Maggie Grove

Because the Narcissist is characterized first and foremost by profound feelings of insecurity, they develop a pathological need for attention and admiration, far beyond the average person. They are deeply self-absorbed; to them, every social interaction is an opportunity to prove their worth, and in turn get that external validation they need to feel good about themselves. It's important to note that not all people who experience deep insecurity or invalidation become Narcissists; many become depressed or anxious instead. And it's important to note that every human is at least a little narcissistic – we can all be needily self-absorbed at times – but the capital-N, diagnosable Narcissist leads with this self-absorption in every element of their lives (no matter how much they try to hide it).

 

Elon Musk is a capital-N Narcissist. He is a man who lies pathologically about who he is and what he’s achieved in order to get the attention, admiration, and validation he needs in order to feel good about himself. And it’s not hard to see how he got this way. The psych community agrees that narcissistic pathologies almost always stem from chronic invalidation, rejection, or abuse early in life. The Narcissist got the message, often from a parent, that there’s something wrong with them or that they aren’t enough.

 

That’s the message Elon got from his father, Errol Musk. Errol was a textbook Narcissist who scarred his son with textbook pathologies. Errol describes his parenting philosophy thusly: "I was a strict father. My word was the law. They learnt from me." He goes on that "the way we lived, the way I lived was we strove to be the best we could... it's sort of our make-up.” All other statements he’s made on his parenting philosophy are similarly self-important. Elon said his father "called me an idiot all the time" and made his childhood "miserable." He calls his father "evil" and "a terrible human being." He calls him violent. That sentiment is echoed by Elon's mother Maye Musk who describes him as "physically, financially and emotionally manipulative and abusive." He is a man who impregnated his own stepdaughter, made his son feel chronically worthless, and Z. The broader Musk family corroborates that "Errol is not a pleasant man to be around." 

 

Errol’s narcissism and lack of morals became, inevitably, imprinted onto his son (genetics play a big role in narcissism as well). His father’s abuse left Elon with profound insecurities and a profound void he needed to fill. To rebuild his sense of worth, to try to create a core self he could feel good about, he became obsessed with proving himself to others. The problem is that he lies a lot to do it. And these lies are leading us to give outsized power to a dangerous man who is not who he says he is.

 

Research shows that the Narcissist will lie and cheat more than the average person. Elon is no exception to this rule. He is a Showman who constructs elaborate, inaccurate PR narratives about himself to come across as someone worth listening to. But he is not at all a person we should be listening to. And that’s why it’s important we expose his narratives for what they are: lies.

 

Elon Musk has carefully crafted his image around three key narratives:

 

1. He is a self-made man, because of his unparalleled vision

2. He is a brilliant innovator

3. He is a champion for the people, looking to improve our world

 

In critically analyzing these narratives, we will find that none hold up. They’re just the empty words of an empty man whose career is defined not by innovation but manipulation and self-promotion. And that’s why it’s so important we challenge them. Because if we let them stand, Elon will remain on a pedestal and we will continue to give him power – power that he will only use to further line his pockets and harm our society. So let’s dissect them.

 

A Self-Made Man?

 

Elon Musk has told many stories about how he’s gotten to where he is today. But the thing he wants you to believe, more than anything else, is that he’s a self-made man. That he received no help in getting where he has – it’s solely his brilliance, vision, and hard work that got him where he is today. He wants us to believe those things, because they would make him seem like someone worth listening to, which he desperately needs for his ego.

 

Elon Musk is obviously not a lazy idiot. He is smart and very hard working (though not in the ways he wants us to believe – more on this shortly). But he also got a head start that he tries to downplay at every turn, and that most people couldn’t even dream of. 

 

The Musk family “owned one of the biggest houses in Pretoria thanks to the success of Errol’s engineering business,” that oversaw massive projects from "office buildings, retail complexes, residential subdivisions, and an air force base.” And Pretoria isn't some small town; it's one of South Africa's three capital cities. Errol Musk was also the “half-owner” of an emerald mine (his words) which he “got emeralds from for the next six years.” His first wife said that when she began dating Elon in college, “Elon’s wealth seemed abstract and unreal, a string of zeros that existed in some strange space of its own.” 

 

Musk denies this background gave him any sort of advantage, writing in his memoir:

 

“[My dad] didn’t own an emerald mine & I worked my way through college, ending up ~$100k in student debt. I couldn’t even afford a 2nd PC at Zip2. Where is this bs coming from?”

