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Elon Musk was once seen as a visionary, a bold disruptor shaping the future of technology and human existence. But as his influence has grown, so too has a darker, more troubling side of his persona. What many first took as eccentric confidence has since been revealed as rampant egomania. Fez Siddiqui is a former colleague of mine at the Washington Post, and he's the author of a new book called Hubris Maximus, The Shattering of Elon Musk.
He's joining me today to break down exactly how Musk's narcissism has evolved and the key moments that reveal just how deeply his self-obsession has shaped his career and the future that he claims to build. Fez, welcome to Power User. It's great to be here.
Thank you for having me. So I feel like we all know that Elon Musk is obsessed with himself, but it seems like he's gotten more and more obsessed with himself over the years. You just wrote this book that really charts his business journey and kind of his leadership style over time, which I think is informed by this egoism, I guess. When you look back at Elon Musk's career, when did you first start to see the inkling of this kind of egomania?
So I write in the book, around 2013, a Tesla official asks Musk about this ambition of his to go to Mars. And the question on the official's mind is, humanity is going to become so much more advanced in coming decades, coming centuries or millennia. Why do we need to go to Mars right now? And what this official quickly learns is that it's not about the necessity to go to Mars right now. Musk wants to be the one to take us there.
And that's a really revelatory moment into Elon Musk's mindset. Got it. So it's not like he's obsessed with going to Mars because he thinks this is humanity's future. And 2013, they developed some sort of amazing technology that was going to make it possible for the first time or anything. It's really about him thinking.
being the one to go down in history as colonizing Mars. Absolutely. And there can be a little bit of both. The ambition can be worthwhile, but Musk needs to be the one to help humanity achieve the goal. It seems like he centers himself a lot, obviously, in his own companies. Like he has to be the CEO of every company it seems like that he's involved with. But then there's also like
these other somewhat smaller events. I'm thinking of 2018 with the Thai boys in caves. Can you explain what happened there? Obviously, there's this horrific instance of these boys becoming trapped in this cave in Thailand. And nobody at that moment is looking to Elon Musk, who heads a rocket company and who heads an electric vehicle company, to save these boys.
It's really Musk inserting himself into the conversation and offering up a solution that nobody was really asking for. And what was the solution that he was proposing? The solution he was proposing in this case was a kid-sized submarine designed by those who work for his companies.
And this was a rescue that was very meticulous through a lot of tight spaces, extremely dangerous, treacherous, required trained divers and experts. Yeah, it seems nonsensical. And it seems like a way to also kind of flex his technical prowess, right? He sort of wanted to show people that he is this like technical genius, right, that could solve these tough problems.
And Musk's frustration at not being acknowledged to be the genius sort of manifests in Musk lashing out at somebody who's actually involved in the rescue and baselessly smearing that person as a pedo guy. When Musk's crew ultimately arrives in Thailand and is not useful to the mission, that's when you see Musk start to get really agitated and smear this man. I mean, this is when I certainly started to notice him losing it a little bit.
and being a little bit crazy online. It seems like he was getting more addicted to Twitter and that validation cycle and kind of needing validation, not just seemingly from his work endeavors, but also through the public, like the public seeing him as this savior. And he was very publicly not seen as a savior in that situation. Just a couple of years later, the COVID pandemic hits. And I feel like you see Elon again,
again, try to center himself very quickly, right? Before coronavirus had become widespread in the United States, Musk started commentating on it. He started to express beliefs. He indicates that he thinks COVID cases will be at or near zero by April, that kids are basically immune, all kinds of unscientific thoughts. And then he gives one of these trademark offers. Musk told people that Tesla was willing to build ventilators, which was a very massive need at the time.
And so Tesla would leverage its manufacturing expertise to build ventilators. Did Tesla actually have any experience in building ventilators or even have the necessary equipment to do that type of thing? Tesla was not a medical device company. And what they deliver ultimately falls far short of technology.
the need. Who did they even deliver these ventilators to? Tesla ultimately built a prototype of a ventilator, which was never put into medical use. And what Musk delivered to hospitals were CPAP and BiPAP machines, sleep apnea devices, which were a partial need, but which were not at the heart of the needs during the height of the coronavirus pandemic. So it seems like this is another time where
Again, Elon Musk has these sort of visions of grandeur, right? He thinks that he can come in and save the day. He doesn't have a lot of respect for people who actually have knowledge and authority in certain places. It sounds like this is the story of himself with so many companies. I think he wrote in the book in 2021, Elon Musk calls himself the techno king of Tesla.
instead of CEO. And he did it on some certain date. He did this on March 15th, the Ides of March, which anyone familiar with Julius Caesar knows as a doomed date. He was not content to have a title that was like an NPC title. This is a big theme for Elon. He does not want to be sort of this generic character, the non-player character. So he's the techno king.
