The Making of Elon Musk: Why His Trauma is Our Problem
- Kevin Lankes
- Jun 13
- 14 min read
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/2vSkO9Wrg3s
Elon Musk, the guy who fell out of the dickhead tree and hit every branch on the way down, and gargled the biggest nuts along the way. He’s the richest man in the world, ironically having never created a single thing of his own on his own other than a video game when he was twelve years old. He bought his way into car manufacturing, he paid a bundle accidentally to control our social interactions, and he bought an American president, even though he may be out of politics now--but it doesn’t even matter if he’s fully out for real because he has all of our data. We’ve been progressively getting insight into his character for several years now, and it’s made a lot of people buy these bumper stickers for their Teslas that say “I bought this before Elon went crazy.” But it would be more accurate to say they bought it before they noticed that Elon was crazy, because the truth is, he’s always been like this, and you don’t have to take my word for it, I’m about to show you the evidence. More and more people are simply noticing the kind of person he is, and that’s in large part related to the fact that he just can’t help but insert himself into just about everything.
For example, the first time I had any real insight into Elon was during the Thai cave rescue operation. I was assigned to write an article specifically about Elon’s involvement, and break down his erratic and anti-social behavior during the whole thing. If you’re unfamiliar, in 2018, twelve kids on a soccer team got trapped in a cave in northern Thailand. Divers had to genuinely risk their lives in a complicated underwater cave diving operation to get them out, and in fact one volunteer diver did end up dead while attempting to reach the trapped kids. And Elon just swooped right in there with his wild, unrealistic nonsense solutions while this serious rescue mission was going on. One thing he wanted to do was build some kind of aquatic autonomous robot thing to get the kids out, and he just railed on anyone who told him factually why it wouldn’t work, including that the thing itself wouldn’t physically fit inside the cave. That’s when he famously called one of the divers a, quote, “pedo guy,” referring to the fact that he was a British dude living in Thailand and Elon couldn’t imagine anyone outside of Thailand being there for anything except creepy underage brothels, apparently. And that’s still on his mind today, because it’s one of the accusations he’s throwing at trump during their big national breakup. Elon tweeted recently that trumps is in the Epstein files, which is why the files aren’t being released.
Pretty much everybody at this point knows that Elon Musk is a big rusty nutsack, but not everyone knows why. Because he really was always like this. We just didn’t know. He’s not the one who changed, it was our knowledge of him that changed. So how did he get like this? Who hurt you, Elon? Where did you come from? Where did you go? Where did you come from, cotton-eyed Apartheid Joe?
How is it that the richest man in the world got so totally broken? In order to find out, we have to dive into the life, career, and ideology of Space Karen. Let’s point out on the doll where the big, mean world touched him.
The thing to know about Elon is that if he were a regular person and not the most powerful man on the planet, you would probably feel very sorry for him. He grew up in South Africa to an abusive father. Reports that I’ve seen suggest it’s possible that Elon’s dad Errol maybe had some undiagnosed mental health challenges, and that he operated under a, quote, “Jekyll-and-Hyde nature.” Biographer Walter Isaacson wrote that “One minute he would be friendly, the next he could launch into an hour or more of unrelenting abuse. He would end every tirade by telling Elon how pathetic he was.” Elon has tearfully described these moments as “mental torture.” Elon’s mother Maye has also accused Errol of physical abuse, which led to their divorce in 1979. Errol has called those accusations “rubbish.”
Elon’s family is, in a word, problematic. Elon’s grandfather was the head of a radical fascist political movement in Canada in the 1930s. Things may start making more sense to you when you know things like this, especially when we get to the substance of the movement, which was encouraging government power to be turned over to elite technocrats. The apple doesn’t fall far from the dickhead tree afterall. The guy decided that he liked Apartheid South Africa instead, so that’s where he went. Errol Musk has this to say about his time growing up there: “It was a good time, because we had no crime. There were no problems.”
Then Errol hooked up with his stepdaughter and they had a kid together in 2017, which is super ridiculously gross all around. We’re just trying to paint a picture here of the things Elon had to grow up with, and the picture feels like one of those William Blake paintings of the Book of Revelation. Both Elon and his brother Kimbal didn’t speak to their dad for several years after the stepdaughter thing, which I feel like is pretty reasonable, actually. And yes, Elon’s brother is Detective John Kimble. So he knows who’s his daddy and what does he do.
