Daniel McGregor-Huyer/ZUMA Press Wire
Elon Musk has a simple diagnosis of what’s ailing America: It’s being destroyed by empathy. In a long interview with Joe Rogan, in numerous tweets, and possibly even in his sleep, Musk has argued that “empathy” is a “suicidal” trait that is a driving force behind civilizational extinction. It is time, he believes, for “the West” to get tough and make hard choices—to bar its doors to immigrants of a certain type and endure “temporary hardship” so that government can be transformed and “the woke mind virus will die.”
As the de facto head of the Department of Governmental Efficiency, Musk has deployed this brand of tactical callousness to maximal effect. He has boasted about throwing the United States Agency for International Development into a “woodchipper” and stumbled around the stage at CPAC with a chainsaw. He has presided over the dismantling of the administrative state and the harassment and mass-termination of federal workers—all while flaunting his lack of concern for the lives he has upended. Fired government employees, he announced last Thursday, with the laughing/crying emoji that’s become his calling card, will now have to “get a real job.”
Suggesting that George Soros and the founder of LinkedIn should be arrested after an old lady shouted at a car is one of the softest moments in recent American history. This is not the gesture of a man who is impervious to protests. It is the response of an oligarch who is being driven visibly insane by them.
This kind of depravity is a prerequisite for Musk’s new line of work. Dancing on the graves of lifesaving programs for kids is not something you can easily do with a conscience. But there is one set of feelings Musk is uniquely attuned to: his own. On Friday, the same day foreign service officers around the world received notices from a DOGE flunky alerting them that they would soon be out of a job, Musk—sans sunglasses—sat down with Fox News’ Brett Baier to ask for a little sympathy.
“I mean, you have Tim Walz, who is a huge jerk, running on stage with the Tesla stock price, where the stock price has gone in half—and he is overjoyed,” he said. “What an evil thing to do. What a creep, what a jerk. Like, who derives joy from that?”
I want to state this as clearly as I can: Nearly choking up on national TV as you lament your falling stock price is weak shit. And it gets to the core of how Musk operates. In a particularly get-over-yourselves moment in January, Axios described Musk and Trump’s governing style as “masculine maximalism,” embodied by “tough-guy language, macho actions…and often unmoved by emotionalism, empathy or restraint.” But back on Earth, the Tesla boss can be better understood in schoolyard terms. He can dish it but he can’t take it. Far from a projection of strength, Musk’s boastful and threatening public comments show a thin-skinned man who behaves erratically in the face of adversity—a snowflake, to use the preferred nomenclature, who melts down when he begins to feel the heat.
And he is definitely melting down. Just look at some of his other responses to the growing anti-Tesla protests, which have coincided with a sharp decline in vehicle deliveries. On Friday, in the same interview in which he complained about his stock price, Musk promised Baier that the government would attempt to rein in the protests of his car company by “going after” Tesla critics.
“What’s happening it seems to me is they’re being fed propaganda by the far left, and they believe it,” he said. “It’s really unfortunate. The real problem is not—are not the people, it’s not the crazy guy that firebombs the Tesla dealership, it’s the people pushing the propaganda that caused that guy to do it. Those are the real villains here. And we’re gonna go after them. And the president’s made it clear: We’re gonna go after them. The ones providing the money, the ones pushing the lies and propaganda, we’re going after them.”
It’s not really clear what lies are being pushed about Tesla. He does own it, right? But Musk has not responded with the vaunted “masculine maximalism.” He is just sort of waving his arms hysterically, like an emperor beckoning for the guards because his chicken is overdone, while pushing a theory that Democratic mega-donors including Reid Hoffman and George Soros are secretly responsible for funding “the organizations attacking me.” (Hoffman, the more outspoken of the two, has denied funding protestors, and told Musk on Twitter that he would “rather make shit up about me than fix your problems.”) A few days later, after the verified X account “Tesla King” posted a video from a protest in which a woman waved a middle finger at a Cybertruck driver outside a Tesla dealership, Musk shared the footage with a call to action.
“It is time to arrest those funding the attacks,” he wrote, conflating arson at Tesla dealerships with the constitutional right to flip the bird. “Arresting their puppets and paid foot-soldiers won’t stop the violence.”
This is a bit authoritarian, yes, but just as importantly it is pathetic. Suggesting that George Soros and the founder of LinkedIn should be arrested after an old lady shouted at a car is one of the softest moments in recent American history. This is not the gesture of a man who is impervious to protests. It is the response of an oligarch who is being driven visibly insane by them.
For Democrats, Musk’s spiraling is an asset. He is both deeply unpopular and out of control; his response to opposition is to descend deeper into the paranoia that got him there. In Wisconsin, he responded to accusations that he was attempting to buy a state supreme court race by offering seven-figure checks to voters; accusing Soros of planting protestors at his events; and rambling on stage about ending the Federal Reserve. The race, he promised last week, in words that have never before been uttered about a state supreme court race, would “affect the entire destiny of humanity.” Musk made the election a referendum on himself, turnout surged, and the Democrat won in a landslide.
To some extent Musk has always been like this—impetuously lashing out under pressure. He declared that X users who shared the published names of DOGE employees had “committed a crime.” People who publish critical stories find themselves suspended from his platform. He told advertisers who were abandoning X to “go fuck yourself.” He called a British man as “pedo guy” after upstaging Musk during the 2018 Thai cave rescue.
Musk cannot take the heat. He has not just the taste and sensibilities of a boy, but the temperament of one. He throws a fit out when things don’t go his way. He wilts. This is someone who can be beat. In another context you might call this terminal inability to take a punch a “glass jaw.” The term “keyboard warrior” comes to mind. But I can think of another word for something that’s so ostentatious and in-your-face except for when it needs to be—a symbol of decadence and insecurity and deregulation that boasts bulletproof toughness, but which breaks into pieces at the first sign of stress.
Elon’s not unstoppable, Wisconsin voters showed on Tuesday. When the rubber hits the road, he’s nothing but a Cybertruck.