You know, he's not the CEO. Well, he wants to be the star. It's not even like he wants to be a supporting character, an NPC or a side character. It's like he has to be the main character in all of his things. And there's a hubris to it. I mean, you write a lot about, obviously, the takeover of Twitter and so much of what you're saying of these previous events.
ultimately show his strategy in Twitter. There's this famous tweet that's like Elon Musk is going to basically realize over and over again by making mistakes that the original owners of Twitter weren't like evil, woke people that were censoring everyone, but everything that they did was for a good business reason. And I feel like that's what we've seen, right? He takes over the company. He tries to roll back all of these things, content moderation, whatever. And now he's in the business of content moderating, right? He's doing a lot of the things that he lambasted Twitter executives for doing just a couple of years ago.
And if you look at the blunder that ultimately led Mustapha to step aside as head of Twitter, he limited sharing of outside content on the platform, which just flies in the face of what Twitter was about, which was an information sharing platform.
This idea that you're going to ban people from sharing links to their Instagrams. Twitter users were not having it. But this is an instance of Musk overruling the guiding philosophy of the platform and deciding that he knows what's best. Shortly after he took
over Twitter, he also insisted on himself being inserted into the feed more, right? Like it became, I feel like an Elon feed where suddenly engineers were being forced to manually put his tweets into people's feeds, right? Yeah. I mean, if you don't want to call it hubris or megalomania or a hero complex or a God complex, call it main character syndrome. And Musk was going to make himself the main character, whether you liked it or not. I feel like you see this with so many Silicon Valley billionaires. And when you look at
at the landscape of Silicon Valley, it's full of so many main characters, each kind of in their own little fiefdoms. We've seen an explosion of interest in AI, especially since OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022, sort of widely. And it seems like Sam Altman is undeniably the main character of AI. And that seems to bother Elon.
So it's unsurprising that Grok hits the scene shortly after this. I write about in the book about how Elon launches autonomy and Tesla's in this big bet on full self-driving shortly after the ride hailing companies embrace autonomy as part of their IPO ambitions. And you see the same pattern with AI. The large language models hit the scene. And then in the snap of a finger, you have Grok now hitting the scene. He can't handle not being the center of attention when there's a
big tech bet that's in the news. It's not even just him trying to be the center of the media cycle, which I totally agree he is. Like he wants to be at the forefront of every single hype cycle and be the main guy. But also he has this kind of like God complex about AI, right? So this idea of playing God is not entirely foreign to what Musk does.
does. He's applied similar thinking to Tesla autopilot, where he believes that at the moment where autonomy is safer, it's a moral imperative to roll it out. The science is not overwhelming that it's safer than human driving. Tesla has numbers that it trots out. So when Musk decides we're at that moment, he is taking on a godlike role in society because he's the person who has the tool.
and the unique ability to unleash it. And then you also see him building these humanoid robots, where it seems like he wants to kind of rule this army of robot humans. Similar to Musk's thinking on AGI, he believes that an army of humanoid robots could go rogue and overpower humanity. So he's talked about when Tesla made this bet on building humanoid robots, he wants to build them to be nice and to be obedient and ultimately serve humanity rather than
overpowering it. He specifically said, it's a robot that you could take yourself as opposed to one that would dominate and ultimately destroy you. I think that's very funny because if you're scared of a robot army going rogue, the first step in that disastrous series of events would be to build a robot army, which is now what he's doing and being like, no, this one won't go rogue.
