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Comment by h0l0cube | Hacker News Reader

I don't think he's purely about attention, but he craves a particular kind of attention. The kind that the gifted schoolboy gets when they put their hand up in class to a tricky question posed to the class. This might have been his only validation in childhood, or at least the one that was most rewarding, and now his whole life is based around being the clever guy in the front of the class. Most gifted children course-correct some kind of humility in their adult years, either voluntarily or by being humbled by reality, but Elon is yet to meet the moment of his awakening. Being told he's wrong in front of the whole class is the most mortifying thing he's experienced, but he has enough money, enough sycophants surrounding him, and enough momentum is his business ventures (so far) to keep making the same mistakes without any reflection.

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> I don't think he's purely about attention, but he craves a particular kind of attention. The kind that the gifted schoolboy gets when they put their hand up in class to a tricky question posed to the class.

This is a pretty interesting interview with a journalist who appears to have spent a fair bit of time with Musk: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/07/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas.... It made this relevant observation:

> Which I felt was a little dramatic. And I thought: Wow, this is a man in his 40s who thinks that he’s the center of the universe. So it always has that element of drama.

> I think he’s greatly informed by video games. Someone described him to me as Ready Player One, and everybody else is an N.P.C. — a nonplayer character. He always has to be the hero or the person who matters the most. Sometimes he does, and sometimes he has engineered it — getting the founder role when he’s not actually the founder or rewriting history or using public relations to make himself the founder.

> He understands the hero’s journey kind of thing rather well. Also the stakes have to be very high, and if it doesn’t work, we’re doomed. He tends to overstate problems. Most companies have problems, but: Everything is a disaster here, and I’m here to fix it. Or: Everything sucks, and everybody previously is criminal or evil or “pedophiles.” A word he likes to use a lot.

> In one tweet, he called Yoel Roth, who was head of trust and safety at Twitter, “evil.” And said that I was “filled with seething hate” — which is really dramatic and ridiculous. I’m not seething with hate.

Ezra Klein has many axes to grind, so I take his commentary with a grain of salt, but it's probably right that Elon has become a solipsist with a savior complex, and harbors the attendant cognitive dissonance that comes with that. I still hold some hope that one day he'll snap out of it, but that won't happen unless he finds himself in a dire situation.

> Ezra Klein has many axes to grind, so I take his commentary with a grain of salt

That quote wasn't from Ezra Klein, it was from Kara Swisher. Klein was interviewing her.

My bad

> The kind that the gifted schoolboy gets when they put their hand up in class to a tricky question posed to the class.

I completely forgot this feeling and now I want it back

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