Elon is at the same time a complicated, yet very simple person. He is driven by his own thoughts, showing many typical narcissistic behaviors, and unable to be reigned in by anyone. At the same time, when he is around someone he truly admires, such as Donald Trump, he almost turns into a child trying to impress their parent. It is this duality of both cold narcissism and an overall immaturity that is apparent when around more established figures that truly defines Elon.
Starting his life under his father who made money in gem trading in apartheid south africa, Elon, according to his father, “has an axe to grind”1. He found early success as part of the “Paypal mafia”, a group of early Paypal founders, before going off to more notable personal ventures. After buying a young car company, Tesla, he grifted his way to being the largest car manufacturer by market cap, and no other metric. Stories of the terrible work environments he created and fostered continually surface, though like much of modern america, not much has gone to change any of that.
In a somewhat perplexing move at the time, Elon bought twitter for $44bn and renamed it to x, firing some 75% of the work force, and absolutely decimating the company. With hindsight, its somewhat apparent that this seems to have been a ploy for political power, since twitter had become the platform de-facto for politics. He seems to have parlayed this purchase into a seat at the table with Donald Trump early on in his 2024 election, as well as being named the head of the new, meme worthy DOGE (department of government efficiency), where he has promised to cut $2t2 from the government budget, approximately the full discretionary budget plus $3bn3. As of writing it is still unclear how this will shake out, but on its face it seems to have all the marks of a classic Elon grift, promising a literal trip to mars before giving us a horribly expensive trashcan that he has to try to catch with chopsticks.