Congratulations, You’re Smarter Than a Billionaire

Elon’s disgraced exit highlights the often tragic cost of “genius”

1- Our 'Deal with the Devil' Came with Demons

“Tech billionaire and DOGE hatchet man Elon Musk promised to save the nation $2 trillion. In reality, in spite of massive cuts in federal agencies, contracts, services, and jobs, U.S. government spending is actually up more than 6 percent over the same period last year during the Biden administration, according to new Treasury data.” - Mary Papenfuss of The Independent.

Up until early April 2025, the dominant narrative around Elon Musk has been something close to this:

1. He is a genius. His mind operates more effectively than normal, translating into excellence in whatever he tries.

2. He founded PayPal and Tesla and developed them into world-class companies, which brought him world-class wealth.

3. When tapped to streamline government like his companies, his genius - and the fact that government is essentially a very large business - meant he couldn’t fail.

This narrative is deliciously clean and devoid of nuance, complexity, or contradictions. And like most spotless stories, it’s wrong.

An overlooked scourge rankling our politics is the myth that policies are separate from personalities, that somehow a flawed character need not hinder exquisite managerial judgment. This is a fallacy, especially when an organization - a company or a government - is undemocratic, when its chorus of varied voices fades, and a single decision-maker morphs his organization into an extension of his own psyche.

Elon Musk lords over his businesses like a dictator. They all operationally mimic his personality. But Musk’s personality has long exhibited a concerningly low level of compassion for others. This low prioritization of human well-being can be attributed to his Asperger's syndrome, or Autism Spectrum Disorder. But his shocking callousness for the widespread harm he has caused no doubt echoes circumstances unique to his story.

We will never fix our broken politics until we stop believing we can have the best of a leader without their worst. We should stop elevating purported “geniuses” from the private sector to civic leadership, where their towering deficiencies reliably overwhelm their narrow abilities. We need to accept that character matters, that “genius” comes with costs, that government is the opposite of business, and that high acumen in one thing does not reliably translate into excellence in anything else.

Elon’s actual story packs a torrent of messiness, self-inflicted failures, near-collapses, and raging pathologies, all of which made his failure to slash government waste all but guaranteed. His spectacular downfall provides one of the most important cautionary tales from the Age of Trump.

2- Early Warning Signs

“Sometimes great innovators are risk-seeking man-children who resist potty training…they can be reckless, cringeworthy, sometimes even toxic. They can also be crazy.” -Walter Isaacson

Elon Musk was born wealthy. His father was a politician and businessman who developed properties and held investments across South Africa. He also abused Elon’s mother, who divorced him in 1979.

Elon’s maternal grandfather was a politician notorious for supporting apartheid, championing conspiracy theories, and making racist, anti-democratic, and anti-semitic remarks.

Elon’s father is also a conspiracist who’s called Joe Biden a “pedophile president, said “the only thing we are here for is to reproduce,” and sired two children with his stepdaughter.

Musk moved to the U.S. for school but overstayed his visa and, for a time, lived in the U.S. illegally. His father gave him at least $20,000 to found Zip2.com with his brother and a friend. They attracted an investment firm that changed the company’s name and strategy. The board wanted to merge with another firm, but Musk aggressively blocked it. He tried to become CEO, but the board refused. Sidelined, Musk retained enough ownership to net $22 million when the company sold.

Musk did not found PayPal. He used his money to cofound X.com, which merged with a more popular online bank that then became PayPal. Early X.com investors did not trust Musk to lead and forced him to step down as CEO. After merging with Peter Thiel’s Confinity, Musk again emerged as CEO, but his brusque style caused Peter Thiel to resign and the board to oust Musk as CEO once again. Re-sequestered, Musk clung to enough shares to net $175 million when PayPal sold.

Helping build a startup and holding equity until the company sells is now a well-trodden path to wealth and, pound for pound, probably the easiest way to become a millionaire in the United States. Musk benefited enormously from timing and executed this strategy before the flood of current competition made it commonplace. Many unknown things swung his way, including not losing equity after his business relationships imploded.

He was a diligent coder. He worked the long nights Bill Gates made famous. But Musk’s belligerence about needing to be in charge came close to sabotaging his early career. He managed to linger inside each venture long enough to achieve a level of wealth that made those early hindrances on his base instincts evaporate.

