This may sound a bit weird but haven't you noticed they all are psychopaths? Although high functioning ones. Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezoz... These are not healthy people mentally. But they are rich and powerful.
They're not psychopaths, they're just disconnected from your perspective. They've got other stuff on their mind and it's hard for them to put themselves in your shoes.
Are you a psychopath for driving your car for a holiday trip, even though there's people dying in 49 degrees heat in Greece? It's really not that different from Jeff Bezos flying his spacecraft.
Not that I'm saying it's ok, obviously Bezos's company is operating in real scummy ways. I'm just saying it's not a sure sign of psychopathy. Frankly, I don't think being a psychopath is compatible with their achievements, but I'm no psychologist.
Also, they're not that powerful. People keep saying this as if they're somehow super powerful because there's a big number next to their name on the Forbes list. 90% of their assets are tied up in stocks that they're not gonna sell soon. Bill Gates couldn't eradicate polio because some broke warlords in Afghanistan started propaganda against him. It took Jeff Bezos 20 years before his spacecraft did anything semi useful, and he still can't land a deal with NASA. If he really is a psycho, why was Zuckerberg so nervous at his senate hearing?
Don't think they are generally psychopaths, but they need to have some (most of them as I see the 'rules' on Google that make you a psychopath) tendencies that would rank high on the list. You explain it with having a lot on their minds and that's a positive spin; the other explanation is that they are just humans and they just do whatever they are driven to by their vision trampling over whatever in their way in any way possible because they work that way and they have the money to do so.
> 90% of their assets are tied up in stocks that they're not gonna sell soon.
It is weird that this billionaire excuse flex didn't exist 5 or so years ago. Someone started pushing this meme really hard. And MacKenzie Scott's ability to liquidate $4B in a year shows that they really can do something with all those zeros if they want to and it won't single handedly crash the NYSE.
My brother-in-law believed that Bezos had $200B in a FDIC-insured bank account until recently.
It seems like it’s in the interest of everyone to be financially literate in how the ultra-rich operate in order to form better thought out policy positions.
> 90% of their assets are tied up in stocks that they're not gonna sell soon.
How is that at all relevant? Name one thing any of them cannot buy just because the vast majority of their wealth is invested. Bezos was putting a billion a quarter into Blue Origin - yes that's a small percentage of his wealth but there's no reason to assume more money would have gone faster.
That's not true. Bloomberg bought the NYC mayor election and into the top 4 of the Democratic presidential primary. Considering he (a) only became a Democrat in 2018 and had held office as an independent (after running for office as a Republican) (b) waffled on whether he was even going to run for the first 8 months of the election and (c) skipped the first four states that's a really good result. He still bought himself into the debates.
And that's buying it for yourself. I think we can easily see the history of rich people buying presidents if not the presidency.
> Are you a psychopath for driving your car for a holiday trip, even though there's people dying in 49 degrees heat in Greece? It's really not that different from Jeff Bezos flying his spacecraft.
I don't think this analogy is reasonable. Let's evaluate what is observable and controllable in both scenarios.
Scenario A: I don't observe anyone dying as I drive. I have no control over people dying in Greece.
Scenario B: Jeff Bezos was frequently reminded of more down-to-earth problems (before and after his space trip). As Amazon CEO and richest man in the world, he's had a lot of control and influence over the wellbeing of others.
You don't have to sell stocks. You can just borrow against them.
Equating stuff you would have to sacrifice your work and support network and forgo your livelihood to help as a normal person vs literally no effect on your day to day is pretty absurd.
If you think the life of a billionaire is so difficult, why don't they just give it all up and live a normal life? Clearly one is preferable to the other.
Also, literally none of this even touches upon being two-faced, abusive, and compulsively lying for profit, which was the context.
My comment is tabloid-level and I'm not a psychologist. That disclaimed, it wouldn't surprise me if Elon Musk is a psychopath; it sounds like his father's personality would not benefit a child's mental health https://www.thelist.com/406823/what-we-know-about-elon-musks...
You don't have to be callous to be a psycopath. And you don't need to be a psycopath to be callous. If you think someone is an a-hole, call the person an a-hole. Please leave diagnostics for professionals.
Musk said he is in the asperger spectrum. Among other things, it generally makes you not care what other think about you. And may lead to behaviour that is "acted" because all social interactions may be a difficult exercise.
