Why Elon Musk Is The Worst Human On The Planet
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Why examine Elon Musk through Stoic virtues rather than praise or condemnation?
Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Elon Musk. Elon Musk. Elon Musk. Elon Musk. The richest person on the planet.
The first trillionaire in human history. Elon Musk is responsible for the deaths of anywhere from hundreds of thousands of people to millions of them. Musk gets involved with Doge. The conservative estimates that say the cuts to USAID should amount to something like 500,000 excess deaths this year.
They have cut 80, 90% of the life-saving programming going on overseas. It is a holocaust of starvation and suffering and death.
Musk has a real talent for burying all of his most repulsive scandals by creating new ones. So much of what Musk deals with is self-inflicted. This guy who is famously good at thinking from first principles now falls for conspiracy theories and anti-Semitism.
How does the host introduce Elon Muskβs public image and controversies?
One of the things I love about reading the Stoics or the Ancients is how they were always taking the lives of great men and women and putting them up for review, right? You hear Seneca talking about Cato, what he did well and where he fell short. You see Plutarch talking about Alexander the Great and Demosthenes and Caesar. They would look at the people who moved history, who changed the world and look at what they did well and look at where they fell short. Look at their virtues and their vices. Right? And they did this not so much to judge, not to feel superior, but in fact, to see, to discuss, to make clear what a good life and a bad life looked like. I thought it'd be worth maybe doing that with someone who's actually my neighbor in Bastrop.
I'm talking about someone maybe some of you work for or admire. I'm talking about Elon Musk, who is decamped to Bastrop where I live. And there's no question Elon Musk is a great man in that sense, right? He has dented the universe. He is a modern figure straight out of the pages of Plutarch. But as Plutarch would remind us, right, great and good, very different things. That it's possible to be quite successful and not virtuous, possible to be quite virtuous and not successful. Like I would argue looking at Elon Musk, it's very clear that all the money in the world can't buy virtue, clearly. But I thought we could look, because again, the lives of the greats, of the big figures, the ones we know about, whose exploits we follow either with admiration or horror, allow us a way to look at some of these virtues from another angle.
And so like courage, we can start with courage, right? I think it takes an incredible amount of moral courage to start a company, to challenge the status quo, to bet your fortune on an idea that you have, and to do it multiple times. And so I don't think we should discount the courage of entrepreneurs in this way. It matters. We would be in a worse place if people like that didn't do things like that. But I do think it's worth talking about courage in the sense that Aristotle talked about it. He talked about the golden mean. He said the opposite of courage wasn't cowardice. He said courage was actually in the middle between two different vices, cowardice being one, but recklessness, on the other hand,
Courage is the golden mean between these two. His friends say he's actually a terrible poker player, because he just goes all in constantly. And eventually you do that and you blow up, or you're just the luckiest person in the world. So the argument is like, is it still moral courage if you're just YOLOing all the time? Or you don't think about the consequences because you believe the world is a computer simulation and this is all a game. Again, courage has to be some conception of the risk and the consequences, or else it's not courage on either end. If you're not triumphing over that fear, if you don't have any fear, it still might be impressive, but it's not courage. And so I just think like, you know, that Silicon Valley idea of like move fast and break things is obviously important, right?
You have to be willing to upset the apple cart again to use another cliche, but it's one thing to do it when you're, you know, experimenting with an app or a social network or something, but it's another to do it when people's lives depend on what you do, when the consequences are borne by people other than you.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
Why examine Elon Musk through Stoic virtues rather than praise or condemnation?
0:00β1:09
2
How does the host introduce Elon Muskβs public image and controversies?
1:09β5:32
3
What do the Stoics teach about studying great peopleβs virtues and vices?
5:32β11:37
4
How is Elon Muskβs courage evaluated between bravery and recklessness?
11:37β16:51
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from The Daily Stoic
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