3- Financial Escape Velocity

“Elon Musk is a very, very smart man, but there are a lot of smart people in this world, and you've got to execute. He's got execution problems.” -Steven Eisen

"If you list my sins, I sound like the worst person on Earth. But if you put those against the things I've done right, it makes much more sense." -Elon Musk, TED interview, 2022.

In the United States, there’s a level of wealth beyond which rules governing one’s behavior change. Most people cannot lie, cheat, and steal without negative repercussions. Enough money, however, attracts immediate support from lawyers, investors, politicians, media audiences, and even judges.

By 2000, Musk had enough money to financially intimidate and legally threaten anyone. We all hope, with age and wisdom, that young belligerence will moderate into social decorum. But Musk’s gargantuan wealth was gasoline to his flaming obsession for control over everything and everyone around him.

Musk did not found Tesla. He joined a year after its founding, but won a lawsuit that allows him to claim he was a founder. Musk was not initially involved in day-to-day operations, but after some success in fundraising, he convinced Tesla’s board to push the other founders out. He then led the successful launch of the Model S in 2012, for which he deserves credit. But that success overshadowed a carnival of self-imposed blunders.

Seven female Tesla employees sued Musk for sexual harassment. Tesla mechanics in Sweden launched a strike that Musk’s intransigence made the country’s longest strike in 85 years. From 2014 to 2018, Tesla's Fremont Factory accumulated three times as many OSHA violations as the ten largest U.S. auto plants combined. Tesla ignored rules to report severe injuries occurring on its premises. Musk sued the TV show Top Gear for libel after the hosts gave Tesla’s cars a mixed review, and lost the case. A whistleblower claimed Tesla executives hacked employees’ phones and spied on them.

The California Civil Rights Department investigated Tesla for “a pattern of racial harassment” and obstructing the investigation. Musk was investigated for violating reporting standards, fictitiously inflating positive cash flow, lying publicly about taking Tesla private, and “gaming” battery swap subsidies that Tesla didn’t properly earn.

Musk was fined $20 million, was removed as chairman of the board, and faced a stockholder class action suit for lying about Model 3 production numbers and misleading investors and consumers about Tesla’s promised, but never-delivered, Self-Driving capabilities.

Now a billionaire, $20 million to Musk is a parking ticket. A wave of lawsuits that would impoverish most people allowed him to intimidate, terrify, and subdue less wealthy opponents, even when their accusations against him were credible. Normal guardrails that limit human cruelty cracked around Musk like levees in a storm, unleashing a neuro-divergent hurricane of hubris fueled by an ocean of good fortune.

4- A Stunning Lack of Empathy

“The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one,” - Bill Gates on Musk shutting down USAID.

“I’d love for him to go in and meet the children that have now been infected with HIV because he cut that money.” -Bill Gates on Musk cancelling anti-HIV grants for Africa.

When Elon Musk hosted SNL in 2021, he divulged he had Asperger’s syndrome. A leading theory on the condition’s cause goes like this: As infants, young brains engage in neural pruning, where unneeded neural connections in the frontal lobe are fried off on purpose so more attention goes to important things (like people) as opposed to less-important things (like objects). The result of this process is that most humans emerge hyper-sensitive to the words and actions of those around them, and less attentive to inanimate objects and non-human phenomena in general.

Sometimes neural pruning malfunctions. The autism spectrum delineates a range of behaviors that result when too many neural synapses sabotage typically deep feelings toward others. Neither “Asperger’s” nor “Autism” is Latin for “no empathy.” Rather, they denote varied neural abnormalities that complicate how interpersonal feedback impacts the psyche.

Unlike most humans with strict limits on the level of harm they would cause to fulfill their desires, Musk regularly steamrolls common limits of decorum and morality for his main desires: money, power, fame, and control.

Back in 2008, while still married to the mother of five of his children, he became engaged to a young British actress and texted this information to his wife, barely batting an eye. Later, Musk mocked his daughter on Twitter in front of 200 million followers. After buying Twitter, Musk enabled premium subscriptions for 150 accounts amplifying pro-Nazi content. And while at SNL, he reportedly rejected sketch ideas so furiously that he made cast member Chloe Fineman cry.

