Learning To Live With Elon Musk's Depression
I am sick of Musk's mood determining the course of human events
It was a Cold War reality that a world leader’s mood swing could bring about the end of life on earth.
A bad day at the office for the American president or a top Soviet Union official could be the beginning of the end: Nukes launched across the sea that would trigger more nukes and more nukes until everyone and everything was on fire. A grumpy morning could wipe out life on earth. An anxious afternoon could fulfill every apocalyptic nightmare foretold by those who opposed the proliferation of nuclear weapons. A little nighttime indigestion and there might be a mushroom cloud over Washington or Moscow.
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Humans during the Cold War were very much subject to the emotional whims of their leaders, who, for the first time in history, had the power of God. International economical entanglement has squelched this fear for now, though maybe it shouldn’t.
David Bowie in 1979’s Fantastic Voyage – off his shamefully underrated Lodger album – called this phenomenon “learning to live with somebody’s depression.” Between jaunty little lyrics about worldwide nuclear annihilation – a preoccupation of his throughout the 70s and 80s – Bowie croons in Fantastic Voyage that he does not, in fact, “want to live with somebody’s depression.”
We'll never say anything nice again, will we?
“We’ll get by,” Bowie sings, “I suppose.” He would have been a world-class doomscroller today; of that I have no doubt.
Today we live not with the depression of our leaders, but of an increasingly tyrannical and outright fascist billionaire class that seems very much done with the last vestiges of democracy. Specifically, we must live with Elon Musk’s depression. This, I would argue, is far worse than learning to live with the mental illness of elected officials because there is no way to dislodge Musk from power. In buying the site we once called Twitter, the richest man alive has shaped the planet’s informational ecosystem in his image. Musk’s well-documented emotional ups and downs and struggles with various forms of mental illness now determined world events.
No one chose Musk for his prominent political role as a primary funder and head of PR for the international fascist movement. No American voted for Musk to have such a role in our country; the only people keeping him afloat are the bros propping up Tesla as a meme stock and his Saudi funders. The man who cosplays as an American like an idiot-jester is using his eye-watering wealth to elect a fascist candidate who promises to launch pogroms on Day One of his second White House term. The Afrikaner who, like a child, is obsessed with interplanetary colonization, is calling the shots and shaping the discourse and determining the direction not just of the United States, but of the entire western world.
If you think I’m overstating Musk’s power, consider the man is deciding when and how Ukrainian forces can attack invading Russian soldiers, thanks to his control over the StarLink network. It’s truly chilling shit.
Capitalism was always going to produce such a scenario: Men with hundreds of billions of dollars buying entire democracies and dissolving them in acid, godlike figures who become impatient with the work of democracy and say fuck it, we’re accelerating into authoritarianism so we can Get Things Done. It’s a thought process with which David Bowie could certainly relate. Deep in the darkness of his cocaine addiction, Bowie openly flirted with fascist ideas, dismissing liberal democracy as an impediment to real progress, to evolving into the superman fascists have dreamed about for generations. These are ideas a sober Bowie, knowing fascist accelerationism always leads to total destruction, later dismissed as dangerous and deranged.
For a while, the idea of multibillionaires didn’t seem so bad. Musk came into public consciousness as the guy who wanted to help wean humanity off of fossil fuels and push space travel into the future promised by science fiction. Musk was the electric car guy back then. He would use his unfathomable fortune to help save us from climate collapse and move humanity into a new era of energy consumption (the Biden administration is doing this; unfortunately no one cares). Mark Zuckerberg for a while seemed tolerant – even enthused – about using his oceans of money to advance the democratic project toward a more fair and just future. Maybe, the thinking went, multicultural democracy could coexist with ultra-wealthy men, each of whom has more money than entire populations. If these guys can stick to good or neutral causes – go tinker with your car batteries, Elon – democracy could go on and self governance could survive, and even thrive.
Zuck, like Musk and Peter Thiel and a handful of other computer-geeks-turned-billionaires, has since given up on democracy as a foundation of the future.
That Zuckerberg’s abandonment of democratic ideals has largely been overshadowed by Musk’s insane blackpilling doesn’t mean it’s less important. It might actually be more disturbing considering Musk likely always held far-right political views. Musk, after all, reportedly says he opposed antisemitism not because it’s wrong and discriminatory and vile, but because racial and ethnic hate is not conducive to a “spacefaring civilization.”
Perhaps this shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone who has watched with great anxiety as the single richest man in human history throws his financial and political weight around with more and more force, embracing fascist voices on his precious X platform, which he has designed to stir racial anxiety and function as a bullhorn for the most odious ideas and theories of the 20th century. Musk’s grandfather, after all, sounded a lot like his grandson seventy years ago.
Just as Musk raves like a madman about the “woke mind virus,” so too did his grandfather, J.N. Haldeman, rage against radio and TV as “an unconditional propaganda warfare… against the white man.” Haldeman, a member of the fascist Technocracy movement – tech bros have always been fascists – was born in Minnesota and moved his family to South Africa after the nation’s racist white leaders instituted apartheid in 1950. Yes, Musk’s grandpa moved to South Africa specifically to defend a regime that had legally turned black people into second-class citizens with no political rights.
Halderman railed endlessly about vaccinations as part of a grand conspiracy perpetuated by rich Jewish people and their allies across the world. Seven decades later, his grandson would take up the mantle of spreading fear and distrust of all vaccinations as the world grappled with a new killer virus, using his internet perch to sow distrust that most assuredly cost lives during the darkest days of COVID. Halderman chastised colleges and universities for failing to tow the fascist line in apartheid South Africa, positing that any white man who disagreed with him had been brainwashed by mass media. His grandson would do the same from his perch atop the most prominent social media platform on earth, calling out American universities as centers of left-wing indoctrination and charging that every one of his ideological opponents had been mesmerized by the so-called woke mind virus. His own daughter, according to Musk, had been done in by that sneaky mind virus and all its wokeness.
