Psycholitics: The Viper and the Python

Part II: The Python

Emotion is heat. Trump senses it and preys on it.

Trump is a pit viper.

Elon Musk, on the other hand, is almost the exact opposite. The radioactive seed at the heart of his dysfunction isn’t emotional. He is closer to not having emotions than he is to having a raw, volcanic relationship with them.

Now, I should say here before going further that Elon Musk has said in the past that he is on the autism spectrum. I have no way of knowing whether that is true. Even if it were, it wouldn’t well explain him IMHO or help us here. What it would do though is contribute to an environment where something that is called a ‘spectrum’ for a reason is cited in damaging and unhelpful ways which stigmatizes people undeserving of that.

IMHO, whether Elon Musk is or isn’t on the spectrum isn’t something we need to focus on – or should - and I think he is understandable without doing so. So, let’s not introduce injury to uninvolved parties by taking this conversation there.

What matters is what makes Musk tick; how that leads to patterned and predictable behaviors; and what that means to us.

If you have read up on Elon Musk’s backstory, you already know that the mythos of the man and the reality are lightyears apart. The pop culture and media narrative about Musk borders on outright fiction – and Musk himself has been its main author and promoter.

Musk was raised in apartheid-era South Africa as the son of an emerald mine-owning father who appears to have some unsmall issues of his own. What matters most about that childhood isn’t the wealth as much as it is the environment of predatory inequity.

Musk went on to earn degrees in physics and economics. He is not an engineer. He has never worked as one. He has worked with many. He himself simply isn’t one. I am astute in analytics. I became astute by having worked with and been taught by people with Ph.D.’s in applied mathematics. They are experts in analytics. I am merely knowledgeable about a subset of the field. I am not an analyst... and Musk is not an engineer.

He isn’t a mechanical engineer, and he isn’t a computer engineer. If the latter weren’t obvious from the nonsensical things he has said about Twitter’s architecture and systems and the decisions he has made, it is obvious from his background.

In the period that launched him into the stratosphere of wealth which enabled everything that he has done in the past 20 years, Musk was a ‘tech entrepreneur’.

He was one of an endless legion of early tech bros looking to carve out a piece of the emerging online pie. His idea was for a payments processor which could – somewhat ungeniusly – send and receive payments electronically… via email.

His company and another merged. Musk became the CEO of the combined company. Under his leadership, it pursued his very un-genius idea without ever coming within a country mile of actualizing it.

Internally, a staff already divided from having come from two different companies with radically different strategies, balked at his overbearing insistence on the wisdom of his vision. Rather than manage the discord effectively, Musk simply pressed on doggedly insisting that his idea wouldn’t just own the payment space but would someday come to be the center square in the entire chessboard of global finance.

It was some serious drink-the-Kool-aid level stuff – and Musk was the only one bringing a thermos to work.

His rigid refusal to adjust fed a worsening internal rancor. Finally, when Musk eventually announced he was taking a belated honeymoon after one of his marriages, his staff saw the moment and met offsite to plot an actual coup. A literal overthrow. The quorum of senior leadership hatched a plan to wait until Musk was on a plane to somewhere tropical and then pounce. Their plan was to approach the board with a collective letter of ‘no confidence’ coupled with a request that Musk be replaced with the CEO of the company Musk’s firm had merged with… Peter Thiel.

Musk left for his honeymoon. The mutineers pounced. The board agreed to the overthrow. Musk learned of the coup upon arrival at his honeymoon and then tried to race home to avert it. He arrived only in time to learn he had been fired from the place he had mismanaged.

In the aftermath, Thiel immediately threw out Musk’s strategy; renamed the company; turned it around; and eventually took it public. That renamed company: PayPal.

Musk had retained his equity after having been fired, so when Thiel’s PayPal went public, Musk quite literally made a fortune from his failure. He would not have made that money had he actually been the person still at the helm. He literally got wildly rich by failing so badly, he got run out of his own company which paved the way for it to succeed.

Musk’s learning from that:

He shouldn’t have left the office.

I kid you not, even after having been presented with indisputable evidence that he had so mismanaged a company that it had openly overthrown him, the ‘insight’ Musk has repeated in the 20 years since is that ‘you shouldn’t be out of the office when there is a lot going on.’

Unsaid: he also learned that a staff not enraptured with the king or beholden to him, is dangerous to a king.

Fast-forward to the present: when Musk bought Twitter, the first thing he did was fire all of the senior people not because they weren’t important or useful but because Julius Caesar had learned to see autonomy and competence as the recipe for an ouster by Brute force.

Now take that general storyline and bump it up against Musk’s last ten years.

He didn’t found Tesla. He paid off the founders to let him claim he did. He hyped an openly false credential.

He didn’t lead SpaceX to success. He led it hemorrhaging a ton of money up until Musk hired an executive who was both competent and non-threatening. She turned the company’s strategic focus toward being a rocketeer for-hire funded by government contracts.

He launched his dipshitted tunneling enterprise called The Boring Company which alleged it could tunnel, tunnel, tunnel, like a magic earthworm. It could do no such thing and quickly violated a multitude of contracts where it had committed to living up to Musk’s hype.

He pumped a Hyperloop idea which was so rebutted by the basic limitations of mechanical engineering and earthly physics, it bordered on cartoonish. The media ate it up. There is no hyperloop. There aren’t even hyperloop segments. Working prototypes. It was nonsense. It didn’t die. It never existed.

