Sigmund Freud had the hots for his mom. This is creepy, sure. But probably not too damaging. What’s damaging is that his inner demon got extrapolated to the general public and he spent a lifetime trying to convince everyone else that they wanna have sex with their mom. Resentment and confusion were created from thin air.

This process of: Secret > Extrapolation > Outrage > Hypocrisy is so predictable it’s basically prescriptive. You wanna know what someone’s inner demon is? Listen to what they rage about. Open a random closet and three anti-gay activists will tumble out. (Several studies have found strong links between homophobia and latent same-sex preferences). Republicans raging about voter fraud? Guess who is most often caught in the act.

This pattern basically comes down to a lack of imagination. The thing I’m hiding from everyone else must be the same thing they are hiding from everyone else. I mean, we are all living the exact same life, right? It shouldn’t surprise us that the same people who fall prey to this have very little empathy. Empathy is the engine that teaches us that other people’s secrets are weirder than we could ever have imagined! Reading fiction is the antidote to assuming your secret is the same as everyone else’s secret. Suddenly, you are let in on all the amazing secrets that are possible in the world.

One of the admitted reasons Elon Musk purchased Twitter was because of a conservative conspiracy theory over “Shadow Banning.” The idea was that Twitter was putting its thumb on the scale and making some accounts have artificially low reach; they were targeting rightwing accounts and boosting leftwing accounts. Elon vowed in the purchase to level the playing field and to out this grand conspiracy by taking over the company and revealing the inner algorithm that wasn’t making him as popular as he should be.

With ownership of Twitter, and all the internal communications that came with it, Elon promised to reveal this grand conspiracy of evil Twitter being a bunch of big meanies. The worst thing he could find was the US government wagging a finger at Twitter for not taking misinformation seriously. Elon’s own lawyers admitted to the courts that Twitter did nothing wrong and that even the US government violated no laws. The worst you can say is that conspiracy nuts and Nazis felt like their right to air nonsense was infringed upon. Even rightwing nutters were deflated over the lack of a smoking gun here. If Twitter was trampling on their accounts, surely there would be something in the code. An email between engineers. Anything. Right?

(In fact, the shadow-banning Elon raged about has now famously become standard operating procedure in hilariously sad ways)

The same drug-addled conspiracy mindset that led to the purchase of Twitter is what also led to DOGE. It’s the great conservative canard that government is wasteful and corrupt, while corporations and free markets are models of perfect efficiency. Nothing could be more upside down and sideways than this, and Elon is doing the Lord’s work by pointing it out. Going into DOGE promising a TRILLION dollars in cuts, the program will probably end up costing US taxpayers more than it saved. Especially when you consider that it only “saved” money by cutting programs and research that were doing good in the world. Or that the fines Musk’s companies were facing were greater than the amount saved. One estimate for the direct deaths caused by defunding USAID puts the tally at 300,000 already. Most of these are children. People are dying while food rots in storage. This isn’t conspiracy or projection, it’s very real. Which makes it boring to the people who pretend to care about conspiracies, children, and waste. It also makes Elon one of the most horrific monsters of modern times, zero exaggeration.

The root cause of all this needless suffering is the same old pattern. You have damaged people who think the rest of the world is damaged like them, and instead of getting some help, they go out and cause a lot of suffering. I was indifferent to Elon right up until he accused a man trying to rescue kids of being a pedophile. The only thing I knew of Elon before this was that he had failed upward when Paypal bought out his company and forced him aside for his incompetence, resulting in a massive payday for him. This was standard startup nonsense. Screaming “pedophile!” with a big megaphone at a stranger was something different. It turns out that Elon’s sole reason for suspecting this was some other stranger whispered the allegation to him. Elon wanted to believe the worst possible thing about a stranger who was attempting to do good in the world. And he just ran with it.

Even more egregious is the case of Haraldur “Halli” Thorleifsson, which is worth a read. Basically, one of the nicest people in the world (literally — he has awards for being amazing) was bullied by the richest spoiled brat in the world. Elon only backed down because it was going to cost him.

One of the things Elon is famous for is not trusting that anyone is doing actual work. He makes employees submit justification for their existence. He’s done this at his companies and also with federal employees. His mass firings have led to a scramble to re-hire people who are only seen as indispensable after they’ve been dispensed with. The same thing played out at DOGE. And perhaps this is Elon’s darkest secret, the one that is causing harm to so many others. It’s the equivalent of Freud’s lust for his mom.

Elon Musk contributes nothing to this world, and he knows it. He knows better than anyone else that he has failed upward in life. Of all the folks out there rolling dice, someone is going to roll a perfect 20 ten times in a row. He failed at his X bank venture and was bailed out by Paypal. He failed at Paypal and his ouster led to a massive windfall. He bought an electric supercar and stumbled into a car and battery manufacturer ten years ahead of the competition. He threw gobs of money and took the reins off the best rocket scientists and they delivered the greatest engine ever built. He made the worst tech purchase since AOL, and that platform swept him into the White House, where he is not only profiting handsomely but shutting down costly investigations.

The opposite is also true: when Elon has full authority to run with his own ideas (the Boring Company, hyperloop, Cybertruck, DOGE, Starship, rebranding Twitter), the results are disastrous.

Of course, it’s easy to ascribe luck to genius. We make this mistake all the time, and Elon’s sycophants have mastered the art. But every time Elon accuses others of being lazy, or asking them to justify their existence, we are getting a peek at his inner demon. Elon Musk has one of the greatest cases of imposter syndrome in the history of humankind. He knows he does nothing better than anyone else. Don’t worry, buddy. We see you. Some of us even empathize.

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