Almost a year ago I wrote a piece titled "How Steve Jobs Kind of Killed Himself" that pointed at this idea that the downfall of these uber-successful billionaires and Silicon Valley moguls we idolize will be the same trait that made them successful in the first place. For Steve Jobs, the reality distortion field he used to push his Macintosh team to finish the final product demo in record time to hit the scheduled announcement date is the same reality distortion field he used to convince himself he could treat his cancer with specialized diet treatments. (Spoiler: that didn't work.)
For Elon Musk, the same self-evangelism that convinced him he was the anointed one to save the world from climate disaster, put man on Mars, computerize our brains, and build really dope tunnels is the same self-evangelism that is leading him to think the fundamentally catastrophic business that is Twitter can be saved by the sheer force of his singular brilliance, which is going, in a word, poorly. It's also the same self-evangelism that made him think he has a right to shove his Doge memes and otherwise unfunny reply threads in the faces of all Twitter users by artificially boosting his Tweets by 1,000x. It's also the same self-evangelism that has lodged him in a lose-lose situation arbitrating internet access to Ukrainians throughout this Russian invasion even if I truly believe he was trying to be helpful when he got into that mess.
It's really brave and admirable to see a major problem in the world and feel called to contribute to the solution. It's a whole different level of egoism to see a major problem in the world and feel certain you and only you have the capabilities to solve it, and Elon Musk far too often crosses this line. It's what made him his billions and it's what is turning him into a clown.
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