He hyped blockchain and Bitcoin. Young, naïve speculators lost a ton of money.

He promised the Cybertruck. It is now three years late.

He hyped the imminent arrival of ‘fully self-driving’ Teslas. The prototypes self-drove into parked police cars.

Over the entirety of Musk’s career, the common themes have been ‘visiony-sounding ideas untethered from doability which either fail outright or accidentally seed some tangential success which only occurs when Musk is no longer in the way.’

And through all of that, Musk has gotten wealthier and wealthier… and it hasn’t been from personal genius or success; it has been from the little he learned after being overthrown.

At Tesla, the already once-deposed king stacked the company board with friends, family and loyalists too cowed or servile to do anything less than serve him. The board granted him outsized pay packages dominated by stock options. They were so ludicrously outrageous, they made Musk the richest man in the world for selling 3% of the world’s cars.

So, in Musk’s eyes, the ‘learning’ from his early overthrow has worked like a charm.

Hype your own genius. Surround yourself with loyalists. Assassinate all dissenters.

That is his system. It has ‘worked’ for him… and it is most other narcissist’s system too. It is absolutely Trump’s. Hype, flying monkeys, and elimination of threats. The Trump Way.

The difference between Musk and Trump is that while Trump, the pit viper, slithers about preying on his victims’ heat, Musk has no aptitude for heat whatsoever. He consumes what he sees. He eats everything in front of him. As he does, he gets bigger and bigger… and so does his appetite.

Musk is a python.

While pythons have ‘pits’ too, theirs are arrayed around their lips and function more like primitive smoke alarms or taste buds.

Snakes’ mortal enemy isn’t a higher order predator. It is… the environment. Snakes have a narrow comfort zone. As a cold-blooded species, they are reliant on ambient temperatures being within a range to function. Exposure to too much cold or too much heat doesn’t make a snake uncomfortable, it makes it dead.

As a result, pythons’ brains and senses have evolved to be good at ‘regulating by proxy’. They detect heat and cold so as to find the right temperature not to prey. Burmese pythons largely require sight to hunt. They have an ability to perceive nearby prey in darkness but lack the advanced thermal ‘night vision’ of pit vipers. Pythons eat you by first seeing you.

Trump grew up in a childhood environment where the emotional temperature spiked wildly from hot to cold... and the spikes were incredibly dangerous. So, he developed a hyper-acute thermal radar… which then dysfunctionally became a weapon of predation rather than a tool of survival.

Musk grew up in the exact opposite. He grew up in a glass terrarium where people like his family were the alpha predators in a system of inequity. He had no need to even learn to regulate temperature because he was always comfortable, and the environment always catered to him.

He also didn’t need to develop any sophistication in how he hunted – because he was always fed. He was free to merely consume without fear of failure or repercussion or possible harm. If a mouse got away, he’d simply eat the next. He wouldn’t starve. And a mouse could never kill him.

When he failed at what eventually became PayPal, it was the first real injury of his life. It was the first threat to his ability to serve an insatiable appetite. Absent any aptitude whatsoever for his own failures or the reasons for them, he learned only how to consume the things he saw differently and more completely. He learned to constrict their ability to escape. His payments company had been the one that got away. He would strangle every future business to see that it couldn’t. And he has.

Musk has no inner life though. He neither feels anything even vaguely approximating our normal range nor even senses it in others like the predatory sister species of pit vipers.

Musk is just a Burmese python that was raised in a comfortable captivity and then set free in the Everglades.

And just like the growing scourge of Everglades pythons, that has left him to visit violence upon prey not by virtue of having succeeded in an ecosystem but as a result of having been dropped into one with unearned advantages and no check on his predation.

In terms of what we will see from Musk, with it being as fundamentally wired into his operating system as Trump’s, the answer is more of the same. Consumption and an insatiable appetite for more. He will eat things like Twitter whole and then asphyxiate their ability to rebel – if he can.

Pythons have two weaknesses though… and neither is something they cannot outgrow or escape.

The first is that they function very poorly in unfriendly climates.

They do better in heat than in cold but extremes in either throw them into peril.

Musk is not equipped to handle when the world goes cold on him. He cannot endure it. He can only try to slither out of it.

When the world cooled to the empty bullshit of The Boring Company and the hyperloop, Musk merely slithered away to consume other things.

When the temperature around crypto and the blockchain started to drop, he merely slithered away to consume other things.

Two years ago, when Musk was hyping people paying for Teslas with crypto, the company purchased $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin. It has since sold nearly all of it.

While his innermost drivers are entirely different than Trump’s, a snake is a snake… and snakes can’t stay in places where the sun no longer shines on them.

And all of this brings me around to the current moment and pythons’ second weakness.

Right now, all discussion around Musk naturally centers around his consumption of Twitter and flailing to run it.

Unlike everything else the man has ever consumed, this one can’t just be reduced to prey through asphyxiation. He can’t just constrict around the company by squeezing out the management team until it is powerless to flee or fight.

Pythons’ second weakness is that they sometimes eat things they shouldn’t.

Twitter is a porcupine.

The hard part isn’t swallowing it. It’s digesting it.

Sometimes pythons bite off more than they can handle…

…and sometimes that goes badly for the python.