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.

    • PrometheusG@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Earthwormjim91@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.