Elon Musk: Walter Isaacson promises to reveal the man behind the Musk mask.

 Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Psychoanalyis, Psychology, Children, Spectrum, Trauma

In one of my weekly conversations with my reluctant son, as we were discussing politics and the influence of Musk on Donald Trump, he noted my lack of knowledge about Musk and offered to lend me a recent biography of him.  I was intrigued and, on his next visit home, he brought it to me.  It is a long book: more than 600 pages, but the chapters are brief – three to five pages generally, and reading it is more like reading people magazine both in the length of the entries and also in their generally journalistic style. 

The biographer, Walter Isaacson, has written previous biographies of historical people (Leonardo DaVinci and Benjamin Franklin), but also more contemporary folks (Henry Kissinger and Steve Jobs).  For this book, he was clearly invited to be in Musk’s inner circle as he wrote the book and there are times when he enters in as a player, letting people at Twitter, for instance, know critical information about Musk’s thinking as the Twitter takeover is happening and everyone is scrambling to make sense of the situation.  This could have led to the kind of hagiography that Ernest Jones employed as a devise in his early biography of Freud – a person he knew and respected.  Isaacson appears to have kept more journalistic distance than Jones, but that is a low bar for evaluating the “objectivity” of an observer.

Musk’s early life strikes me as beyond bleak.  He was mercilessly belittled by his father and experience significant episodes of bullying from his peers.  While Isaacson acknowledges this and repeatedly refers back to it, he does not, I don’t think, give it enough weight to it as a contributor to Musk’s psychological make-up.  He repeatedly chronicles episodes of Musk failing to understand the impact of his behavior on others, something that he attributes to Mush being “on the [autism] spectrum”, as Musk himself does.  But I think his need to attend to others – to keep an eye out for what they might do to him next, may contribute to his ability to manipulate and, actually, read others – not by virtue of empathy, but more cognitively, mathematically, or even as a kind of computer code – because x happened, I expect y will occur next, and this is not the result of deep insight, but simply a predictive algorithm based on past experience.

In so far as Musk is driven by his past traumatic experiences, the paucity of his internal experience may be the result of the external focus that he needs must have engaged in to ward others off.  This seems to make him a psychological brother to Donald Trump – both of them were savaged by their fathers.  That said, Musk, unlike Trump, was able to be tremendously successful in the endeavors that he has engaged in.  This is attributed by Isaacson to his having read science fiction as a kid – particularly Asimov, Heinlein and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  I was an avid reader of Asimov and Heinlein and have been curious about the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy forever – and have now acquired a copy.

I think that the values that Musk picked up from Heinlein and Asimov have led him to love humanity, but I don’t think they put much of a dent in his hatred of humans – not just the particular ones who have caused him harm, but the many who could – and still do.  Heinlein in particular, in his book Stranger in a Strange land, a book about a human returning to earth from having been born and lived his early life on Mars, articulated for me, as an isolated, nerdy adolescent, the yearning that I had to be in contact with others.  It also presented a vision of that contact being able to be made through sexual interactions with women.   I think Musk has found solace in his relationship with women (though these are often stormy and complicated as well as soothing), but perhaps even more so in his relationships with his children.  I think it possible that he has so many children not just because of his stated concern that the declining birth rate is the greatest threat to human kind, but because each of his children push him towards being able to feel connected to others in a loving way.  This is perhaps most completely chronicled in his relationship to X, his youngest son through much of the book.

 Musk’s hatred of particular people – usually expressed by firing them or firing off angry tweets at them – is mirrored by Trump’s snide dismissal of those he denigrates, and both, from a psychodynamic point of view, could be understood as trying to turn passive into active – becoming the aggressor rather than being aggressed against as they try to battle the critics who mirror their fathers’ early criticism of them.  From a slightly more sophisticated vantage point, they could also be understood as laboring against the internalized critical voice that results from an identification with the criticizer, and they project onto others the traits or thoughts and feelings that they struggle against, and then attack them out there rather than attacking themselves.  From this point of view, Musk rails against the soft aspects of corporate life and the lazy workers it attracts while rationalizing his bouts of gaming engagement as helping him learn techniques to better manage his companies.

