In a 2017 Rolling Stone interview, Elon Musk cried while describing his father. \u201cHe was such a terrible human being,\u201d he said. \u201cMy dad will have a carefully thought-out plan of evil. Almost every crime you can possibly think of, he has done.\u201d\u00b9 His staff confirmed they\u2019d never seen him cry before. He could have been describing himself.<\/p>\n
Donald Trump\u2019s father had one lesson: be a killer. Anything less was weakness.\u00b2 His eldest son Fred Jr. became a pilot instead. Fred Sr. called him \u201ca bus driver in the sky\u201d and systematically dismantled him until he died of alcoholism at 42.\u00b2 Donald watched. Donald learned the wrong lesson.<\/p>\n
None of this excuses anything.\u00a0Musk and Trump are racist billionaires burning down the world for their own benefit, and they bear full responsibility for every choice they make.\u00a0But monsters are made.<\/p>\n
There is a science to this. A 2015 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences tracked 565 children and found that\u00a0narcissism develops when parents treat children as inherently superior.\u00b3\u00a0But the opposite pathway also works.\u00a0Insufficient early gratification leaves children with what psychologist Phebe Cramer called \u201ca sense of neediness and an expectation that others will not naturally be responsive.\u201d\u2074 A 2016 study of 674 families found that\u00a0parental hostility at age 12 predicted exploitative behavior at age 14.\u2075 This indicates that parenting shapes the maladaptive components of narcissism more than the adaptive ones.<\/p>\n
Walter Isaacson\u2019s 2023 biography quotes Musk\u2019s sister Tosca describing their father\u2019s lectures, which lasted hours.\u00a0\u201cCalling you worthless, pathetic, making scarring and evil comments.\u201d\u2076\u00a0When Elon was hospitalized after a beating at school,\u00a0his father Errol took the side of the attacker.\u2076 What a lesson to teach your son.<\/p>\n
Musk\u2019s ex-partner Grimes told Isaacson something specific: Musk \u201cassociates love with being mean or abusive.\u201d\u2076<\/p>\n
In the same Rolling Stone interview, Musk said: \u201cIf I\u2019m not in love, if I\u2019m not with a long-term companion, I cannot be happy. Going to sleep alone kills me.\u201d And: \u201cWhen I was a child, there\u2019s one thing I said: I never want to be alone.\u201d\u00b9 In 2018, he told the New York Times he\u2019d spent his birthday at the Tesla factory. All night. No friends. Nothing. He alternated between laughter and tears during the interview.\u2077 In 2024, he told Don Lemon about \u201ca negative chemical state in my brain, like depression.\u201d\u2078 At the 2023 DealBook Summit, he revealed he\u2019d contemplated suicide as early as age 12.\u2079 In 2022, he said: \u201cI am not afraid of dying. I think it would come as a relief.\u201d\u00b9\u2070<\/p>\n
Musk is worth more than most nations. He has rockets, car companies, and a social media platform.\u00a0He does not have peace.\u00a0If he could find it, maybe he\u2019d buy an island and disappear. Maybe he\u2019d feed the hungry or cure a disease. But he cannot find it.\u00a0So instead he burns down the world looking.<\/p>\n
God forbid he lift anyone else up.\u00a0When you were trained to believe you were worth nothing, you can only try to put others below you.\u00a0Trump\u2019s daddy taught him the same lesson.<\/p>\n
Mary Trump is Donald\u2019s niece and a clinical psychologist. In 2020, she published her account of the family where she described Fred Sr. as a \u201chigh-functioning sociopath\u201d\u00a0whose core belief was that in life, there can only be one winner and everybody else is a loser, and kindness is weakness.\u00b2\u00a0Her assessment of Donald: an \u201cinsatiable black hole of need\u201d created by childhood emotional deprivation.\u00b2 He was trained to hunger endlessly for daddy\u2019s approval. He has never been loved, and on some level, he knows it.<\/p>\n