 

But here’s the thing: there is a huge difference between your dad making you pay your way through college – to make a self-indulgent, self-congratulatory point about the importance of hard work – and getting no advantages or support from him. 

 

Elon got plenty. Like his family’s ability to fast track North American citizenship to launch his career. “When Elon was a teenager, he wanted to make a radical change: moving to Canada. ‘He felt like North America was the right place to pursue his computer interests,’ Musk’s mother wrote [in her memoir]. ‘He asked me to apply to regain my citizenship so the three kids could all get citizenship.’ The entire family took French classes, and eventually, they got their passports. Three weeks later, Elon was on his way to Canada at 17 years old.” How lucky for him.

 

He also received generous loans from both Errol and his network. When Elon dropped out of Stanford to start his first business (a software company called Zip2), his father gave him $53K in loans. He also got "an additional $200,000 from [connected] investors." Those loans continued throughout his career, spurred by connections in high places – “there is a big difference between the options that have been available to Musk and the options available to most business owners. Musk was able to live on $200,000 a month in loans from billionaire friends –  while still flying in a private jet – rather than sell any of his Tesla stake.” And then of course, there are the more eccentric financial advantages we normies don’t think about, like Elon and his brother Kimbal as kids “selling some of the precious stones [Errol’s emeralds] to Tiffany & Co. on Fifth Avenue off the street" to make a buck. 

 

Elon made the absolute most of the advantages given to him; that’s undeniable. But to say he's self-made is disingenuous. For him to say he received no support is simply untrue. Errol wanted his son to succeed. Not because he cared about Elon’s happiness or wellbeing, but because Errol is a Narcissist and it would reflect poorly on him if his son doesn't. He may have withheld money in certain situations as a manipulation tactic, but at the end of the day he was fully invested in his son's success.

 

But it’s not just Elon’s background that makes him hard to view as this “self-made,” god-like innovator. It’s also the trajectory of his career… which has consisted almost entirely of piggybacking on other people’s good ideas through hostile takeovers.

 

Brilliant Tech Innovator?

 

This is the story Elon Musk tells of his career:

 

He dropped out of his PhD program because "when I was in college I was thinking, well, what is going to most affect the future of humanity? You know, electric cars, solar power, essentially sustainable consumption.” He then went on to revolutionize financial technology at companies like PayPal, led by his visionary insight that “we’re at the third stage now where people are ready to use the Internet as their main financial repository.” He then went on to revolutionize environmental and space technology, and continues to today, as the founder of Tesla and SpaceX. 

 

But the real story of Elon’s career isn’t defined by a series of bold innovations, but rather a series of cold-blooded, tactical mergers. 

 

The company that Elon dropped out of Stanford to start, Zip2, was a standard late-90s web software company geared towards news publishers. Musk’s around-the-clock programming and smart salesmanship won them big contracts with the likes of the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. Yet he never quite won the Board’s vote of confidence; they repeatedly rebuffed his attempts to become CEO. The struggle became irrelevant, however, once Zip2 was bought out by Compaq for $307 million in 1999. Musk used his sizable cut from the deal to launch X.com, an online bank. But the company’s investors were also skeptical of Musk’s vision, and replaced him with a CEO from Intuit by year’s end. The following year, X.com merged with Confinity. Despite Musk initially being named CEO of the newly merged company, he was ousted over issues with the company’s business model and technology, and replaced by Peter Thiel. By all accounts, it was under Thiel’s leadership that the company grew into something truly innovative: PayPal. 

 

Musk may not have had the confidence of PayPal’s leadership, but what he did have was the most stock in the company. When eBay bought PayPal, Musk received $176 million.

 

Around this time, feeling unappreciated in his companies, Musk started to look elsewhere for professional inspiration. In 2002, on something of a whim, he leveraged his PayPal payout to start SpaceX, with the goal of building more affordable spacecraft. Then in 2004, he stumbled across a little company called Tesla. These are the projects he has come to stake his career and reputation on today.

 

Though Musk pretends he started Tesla, he did not. Tesla was co-founded by engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpennin who shared an earnest, innovative vision for the future of the electric car. Musk glommed onto that vision, investing millions in Tesla, seizing control of the Board, and naming himself CEO within a few years, despite not previously being involved in the company’s day-to-day operations. Musk then ousted Eberhard who, while bound by an NDA, has made it clear that he wasn’t happy with what transpired. In 2009, Eberhard sued Musk for libel, slander, and breach of contract – saying that Musk disparaged him and pushed him out of the company, and that he “compromised Tesla's financial health.” Tesla later settled.