This book, though, oddly calls up Bill Clinton, whose autobiography was long on the ins and outs of the various challenges that he faced throughout his life, but short on a description of how his mind was working during the period of time he was facing those challenges.  Clinton’s background reflected more neglect than malice – but I don’t think any of the three – Clinton, Musk and Trump - all very bright men, two of whom became president and one who became the richest man in the world, built internal worlds that give them much sustenance.  Clinton comes the closest of all three to experiencing gratitude for all that he has witnessed and been able to engage in, but his is more of the gee shucks variety – how could I be here at Camp David negotiating Middle East peace treaties when I am just a kid from Arkansas – while neither Trump nor Musk appears to be any less hungry at this point in their lives - still searching for whatever it is that will make them happy.

Musk’s professional accomplishments are tremendous.  I had a patient refer to him last week as an Einstein – but I think Thomas Edison or Henry Ford are better models.  They were engineers and tinkerers and Musk is certainly both of those.  They were also the models for Tom Swift, a fictional inventor about whom over 100 short novels – much like the Hardy Boys series – have been written.  Tom Swift invented stuff of fantasy and vanquished all sorts of enemies – just as Musk has done, in fact, and in his mind.

Perhaps the most revealing thing about the book, though, was how badly I had misperceived Musk through my connection with him through the media – and I think this is why the reluctant son recommended the book to me.  For instance – I have been appalled that Musk sided with the Russians by cutting off the Ukrainian’s access to Starlink, his satellite-based internet connection system.  I was appalled that a private citizen could make a decision about something with such important international implications with no governmental oversight.

What I didn’t know was that Musk had largely donated the Starlink system to the Ukrainians – with some financial aid from various countries, but his share in the creation of the system, according to the book, was 60 million dollars.  And Starlink was critical to their early survival of the Russian invasion.  Musk was, in fact, fighting against the Russians throughout, but turned off the Starlink system just around Crimea when the Ukrainians were planning to deploy drone submarines guided by Srarlink to attack the Russian Navy.  He severed that connection because he feared that if the Ukrainians had been successful, that could have led to an escalation in the war so that the Russians would have felt justified in using nuclear weapons.

My concern about a private citizen – especially one whose knowledge of war tactics comes largely from gaming and reading histories of warfare and whose diplomatic skills are negligible when he is not negotiating from a position of having the upper hand against an opponent – making decisions about the kinds of tactical resources our allies can have access to during war continues to be valid, I believe.  I also believe that Musk’s interests lie in a science-fiction-based conception of what human well being looks like.  He does not have a good sense of the value of human lives that are not, in his estimation, productive and focused on the current threats to human life.

His idea of what is most important to preserve, and thus the centrality of his drive to populate Mars, is human consciousness.  He believes that it is, based on our observations, unique in the universe.  Human Consciousness is something that I have increasingly come to focus on in my History of Psychology course as it has evolved over the years that I have taught it.  Recently a friend who is a philosophy professor clarified that one of the positions I take with my students was first proposed by Epicurus.  The position is that death will not be a traumatic experience, because all of the faculties that we use to experience the world and the pain that results from that interface will cease to exist.  Indeed, the universe itself exists, to me, only in so far as I percieve it.  When I die, it does, too.  From this perspective we could understand Musk's central driving factor as being a fear not of humanity ceasing to exist, but as a fear of his own death.

Musk disdain for human beings the governments they create belie his being born on third base and believing he hit a triple.  No, he did not inherit wealth in the way that Trump did, but we live in an incredibly interdependent world.  Thousands of people working together result in our being able to eat bacon and eggs every morning.  Musk’s decisions about building cars and rocket ships are carried out by engineers who were trained in elementary schools, junior and senior high schools, colleges and universities – and they would not have been able to carry out the visions that he mapped out without the background that was supported by a dizzyingly complex social system that certainly has inefficiencies in it, but, while his engineering mantra of you haven’t cut enough if you don’t have to add something back in works on an assembly line with a clearly defined product – the assembly line of education is a much more haphazard undertaking whose output – the kind of workforce that he can tap into – is not one that can or should be dominated by capitalistic ideals, even if that is the system it is feeding (and supported by).

