For Narcissistic Elon Musk, Twitter Was the Perfect Buy
You may have missed it, but back in 2017, Bandy Lee, M.D. organized and edited a book entitled The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump. Laid out in 25 essays, psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health experts made the case that President Trump was a danger to the country and all Americans. Much of this dangerousness was related to personality traits and other symptoms that suggested Trump suffered from mental or personality disorders. Pathological narcissism, sociopathy, hedonism, and cognitive issues were all suggested.
I mention this because I believe a similar book about Elon Musk would be timely and insightful. Below, I offer some of my opinions about the narcissistic traits Musk appears to exhibit, and how those traits impact others around and the companies he runs.
Elon Musk’s Early Years & Quest to Become a CEO
Musk was born in South Africa along with two younger siblings. He attended expensive prep schools, eventually moved to the U.S., and received a Bachelor’s degree in physics and economics. Contrary to popular belief, Musk holds no engineering degrees, and other than a few internships, has no direct background in engineering. (You’ll also notice the lack of a business degree, and an information science or programming degree.)
Forgoing graduate school to ride the dot.com boom in the mid-1990s, Musk and his brother founded Zip2, a city guide website. According to Wikipedia, Musk tried to be CEO of the company, but his attempts were thwarted — a recurring theme of his early business experiences. After receiving a nice payday from the sale of Zip2 ($22 million from a $307 million sale), he went on to co-found X.com, an online banking service.
He originally was CEO of X.com, but investors replaced him with another person because of their apparent concern with Musk’s inexperience in the leadership role. X.com merged with the creators of PayPal, and Musk returned to lead the newly merged company.
According to Wikipedia, Musk was ousted from the CEO role and again found himself replaced in 2000 by a more experienced individual. When PayPal was eventually sold, Musk received more than $175 million from the sale.
SpaceX, Tesla & His Other Companies
Musk is best known for his two great successes: the founding of SpaceX in 2002 with $100 million of his own money and his 2004 investment of $6.5 million in Tesla (a company founded by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning a year earlier).
SpaceX launched its first rocket in 2006, a short 4 years from the company’s inception. It had its first successful orbital launch in 2008, and landed its first reusable rocket in 2015. Nearly bankrupt, SpaceX was rescued by an enormous NASA $1.6 billion contract awarded in 2008. SpaceX now regularly launches rockets (and lands their reusable boosters) at least once monthly, with plans to have multiple launches every week.
Tesla has also been a strong success, introducing popular electric vehicles (EVs) to the US market along with a nationwide charging network. It really began to gain traction with its Model S in 2012, and later with the more affordable Model 3 launched in 2017. Tesla remains the largest EV automaker in the U.S.
Not content to lead two successful companies as CEO, Musk also has started smaller companies, including Neuralink (a brain surgery/technology company) and The Boring Company (digger of small tunnels). He also championed the financial rescue of SolarCity, founded by Musk’s cousins, when it had liquidity issues by having Tesla purchase the company.
Musk-y ‘Expert’ Themes Emerge
One theme emerges from the history of Musk’s professional life — he likes to be the person in charge. Whether he’s ostensibly helping build rockets to launch into space or electric vehicles, he’s the one who calls the shots. Being the CEO (and sometimes the self-described “Chief Engineer”) of two or three companies concurrently is a rare achievement. There is, after all, a reason CEOs make such large salaries. It is believed their singular focus and leadership on a single company’s products and services is essential to the company’s success.
Life outside his companies appears to mirror this theme. When 12 children became trapped in a Thailand cave in 2018, Musk believed a mini-submarine could be useful to help free the children. Musk had no experience or understanding of the cave system he was offering a solution for. The submarine eventually delivered to Thailand was too late to help in the rescue operation (which was performed by experienced cave divers).
Upset by his perceived attempts to insert himself into the situation, one of the consulting professional divers accused Musk of a public relations stunt and having “no conception of what the [narrow] cave passage was like.” Musk returned fire, calling the diver — who actually provided valuable advice and help to the rescuers — a “pedo guy” and “child rapist.”
Musk appears to enjoy expressing his opinions as a self-educated expert on a wide range of topics. When the COVID-19 pandemic first began, Musk mused, “The coronavirus panic is dumb” and suggested there would be “probably close to zero new cases [in the US] by the end of April [2020].” To date, over 1 million Americans have died due to COVID-19 and millions more continue to suffer from the symptoms of Long COVID.