 

To me, this isn’t the career of an unparalleled tech innovator, but that of a businessman who knows how to convince people to give him money and springboard himself off it. 

 

And the brilliant tech innovator narrative really falls apart when you realize that the stuff he has innovated at these companies… hasn’t been all that great. First, SpaceX.

 

SpaceX is Elon’s rocket/spacecraft manufacturing company. Its stated mission is to "revolutionize space technology." Elon talks a big game, describing SpaceX’s two main projects Starship and Starlink as “two Manhattan Projects running in parallel.” The Manhattan Project developed our first nuclear weapons, and is widely hailed as the most significant national scientific project in modern American history. Big talk.

 

The only problem is that SpaceX is stupid. As Space Policy Online writes, after “four tries [and] four failures, SpaceX is undeterred on Starship tests." Of SpaceX’s 10 major launches, five resulted in complete failures, four in partial failures, and 1 in partial success. Tech pundits have described his latest projects showcased at the Consumer Electronics show as “failures,” writing "Two of Elon Musk’s Terrible Ideas Both Flopped in Las Vegas This Week." Elon says you need to fail in order to eventually succeed… but isn’t that convenient? Under that framework, he can keep launching stupid rockets for the rest of his life – burning up resources that could be used to actually improve life on Earth – in the name of – ‘innovation.’ Even if he was building rockets that worked, there is no point to these projects; they are no great innovations. Elon envisions a world where he can fly people and cargo to space for $2-10 million per trip. That is unaffordable to nearly every human, so who does it actually help? And it’s an utter lie that Elon is the only person out there pioneering space tech – organizations like NASA or the EPA or even Toyota are working on actually viable projects that benefit society-at-large, as opposed to satisfying a sad man’s desperate need to appear innovative. An academic case study on SpaceX agrees that after nearly two decades it still hasn’t proven its value to society:

 

“To avoid the dangers of Great Powers rivalry, aside its main purpose of creating a human settlement on Mars, SpaceX needs to set out additional corporate purposes that identifies how the company can assist people, organizations, societies and nations to address the challenges they face.” 

 

SpaceX isn’t about purposeful, brilliant innovation. It’s just the vanity project of a man who likes to fancy himself Space God, piggybacking off of – and taking government resources from – organizations who actually have made a difference. Elon says "I can’t think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars.” Yeah maybe that’s ✨exciting✨ for him but it’s doing nothing for us.

 

And then there’s Tesla. This one’s a doozy.

 

Elon Musk wants you to believe that he is revolutionizing the electric car industry. He wants you to believe that Tesla grew to the size it is today because of his brilliant innovation. But this is not the case. Tesla is built almost entirely on government “subsidies,” financial manipulation, and PR stunts – not the value of its products to society. 

 

The government gives subsidies – money for research and development – to support companies who are working on important scientific projects. Tesla has received around $10 billion in government funding, more than any other electric vehicle organization. It’s an obscene amount, and speaks to his Elizabeth Holmes-ian showmanship. He dazzled and convinced the government to invest heavily in him over other established players (like Toyota with its Prius), giving Tesla a huge leg up.

 

The other reason Tesla has – or rather, appears to have – so much money is because Elon structured the company in a way that artificially inflates its value (and that also funnels hundreds of billions of dollars into his pockets). 

 

A company’s value is determined by how it’s projected to perform. If people think Tesla is going to perform well and grow, they’ll buy stock in it. In turn, Tesla’s value grows. Elon is a master at inflating performance expectations (and thus Tesla’s value). He spends all his time trying to convince the public that Tesla is some powerhouse, lying and sensationalizing to do it. In reality, Tesla isn’t nearly as valuable as he claims. There’s a great report from Seeking Alpha that proves out “the outrageously high valuation of Tesla stock and the clear impracticality of the company meeting the expectations.” Tesla’s “valuation implies it will own 60%+ of the entire global passenger EV market and become more profitable than Apple by 2030.” Based on its market performance (see below), there is virtually no chance that would happen. “It is hard to make a straight-faced argument that Tesla can achieve the sales implied by its valuation,” they write. Shares Magazine echoes,

 

“Tesla appears to lack direction strategically and is facing greater competition than ever before, yet the shares are still valued on outlandish multiples and what earnings there are depend on government subsidies.”