After reading this book, I have a better sense of Musk.  I admire him more – but continue to mistrust his ability to generalize his belief that he can improve everything he puts his hands on.  Isaacson is more caught up in what could be seen as cult-like worship, though he appears on the surface to have retained journalistic objectivity.  I don’t fault him for being part fanboy.  I could not objectively evaluate the outcome of a treatment that I have conducted: I am too closely allied with the subject of the investigation.  Fortunately others – consultants in my case, the reader in the case of Isaacson, can put what we hear into perspective.  We can worry about Musk and the gaggle of other billionaires who exert outsized influence on this government that is, in theory, by and for the people; and we can experience that anxiety regardless of which party is in office. 

Postscript 2/16/2025: This post was conceived and written before DOGE went into operation.  It is clear from its working that Musk is applying the same principles to Government that he honed in the private sector, particularly at Twitter (now X).  There are problems with this - in addition to his continuing to fail to think about or be concerned with the impact of his firing people on the people he fires and the institutions that they serve - Government is essentially different than the private sector.  Musk felt at many times that his ventures might fail.  His changes at Twitter endangered it as a viable entity.  Indeed, businesses do fail.  There are no remaining members of the Dow Jones Industrial group (from which the average is taken) who originally belonged.  GE (a company founded by Thomas Edison) was the last founding entity to lose its status.  If our government fails, we are in a profoundly different position than having the stockholders of a company lose their investment.

The patient I mentioned above commented this week that the government is not like a private corporation.  When Musk runs Tesla or SpaceX, he constantly states that the only laws that matter are the laws of physics.  When you run a country, the laws that matter are constitutional.  Violating those laws is like violating physical laws when building a product.  The thing may limp along for a while, but the tear in the fabric of the social contract will not heal itself.  We need to rebuild our country - return it to being the one that we have agreed to live in - or face the consequences of living in a world where the rule of law no longer applies.  That is scary beyond belief to me.

Btw, in addition to Asimov and Heinlein, Musk credits The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as helping form his cosmology.  I have long wanted to read that book - hearing that it is a kind of widely shared antidisestablishmentarian book.  It is that - but it is decidedly tongue in cheek...  It is written by a writer for the Monty Python group - and its regard for the value of human life is cheeky, at best.  We are a laughable species whose main purpose is to consume...  Not the philosophical base that I would have an unelected de facto president use as the basis for making decisions that affect millions, if not billions, of people.

Postscript 2/18/2025  It occurred to me overnight that one of the motivations for Musk to take on the DOGE position is that it gives him access to LOTS more data.  I was initially concerned that the 19 and twenty somethings working for him would post my bank account information on the dark web (which they may), but I think his motivation is to gather more information for his AI initiatives.  If he can get his computers to understand the financial system (and his competitors don't have access to this information) and the other governmental systems, he can train them to anticipate and therefore use that information for what he will deem to be prosocial goals - including expanding his wealth so that he can help a few of us get to Mars so that when this planet is destroyed - whether by AI or by climate change or by whatever - human consciousness - including that of his son X - will survive.  And this is the stuff of science fiction - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to be precise...

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Suits: Is the law this base?

  Suits; American TV series; Psychology; Psychoanalysis; Psychoanalytic/Psychological understanding of suits and the law.

Suits is a nine season, 10-16 episode per season drama series that has recently been streaming.  It is the first such long series that I have watched from beginning to end (I never made it to the end of Mad Men, for instance), though I have made it to the end of shorter, series – both in time of episode and number of episodes, including Succession, another long drama series.

When the Reluctant Wife first proposed that we watch it, I was intrigued in part because the Reluctant Son is in law school and I was curious to see how the law was being portrayed – to see what I might learn about the law.  Spoiler alert – the characters play fast and loose with the law – and the script frequently leaves big holes in it about how conclusions are reached and what the legal issues actually are.  The characters seem to be explaining the law – or, more frequently, the reasons why the law would force someone to do something they don’t want to do so they settle – but I learned very little about the law from the program.  The Reluctant Son was a much more reliable source about a world that I know very little about.

