argument is like is it still moral courage if you're just yoloing all the time or you know you don't think about the consequences because you believe the world is a computer simulation and this is all a game again courage has to be some conception of the risk and the consequences or else it's not courage on either end right like if you're not triumphing over that fear if you don't have any fear, it still might be impressive, but it's not courage.

3:52And so I just think like, you know, that Silicon Valley idea of like move fast and break things, it's obviously important, right? You have to be willing to upset the apple cart again, to use another cliche, but it's one thing to do it when you're, you know, experimenting with an app or a social network or something, but it's another to do it when people's lives depend on what you do, when the consequences are born by people other than you. And so I think it's worth thinking about courage, not just what are you willing to do, but sometimes we're writing checks that other people have to cash, literally, figuratively.

4:25So like, what I know is like, when I see this person's attitude to risk, I don't go like, I want to jump in a Tesla robo-taxi, that sounds safe, or a Tesla rocket ship, right? Because we see that that relationship with risk is maybe different than it is for most people. And it's probably a dial, right? The dial that Aristotle is talking about is getting it exactly right, Too far in one direction and you're cowardly. Too far in the other direction and you're reckless. Like the Spartans actually punished reckless soldiers who fought too bravely because they endangered the other men. So that's courage.

4:58Okay, let's go to discipline. All right, there's no question Elon Musk works very hard, right? Extremely hard, probably harder than everyone in this room. I think what's interesting to me about Elon Musk is you have someone who is so disciplined in one sense and then emotionally just a complete chaotic, dysfunctional mess in another, right? Like this is a guy who is impulsive, who's erratic. He's never had a thought that he didn't immediately tweet. He's tweeted something like 30 ,000 times since he joined the app. That's a lot for someone who's so busy, I would say. Probably more than reasonable.

5:29Mark Schmiel has talked about how we always have the power to have no opinion. I think it's fascinating to see powerful and important people who for all that power don't have that power. They can't not express that opinion, right? They can't not say the thing that pops in their head, even if it's poorly thought out, even if it might hurt people's feelings, even if it might cause problems for them. And so for all of Elon Musk's success, he lacks that discipline. And look, stoicism, as I said, is about dealing with stress and pressure and crisis and adversity. But so much of what Musk deals with is like self-inflicted.

6:02And I think if you think Elon Musk is doing really important work, which I do, this is probably the criticism that should land the most, right? There's an opportunity cost to every one of those tweets. There's an opportunity cost to every deposition and trial he has to sit through, to every conflict, to every negative media story, to every person he turns off. There are people who won't buy Teslas, as we were just talking about, even though they'd be good for the environment because the brand is toxic. And so that's discipline and why it matters. Now, let's get to justice. I'm not in any way taking away from what a credible, transformative company Tesla is.

6:39that's great for the environment, that's changed the world. Everyone should be driving electric cars. It would be better if they did. He employs lots of people. He obviously makes positive difference in their lives. Many, many people are about to become millionaires because of the SpaceX IPO. That's all great. But I think when we think about justice and when we examine this life on a whole, we're gonna have to look at a literal illegal immigrant who came here on an expired student visa from Canada, spreading misinformation about immigrants and advocating for mass deportations. We have to look at the fact that he treats people and employees like garbage.

7:14Musk gets involved with Doge. Like, how are we to square the idealism and the impact and the innovation with Tesla and SpaceX and SolarCity with the conservative estimates that say the cuts to USAID should amount to something like 500 ,000 excess deaths this year? They think by 2030, four and a half million, like literally millions of people. It is a Holocaust of starvation and suffering and death that can really be traced back to one person, to a tweet where the richest man in the world tweets, I could have gone to some cool parties today. Instead, I fed this government agency into the wood chipper.

7:55I would say that the fact that that didn't result in like the immediate expulsion from polite society, that it wasn't condemned universally by all people, Like Elon Musk has talked about how he thinks empathy will be the death of Western civilization. The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. I would say that our willingness to tolerate and accept, that is the death of a moral society. That is what puts the values of Western civilization on the line. Do we actually mean them? or if someone comes and turns them upside down, undoes generations of work and compromise and political progress and we just accept that because we don't want to have people tweeting about us on the internet or we don't want to piss off the richest person in the world or we don't want to be primaried in an election.

8:45Like we are willing to accept that. To me, that is the extinction level event that we should be worried about. That's the virus of fear, not the woke mind virus. That's the virus of cowardice and complicity that we have to be worried about.

8:59Ryan Holiday: It all comes down to hiring. You got to find the right people for your team and you got to bring them on board and you got to onboard them quickly. You know, just throwing up a job posting and hoping you get lucky. I've just found, well, you don't get lucky enough. If you want to find quality hires, well, you should check out Indeed right now. People are finding quality hires on Indeed right now. In just the 30 or so seconds we've already been talking, people have made dozens of hires on Indeed, according to Indeed data worldwide. Their sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed are 95 % more likely to report a hire than a non-sponsored job.

9:39Ryan Holiday: So join more than 3.3 million employers worldwide that use Indeed to connect with quality talent that fits their needs. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less time, less stress, more results. When you need the right person to cut through the chaos, this is a job for Indeed-sponsored jobs. And listeners of this show get a$75 sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at Indeed.com slash stoic. That's Indeed.com slash stoic right now. And support the show by saying you heard about it on this podcast, Indeed.com slash stoic.

