Walter Isaacson, whose biography on Elon Musk is set to come out this fall, repeated his narrative about the Tesla CEO as a kind of flawed genius.
Walter Isaacson, whose biography on Elon Musk is set to come out this fall, repeated his narrative about the Tesla CEO as a kind of flawed genius.
I mean he profits from the suffering of others. I don’t see how that’s not psychopathic
Because that’s not the definition of psychopath.
Most of us profit from the suffering of others. Does that make us all psychopaths?
In any case, I would probably classify him as evil, regardless of whether he’s a psychopath.
The three core traits of psychopathy:
• Arrogant and deceitful interpersonal style: impression management or superficial charm, inflated and grandiose sense of self-worth, pathological lying/deceit, and manipulation for personal gain.
Everything about this describes Elon.
• Deficient affective experience: lack of remorse or guilt, shallow affect (coldness and unemotionality), callousness and lack of empathy, and failure to accept responsibility for own actions.
Several people have described this about him, especially his first wife. This article is about this. And he routinely blames others for negative things that happen. He called a professional diver a pedophile for not liking his stupid submarine idea to rescue those kids from that cave, and doubled and tripled down on it when called out. Again, not accepting responsibility for his own idea being dumb, he had to deflect and slander someone else.
•Impulsive and irresponsible lifestyle: impulsivity, sensation-seeking and risk-taking, irresponsible and unreliable behavior, financially parasitic lifestyle and lack of realistic, long-term goals.
This is a man that will do monumentally stupid shit on a whim, which has landed him with fines from the SEC. Like saying he was taking Tesla private, that he already secured funding, etc. None of which happened. He ended up buying Twitter based on an impulse tweet and got stuck with it after signing the contract without doing any due diligence at all. He has thousands of engineers behind him that make his impulse claims come true a lot. And several of them across companies have come out and said that they didn’t know about features until Elon just tweeted them out.
By pretty much all metrics he is a psychopath. He just has the money for an army of people to keep him in line enough.
This is not a good descriptor of paychopathy. Psychopaths are essentially people with antisocial personality disorder, you can look up the DSM or ICD 10 entry for that, having those traits is not enough to secure a psychopath label.
The ICD-10 is out of date. The current revision is ICD-11, which collapsed all personality disorders into one single “Personality Disorder” diagnosis. Antisocial Personality Disorder doesn’t even exist anymore.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICD-11#Personality_disorder
Psychopathy is a trait of Personality Disorder. Not a standalone diagnosis.
ICD isn’t a diagnostic manual. It’s just for medical record and bill coding.
It absolutely is. It’s the main diagnostic manual for most of the world, maintained by the WHO and covers all diseases.
The DSM is largely just an American thing and solely deals with mental disorders.
The ICD is more commonly used for clinical diagnosis than the DSM even in the US.
I stand corrected.
Most of us don’t willingly profit from the exploitation of others