Not only are the descriptions of the law thin, so is the entire premise of the show.  Mike Ross (Patrick J. Adams) is a kid who is doing a favor for a friend who is a drug dealer.  He is being pursued by the police when he is carrying a briefcase full of marijuana in an office building and he ducks into a law office, where he talks his way into being interviewed for a position as an associate attorney at the most prestigious and cutthroat practice in the city.  In the interview, we discover (as does the partner, Harvey Specter (Gabriel Macht) that Mike has a photographic memory.

It turns out that Mike, though he has studied law books to illegally take the LSAT for others, has not graduated from college.  The same drug dealing friend who set him up to get caught with a briefcase of weed got him kicked out of college for cheating.  Yet Mike still has faith that this drug dealing best friend guy has his best interests at heart.  Well, the small-time drug dealer has met his match in filling the father role in Harvey Specter – the best closer in New York – and someone whose scruples are both much more in tact and much looser than Mike’s best friend brother/father figure.

It turns out that Mike desperately needs a father figure.  His parents died in a car accident when he was a tween (or so), and (we learn much later) he was screwed out of a reasonable settlement by an unscrupulous lawyer.  His grandmother has raised him to be a morally upright, good boy, and he is supporting himself through being a bike messenger and getting a hefty fee to take other’s LSATs for them.  Harvey offers Mike an opportunity to make an honest man out of himself – to use his talents to engage in the law – on one condition – no one can know that he is not actually a lawyer.

This secret turns out to be Mike’s only moral failure.  Even carrying around weed was to help someone else out – a moral action that cancels out the illegal aspects of it (at least in his mind – and presumably in the minds of the viewers) – and Mike’s moral compass continues to be his guiding star, and the star that increasingly guides the very high powered law firm – all while Mike is learning from Harvey about how to use “leverage” to manipulate people into doing what you (or your client) need them to do.  He becomes, in essence, Batman – a vigilante working at the margins and/or outside of the law – where the law can be defeated by an evil presence because it is constrained to act within the law – and the vigilante’s moral compass can stay focused on true north.  Of course, in the jocular interplay between Mike and Specter, Mike is Robin and Specter is Batman.

One of the reasons I stuck with this show as long as I did was the artful way that cliffhangers were used.  For the first few seasons everyone who knew about Mike’s secret was in danger of being found out in seemingly every episode – and the circle of people who knew kept widening and the danger to the entire firm became more and more in the balance.  Eventually the cliffhangers hung on other aspects of danger – including in Mike’s evolving relationship with his work mate, girlfriend,  fiancé, and eventually wife Rachel Zane (Meghan Markle – who left the show after the seventh season to become the Duchess of Sussex).  Will they (whoever they is this week) be OK?  Will they be found out?  Will the new person who discovers the secret use it as leverage?  To what end?  Tune in next week… or, since it is streaming – don’t touch that remote – we will answer the dire question in the next episode.

Somehow this set of cliffhangers remained generally engaging though it was also exhausting and even tedious at times as we would binge on two, three, and sometimes four episodes at a sitting.  I think one reason it was not more tiresome is the contentious nature of each of the characters.  Partly in their role as attorneys, or legal secretaries, or paralegals they were confrontational with their clients – but also with each other.  There was a kind of bracing authenticity to the interactions as people would tell each other what they really thought about the other and about their relationship or, if it was impolitic to do that, they would talk with each other about what was really going on in a professional or personal relationship and strategize about how to handle the situation.  These conversations were refreshingly direct, honest and the communication was clear – even if its intent was to figure out how to tell a lie to someone so that the desired outcome would be achieved.  Combativeness seemed to be an essential cornerstone to being so clear in their communication (Harvey boxes as a means of staying fit – carrying the pugilistic feeling literally into the ring).