When the lack of ventilators to help patients with COVID-19 became a worrying concern by healthcare leaders, Musk offered to have his companies build or acquire them. Instead of ventilators, however, Musk ended up buying and donating BiPAP and CPAP machines — cheaper, less-useful versions of the kind of ventilators needed. Musk-donated machines languished in hospitals, largely unused.
Let’s Buy Twitter!
Musk, a long-time Twitter user and critic of the platform, finally decided to do something about his hopes to help change the social media side.
He decided it was a good idea to buy (and, of course, become CEO of) the social media platform, with no background or experience in online community or social media (other than as a user). Believing, as he is wont to do, that he alone could “save” Twitter, he agreed to purchase the popular social media platform for an eye-watering $44 billion in 2022. Shortly after making his over-priced offer and signing a binding agreement to purchase the company, he had buyer’s remorse and publicly tried to back out of the offer. When Twitter’s board of directors filed a lawsuit to make the sale happen and facing the possibility of a lengthy and expensive trial, Musk relented and closed the sale of the company at the end of October.
Even for a billionaire, $44 billion is not pocket change. He therefore needed to raise most of the money needed to make the purchase from private investors. This choice means he now has crippling annual interest payments of nearly $1 billion, according to news articles on the sale.
Combined with Twitter’s quarterly losses, Musk came into Twitter with all guns firing, looking for ways to cut costs and increase revenues. After claiming he didn’t want to make any changes that would substantially alter or upset the platform, he fired half the staff and nearly all of the contract workers who helped moderate questionable content (like targeted hate speech or threats of violence).
He told the remaining employees that Twitter may have to file for bankruptcy. This is an extremely odd way of motivating employees right after you purchased the company you overpaid for. (Fear is rarely an effective long-term motivating factor for employees; we have decades of scientific research demonstrating this.)
Musk rolled out a newly revamped “Twitter Blue” subscription service at nearly double the price of the old service. This version granted checkmarks to any account willing to pay $8, and promised to elevate such people’s tweets and replies. He’s even suggested that for those who don’t pay up, their tweets will eventually be relegated to the equivalent of Gmail’s spam or junk mail folder, suggesting anyone who doesn’t pay is equivalent to a spammer.
Nevermind that Twitter has been used an invaluable tool for political protest and disruption of corruption in countries throughout the world. Nevermind that the new service could only be obtained on Apple devices, and only if you had a pre-registered account before its launch (e.g., you couldn’t register a new account and sign up for the service). There were so many red flags about the rushed roll-out of this new service, but Musk couldn’t be swayed from his rigid mindset.
As a surprise to absolutely nobody except Musk, this decision quickly led to brand and celebrity impersonation by parody accounts tweeting about “free insulin,” former President George W. Bush suggesting he missed “killing Iraqis,” and other unlikely news. Musk shut down the new service within 48 hours. The comedic impersonations led to significant drops in some companies’ stock prices, and many advertisers have since paused all ad campaigns and spending on the platform.
Not satisfied with the chaos he created in the first two weeks of his ownership, he directed developers to shut down services he believed “slowed” the platform. This resulted in some services, such as forms of two-factor authentication, no longer working. Here’s a great Twitter thread (ironically) detailing all of Musk’s odd business choices and behaviors.
It appears Musk is engaged in a coordinated campaign of self-sabotage of Twitter. One can only speculate the end-game Musk has in mind. But one idea is that because of his narcissistic traits, he can’t see how his opinion can be wrong. He alone can fix the platform, and if that means breaking a few things in the process, well so be it.
Musk: An Expert in All Topics?