Researchers Morf and Rhodewalt identified the paradox in 2001:\u00a0narcissists build a grandiose self, but they cannot get genuine positive feedback because they cannot genuinely connect.\u00b9\u00b9 The wound cannot be healed by the success it generates. Trump has never stopped complaining. Academic analysis in the Quarterly Journal of Speech called it \u201cthe rhetoric of ressentiment,\u201d noting that his animosity can never be satisfied.\u00b9\u00b2 He said no president had ever been treated worse.\u00b9\u00b3<\/p>\n
At least Frankenstein\u2019s monster had the decency to walk into the Arctic. Musk and Trump walked into the White House.\u00a0The worst of us have become the wealthiest and most powerful.\u00a0Psychologists call it the dark triad: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.\u00b9\u2074\u00a0In a poor person, these traits lead to prison.\u00a0In a rich person, they lead to the Forbes list and the Oval Office.\u00a0Our system does not accidentally elevate men like this. It rewards them. This is not the millionth psychological profile of Trump and Musk. The goal is not to return to 2023 or 2015.\u00a0The system that created them has to be dismantled and rebuilt.<\/p>\n
Every adult is responsible for what they do with their pain.\u00a0These men will never have enough money or power to fill what their fathers hollowed out of them.\u00a0That means they will never stop taking.\u00a0A system that lets wounded men amass this much power while paying almost nothing back is a system designed to be looted by people exactly like them.\u00a0If we want to stop the bleeding, we start by closing the wound.\u00a0Tax the rich.\u00a0Not because it will fix Musk and Trump. Clinically speaking, nothing is likely to.\u00a0But because it limits how much damage they can do while they spend the rest of their lives trying to feel whole.<\/p>\n
\u2014 –<\/p>\n
A note on numbers: Musk\u2019s wealth exceeds the annual GDP of roughly 150 countries.\u00b9\u2075 That number is actually conservative; some estimates put it closer to 160. There is a methodological caveat worth noting: comparing net worth to GDP is not a perfect comparison. Net worth is total accumulated assets at a point in time. GDP is annual economic output. By national wealth rather than annual production, Musk has more money than 80 countries.<\/p>\n
Tesla paid zero federal income tax in 2024 despite $2.3 billion in income.\u00a0Over the past three years, the company reported $10.8 billion in U.S. income and paid $48 million in federal taxes.\u00a0That is a rate of 0.4 percent.\u00b9\u2076 The bottom half of American taxpayers pay 3.5 percent.\u00b9\u2077\u00a0A single mother working two jobs pays more of her income in taxes than the richest man on Earth.<\/p>\n
Fuck this guy.<\/p>\n
We live in a country where Epstein\u2019s best friend is president and the richest man on Earth shares 20 year old FourChan memes.\u00a0Both commit fraud, theft, and scores of other crimes daily without consequence.\u00a0It feels like nothing will ever change.\u00a0But systems that protect the powerful only survive as long as the rest of us let them.\u00a0If we want a fair world, we have to build it. That takes recruitment. The way religious people evangelize for their church,\u00a0we need to evangelize for justice.\u00a0Educate the people around you. Knock on doors. Bring them in.\u00a0Building solidarity is all we\u2019ve got.\u00a0Rich and powerful people will not save the rest of us.\u00a0The only power we will gain is the power we take, not the power we ask politely for.<\/p>\n
Call your state legislators and governor.\u00a0Tell them to tax the rich, close loopholes, and stop giving profitable corporations our tax dollars.\u00a0Tell them companies that donate to\u00a0political campaigns or PACs should not receive tax breaks or subsidies.\u00a0If they have enough money to buy elections, they can pay their damn bills.<\/p>\n
If you want to understand how we got here and what to do about it, the following are available as free PDFs: Conservatism: America\u2019s Personality Disorder, The Opposition Guide to Tax Warfare, Introduction to Soft Secession, and Grab Them by the EARR: Educate, Activate, Recruit, Repeat.<\/p>\n
Just click anywhere on this sentence for the free booklets and books.<\/a><\/p>\n