ELON MUST

Bob Deutsch

Elon Musk has his critics as well as his adherents. Some call him a genius and others say he leaves a lot to be desired as a corporate leader.

I say both groups are missing the point: Elon MusT — like all of us — is corralled by his own inner promptings, mostly set early in life. As a cognitive anthropologist I have studied and written about such an intimate template I call “Self-Story.”

Self-Story is a must.

Somewhat based on one’s inborn temperament, self-story stands prior to personality. It is comprised of tendencies regarding a baseline level of agitation (temper), need for succorance and recognition and the rhythm of recurrencies for such inclinations. Self-story is like a metaphorical homing device that is pervasive in a person’s life.

One example: In the early 1990s I was tasked by the US Government to develop a profile of the Russian president Boris Yeltsin. Hence, I had access to sources the US Government had. Rightly or wrongly, I was given this assignment as I was a known cognitive anthropologist who was thought to have expertise understanding how people operate. As a first sweep through the Yeltsin file I was privy to I didn’t come up with what I call a person’s “core metaphor,” which is a major dynamic in that person’s self-story. I then went to speak with people who had direct access to Yeltsin. I told these people I have a general familiarity with Boris’s biography, political history, even medical history. What I wanted these people to tell me was what one and unique thing stood out in their memory that characterized the Russian president’s behavior, whether political, personal, even mundane. Two things stood out. Yeltsin loves to “spike” a volley ball and to slam it over the net such that an opponent cannot hit it back. The other standout was, as president, when arriving at a destination, a waiting Soviet official would open the car door and Yeltsin would bolt” out of the car. The waiting official would have to quickly back out of the way so not to be knocked over by Big Boris.

With these two examples of Yeltsin’s somewhat peculiar behavior I finally felt as if I “had” him. I asked myself what could spike and bolt have in common. Then the sentence came to me. Yeltsin wants — needs — to destabilize his immediate environment. With that in mind I went over some of the biographical information I had already had access to. So much then made sense. I did not know what caused his intention to destabilize his immediate environment, but my goal was not a psychoanalysis; it was prediction: what would he do if….

When I started considering ideas about Elon Musk’s core metaphor and self-story I asked myself — at an abstract level — what does Tesla, SpaceX and Neuralink have in common. My answer was: escaping constraints. Not being restricted by availability and price of foreign oil, not being restricted by gravity and not be restricted by a central nervous system affliction.

Being free to do what Elon wants to do is what Elon must do. That includes such different things as running his social media site X the way he alone desires, and naming his children by the names he wants to give them; for example, X AE A-Xii.

Yes, Elon Musk must innovate, be unique, be dominant. This can be good, but when it’s a must with no limits, when it is akin to a covert obsession, danger often lurks. With Elon there is always a tinge of pessimism, of playing a zero-sum game. There is no empathy, just “I want.”

Elon relates to his innovations as toys that he invites others to play with. But he tends to get bored with his inventions after a while and then is on to other things. It’s no surprise that Tesla and X are now suffering.

So much of life today — business life and private life — assumes logic runs the world. The human brain isn’t capable of logic. Everything is processed through emotion. Data are a different form of knowledge compared to beliefs that are wholly emotionally-based. A peculiar thing about belief is the more you logically disprove the beliefs of others the more strongly they hold those beliefs.

Doesn’t that remind you of our polarized world?