This is what Musk has managed to sell his investors on. When we think more about him kind of centering himself, I think also of the most recent election and people saying President Elon and how he's kind of the shadow president. And it seems like not only did he want to be central to the election and claim
that he was sort of responsible for the victory of Trump. And I think he probably was, at least in large part, right, given the amount of money and the way that he leveraged his platform to promote Trump messaging. But he also wants to have this crucial role in the administration, right? He sort of immediately sets himself up where he's not president. He can't be president. Where you get this vibe where he's kind of
once again trying to be the main guy. Musk believes that society is hamstrung and strangled, basically, by regulations and by what he has called the woke mind virus. Again, you have to take him at his word here or accept that maybe he's trying to sell people on the idea that these things are getting in the way of humanity's ambitions, and he has to be the one to free humanity from that stranglehold.
Of course, that's really just about like getting tax breaks, right, and firing regulators for his own business. Trump takes power and Musk assumes this godlike role. He can decide or ultimately delete entire agencies so he can decide on the fortunes of entire agencies or delete them if he wishes. And Musk was the person who was Trump's largest donor, Republicans largest donor. He was the person who made this possible.
So how is that going to be rewarded other than with a massive amount of power that is unprecedented for an unelected official? But it goes back to this like delusions of grandeur, right? It's hubris. It's I ran a car company successfully and a social network not successfully. And so I should be the one to come in and mandate all these changes in government.
Musk once again centers himself. He believes that he is uniquely equipped to carry out this wish of his of reigning in the federal government. And he doesn't need to have the relevant expertise. And that belief is egged on by hordes of investors and fans. And obviously, Elon has millions of followers and people that kind of hang on his every move. And I feel like even the media themselves kind of like bed his delusions for a really long time.
What role do you think the public internet has played in building up these delusions of grandeur in Musk's head? Whenever Musk needs to feel validated in a decision that might be unpopular everywhere else in society, the fans on X are backing him. And we saw this play out when Musk intervened.
entered into government. Some of Doge's initial work was highly controversial and was frankly unrelated to the agenda of the Trump administration, regardless of how people might have felt about that agenda. And yet, Musk was cheered
as a hero and somebody with this unblemished business track record. It's somebody who, if anybody could reign in the government, it would be Musk. But some people were ultimately disappointed. He said he was going to cut a trillion dollars and he got to $150 billion. And now he's stepping back from Doge.
It seems like also framing himself as this singular leader and this sort of cult of personality has also allowed him to shield himself from a lot of accountability over the years as well. Absolutely. I mean, when there are attempts to scrutinize Musk, whether it's in the press or whether it's among regulators, there's a tremendous amount of pressure put on people, people who've had to flee in fear of their lives for daring to say something negative or even with the appearance of negativity about Elon Musk.
So there are instances of auto safety investigators who found themselves facing threats to their safety for daring to look into Tesla. And so extract that and think about, you know, Musk is now in power. And where do you get an environment of the expected scrutiny of a public official when there's so much pressure on people to just shut up and accept that he is a great man? How do you
think also Musk self-mythologizing so much and building himself up into this figure, this godlike figure, I guess, in tech has affected other tech leaders in the landscape? Because I feel like this brain rot that he has is spreading. I think this next crop of tech leaders faces an impossible task of trying to measure up to Elon's place in society. And I think that's why you get a maybe deeply flawed Sam Altman, or you get
a serious crash in the case of Sam Bankman Freed, or you get extreme disappointment with Mark Zuckerberg. You get the entire picture of who these tech leaders are, but you also get some occasional wonkiness. I'm going to go back to Zuckerberg. You get the cool Gen Z Mark Zuckerberg. Where did that come from? I don't think you get that without Elon.
Sam Bankman Freed is such a good comparison because he also kind of positioned himself as this force for good, right? That was solving humanity's problems. And I feel like that's so common now with these younger tech leaders that I guess have grown up in like the post-Musk world where they just self-mythologize very early. Absolutely. I don't think the environment works
Would be conducive to that without the myth of Elon. Do you think that Elon ever exposes himself to criticism? It seems like he has the thinnest skin possible. I think he does everything in his power to avoid that unpredictable situation where somebody might ask him a tough question.
The example that I think of a lot is when he was booed at the Dave Chappelle show in San Francisco, the city where he had laid off so many workers from Twitter. This was around 2023. Musk is getting just like vigorously booed and he is facing this very public rejection. And he turns to Dave Chappelle kind of like a deer in the headlights. And he's like, Dave, what do I say? He does not like to expose himself to that unpredictability.
