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Becoming Elon Musk, Part One

🕑 Added 2025-03-17 10:30:04 +0000 UTC

Comments

RH

Same, I’m quite confused too! I would really like to hear what they mean by describing Amber Heard as chaotic especially since she’s been painted by mainstream media as “manipulative” during her trial against her abuser, Johnny Depp.

Lucy Sakiewicz

Wild to use amber as an example of Elon’s chaotic relationship/toxic relationship behavior 😬

Roman Drake

It’s interesting that it bewilders liberals that personalities like Trump, Vance, and Musk would ever appeal to anyone, when they’re precisely the same people who liberal society appreciated the appeal of just years prior. Liberals in 2010 were weirded out by the Cheneys and liked Elon Musk. In 2016, they loved JD Vance’s take on middle America and vilified Mike Pence as a Bible beater. And now they’re so indignant like it’s so obvious which ones are the big bad cartoon evil.

Jack Wolfe

longtime KYE head, livin' for the "i do NOT like GK chesterton" asides (tho "the man who was thursday" kinda rocks?). excellent work boys, cant wait for pt 2

David Gillman

I don't know, guys. You don't acknowledge it, but the person you describe is not without sympathetic qualities: he likes the Hitchhiker's Guide, he's attracted to interesting women, he took that blue collar job. I'd feel better if you let the story be more complicated. To Matt in particular: God made nerds in His own image. Love the nerd. Hate his outsized power.

Leonardo Restrepo

I like videogames, too. I mean, a game is just a way for people to simulate conflict and/or narrative, whether it's tag or Return of the Obra Dinn. I don't think there's anything wrong with enjoying games as adults, but there is the added burden of having some amount of media literacy and self awareness. The stereotype of the "gamer," as exemplified by Musk and even Peter Thiel, belies an unwillingness to mature and understand that the power fantasy is just that.

greyscale

You’re right gaming is a power trip - but there’s huge differences between genres and games on the nature of that fantasy. There’s a reason HOI and EU4 communities have a reputation (roleplay as the nazis or colonialism!) I say this as someone who plays a lot of games too, and think many of them to be beautiful art. We need more actual video game journalism imo

Philip Schaeffer

Look

Adam Blood

“Steeping in the gestalt of Musk” is an appropriately horrific description for the predicament we are all in- my sympathies to Sam and Matt for the research required to compose this episode

Chad Bailey

One other interesting bit of history: Peter Theil lived in a part of South Africa inhabited by some unrepentant Nazi sympathizers after WW2. Any surprise he gave up on democracy pretty early on?

DC

X:Musk::Barron:Trump

Chad Bailey

Oh my goodness, you guys knocked this one out of the park! Or maybe in Musk terms, knocked it up.

Kyle Reesman

Musk doing Reacher accidentally

Kyle Reesman

That and lord of the rings.

Know Your Enemy

This is such a very helpful comment, Nick, thanks (Matt)

Lauren Bickel

I strongly believe that the requirement for being one of these tech bros is to have read a lot of sci-fi but actually understood absolutely none of it. All the STEM, none of the humanities. I have never heard one of these guys reference a sci-fi novel and NOT unintentionally communicate that they entirely missed the point.

Garett Smith

Thanks for the recommendation

Aaron Lee

I didn’t know Musk lost a child to SIDS. Heartbreaking to gain that context for what followed. I’m stuck on the Hitchhiker’s Guide stuff, and your comment that he missed the point of the book - the way the “little guy” is trampled by larger, stupid forces. I’m the same age as Musk, so I was also irony-pilled by Hitchhiker’s (Devo also comes to mind as a teenage sci-fi/ irony influence). Douglas Adams, Devo and their ilk were hippies at heart, a point that I certainly missed at that age (I resonated more with the classic adolescent “everyone’s stupid but me” side of it). I’m guessing Musk saw (sees?) himself more as Ford Prefect than Arthur Dent; the cool guy standing on the side while all the crazy fools make a mess. I would bet he views Trump pretty much the same way you’d hear him described on a Chapo episode - a comical grotesque who Musk is smarter than. Throw in the Ketamine and I’m sure it’s all one big hilarious cosmic joke.

Aaron Lee

You make me think of the Zizek riff about how a guy playing Grand Theft Auto, who gets to indulge all his primal impulses, experiences the game as more real than the day to day non-reality of obeying the Big Other. Now combine that mentality with what is surely the complete detachment from reality of being the wealthiest man alive… yikes

Matt Gately

Jill Lepore did a podcast, the Evening Rocket, about how Musk's fantasies come from his near illiterate understanding of a narrow band of science fiction.

Karter Elisabeth

This episode felt like a personal horror movie for democracy but also for every woman who dated an evil gamer…the psychological profile y’all described is reoccurring across the nation.

