Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk has this on his father, who went crazy in his 40s:
One day [Musk’s cousin] Peter came over to the house and found Errol sitting in his underwear at the kitchen table with a plastic roulette wheel. He was trying to see whether microwaves could affect it. He would spin the wheel, mark down the result, then spin it and put it in a microwave oven and record the result. “It was nuts”, Peter says. Errol had become convinced that he could find a system for beating the game. He dragged Elon to the Pretoria casino many times, dressing him up so that he looked older than sixteen, and had him write down the numbers while Errol used a calculator hidden under a betting card.
Elon went to the library and read a few books on roulette and even wrote a roulette simulation program on his computer. He then tried to convince his father that none of his schemes would work. But Errol believed that he had found a deeper truth about probability and, as he later described it to me, an “almost total solution to what is called randomness.” When I asked him to explain it, he said, “There are no ‘random events’ or ‘chance.’ All events follow the Fibonacci Sequence, like the Mandelbrot Set. I went on to discover the relationship between ‘chance’ and the Fibonacci Sequence. This is the subject for a scientific paper. If I share it, all activities relying on ‘chance’ will be ruined, so I am in doubt as to doing that.”
I’m not quite sure what all that means. Neither is Elon: “I don’t know how he went from being great at engineering to believing in witchcraft. But he somehow made that evolution.” Errol can be very forceful and occasionally convincing. “He changes reality around him”, Kimbal says. “He will literally make up things, but he actually believes his own false reality.”
Among the other symptoms of Errol's madness were falling into conspiracy theories, believing that Trump won the 2020 election, praising Vladimir Putin, and going off on racist rants.
Fascinating. I have found Walter Isaacson to be a very reliable writer, and I think we can believe him. So maybe Elon's crackup is a hereditary problem, although all that ketamine and testerone can't help. (Of course maybe he went a little crazy, took ketamine for that, and ended up really crazy.)
I find myself wondering if Musk could ever have gotten funding for his ventures in the nineteenth century. I can imagine people like Gould or J.P. Morgan saying, "He seems brilliant, but you have to look at the family. Unreliable blood."
Via Anatoly Karlin on Twitter/X, and Scott Siskind's April links post.
3 comments:
Musk's actions and his whole way of being are completely in line with the whole "move fast and break things" techbro philosophy. It's absolutely what happens when the accelerationist musings of people like Marc Andreeson and Nate Silver are put into action. If Musk is mad, his madness is of the sort that reaches to the logical-consequence essence of ideas that might hitherto been given a pass as merely speculative "food for thought."
Doge is perfectly in line with Musk's previous work, but that is not why people think he has gone insane. It's his Twitter feed, which is full of nonsense and lies. He retweets absurd claims about Russiand Ukraine, Covid, history, science, pretty much everything. E.g., he recently retweeted a claim that the formula for the volume of a sphere was not known until the 1700s; surely at some point in his engineering studies he heard of Archimedes? Also his bizarre dealings with women. Plus Scott Siskind knows people who know him and they report that he is just as crazy-seeming in person.
I'm sure there's plenty of evidence for Musk's special madness, and I have no desire to argue against that conclusion from the evidence. My point, FWIW, was that his possible madness or at least need of a rest (I don't propose the latter to defend him or give him any benefit of the doubt--merely that it seems a possibility) seems to me maybe a bit of a footnote in the long run. I wouldn't want too much of an eye taken off what are, IMO, the wider deleterious forces and deeper deleterious ideas he represents.
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