There was that great piece recently that cataloged what happened to people who criticized him on Twitter. These are people on the right, including Laura Loomer, right? Like what happened to their accounts? And you just see it drop off a cliff where certainly my account was affected as well, where I'm rate limited and all this stuff. But like, if you criticize him, he tries to deplatform you. Like it seems like he cannot take any sort of discourse.
Try to think about the last time you saw Musk sit down with a journalist who was prepared to grill him with tough questions. Or think about the fact that he bought Twitter under pressure, you know, to be deposed in that Twitter case. He's not somebody who wants to be in any way subject to critical questioning.
Where do you think this goes for him? Do you think there will ever be a crash and burn? Did you learn anything in your book that might give us a clue as to how all of this ends? So the term crash out comes to mind. And will there be an Elon crash out? I don't have a direct answer to that question, but I can tell you what the cycle is. There is generally a crash out that precedes a moment of
quiet and deep discomfort and retooling where Elon decides what his next bet is. We've seen this repeatedly. The most recent one that comes to mind is after he was rejected as, you know, should he stay on his Twitter CEO? Twitter users overwhelmingly said yes.
No. And it was kind of hard to get Elon's every thought out of him at that moment. And then we saw him retool and get himself involved in electoral politics. Well, this is another moment where the American people have expressed a deep dissatisfaction with his role in government. And Elon has to return his attention to Tesla, which is under a tremendous amount of pressure. What does that retooling look like? Does he become even bigger and more powerful?
well, the last few cycles have produced a bigger, more powerful Elon. And the
the question now is how do you even get more powerful than he has just been? With a Venmo debit card, you can Venmo more than just your friends. You can use your balance in so many ways. You can Venmo everything. Need gas? You can Venmo this. How about snacks? You can Venmo that. Your favorite band's merch? You can Venmo this. Or their next show? You can Venmo that. Visit venmo.me slash debit to learn more. You can Venmo this or you can Venmo that. You can Venmo this or you can Venmo that.
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It seems like he, no matter what, he can't just, as they say, build in silence, grind in silence. I can't remember what the kids say, but it makes me think of that quote that he just gave when he's leaving Doge, where he compared himself to Buddha. Yeah. Elon asked, is Buddha needed for Buddhism? Was it not stronger after he passed away?
This was Elon's way of encapsulating Doge's role in society without Elon necessarily in charge. But it's also a glimpse into the mindset of Elon that he is driving an entire theology, I suppose, or at least philosophy of how government should be run. But it also tells us how Elon sees himself. Yeah. There's one more story from your book, I think, from the early days that seems to be really relevant.
of when he kind of compares himself to Alexander the Great, right? So Elon was working to build his first startup, Zip2. He's in Silicon Valley. A top investor in the company is grabbing lunch with their precocious founder to check in with Elon on how it's going and digitizing the yellow pages. And Elon, rather than having sort of a mundane company update, starts getting frustrated with the line of questioning because to Elon, it's kind of narrow-minded.
Elon has bigger visions, he says. And the investor is kind of taken aback by this. Elon ultimately turns to him and says, you don't understand. I'm the reincarnation of the spirit of Alexander the Great. And the investor, like you, Taylor, is kind of like, what? This was a conversation about getting addresses and phone numbers for our digital iteration of the yellow pages. But Elon is so fixated on this idea that you don't understand. This is going to be the biggest company ever.
I would rather commit seppuku than fail, Elon ultimately says. And this is another just glimpse into how he saw himself even from the earliest days of his rise. Wow. Well, Fez, thank you so much for joining me. Tell me where people can get your book and follow your work. So you can get my book, I think, wherever books are sold. Definitely check out your local bookstore. Check out Barnes & Noble. Check out your local library. It's Hubris Maximus, The Shattering of Elon Musk.
Fez, thank you so much for joining. Thank you so much for having me. All right, that's it for this week's episode. Don't forget to subscribe to my tech and online culture newsletter, usermag.co. That's usermag.co, where I talk about all this stuff and more. You can watch full episodes of Power User on my YouTube channel at Taylor Lorenz. If you like the show, give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Also, my bestselling book, Extremely Online, is finally out on paperback with a brand new cover. You can pick it up wherever books are sold, and it's amazing.
a great history of the content creator industry over the past 20 years, the rise of social media. I hope you guys like it. That's it for now. See you next week.