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Elon Musk has fired half of Twitter's 7,500 employees, including teams devoted to combating election misinformation. Most had no idea they were fired until their email accounts were shut off.
This was after he fired Twitter's executives "with cause" to avoid paying them the golden parachutes they're owed, after he taunted Twitter and the law firm it worked with in its lawsuit against him, suggesting he would sue all of them. It was after posting an unfounded article suggesting Paul Pelosi had been drunk and in a fight with a male prostitute.
It's been a long two months since Musk bought Twitter. But this has been his MO all along.
When the British diver Vernon Unsworth rejected Musk's help rescuing youth football players trapped in a cave in Thailand, Musk described him as "pedo guy." During the pandemic, when public health authorities refused Musk permission to reopen his Tesla factory, he did it anyway. After several mainstream news outlets called Musk out for his plans to launch a website ranking journalists' credibility, Musk linked to what he described as an "excellent" analysis published by the NXIVM cult.
Taunting opponents. Stiffing people he owes. Treating employees like dirt. Refusing to be bound by the law. Bullying adversaries. Demeaning critics. Craving attention. Refusing to be held accountable. Attracting millions of followers and gaining cult status. Telling lies. Making gobs of money. Impetuous. Unpredictable. Ruthless. Autocratic. Vindictive.
Remind you of anyone?
Musk is not exactly Donald Trump. They possess different skills and occupy different roles in the bizarre firmament of modern America. And Trump is far more dangerous to democracy—so far.
But both represent the emergence of a particularly American personality in the early decades of the twenty-first century: the wildly disruptive narcissist. Both wield sledgehammers to protect their fragile egos. Both are utterly lacking in empathy. Both lie and push baseless conspiracy theories (such as the one cooked up about Paul Pelosi). And both are indefatigable self-promoters.
Both are billionaires, but they are not motivated primarily by money. Nor are they fueled by any larger purpose, principle or ideology. Their singular goal is to imprint their giant egos on everyone else, to exercise raw power over people.
Their politics is neither conservative nor liberal. Call it megalomaniacal authoritarian.
Why did both achieve such prominence at this particular point in history?
The answer, I think, is that a large segment of the American public projects its needs and fantasies on them. People who are "mad as hell and not going to take it any more" crave strongmen who shake up the system.
People who have been bullied their whole lives want to identify with super bullies who give the finger to the establishment, answerable to no one but their own ravenous egos.
Their arrogance and certitude attract millions of followers, fans and cultish devotees, along with a fair number of goons and thugs who want to vicariously feel superior.
But they are not leaders. They are bullies who demean America.
Beware. The last time the world gave in to megalomaniacs, it did not end well. The robber barons of the Gilded Age, men like William ("the public be damned") Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, siphoned off so much of the nation's wealth that the rest of the nation had to go deep into debt to maintain their standard of living and overall demand for the goods and services the nation produced.
When that debt bubble burst in 1929, the world got a Great Depression. And that Depression paved the way for Benito Mussolini, Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler, who created the worst threats to freedom and democracy the modern world had ever witnessed, and the most deaths.
We are much safer when economic and political power is widely diffused. We are better off when people like Musk and Trump cannot gain such untrammeled wealth and influence.
Robert Reich is professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