Entities Musk leads now embody his devaluation of people who are not him. In his first week of ownership, he fired 6,000 employees from Twitter. Corporate layoffs - meant to cut costs, improve production, increase value, and ensure long-term survival - are so ubiquitous a corporate tool, they’ve stopped registering as tragic events for those made unemployed. But Musk’s Twitter layoffs brought none of these benefits. Twitter lost 80% of its value. The platform experienced blackouts and major glitches. Media observers detected a surge in far-right content and conspiracy theories. Without blinking, Musk shoved 6,000 strangers into varying levels of personal chaos for a vanity project.

5- Taking Callousness Public

“He comes in with his idealism and his Silicon Valley playbook, and a few interesting things happened. Does the ‘move fast and break things’ model work in Washington? Not really.” -Appian software CEO, Matt Calkins.

“[T]here’s a lot of inertia in the government…So it’s, like, it’s not easy.” -Musk on cutting costs in the government.

“At the core of Musk’s challenges was his unfamiliarity with reforming an organization that, unlike his own companies, he does not fully control,” - Michael Sherer and Ashley Parker of The Atlantic.

Musk and Trump, in a thousand ways, are oil and water. One is a painfully awkward, GenX tech savant with dreams of moving to Mars and populating Earth with his offspring like a dystopian mad scientist. The other is a semi-literate, carnival-barking baby boomer at peak animation when using rhetorical sleight-of-hand to hit on someone’s daughter. But one thing they share, aside from inveterate dishonesty, is a stunning lack of concern for the suffering of others.

Trump’s moral emptiness is legendary, from cheating on each of his wives, to tearing immigrant children from their parents, to pandemic politicization that caused an estimated 400,000 preventable COVID deaths, to disappearing a Maryland father of three to a torture dungeon in El Salvador and joking about it.

Remarkably, Musk can match Trump’s extraordinary callousness. Musk recently fathered multiple children with his Neuralink employee while supposedly monogamous with the mother of two of his children, cementing an established pattern of profligate cheating and lying.

There may be no more tragic and destructive move by either man than Musk shuttering USAID and cancelling research into deadly diseases. According to Oxfam, the loss of USAID threatens 95 million people with losing basic healthcare, which could easily cause 3 million preventable deaths per year, at least eight times worse than Trump’s handiwork during COVID.

Here at home, cuts have ended clinical trials and research developing vaccines for future, inevitable pandemics, all while cases of measles and bird flu are surging.

Both Trump and Musk had interests competing with these titanic losses of life: Trump to trigger conservative cheers at his violent slashing of government, and Musk to spotlight his genius and hobble regulatory pressure on his companies. Most people with similar interests would have been stopped by the unfathomable damage their cost-cutting would cause to millions. But Musk felt no hesitancy. His immediate interests were, are, and ever will always be a speeding freight train whose brakes never worked.

Musk treated government employees - including my former colleagues - with the same callousness he shows his employees. DOGE was likely responsible for north of 200,000 federal workers losing their careers. That is equivalent to every man, woman, and child in Salt Lake City sent scrambling for new jobs. Musk thanked no one for their service. Instead, he celebrated, chainsaws buzzing overhead.

Unlike a private company, the U.S. government was designed as a power-sharing entity. The three branches were constructed to check each other's power, and each employs thousands of bureaucrats who spend their days executing those checks and balances. When an erstwhile executive tries to escape checks on their power, they will crash against a vast powersharing infrastructure built up slowly over 248 years. Musk lost his nerve. Trump never will.

Both Trump and Musk made the same mistake many humans make: believing that government is no different than a company, that an efficient business mind will automatically excel in government, and that being exceptional at one thing translates into success in everything else.

Podcaster Scott Galloway claims our society over-idolizes tech innovators, as if their contributions are so valuable as to be worth towering tradeoffs. We can assess this human instinct by taking the extreme hypothetical between technology and empathy: if forced to live in a society where everyone is a Nobel Prize-winning scientist but treats every other person like garbage, or a society where technology chugs along slowly but everyone is an empathetic, bear-hugging sweetheart, I know where I want to live.

DOGE-era Musk dominated global headlines for months with his promises of public sector innovation, but failed spectacularly. He promised $2 trillion in government savings and ended with a deficit. Federal workers he fired have been reinstated. His choice for IRS secretary was replaced. Departments are busy reversing his changes. Tesla sales have cratered, and post-DOGE Musk, the formerly lauded genius, is now an object of international ridicule. If these are the trappings of genius, I humbly opt for the bliss of ignorance.