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Elon Musk and the Silicon Valley Leper’s Club
We don’t need sociopathy to explain bad behavior. Just numbness.
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Is Elon Musk a sociopath? I have been pondering this question as he recklessly dismembers Twitter.
Color me skeptical. I don’t want to justify Musk, but I think you can criticize his actions and even his character without resorting to pathological labels. However, people have accused him of psychopathy, sociopathy, and malignant narcissism for many years, and their accusations have intensified since his acquisition of Twitter.
It’s not just Elon Musk. In recent months Silicon Valley has produced multiple villains:
- Mark Zuckerberg gutted his own company in pursuit of a dystopian nightmare consisting of bad commercials and poorly rendered avatars without legs.
- Sam Bankman Fried oversaw the collapse of his cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, under allegations of a pervasive, long-standing pattern of fraud.
- Elizabeth Holmes and her former partner, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, were both sentenced to over ten years in prison for the multimillion-dollar con they played as the heads of Theranos, a failed biotech firm.
In the wake of scandals like these, people habitually reach for comfortable explanations that attribute the…