The alleged “genius” Elon Musk is apparently leaving DOGE to concentrate on his business, which has suffered since his Sieg Heil salutes and chainsaw approach to the government.
If he were to follow his own directives and list 5 productive things he’s done in the past 3 months it would include tanking the stock of Tesla, fathering and abandoning children, making flying unsafe in America, harming the economy by firing thousands of federal employees, and gutting government agencies that provide critical help, research, and supplies necessary to save lives and prevent sickness.
Despite leaving a trail of wreckage, Musk is still worshipped by his fanboys, such as Joe Rogan, as a brilliant, unorthodox trailblazer. In reality, he’s what F. Scott Fitzgerald describes as one of the “careless people” who “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
However, this time, the damge was done publicly in front of a global audience that keeps the receipts. Musk’s popularity has plummeted. He is now openly mocked by Bill Burr, Rogan’s cadre of manosphere comedians, and insiders within the Trump Administration. After years of nurtring and promoting a bullshit narrative and facade of brilliance - does that remind you of anyone who has allegedly mastered the “art of the deal?” - it seems that Musk has been exposed. He's a deeply broken, insecure, vain man whose immense wealth can’t buy him enough love or adulation that he needs to fill whatever void exists within him.
His “hubris,” according to Washington Post reporter Faiz Siddiqui, is ultimately what has “shattered” the myth of Musk as a genius. In his new book, releasing this week, Siddiqui has brought all the receipts and done investigative reporting into Musk’s “Hubris Maximus” that has led the richest man on Earth to imagine himself as the new Alexander the Great, destined to save humanity regardless of the costs to democracy, freedom and humanity itself.
In this Chai Talk, I talk to Siddiqui about the hubris of the richest man on Earth, whose ambition is matched only by his reckless appetite for destruction.
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