Musk has exhibited behavior time and time again consistent with someone who has narcissistic personality traits. Let’s look at the criteria for narcissistic personality disorder:
- grandiosity and self-importance
Clearly Musk believes he is the most important person in the room at any given time. He has frequently demonstrated that he believes only he can solve a given problem. He has publicly complained about not being given enough recognition for his successes at Tesla and SpaceX (despite his competitors receiving the same lack of recognition). - fantasies of success, perfection, or power
Since his very first professional success, Musk has always appeared to aspire to success and the top leadership position of CEO. He seems to strive for perfection, not only for himself but also for anyone working for him. - a strong conviction of being special and unique
Whether he’s trying to save children trapped in a cave halfway across the world, sending humans to Mars, or fixing one of the world’s social media companies, Musk appears to believe he alone has the answers. He believes the companies he leads are special and unique. That’s why he insists on being the CEO, even if he doesn’t have much to do with the company outside of promoting its achievements publicly from time to time. - a need for admiration and praise
Musk has apparently fired employees who don’t give him enough deference, admiration, and praise. He scorches his critics and journalists on Twitter and elsewhere whenever they don’t unabashedly sing his praises without criticism. He dissolved the public relations department at Tesla seemingly because he felt journalists weren’t being “fair” enough to Musk and the company. - entitlement
When asked about not paying federal taxes for 2018 in the U.S., Musk responded he’ll pay “more taxes than any American in history this year.” He seems entitled to not paying a fair share of federal taxes annually. He also appears to believe he is entitled only to positive press and news items about him or his companies, and belittles those who point out the problematic behavior or concerns with him or any of his companies. - a pattern of exploiting others for personal gain
Musk is known for requiring employees at many of his companies to put in “at least” 40 hours/week. In companies like SpaceX, putting in the minimum 40 hours/week is likely going to get you fired, according to employee reports. - low empathy
Musk doesn’t seem to have much empathy for others. He sees no problem in elevating those who can afford to pay $8, but offers no solution to the poor and those struggling to survive. Their “free speech” will not be elevated as rich people’s free speech will be. - envy, jealousy, and distrust
Not sure this applies to Musk, as he doesn’t appear to typically express these characteristics publicly. However, one could argue that whenever an employee calls him out in public or suggests he isn’t as knowledgeable as he believes himself to be, he is distrustful of that person’s loyalty not so much to the company, but to him. - arrogance, haughtiness, and scorn
A lot of the way Musk talks in presentations, on podcasts, and in interviews suggests he is arrogant and has little regard for actual topic experts. He appears to believe he can get up to speed on any topic and become his own expert by simply reading a few articles. He likes to fire employees, at least at Twitter, who disagree with him, especially if they show him up.
What Does It Mean if He’s a Narcissist?
It means that Musk is likely his own worst enemy. As someone who appears to have many of the symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder, Musk may have a frustrating time, butting heads with the world around him. A person with this disorder often doesn’t quite understand why their perspective isn’t valued in the way they believe it should be. Such a person also believes they alone have the capabilities, skills, and resources to solve virtually any problem they put their mind to. And they want others to give them all the credit (even if a team behind them did the actual heavy lifting and work).
In moderation, such thinking can be beneficial in life. But with personality disorders, this kind of thinking is usually taken to an extreme. It’s not limited to a single area in a person’s life, either. They would not only see themselves an expert in business, but also in relationships, in any hobby they take up, and in anything they set their mind to.
People with this kind of personality often face challenges in life, sometimes not achieving as much as they believe they deserve. This is clearly not the case with Musk, since his entire career has been virtually one success after another. His personal life has been more challenging, however, with a string of ex-relationships and nine children with three different women.
Musk is apparently not someone who can be told he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, even if everyone in the room clearly sees that the emperor has no clothes. He likely surrounds himself with deferential people who rarely challenge him or his decisions, finding ways to disagree with minor points or priorities, but not the overarching actions he takes or wants to take. People who tell him point-blank that he’s wrong likely don’t last long in his inner circle.
The problem is that Musk sometimes — like most normal human beings — knows little about that he is talking or making decisions about. For example, he knows little about online community, so like a bull in a china shop, he simply started destroying all of the things that made Twitter special and unique. And because he seems to also be a narcissist, he can’t be readily told or convinced that he doesn’t know things. He thinks he knows everything (or can quickly learn it).
One thing a narcissist really loves is people talking about them. Good, bad, ugly — it doesn’t matter. As long as they’re in the news cycle, their name is in your mind, and that’s all they care about. This explains Trump’s need to constantly post on Twitter (before his ban for inciting the January 6 insurrection on the Capitol). And it explains why Musk is elated to share even the most ill-advised memes or opinions. (For instance, he mocked Sen. Markey when sent a letter asking about an account that impersonated him with a verified checkmark.) Better to be talked about than forgotten.
That may explain his purchase of Twitter more than anything. He now owns the platform he spent so much of his time on, and people will gladly talk about how well or poorly they believe he’s running things. He’ll be trending on Twitter for the rest of his life.
His behavior suggests that if you don’t believe Musk is the smartest person in the room, you probably shouldn’t be in the room with him. Because he will always find a way to outmaneuver or simply overpower (“You’re fired!”) those who hold opinions different than his. This makes for a poor relationship if he’s your boss. But if history is any sign, it also means he will be more successful than his critics would like to believe.