10:14Terms and conditions apply. I was asking some people at the staff meeting for Daily Stoic the other day if anyone uses Whatnot. and apparently i'm way out of the loop because not only did a bunch of them use it they raved about it and and look when you check out the app you sort of get it it's it's it's really exciting honestly you're seeing all these sales happen in real time and and you see the like the face of the person who's selling it which is of course not really what online shopping typically is if you don't know what whatnot is it is the largest dedicated live shopping platform beauty collectibles electronics luxury fashion even cookies and there are people there selling stuff building real thriving businesses and anyone can start selling on whatnot whether your business is very big very small whether it doesn't even exist yet people selling on whatnot sell 10 times more than other major marketplaces because you're not just listing products you're building a real connection with your buyer check it out today you just go to whatnot in the app store that's W-H-A-T-N-O-T, W-H-A-T-N-O-T, whatnot in the app store, download it and you can start selling right away.

11:22Okay, so wisdom. Look, Elon Musk is smart. Of course, he is very smart. Saying he's not smart is like saying he's not rich. He is obviously a lot of both. He is probably smarter than me, probably smarter than most of the people in this room. He also does some really stupid things. And those two things are related, right? Ego is the enemy, as I have talked about. You can imagine how if your friends stage an intervention because you want to start a company, and then that company becomes the most valuable company in the history of markets, you're not going to listen to criticism that much. And people are going to want to tell you things that are good for them, but maybe not always for you.

12:03Like you think about the emperor of Rome. How much honest feedback does the emperor of Rome have or get? Probably not much. There's a joke from one of Hadrian's advisors who says, you know, the man who controls 50 legions is always correct. The person who writes your paychecks, who controls the stock options, who has the largest megaphone in the world. You know, this is someone that people don't want to criticize. He's like the largest landowner and employer in the county, the little rural county that I live in. These are things that people think about. I get it. So obviously courage comes in here, but I think about it as being bad for him, right?

12:39The story of the emperor having no clothes is a cautionary tale about what happens when the emperor or when a leader or when a powerful person does not get told the truth. And so here we have this powerful, smart person becoming very vulnerable. Like the guy who used to read Soviet rocket manuals to figure out the aerospace business is now hearing about the world through tweets and podcasts, which are good as far as they go, but it's not quite the same thing, right? He's surrounded by enablers. Mark Shrews would talk about being stained purple, right? Being dyed purple by the cloak of the emperor.

13:17And you know, when people won't give you honest feedback, I think, you know, you get the cyber truck. That's what happens.

13:30So, as I talk about in the wisdom book, I think Elon Musk broke his brain. He was so smart, he broke his brain. He spent too much time on Twitter. And then, instead of going like, oh, I got to go to rehab for this, he bought Twitter and tried to break everyone else's brain. And so this guy who was famously good at thinking from first principles now falls for, like, conspiracy theories and anti-Semitism. You know, he's quoted by Walter Isaacson in Isaacson's bio. where he says, it's okay to be wrong. It's just don't be confident and wrong. Well, here we are. And so again, the cautionary tale here is that you can be very smart.

14:07And in fact, that intelligence is something distinct from wisdom, just as power and success is distinct from virtue. So I don't wanna belabor this, but I think here we have a guy who's rich and famous and accomplishment, but by his own admission, he says, if anyone knew what it was like in his head, you would not want to be him. You would not want to trade places. He says, my mind is a storm. My mind is a storm. I don't think most people would want to be me. They may think they'd want to be me, but they don't. They don't know. They don't understand. His brother has talked about how he's addicted to drama.

14:38That's the theme of his life. He is constantly fighting with people, constantly in trouble, constantly alternating between extreme highs and extreme lows. He's never at leisure. He can't possibly have enough time to see his enormous family. how would he and then because he got politically radicalized he is complicit in all this horrible stuff that is happening in the world the corruption and the incompetence and look we don't have to get into the Epstein stuff the thing that looked a lot like a Nazi salute and we don't have to judge either we just have to go hey there but for the grace of God go all of us right if it can happen to someone who is that smart and that hardworking and that courageous.

15:21It can happen to all of us. That's why the Stoics put up the lives of the greats for review, to see ourselves in them, to see our own tendencies in them, to try to learn from the experiences of others instead of always by our own powerful trial and error. And we can take good things from the lives of these people, as well as the things to steer clear from. No one is all good or all bad. But when we look at the life, we want to see, hey, what do I take away from? What are the moral lessons? It's not they did this on this date, but what do I take away from that about what a good life looks like?

16:00And what are the costs of selfishness and immoderation, risks, sake, and ego and hubris? Where do they lead us? They lead us here. And the reason we want to think about what makes for a good life is that we only get one life. we are only here for a very short amount of time, the Stoics would say. Like, a half a year is dead and gone, right? Dead and gone. Seneca would say it's wrong to think of death as something in the future. It's something that's happening right now. He says we're dying every minute. We are dying every day. So what we spend our time on, what we work on, who we are, what we are trying to do, this matters.

16:34What we are spending our time on is something we are paying for with our lives. Thank you.