There are some musings out there that Elon may have PTSD from some of his childhood experiences and trauma. A lot of people mistakenly believe that PTSD is something that only happens to combat veterans, but any big traumatic event or experience can cause lingering mental health effects. Like, you know, when I was 25 I had cancer. And while I’ve never been officially diagnosed with PTSD from that extremely hellish experience, that’s the kind of thing that might do it. Elon’s parents sent him to a dystopian survival camp for kids when he was little, and while he was there, he got beat up repeatedly and had to fight for food for some reason. Isaacson wrote that it was a kind of Lord of the Flies-type scenario. So if none of that happens to be an exaggeration, that’s an experience that could embed a lot of trauma all on its own. He was also viciously bullied in highschool, and once got the crap kicked out of him so hard that he ended up in the hospital, which is another really traumatic experience.
Those events could potentially do it. And researchers also say that prolonged childhood trauma like suffering abusive parents and bullying is less likely to provide that single event or catalyst that creates post-traumatic stress. But there’s also a sort of unofficial diagnosis called CPTSD or Complex PTSD that some believe can spring up from this exact environment. Other clinicians argue that CPTSD is just a manifestation of other personality disorders like Borderline Personality Disorder. It’s known that BPD can absolutely come out of a prolonged period of childhood abuse. And listen, we’re not diagnosing Elon with anything here, because I don’t have the qualifications to diagnose anyone, and he hasn’t been thoroughly examined by a clinician. We’re simply taking a look at the possibilities based on the available evidence and expertise, and connecting some logical dots as best as we can.
Unfortunately, Elon is the most richest memelord around, so we can’t just stop here. Because I’d love for this conversation to end with some empathy for his lonely and painful childhood that brought him so much trauma, but because he is so powerful, we have to talk about how all of his personal issues affect the rest of us. The Atlantic has called Musk “a new kind of bullshitter….[a] bullionaire….an unusual purveyor of infantile jackassery, whose unfathomable wealth makes it possible, and even likely, that he’ll carry out even the most ridiculous plans.” I, for one, think that’s an incredibly accurate summary. Case in point, this f*ckin’ thing (the cybertruck), which is, as far as we know, one of just two things he’s ever designed himself. And this one was really built by other people with real industry knowledge who had to suffer through his whims, and it still keeps catching on fire and falling apart in various ways that’s led to dozens of recalls. This is a theme throughout his career; insider reports suggest that the people around him do their best to entertain him when he barges in, distract him so he can’t really work on anything meaningful because he’ll screw it up, they can’t wait for him to leave, and then they just completely disregard everything he said. The other thing Elon made was a video game when he was twelve. Literally the only thing we know for sure that Elon created himself was a bare-bones ripoff of Space Invaders as a child. So we know at one point he possessed coding skills comparable to pretty much anyone who’s ever messed around in Khan Academy. Some people still probably believe he made his money by inventing electric cars at Tesla, because he marketed himself pretty well as a kind of real-life Tony Stark early on. But two other men founded that company. Elon was an early investor, and eventually he put up enough of his money to force the other guys out. That’s it, that’s what he did.
So where did he get that money in the first place? That’s a subject of intense online debate. Lots of Elon fanboys want to push the narrative that he’s somehow self-made, but that’s just not anywhere near the truth. The truth is that he grew up wealthy. His parents were rich. Maye Musk wrote in her book because of course she has one, that when she divorced Errol in 79, he owned two homes, a yacht, a plane, five luxury cars, and a truck.
In 1986, Errol sold the plane for 80k pounds and put the money into an emerald mine. The emerald mine is for some reason a giant point of contention with the story of Elon Musk, but it’s very real, no matter what anyone says. His father Errol was half-owner of this mine. I guess it messes with the narrative somehow, but Elon is said to have walked the streets of New York City with literal emeralds just sticking out of his pockets. His father himself has said that, quote: “We were very wealthy. We had so much money at times we couldn’t even close our safe.” He said that closing the safe was a two-person job, so one family member had to keep the money from falling out while someone else carefully closed the door. “And then,” he said, “there’d still be all these notes sticking out and we’d sort of pull them out and put them in our pockets.”