Matthew Theisen

Sidenote putting the 1991 internship with the Canadian Bank (Peter John Nicholson / Bank of Nova Scotia), has now put on my radar how Musk sees Brady Bonds, which were created for Paul Volcker created a ticking timing bond with interest rates that impacted foreign policy … for you just increased other countries borrowing cost if they are considered less stable than the US thus Musk at 19 was tasked to understand the new 1989 Brady Bonds as his intern job. He then in turn saw this as naked corruption / self dealing, and foreign policy USAID that the US did with other countries but not South Africa and how these Brady Bonds have a similar structure to Climate Change Credits, CAFE standards, etc where the big thing in the 1980s and 1990s in Economic thought was to use these credits to reduce the cost of pollution change for industry for it encourages companies like Tesla to pursue clean tech and companies like Ford or GM to pay “sin taxes” to their competitor until they transition their own fleets. And this is self dealing and I can understand the ideal Econ brain seeing this as a good thing, but what happens if you get a person who can say one thing but believes another ? What if this two face person who says one things yet believes another, are now talking about a magic number fourteen and say there are this magic number of computers creating money while he hires his own 19 year olds to run DOGE ? ( I feel icky talking about this last paragraph for I can not prove it even if he magically said that word, it is a dog whistle that I may or may not be mishearing. So I trust others to tell me if I am doing a false positive, since I can not prove it merely suspect. )

Know Your Enemy

lol true

Joel

Woah Saskatchewan mentioned on KYE lol

Tim Combes

The narrator of Our Dope Future is somehow the least redeemable character in a collection that also features an incel and a sadist

Leonardo Restrepo

I always think about the gamer as a perfect encapsulation of the modern man: a wounded human that can only experience the world as a simulation under layers of abstraction. Whether a simulated world, spreadsheets of data, or the terse logic of hard coded systems, the virtual world of games and computer science simultaneously feels emancipatory and safe. The ultimate power fantasy.

Matthew Theisen

One, ordinary person personal horror, I have and been working through is I really got into Westworld Season 1 in October 2016, during that time of horror and dread. I really got into that sci fi sjow with its place of stories and escape… to get my head out of how I already felt things were bad in October 2016 even if Hillary Clinton would have won for this new style of new right politics has arrived and will never go away. Well Westworld made me feel better for a time. Well the horror part is realizing how much the Jimmi Simpson character maps onto Elon Musk, and how Jimmi Simpson meets a robot / host in the 2nd episode played by Talulah Jane Riley-Milburn (they would have been married while filming season 1, but their 2nd divorce should be finalized by airtime.) Even the concept the Jimmi Simpson character struggles with, false beliefs, are how Elon acts it is so close it is spooky. To borrow a latin word deludere "to play the game wrongly; to mock, deceive," from de- "down, to one's detriment" (see de-) + ludere "to play" (see ludicrous) and from this word we get delusions … delusions of a grand nature, delusions of grandeur and splendor 😬 from the 2nd episode, the character introduction key moment • Talulah Riley: “You want to ask, so ask.” • Jimmi Simpson: “Are you real?” • Talulah Riley: “Well, if you can't tell, … (emphasis) … does it matter?” the man who sometimes says he wonders if we live in a simulation, and he calls other people NPCs and Bots, who bonded with Grimes over a hypothetical where a future AI can spin up digital memories of people and torture them in AI hell if one was bad in a way the AI judges. Spooky!

Kate R

Put JD Vance where? 😂

Know Your Enemy

lol

Alex Alvarez

Know Your Enemy: #1 podcast for lovers of the word “odious”

genrepunk

This reading of what I'm gonna call the genius-idiot dialectic into Musk's relationship with his father and peers makes a lot of sense. I'd chalked up that aspect of him pretty exclusively to the rationalists as it lines up so neatly with the chutzpah of assuming you can do things better than the experts and solve the problems that have stumped them purely by the power of rationality. I expect some variant of that personal history (if not so severe, at least one would hope) is a big part of the draw of rationalism. I won't say I don't enjoy them, but roguelike games and hard magic systems in SFF like by poster boy Brandon Sanderson cater to a fantasy of being on top of just such a dialectic.

Ann

I used to be shy about my books but now I like to keep them out and engage with people on it. Use it like honey to bring in the other side and start a conversation. Plus they are usually impressed you’re engaging with “their” sides material.

Ann

That was a big debunking for me too.

Garett Smith

Loved this episode. Hopefully I can send this episode to my non-political brother who is a big time Elon fan and get him to see the light.

Nicholas Haggerty

It’s something of an indictment of our culture that the Democrats have felt the need to try to brand Musk a “nepo baby.” The problem is the culture that rewards him for what he actually does, and struggles to find vocabulary beyond that of unearned privilege to express disapproval.

Kyle Mitchell

Yay! Was getting worried about you guys. Been too long since the last episode

desdinova

In elementary school we learned how to make book covers out of brown paper bags. I do that for books I want to read in public but don't want people to engage with me about (randomly in public). It's easier with hardcover books for sure, but useful nonetheless.