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In plain speak: Tesla isn’t nearly as big as it claims to be. It can’t back up its hype. Elon is just betting that if it sounds big enough – if he hypes it enough – people will invest in it more, and then it would actually become valuable. His business model isn’t based on market performance, but market manipulation. And it’s a model oriented entirely around making him rich. Because the vast majority of Elon’s wealth comes from Tesla stock. The higher the stock is valued, the more money he gets. So he’ll say or do anything to make that happen. As Seeking Alpha writes, Musk’s whole gambit is about “headlines and fueling speculation rather than doing any real business.” 

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Seeking Alpha

 

 

But Tesla isn’t just a problem because it’s built from our tax dollars and rests on a house of cards. It’s a problem because despite Elon’s claims, it has actively hurt the electric car revolution.

 

First off, Musk has made electric cars less accessible. Per a CNN Business analysis, "Tesla's most affordable car is only getting more expensive, while other electric vehicles sold as long as it have dropped in price." While "Tesla's cheapest Model 3 now sells for $46,990 following a price hike this month," other “electric cars like the Chevrolet Bolt and Nissan Leaf have dropped to $32,495 and $27,400 respectively."

 

If you care about improving the environment, you should be trying to get as many people driving electric cars as possible. Making them financially inaccessible does the opposite of that. And Elon, like always, has excuses for why they're so expensive. He blames inflation, that Tesla was "seeing significant recent inflation pressure in raw materials and logistics" to explain the price hike... but those other car companies experienced the same, so that doesn't hold water. What we're witnessing is the same thing he was accused of when ousted at X.com – a "lack of a cohesive business model," one that has prioritized his wealth over all else and is now catching up with him.

 

Also, Tesla and its cars aren't better – in terms of performance and environmental impact – than other electric vehicles. Elon has used his showmanship to make Teslas sound "cooler" (and thus better), but outside of that we'd be far better off investing in other companies, who wouldn't funnel all their resources into making themselves the Richest Man in the World. Pratima Bansal, Professor of Strategy at Oxford, writes:

 

"Tesla has disrupted the auto industry by making exclusively electric vehicles — and maybe more importantly, by making them sexy. When the Model 3 was released in 2017, corporate elites and tree-huggers alike put their names on the waitlist. Tesla succeeded in electric cars where General Motors and Ford had [not]."

 

Maybe he succeeded in sounding cool, but is that the same as being good? A recent study found that "Tesla is among the 15% of the world’s largest companies, across 14 indices, that do not disclose their overall greenhouse-gas emissions. General Motors and Ford, meanwhile, are far more transparent – about both the emissions they create in making their vehicles and their targets for reducing those emissions." Tesla cars themselves are also notoriously sensitive and costly to maintain. Watchdog Consumer Reports says that Tesla's only car that performs at the industry average is the Model 3 Sedan; "the rest of Tesla's vehicles are rated below average" and "get poor reliability scores." Elon himself was forced to own up to their "quality issues" in 2021, after "critics slamming Tesla for Model 3 quality issues for years."

 

We’d also be far better off investing Tesla's resources into social projects that help actual people. 

 

Every one of our tax dollars given to Elon and Tesla is one less that goes to programs and projects that actually help society. The more we invest our national wealth in Elon’s harebrained and unproductive schemes, the less we're investing in things like education, childcare, housing, or healthcare – things that are less affordable to everyday Americans than ever. Working Americans currently own the lowest share of US wealth in modern history, while corporate profits are higher than ever. It doesn't make any sense for our government to be giving more money to the likes of Elon Musk... but that's the strength of the Showman, convincing people it does.

 

It’s hard to see Musk as a brilliant innovator when other companies are making similar, workable projects at a lower cost to society, and don’t structure those companies around making them the richest man in the world. 

 

And it’s hard to see Musk as some brilliant innovator when he hasn’t done anything to improve the world or meaningfully advance the industries he’s in – when all he’s done is innovate new ways to inflate his wealth. You know what innovators I find truly impressive? The people who came up with WiFi. The people who came up with GPS, Venmo, Bluetooth, vaccines, podcasts. People who have created innovations that improved the ways we interact and move through the world. Elon has produced no discernible value for our society. He is no innovator, just an entitled rich kid who likes building and playing with toys, and bragging about them to whoever will listen.

 

Champion of the People?