And when Errol got a hold of the mine he referred to it as “an under the table operation.” He said out loud in an interview for some reason that “If you registered it, you would wind up with nothing, because the Blacks would take everything from you.”
By the way, do you know who’s not a big stupid racist? Me. So do me a favor and like this video and subscribe to the channel if you like what I’m doing. I’m trying to build a community of like-minded people who aren’t assholes and want to improve things around them as best we can. I’d really appreciate the help.
Elon’s family is gross. They’re also rich. Elon grew up in a super wealthy white neighborhood in Pretoria. He was afforded opportunity and advancement that other people simply do not have access to. He attended ritzy private schools where other celebrities also went, he had an education and access that brought him sliding into home plate by the time he was born. The first and probably only money he ever made on his own was from the sale of that video game for $500. Elon and Kimbal made a company called Zip2 after their dad gave them $28,000 pounds to start it. And they later sold that in 1999 to Compaq for $300 million. Zip2 was just the yellow pages digitized, and it made money by convincing companies to pay for a spot inside. I’ve seen reports that Elon personally pocketed somewhere around $22 million from the deal, and he denies left and right that their dad ever gave them money, but that information is in a 2015 biography of Elon.
Then he took the money from Zip2 to start X.com in 1999. And this should tell you just how long he’s been obsessed with this incredibly weird X thing, from putting it in his rocket company SpaceX, to turning twitter into X, to naming his kids iterations of X, it’s deeply weird and he’s always wanted to force it to be a thing. Because as soon as other people got involved, like when X.com merged with Peter Thiel’s Confinity, everyone there was like, no, dawg, X is a dumb name, we’re calling this PayPal.
And yeah, I feel like not a lot of people know that Elon had anything to do with PayPal, but he was there when the thing was made, and part of it was something he tried to create himself that nobody else liked. No one liked it or him so much that they forced him out as CEO in 2000 and replaced him with Peter Thiel, which is yikes. And there’s a long history of this, of kicking him out of things because he sucks, but then somehow Musk weasling out a way to claw some measure of success out of the fact that everyone on earth hates him. In this case, he happened to be the largest shareholder of PayPal, and so when eBay bought it in 2002, it’s said that he personally came away with somewhere between $165 and $180 million. This is another trend with Elon. He just owns stock that appreciates or pays out over time. That’s kind of it. He owns companies, and anytime he actively tries to manage those companies, they lose value. He went on to actually create a company in 2002, which was SpaceX, and then buy another one in 2003, which was Telsa, the company that made him famous, even though two other men actually started that one. At this point, Musk was overextended and in trouble. His brother Kimbal said that Elon was “in debt,” and “more than broke.” But, like 99.9% of billionaires everywhere who are sticklers for pretending they’re self-made geniuses, Musk was bailed out by the government and his companies were saved.
In the late 2000s, after the space shuttle program was sunsetting, NASA was forced to hitchhike to space on the ancient Russian soyuz rockets launched from the remote desolate landscape of the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. It was then that NASA handed a $396 million contract to SpaceX for unmanned resupply missions to the International Space Station. After that point, multiple contracts followed, including one to replace soyuz as the ferry system to the ISS starting in 2020, and in 2021 SpaceX received a $3 billion contract to take humans to the moon.
Because he’s not really a businessman, or like, an engineer, or a programmer, or anything other than a professional troll, he’s had a lot of regulatory issues and legal woes throughout his working life.
For example: Tesla went public in 2010, the first car company to do so since 1956. And they raised $226 million in the IPO. But then in 2018 a tweet Elon made a dumb threat about taking the company private again. He tweeted out that he’d secured funding to do it and share prices would start at $420 dollars. And this landed him in hot water with the SEC for securities fraud. Because he was attempting to manipulate buyer perception about stock prices. The whole thing ultimately forced him into a settlement with the SEC for $20 million and he was also forced to resign as chairman of Tesla for three years. And then in 2021, Musk was sued by a Tesla investor for his repeated “erratic” and “unlawful” tweets about the company and its value, which lawyers argued constituted making false statements about the finances to the public. This is also when he changed his official company title from CEO to “technoking,” seemingly in response to the idea that people could keep holding him accountable for things and he didn’t like that and wanted to pretend he could just do whatever he wanted. So he’s a guy who needs to try to make himself feel better by giving himself edgelord nicknames.