Halderman, like any far-right conspiracy peddler worth his salt – and like his dear grandson – saw his shadowy enemies in every corner of every institution: In the United Nations, in the British parliament, in the U.S. government, in churches and schools and social clubs and other places where the concept of African self governance was promoted and apartheid disparaged. And so it is with Musk, who recently told Tucker Carlson, a fellow enemy of democracy, that it would not matter if Joe Biden or Kamala Harris were assassinated because they would simply be replaced by new “puppets” for the international conspiracy Elon sees in every crack of his blackpilled reality.
It’s quite the experiment in bad faith. Musk, like Halderman and countless other shameless conspiracy theorists over the past century, create a reality in which they must unravel democracy if they are to save the world from the all-powerful Unseen Men who really control things. If they are battling against these scheming, conniving puppeteers, they can’t be wrong. How could someone side with the puppeteers, after all? Musk, like his grandfather before him, is on the right side of the history he have created in his head. In this bad-faith reality, they are the unquestioned protagonists fighting an evil that cannot be named, but most certainly exists. Just trust them: The evil, it’s there.
One can only hold these beliefs and exist in this wholly invented reality if one is unwell.
See A Doctor, Man
Musk has been strangely open about his mental health struggles over the years, something you would not expect from a man who tries so valiantly to play the part of an alpha male – a character he must play to fit in with all of his toxic computer friends with far-right politics.
In 2017, well before his sharp turn toward fascist politics, Musk told a random Twitter user that he believed he had bipolar disorder, but couldn’t be sure. He claims to regularly experience “great highs and terrible lows.”
This aligns with how people close to Musk have described him. Walter Isaacson, Musk’s biographer, said he often saw Musk’s “dark demon mode,” a phrase coined by former Musk girlfriend, Grimes. This so-called demon mode would include a "maniacal" sense of urgency, Isaacson said. Musk would often "rip a person apart" in the workplace if they did not match his intensity in problem solving.
You’ve certainly heard or seen Musk talk extensively about his use of ketamine to counter his brain's “negative chemical state," whatever that might mean. I’m not a doctor, as you may know, but this sounds an awful lot like a man who has diagnosed himself and is, naturally, self medicating.
Investors in the Musk empire have long expressed major concerns about Musk’s use of ketamine, and Musk said it’s in these investors’ best interest to let him do whatever he wants to do with ketamine if they want to keep making money off his laughable promises to make science fiction a reality by this or that date.
This is not to disparage Musk as unhinged or to speak badly of those who deal with mental illness. I have my own experience with mental health for which I have not summoned the courage to write about. Maybe someday. I want to be clear about this: His struggles with depression and anxiety are not what makes Musk a destructive and malignant force in our culture and politics. I very much hope Musk one day seeks and receives the help he needs to lead a more content life. He has to want that medical intervention before he gets it though.
It’s not that people who deal with mental illness should not be the heads of companies or become fabulously wealthy. Struggling with whatever Musk struggles with is in no way a personal failing. There’s evidence showing links to bipolar disorder and the kind of drive and creativity that has created business empires and transcendent art. It’s wrong and deeply unfair that regular folks – people who trade their labor for a little money and just want to get along – have to live with the manic episodes of these titans of industry because they have grown so terribly wealthy and powerful and have used their resources to buy what is supposed to be a representative democracy. Musk and his billionaire rivals have slithered their way into the heart of the American experiment and undone it from within thanks to fascist judges creating paths to their hostile takeover of the experiment. Shoutout John Roberts.
'This Infuriating Thing'
By the late 1970s, David Bowie was well past his disturbing dalliance with fascist ideas, one of which was a nuclear apocalypse bringing about a glorious renewed future where the Best Men could rule. A half decade later, Bowie was among the many pop music makers fretting about the end of everything as two empires threatened each other with extermination every day.
“So many things are out of our control,” Bowie said during a 1979 interview. “It’s just this infuriating thing that you don’t want to have leaders’ depression ruling your life.”
Bowie by this point was clear-eyed about the prevailing geopolitical winds of change. He saw the rise of right-wing politicians like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. He heard their promises to unravel the postwar order and unleash capitalism and all its mind-bending brutality. He listened to them and his music reflected this (see 1980’s “Fashion”).
Bowie hoped, I suppose, that none of these right-wing radicals suffered with the kind of mental illness that could result with the Big Red Button being pressed. Perhaps Bowie never imagined that someone who had not been elected to a powerful office could threaten the world on a down day, on a gloomy afternoon, on a manic night.
Living with someone else's depression is nothing new for Americans in the 2020s. Donald Trump's mental state has ruled our lives for almost a decade now. That was especially true while he occupied the White House – a period many Americans seem to have memory-holed – and a spate of anger from the tired old man could lead to days or weeks of political and cultural chaos. Trump's depression, undoubtedly exacerbated by his merciless and loveless father, has determined the course of human events for much of this century. That should not be, yet it is.
It’s OK that Musk and other fascism-curious billionaires suffer from various mental illnesses. Like Trump, Musk – according to his brother – grew up in an utterly loveless household in an environment of "absolute fear." His subsequent struggles should not determine human events and the future of how people organize society. A single person’s depression should not be able or allowed to tear down democratic guardrails and usher in an age of authoritarianism, to wash away every last part of the everlasting mission to make life freer and fairer in the United States. No one should have that power. Elon Musk does, and he has told us in no uncertain terms that we must learn to live with his depression.
I don’t want to live with anyone's depression.
Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @cdcarter13.bsky.social and on Threads at @CDCarter13.
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