Another element that kept my attention was the genuine likeability of the characters.  Donna Paulsen (Sarah Rafferty) is Harvey’s mind reading secretary – sort of an attractive Radar O’Reilly (a character on the TV show M*A*S*H who always knew what his commanding officer needed) – and Donna is always a covert love interest – only at the end of the series do she and Harvey become a genuine item (and the tension of not being straightforward about their attraction to each other in this show that is based on honest interaction only increases the ironic tension).  Her caring for Harvey, but really for the entire firm is the counterbalance to Mike’s moral uprightness in a sea of turpitude.  And she sees Harvey’s moral fiber beneath his make the deal at any cost outward armor.  Louis Litt (Rick Hoffman), a winsome and clownish character who is always artlessly climbing towards the top of some hierarchy while being a loveable buffoon who inevitably fails in his efforts but is always contrite when he realizes his errors, provides comic relief and, as his character develops, pathos.

The show, in a word, articulated my worst fears about the legal profession.  These lawyers were more interested in their own well-being and were working hard to beat every other lawyer – but they had a kind regard for each other and treated those that they bonded with as family.  

When I was a graduate student, there was a term for people who cared about each other but not about the rest of the world.  This was a type 2 psychopath.  A type 1 psychopath was someone who viewed everyone as an enemy and felt no remorse for harming others as long as they were able to profit from the interaction.  A type 2 psychopath is one who behaves like a type 1 to everyone outside of the core social group - often their family.  Outsiders are all marks to be taken advantage of, but they care deeply about those who are in the family.  In this way, this show might mirror the Sopranos – or another show about the mob – who are a well-known group of type 2 psychopaths.

Does it worry me that my reluctant son, reluctant though he may be, is going to be working for a high-powered law firm?  Will he become focused on the firm’s profits at the expense of his very soul?  Yes, that worries me.  Do I hope that he will have the integrity of a Mike and keep the firm on the moral high ground?  There are indications that this may happen.  He was a summer intern at the firm he will be working for and while there he observed one of their top lawyers depose a man who was suing the company the firm represented.  The firms attorney, by building a relationship with the plaintiff – by treating him as an ally rather than an adversary – an ally in investigating the truth of what happened to him – was able to clarify that the person had, indeed, been injured, and needed to be compensated, but it was not the company that the firm represented who was responsible, but another party, and the plaintiff agreed (and so did that plaintiff’s attorney) that it made more sense to sue the other company.  This was a regular Specter and Mike move.  Let’s make sure that the bad guys pay – and that our guys are not the bad guys.

Of course, it is not always the case that our guys are the good guys.  One of my old reluctant roommates from graduate school asked me to listen to a podcast about BP’s Deep Water Horizon oil spill and its aftermath.  The podcast is called Ripple.  It documents the antics of BP and their attorneys to protect the corporation from suits over the long-term effects of fisherman who were hired to clean up the spill after their fishing was ruined by it – and the fact that only one person has successfully negotiated compensation for the health consequences.  This person represented himself for a long time in the fight, calling in attorneys to help only near the end of a twelve-year battle, but most importantly, he had moved to Tennessee and had the case moved there.  His belief is that the court system in and around the gulf coast is essentially owned by BP – and the podcast made the point that BP had been put in charge of the clean up and of documenting its effects on the environment and the workers by the federal government.  It was a case, the podcast maintained, of the fox guarding the hen house.

A case where the fox is guarding the henhouse is exactly the kind of case that Mike championed on the show.  When Megan Markle became the duchess of Windsor and left the show, it was easy to write she and Mike out – they went to the west coast and joined a firm that engaged in going after big corporations.  He could not continue to do that at a New York law firm that was tasked with defending corporations – those corporations would not hire a firm that was going after businesses like themselves.  Mike was increasingly portrayed as taking the big firm tactics and using them in support of the little guy – using leverage, but also bluffing – and calling the other person’s bluff – essentially playing high stakes poker as a means of resolving disputes.

Some would say that this is psychological warfare and should be right up the alley of a psychoanalyst.  There are, in fact, two psychotherapists who play significant roles in the series.  And though the psychotherapists are clad in Hollywood garb, the writers and actors got the essence right – both therapists are anti-suits in their approach – they are working to ally themselves with their clients and to help them see through the context of a caring relationship how out of balance their lives are and the importance of moving relationships to the center of their lives rather than treating relationships as additional areas in which to exercise leverage.  Interestingly, both psychotherapists engage in boundary violations with their patients – demonstrating the dangers of becoming too passionately involved in professional relationships by their actions…

But psychological warfare is not, ultimately, what practicing psychologists and psychoanalysts study, even though that warfare or poker playing gets dubbed "psychological".  I would be a terrible poker player.  I am not trying to outwit my patients.  I am trying to connect with them.  Sometimes that does mean that I have to practice abstinence – meaning to step back and let them solve something for themselves – or to feel something deeply even though that may be painful and all I can offer at that moment is myself as witness to their pain.  And also as witness to their survival of the lived experience of it.