I think the best way to explain Elon Musk is that he’s simply a twelve-year-old boy inside. He’s a weird lonely guy who felt deeply hurt and alone throughout his entire life, didn’t experience love or a support system to allow him to grow and mature, and he does really stupid and cringey things that children would think are cool, like naming his cars for an acronym that spells out the word “sexy.” You probably didn’t think about that, and I didn’t know about it for a long time, either, but Tesla car models as they were released are: Models S, 3, X, and Y.
Then there’s that 2018 tweet about taking Tesla private with a share price of $420, 420 being drug parlance for smoking weed. Then there’s the time he sold an actual flamethrower to fund his failed Boring Company, because of a line from the movie Spaceballs where they talk about selling merchandise, quote, “such as lunch boxes and flamethrowers.” It’s worth noting that Musk created the entire Boring Company seemingly because he was mad one day that he had to sit in traffic, and he tweeted that he was just going to bore a tunnel through the earth. And then he literally turned that into securing real and lucrative contracts with multiple cities in exchange for creating these tunnels, which he never did. Another great Atlantic quote that sums up this dynamic reads as follows: “Elon Musk says or does absurd and even stupid things, but then those absurd and stupid things end up paying off.”
Scott Galloway, a professor at the New York University Stern School of Business, had this to say to The Washington Post about Musk, “Is it the errant missives of an eccentric billionaire? Or is it dangerous? And the answer is yes and that it is.”
And now Elon may or may not be making up with trump. He just apologized for some of the things he tweeted about, like trump being in the Epstein files. Though I think we already knew he was in there. What Elon represents, and also in a way, his ex with benefits, Donald trump, all this cultural and economic, and now political dependence on these rich garbage patch people who don’t care about anyone or anything beyond what they can do for themselves, and their pathological clawing for power and attention-- the thing that’s going to absolutely end us if we allow it. And right now, we are. We’re allowing giant mentally crippled man babies to run our society, when they should probably all be in inpatient psych care until they can develop the emotional maturity of normal humans and learn how to function in society. These are the people in the past that we would have left beside the sabertooth tiger den and told them we’d be right back. Yeah, we’re playing a fun game and you’re definitely the main character. Just hang out here, we have to put the fun surprise together for you. Oh, don’t worry about that growling, it’s just Bobby’s iPhone, just playing some sick nature beats.
And I haven’t even said anything about the guy’s blatant drug abuse yet. A new report from the Times claims that he’s been abusing ketamine, which we all knew, but also lots of other things, too, and he carries around a pill case with at least 20 pills in it everywhere he goes. He’s outright told people that he’s taking so much ketamine it’s affecting his bladder. So he’s peeing himself and seeing things on magic mushrooms and frying his brain with adderall. And you have to go to work tomorrow and pee in a cup, and there better not be any THC in there or you’re fired.
Unfortunately, modern society has no accountability features for someone with more money than God. We just for some reason stop punishing people beyond a certain net worth. It’s a very disturbing feature, and I wish we could do something about that, because I’m convinced that in the future we’re going to stop walking on egg shells around these people and find out they have some intense pathologies happening in their disjointed brain parts, and we’re going to stop letting them run things. But right now we’re letting them off on every single thing they do, illegal, unethical, or just plain bizarre. And we’re entertaining their whims, like the one Elon has about populating the world with as many of his test tube babies as he possibly can. This desire to fill the earth with his spawn would be super revolting if it weren’t for the fact that the ones that are old enough to think for themselves seem to hate the shit out of him. It would be very funny, if he accidentally built an army of anti-Elons, instead of whatever weird eugenics experiment he’s trying to run on the rest of us.
And I promise I’ll never run experiments on you. So please don’t forget to like and subscribe. Let’s work together to make sure we get people into government who deserve it, people who believe it’s a public service and who treat it that way. People who really care about making the world a better place and won’t stick around until their on their deathbeds in order to horde as much wealth and power that they can. Let’s do some f*cking good about wealth and power in America. And let’s do some f*cking good about Elon Musk. The next time you see him, give him a hug. He’s a sad, lonely kid inside. If we get him to therapy and show him we genuinely care, then maybe he won’t want to destroy the planet and run away to Mars anymore. But then again, maybe we should just let him leave on one of his exploding rockets.
I’ll see you in the next one.
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