There are two stories that perfectly capture the essence, the core, the totality and the absolute truth about Musk. The first is the piece by Sam Harris, The Trouble with Elon. The other is Harry Shearer‘s recounting of Elon Musk’s obsession with being a globally ranked video game player (starting at minute 4:00).
Read more: Elon Musk in Two StoriesSam Harris is heir apparent to Richard Dawkins as the promoter of reason and atheism. He is a lucid, articulate thinker who argues for ethics and morality far, far more convincingly and more cogently than any living religious figure in the world. In this piece, he recounts how Musk elected to become an enemy of Harris after losing a bet to Harris on how many cases of covid-19 will be diagnosed in the United States. It is a superb account of how Musk would rather deny reality than to lose a bet.
Confirming this account is Harry Shearer’s aggregation of the many reports of how Musk cheats at video games–at the age of 53–solely for the purpose of maintaining the lie that he is a world-ranked video game player.
The desire to shape reality is an essential role of advertising in the modern age. Putting forth extraordinary effort to deny reality is the province of deviants who will happily cheat at video games, deny pandemics, invade Ukraine, and even commit ethnic cleansing just to avoid admitting that they are wrong.
I didn’t set out to become an enemy of the world’s richest man, but I seem to have managed it all the same.
Source: The Trouble with Elon