Goodbye, Elon

Elon Musk was my hero.

During the thousands of long nights building my first startup, at times, it was seeing what Elon had accomplished that kept me going. Stories of the same long nights he’d faced and survived gave me the energy I needed to face them myself. He gave me the hope that if one human could go so far in the face of so much, maybe there was a chance that I could, too.

But more than anything, he was my hero because he saw the world not for what it was, but for what it could be.

I have reflected on Elon to great length. In fact, I’ve modeled a lot of my professional life after him. I successfully achieved the same level of “initial” wealth at the same age, which I thought was pretty good, given that I started from poverty. So, not to sound like just another fanboy, but I think I might actually understand him better than some people.

So here are my thoughts on what has happened to Elon Musk.

Elon entered the stage in his early 30s with the creation of Tesla and SpaceX (haters be damned, those are his companies). With his mind full of sci-fi novels, he shot straight for the stars, rallying around him a force to be reckoned with. He expressed and acted upon the desire so many people his age feel: the need, the desperate need, to venture into the unknown, to follow your dreams, and to make the world a better place for everyone.

Thanks to a whole lot of really hard work in his 20s, he had been given the opportunity to change the world as he saw fit. That tantalizing world of the future was dawning, and he would be the god-like figure to usher it in.

And for a hot second, wow, he really went for it.

He zipped up and down California highways in his first gift to humanity: electric vehicles that didn’t suck. But that was just a side project, to use up the extra cycles in that ever-faster-spinning brain of his. His real mission: humanity’s sci-fi revamp Step One — get to Mars.

I don’t think Elon is going to get to Mars. But I do think SpaceX is one of the greatest companies ever created. It picked an impossible problem, solved it elegantly, and, at times, uses that solution for the betterment of humanity (by this I am mostly referring to Starlink — although like really, c’mon, слава україні).

For a moment that Elon demonstrated to the world what sheer human willpower can accomplish. He has illustrated to us that yes, greatness truly does lie within humanity. He showed us that we can always rise higher, much higher, further than we ever thought possible. We can succeed beyond our wildest dreams, if we only try.

But then something changed. He started to lose focus on what really matters.

Suddenly, now he was the man of a thousand ideas! With billions in his pocket, what problem couldn’t he solve? Time to build AIs, dig massive tunnels, and finally connect our brains to one another's! One project after another from the sci-fi utopia checklist. The promised future felt inevitable. The combination of his sustained force of nature and a nearly incomprehensible amount of money? The future was only a few checks away!

Yet in his wake he left a trail of fleeting ambition. A distraction to hide the fact that he was, in fact, losing his way. He was forgetting the dreams of his youth. He lost sight of what we truly could be if we only stayed the course, for once in history.

Then things took a turn for the worse, and quickly. Some people say that he lost his “reality distortion field”. I would disagree with that. I would say that he lost his mind. I think he just kind of broke under all the stress he placed on himself.

Out of nowhere, he’s calling people nasty names on Twitter, poking at the establishment in the wrong ways, and in general just messing around and being unhelpful. It was like yeah man, we get it, 420 means “drugs”, you’re rich and you do drugs, ha ha.

And it just kept getting worse. It escalated so quickly. He couldn’t stop pushing the limits, just to see how far he could go. He’d been limitless since for decades — why shouldn’t reality continue to bend to his will, now more than ever?

Unfortunately, he picked the wrong limits to test.

Rather than pushing the limits of carbon capture efficiency, he tested the limits of politicians. Rather than see how far we can take fusion power (and instead leave that to Bill Gates, seriously?), better to test the legal system and ultimately waste a ton of money buying a failing company, because people on it are using it to call you names.

It’s just a real shame.

I really had thought that maybe this guy, this rocketman, this real-life Iron Man, this seriously cool dude — maybe he’d go the distance. He could shatter reality for all of us and show us everything we can be, and more. Maybe there was finally going to be a titan who would reshape the world for the better, not crush it to pieces out of spite.

Elon, do you really want to troll humanity? Absolutely blow our minds in ways that they will talk about for the remainder of our species’ existence?

Give away 99% of your wealth tomorrow. You’ll still be a multi-billionaire. Shut down Twitter completely (the election is on Tuesday, so that’s a twist for the bankers AND politicians!).

And then like, go get a tan. You’ve earned it. We’ve got it from here.