Elon Musk Dealbook 2023 — The Demons Begin the Dismantling
What was Elon Musk thinking when he told advertisers they can go f*$% themselves. Why would he do this and sabotage his own company?
It brings me no satisfaction to say this, but this doesn't surprise me. In a video from [month] 2023 I described why Elon Musk was on course to burn down everything he's worked so hard to create: his companies, his reputation, everything. This comment at the Dealbook Summit yesterday is an example of that.
In the Joe Rogan podcast a couple months ago he said, “My mind is a storm.”
Andrew Ross Sorkin asked him if this was a happy storm. “No,” he replied.
Elon went on to say: “These demons of the mind are, for the most part, harnessed to productive ends,” referencing all the things he’s achieved with Tesla, SpaceX, and his other projects. And that’s the paradox — these demons are what provided the extreme amounts of energy and sacrifice needed for these projects. Remove the demons and you remove the energy and the projects don’t happen.
We should be understanding of this when we criticize big figures that change the world — many of them will also do bad things at some point. Rarely can you have one without the other.
Carl Jung was a famous psychologist who spent a lifetime studying and describing the unconscious forces within us.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
His message was that as long as we don't recognize and acknowledge them, they will control our lives; and to the degree they are negative forces, they will destroy our lives.
He wrote:
“It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life, and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself.”
Elon Musk’s demons are the negative ones and they’re beginning to destroy his life.
There’s hope
By no means is the destruction of his life’s work inevitable. If he recognizes the powerful unconscious forces inside him, he can make peace with them, and as Carl Jung would say, “integrate them.” These forces aren’t evil by nature, they are parts of us that want to be heard, and like a child seeking attention, they do it in simplistic ways like causing trouble the parents can’t ignore.
It’s the child that told advertisers to f*$% off, it’s the child that tweets controversial things, it’s the child that sues people. The hurt child takes its anger out on the world, but with adult tools.
We use words like "demon" or say “what ‘possessed’ him” — when talking about things like Elon’s Dealbook interview — because an otherworldly force seems like the only way to explain actions like that. And we’d be right. To our logic- and rationality-driven culture, these are otherworldly forces that we’ve lost touch with and no longer believe in.
The hope for Elon is that something happens that makes him realize there’s this other part to him. From there he has a chance to understand the connection to the “storm” and trouble it’s creating. If he doesn’t and continues to ignore it, the actions will escalate until there’s nothing left to distract him… it’ll just be him and the child sitting in the wreckage of his life.
I’ll be cheering for him and sending him good vibes.