Humans are complex and deep. And sometimes awful. There are more dimensions to a person than a good/bad guy or psycho/normal.
And with asperger - neurological diversity expands this space in ways it makes it very hard for neurotypicals to intuitively tell what the hell is going on.
Nobody is excused for bad manners. But not having any would not make person a psychopath.
> Musk said he is in the asperger spectrum. Among other things, it generally makes you not care what other think about you. And may lead to behaviour that is "acted" because all social interactions may be a difficult exercise.
.
Small point of contention- people with high-functioning autism (aspergers pre DSM-5) generally understand and care how they are perceived, but still have difficulty interacting in social spaces. Depending on the individual, communication skills can vary wildly. This is one of the reasons suspected to be behind autism's extremely high co-morbidity with depression disorders.
>generally understand and care how they are perceived
Personally, I do care how I am percieved. I want to be a legitimately good person. However, we sometimes do things that make it look like we don't care what others think of us because it doesn't always occur to us that what we are doing isn't normal. Even when beforehand we think of what a normal and appropriate thing to do might be we could totally miss the mark and do something weird that gives the impression that we don't care.
I know very closely several diagnozed asperger spectrum persons - I should have written their behaviour may seem non-caring when in fact they may try their hardest to behave as neurotypical would and to act in the best manners they understand. But human interactions are really complex and difficult.
You don't have to be callous to be a psycopath. And you don't need to be a psycopath to be callous. If you think someone is an a-hole, call the person an a-hole. Please leave diagnostics for professionals.
Musk said he is in the asperger spectrum.
I dated a woman on the Autism spectrum. This has been discussed in many books about Aspergers: People on the spectrum can resemble sociopaths and psychopaths on the surface. They are not. However, the appearance of insensitivity can often look like it to laypeople.
No. But isn't it ironic for someone to complain about armchair psychologists and then start talking about a condition that's not even recognized anymore?
DSM-5 replaced everything with autism spectrum disorder.
No. But isn't it ironic for someone to complain about armchair psychologists and then start talking about a condition that's not even recognized anymore?
The way you put it sounded like the thing didn't even exist. Whereas, it was just a name change. If that wasn't deliberately misleading, it might as well have been. Someone who isn't familiar with these issues might have looked things up briefly, then concluded that someone was lying.
In my view, intellectual honesty demands taking care not to create such misleading situations, even at the cost of strongly "scoring a point." Especially at that cost!
And to elaborate on this the explanation I read stated that with DSM-IV you had a bunch of specific disorders with their respective checklists of symptoms which didn't accurately reflect variations between individuals and the overlapping symptoms. (Since its a spectrum). This led to situations where people didn't check enough boxes to be eligible for certain treatments that might benefit them because they were associated with a slightly different diagnosis than the one they had.
> This may sound a bit weird but haven't you noticed they all are psychopaths?
Easier to get to the top - and stay there - if you don't care about anything (or anyone) else. Even better if you can do so while projecting a different image.
This may not be true for all CEOs. If you choose only the billionaires as examples, there could be some selection bias at play.
Gates was a ruthless tyrant in his Microsoft days. He worked very hard to rehab his image after leaving. Work that might be completely undone if the nature of his alleged involvement with Epstein and the reprehensible things that may have entailed ever surface. He appears to have lost his wife because of the cloud of suspicion there.
There was a couple year span on Reddit where you'd see a couple of really positive Bill Gates posts each day. At a glance it seemed organic, but people were always in the comments suggesting it was great PR. Seems like they were probably right.
Even before the Epstein scandal, there were hints of it old personality like when he claimed in Steve Job's biography that Next OS had no role or association with the creation of OSX (now Mac OS); hinting that Jobs was hired back on the board's whim.
The Netflix documentary about Bill Gates... Watch that. It's a very fine piece of propaganda and what makes it work. Excellent study material if you are interested in what makes people believe something.
Google shows enough I guess but things like [0] and [1] but there are quite a few books describing it all in more detail and he has talked about it himself [2] (not only here).
Not weird, you need something different in you to govern over many lives (employees & families, but this is no different than kings, dictators, presidents etc); this is probably more psychopath or sociopath than we are used to normally. How can you take decisions over 10000s+ of people's lives if you are a sane person?
