Okay, but really, like:
The clearest comparison to Musk is Trump.
I think they were both born under the same specific kind of monkey paw: The Gift-Curse of the Second-Generation Billionaire.
These guys are not self-made, as everybody will happily remind them. And under the circumstances, they can never really
be self-made like their progenitors were; that avenue of achievement was and always will be closed to them.
But at the same time, these guys are very much - and they will be again reminded of this constantly - very much
not Old Money. They are not recognized nobles, not the Roosevelts, the Du Ponts, the Anheusers or the Busches... hell, they're not even the Bushes. There's a very different kind of "rich" you're born into if your daddy's* a billionaire versus if your entire family tree is. At the end of the day, Trump and Musk still have to pay their lawyers actual money, despite their every attempt to do otherwise. Old Money doesn't have to pay in actual money, which is why they don't play the net worth game. Old Money pays in
influence, and that's a currency that these deminouveaus are always desperately mining for. Trump especially spends a lot of time on the golf courses and not as much time in the golf
clubhouses as he's probably hoping for.
And then there's the other problem:
A lifetime of public isolation. Do you think Donald Trump or Elon Musk have ever had a friend? Like, a real friend, that legitimately just cares about their wellbeing and would put their own interests aside to help them if needed for no good god damn other reason than because that's just what friends
do? Fuck no. They can't. It's impossible to be that rich and have an interaction with a human being that doesn't want something from you. Even your financial peers are only evaluating you on the basis on what your continued wellbeing, or lack thereof, means to their own. These guys don't know how to act like normal human beings because they've never been one and
have never even met one. As far as Musk is concerned, Iron Man is as much of a real person as your next door neighbor.
So everything these guys do is half-motivated by deep-seated and incurable insecurities. Oh, the other half?
Cocaine. So much cocaine.Like seriously everybody's always like "I was so stupid for trusting Elon Musk years ago but now I see what his true colors are" and those aren't exactly false statements but you all need to stop kicking yourself. Musk
was a... functionally-functional human being for most of his career. Then Joe Rogan had him do drugs in public as a bit and then Grimes introduced him to the hard stuff and
pretty god damn quickly he turned into... this... guy. And no, this isn't some conspiracy theory; he and Yoko are documented going full Scarface in front of journalists on purpose. These guys really really want to believe and/or prove that they're as invulnerable as they feel entitled to by birthright.
Trump, of course, has been tweaking constantly in our faces for most of a decade now, and a moderately experienced DEA agent could probably chart the exact mg he's been dosing over time just from observing him.
"So what," I'm pretending you're asking yourself because you're probably actually trying to figure out how to get me back on internet leave. "Do you feel sorry for these guys, or what?" Ehhhh. Eh. A little. But they're not only children, either, so clearly you don't
have to be a douchenozzle if you were born moderately wealthy.
Siddhartha was right, again. If you have so much that it's never enough, then you need to chuck it all until you figure yourself out. And I mean
really chuck it all. The deminouveau community gets it, but then their solution is to spend a few hundred thousand dollars to have an air conditioned tent in the desert and easy access to even more drugs because they are stupid fucking assholes from Western Culture. Do I feel sorry for these guys? No.
Do I want them to suffer more?
No.
But it's not for their sake, because I'm not their friend either. I'm just tired of living in a society that's losing an Opium War
with its own god damned self.
If you've got a rebuttal, that's great! Do not post it, and if you were tempted to at all, delete this post immediately.
* And/or your mommy.