 

Elon Musk pushes several narratives that make him seem like he cares about the wellbeing of people and greater society. He says these things to seem like someone we can trust and is worth listening to. But this is just another narrative, another smokescreen, designed to give him more legitimacy and power that he does not deserve.

 

First, his claim that he’s a champion for the environment.  

 

To refresh your memory, Elon claimed that he dropped out of college because he “was thinking, well, what is going to most affect the future of humanity? You know, electric cars, solar power, essentially sustainable consumption.” If that was the case… then why did he spend the first 10 years of his career working in online finance and web software? Things that had absolutely nothing to do with the environment? Elon Musk knows that his narrative will make it seem like he’s been thinking about these bigger issues for decades; it’ll lend him legitimacy. But until he glommed onto Tesla – and saw the opportunity to piggyback on someone else’s vision – he didn’t show any real interest in the subject.

 

And while there’s no need to rehash how his company has hurt the electric car movement, it’s worth discussing how his increasingly incendiary political rhetoric is undermining the very environment he claims to care about.

 

Musk has recently come out as a vocal critic of the Left, actively telling people to vote Republican. He thumps that the Left has lost their minds while the Right has remained firm in their integrity (ok guy). By actively trying to discredit the progressive movement, he is crippling progressives’ ability to push the environmental policies desperately needed in our country today. You can’t be pro-environment and support a party in which “many Republican legislators still reject the science of climate change. Their positions have not kept up with their constituents, or even some business groups with which they are aligned.” You can’t be pro-environment and support a party that’s killed critical environmental policies from the Global Warming Solutions Act, to the Green New Deal (which has “overwhelming support” among both Democrat and Republican voters), to the Paris accord, to the Climate Emergency Act. You can’t support a party that rolled back over 100 environmental regulations when they last held office, who gutted the Environmental Protection Agency, who has vocally campaigned against shifting from coal/gas to clean energy sources (despite it having support from 77% of Americans), and who has received 4x the amount of Big Oil dirty money as their Left counterparts. Per MIT environmental policy professor Judith Layzer, over the last few decades “conservatives have been instrumental in blocking efforts to pass major new environmental legislation.” And I’m supposed to believe that Elon, who’s aggressively endorsing them, cares about the environment?

 

If Elon Musk cared about everyday people and the world we live in, he wouldn’t push inane political narratives that subvert the People’s interests and are solely designed to advance his (or spend $4.6 million lobbying the US government). The reason Elon is trying to get people to vote Republican is because they are the party of tax cuts for the wealthy, corporate welfare, and reckless deregulation – all things that make Elon a lot of money. It’s no more complicated than that. Musk has no real conviction, it’s just about the show.

 

So it probably won’t come as a surprise that Elon isn’t the free-speech champion he claims to be either. 

 

Musk has branded himself a “free speech absolutist” and has begun parroting the Right’s claims that Democrats don’t support free speech. That’s a hard stance to take when the Republican party has embarked on a book-banning campaign (fueled by rich donors), actively kills legislation to protect voting rights, pushes legislation like the Don’t Say Gay Bill, and is trying to kill measures to prevent disinformation from the Department of Homeland Security.

 

And it gets even harder to take Musk seriously when you consider his rich history of suppressing free speech.

 

First, he’s gone out of his way to suppress the free speech of his workers. When an employee is terminated, Musk forces them to “sign separation agreements including a strong non-disparagement clause with no end-date.” AKA a gag order. He also fires employees who speak up. Like Karl Hansen, “wrongfully terminated from his job as an investigator at the company’s battery plant” after ringing the alarm about widespread materials theft. Or Stephen Henkes, fired in 2020  “after raising safety concerns internally then filing formal complaints with government offices.” Or John Bernal, “a former employee who was fired after he posted YouTube reviews of Tesla's autopilot functions on his channel.” Other things that can get you fired by Musk: disagreeing with him and speaking up about harassment. 

 

Then, there’s the suppression of journalists’ free speech. Musk “asks reporters to sign NDAs or show story drafts to the company to obtain approvals before publishing.” He actively buries unflattering stories, like a massive EEOC lawsuit brought against him by factory workers. He mocks and tries to discredit journalists who he can’t answer to – “memorably, Musk berated and cut off an analyst on an earnings call in 2018. ‘Excuse me, next. Boring, bonehead questions are not cool,’ he said after a [very valid] question about his company’s capital requirements. The automaker had just posted its worst quarterly loss in its history.” In another instance, Fast Company revealed that Musk hunted down the identity of an anonymous blogger who posted a negative stock analysis of Tesla, and contacted his employer threatening to sue. And he actively punishes journalists for not saying flattering things about him; after Electrek, an industry publication, released a story with the headline “Tesla is charging owners $1,500 for hardware they already paid for,” Tesla stopped inviting Electrek staff to company events. Meanwhile, “a journalist who had been critical of the Tesla Model X launch event was called by Musk personally and had their order for a Model X canceled.”