The reluctant son took a class in law school last semester on mediation.  There was a lab associated with the class, and he needed to mediate ten cases at a small claims court across the course of the semester.  Courses were referred to mediation as an alternative to trial.  If the cases were not successfully mediated, if the parties could not come to an agreement, the dispute would go back to a trial and the judge would decide how to resolve the issue. 

We discussed the cases and the ones that were most successful (meaning that the reluctant son was pleased with the outcome) were the cases where there was a dispute between friends or family members over some financial issue.  The complainants were frequently able to come to an understanding of the underlying issues – and there were even cases where the emotional disagreement was identified and addressed!

There were other cases that were more complicated.  Someone who had been in section 8 housing for 10 years was moving to a new apartment and the landlord wanted to keep the $200 deposit because the apartment needed to be painted and the carpet needed to be replaced.  The tenant sued to get his deposit back.  The landlord’s lawyer came to the mediation and threatened to countersue for $400 because of other damage they found.  The lawyer “generously offered” not to countersue if the complainant would drop his case to get his deposit back.  The reluctant son was not allowed to tell the complainant that the lawyer was using leverage and likely bluffing.  The complainant agreed to withdraw his suit – and was satisfied with the result: from his perspective he had saved $400!

The reluctant son tells me this last case was consistent with the evidence from studies of mediated solutions.  Poorer people have poorer objective outcomes from mediation, but they have higher satisfaction with the outcome of the mediation process than do more well-heeled people who make use of this avenue.

In my view, the legal system should be used as a court of last resort.  Most of our disagreements are not primarily about money.  In fact, most of the disagreements that provided the cliffhangers on suits were not primarily about money, but more often about grudges, or getting even, or trying to get more power, and money became the means of determining the outcome of the issue.  This was generally satisfying as the good guy – the one we identified with and that Mike and Harvey Specter represented – almost always won.  But the legal system is about winners and losers and it is an adversarial system that determines who is at fault – who is to blame.  Real life problems are rarely that simple.  And the more complete solutions require bargaining in good faith – meaning, bargaining based on the assumption that the other person, too, is a good person.

It is also the case that, in real life situations, to achieve the best possible outcome, the kind the reluctant son will feel good about, we need to be as candid and upfront as the characters in Suits are.  We need to let people know how we really feel about the issues that affect us.  This is difficult to do.  We have been socialized to be indirect, to be "polite", which means, on some basic level, duplicitous.  We need to hide our feelings and to pretend to resonate with the feelings of the other.

In order to make a negotiated system work well, all parties need to act in good faith and to be honest and direct.  This means that they have to assume that the other person is a well-meaning individual who also wants to find a harmonious solution to whatever difficulty is being faced and that they will represent their true desires truthfully.  Rarely do we achieve this state of affairs, and so we, especially in the United States, settle back into a position that what the other person is doing is not fair and we triangulate in someone to referee between us.  Sometimes, as in Louisiana, that referee appears to be biased against us.  Sometimes we need to find an advocate who is wilier at the “psychological” ability to outwit the other guy – which often means coming to have a sense of who that person is, what they want, and why they want it not by listening to what they say, but by inferring what their motives are by closely watching their actions and then figuring out how to provide a satisfactory version of what they really need rather than what they think they need.  Ultimately, in the final season of suits, the characters that we came to be identified with, the people that we cared about, had a “happy” ending – which generally involved their finally expressing and addressing their relational needs – and ultimately, at least for some of them, giving up on the rat race that had used money and adrenaline to create the illusion that those needs were being addressed.  Of course, this let's the air out of the balloon of unmet needs that has kept us glued to the set, and we are oddly deflated by at all this happiness...

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