Elon Musk Can't Take the Heat

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/04/elon-musk-cant-take-the-heat-wisconsin-supreme-court-empathy-doge/

Elon Musk Can’t Take the Heat
The numbers say anti-Tesla protests are working. So do Musk’s increasingly unhinged actions.
Tim Murphy

Elon Musk has a simple diagnosis of what’s ailing America: It’s being destroyed by empathy. In a long interview with Joe Rogan, in numerous tweets, and possibly even in his sleep, Musk has argued that “empathy” is a “suicidal” trait that is a driving force behind civilizational extinction. It is time, he believes, for “the West” to get tough and make hard choices—to bar its doors to immigrants of a certain type and endure “temporary hardship” so that government can be transformed and “the woke mind virus will die.”

As the de facto head of the Department of Governmental Efficiency, Musk has deployed this brand of tactical callousness to maximal effect. He has boasted about throwing the United States Agency for International Development into a “woodchipper” and stumbled around the stage at CPAC with a chainsaw. He has presided over the dismantling of the administrative state and the harassment and mass-termination of federal workers—all while flaunting his lack of concern for the lives he has upended. Fired government employees, he announced last Thursday, with the laughing/crying emoji that’s become his calling card, will now have to “get a real job.”

This kind of depravity is a prerequisite for Musk’s new line of work. Dancing on the graves of lifesaving programs for kids is not something you can easily do with a conscience. But there is one set of feelings Musk is uniquely attuned to: his own. On Friday, the same day foreign service officers around the world received notices from a DOGE flunky alerting them that they would soon be out of a job, Musk—sans sunglasses—sat down with Fox News’ Brett Baier to ask for a little sympathy.

“I mean, you have Tim Walz, who is a huge jerk, running on stage with the Tesla stock price, where the stock price has gone in half—and he is overjoyed,” he said. “What an evil thing to do. What a creep, what a jerk. Like, who derives joy from that?”

I want to state this as clearly as I can: Nearly choking up on national TV as you lament your falling stock price is weak shit. And it gets to the core of how Musk operates. In a particularly get-over-yourselves moment in January, Axios described Musk and Trump’s governing style as “masculine maximalism,” embodied by “tough-guy language, macho actions…and often unmoved by emotionalism, empathy or restraint.” But back on Earth, the Tesla boss can be better understood in schoolyard terms. He can dish it but he can’t take it. Far from a projection of strength, Musk’s boastful and threatening public comments show a thin-skinned man who behaves erratically in the face of adversity—a snowflake, to use the preferred nomenclature, who melts down when he begins to feel the heat.

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