 

A comprehensive review of Musk’s transparency and free speech practices from the LA Times sums it up:

 

“When it comes to the speech of others, particularly his employees and critics, his commitment has been anything but absolute. Far from defending their right to speak up, he has sought to stifle them with legal muzzles or responded with firings, lawsuits or even the hiring of private detectives.”

 

Elon Musk doesn’t give a fuck about free speech. Or the environment, or the wellbeing of everyday people, or political sanity. He cares about hoarding as much money as possible, and convincing everyone that both 1) he deserves it, and 2) he didn’t even ask for it. But he did; he pursued it with everything in him. He needs it to fill the void after all. 

 

Musk says stuff like “I didn't even want to be CEO of Tesla” and that he “doesn’t care about the economics of it at all.” His girlfriend Grimes says stuff like Musk "lives below the poverty line" and that "bro wouldn't even get a new mattress," and that she lives off "eating peanut butter for eight days in a row.” But it’s hard to believe Musk doesn’t care about power when he staged a well-documented, unnecessary, hostile takeover of Tesla to appoint himself CEO. It’s hard to believe he doesn’t care about money when the moment he got his first big merger payout, he immediately bought a $1 million McLaren F1 – one of the most expensive and status-signaling cars in the world. It’s hard to believe he doesn’t care about money when he owns a slew of mansions, including a $35 million "Mediterranean-style mansion" and a $29 million mansion in Los Angeles, plus "four other properties in the Los Angeles area that are worth nearly $40 million combined." It’s hard to believe he doesn’t care about money when his entire business model is dedicated to inflating his personal wealth. It’s hard to believe all these things he says because they are not true. The only reason he says these things is to seem like a man of the people, when in reality he is a man single-mindedly obsessed with amassing money and attention and power – he just says anything he can to not make you think that. Because who would trust a man like that?

 

How to Shut Down a Showman

 

Elon is not a straight-shooter. He is not a generational innovator or someone who cares about society-at-large. He only cares about convincing people he does. 

 

Because Elon is a flaming Narcissist who has never and will never be satisfied with himself, he devotes all his time and energy to churning out PR narratives that make him seem like someone he is not. He devotes his time to clapping back on Twitter to seem cool and get you to like him (despite getting owned at every turn). He misrepresents his achievements to seem impressive. He needs our attention, our admiration, our belief in his vision in order to get the validation and power he craves – to a pathological and dangerous degree. Make no mistake, this is how he has gotten where he is today.

 

[final lines tbd]. 

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Series Conclusion

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America's richest man owns the Washington Post. Our second-richest tried to buy Twitter. The third owns Microsoft, while the fourth owns Facebook. Overtaking our communications industry is an incredibly effective way for disingenuous people to peddle the lies and misdirections that hurt everyday Americans. They know this, which is why they're doing it. There is no innocence in these lies. Only victims.

 

These are not men we want dictating our story. These are dishonest, greedy ghouls obsessed with self-image who've gotten high off their own supply. Sitting high in their ivory tower, the rest of us look like ants –  and they treat us accordingly. I came across a tweet that really spoke to me:

 

"If a monkey hoarded more bananas that it could eat while most other monkeys starved, scientists would study that monkey to figure what the heck is wrong with it. When humans do it, we put them on the cover of Forbes."

 

If media outlets like Forbes want to give liars a platform, that's their decision. But we as people also have a recourse: to rail them for it. To reject it, to disdain it, to not read their op-eds. We need to stop glorifying and listening to dishonest, profit-obsessed Narcissists who are clearly only out for themselves. Didn't the bible say "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God”? Why are we equating money with honesty or wisdom or heart? Let these silly men run their businesses, write their uninspired books, make their corny YouTube videos, whatever. But to give them any more power than that in our society – to deify them for their greed and listen to them at all – will be our downfall. Normalizing and adopting the views of greedy charlatans, letting them actively mislead us and shape our cultural norms and political priorities, will be the death of our society. Maybe that sounds dramatic, but it's also true.

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