Elon Musk’s Recent Meltdown Is A Lesson On Validation
Don’t be an Elon.
Ever since his brilliant purchase of Twitter, Elon Musk continues to get up every morning and consistently walks onto a rake to hit himself in the face. Whether this is part of his 4-Dimensional chess play moves on a 3-Dimensional board, or his disdain for systems, we don’t really know.
Any person grounded in reality can find it pretty hard to grasp what is going through the mind of someone that could be described as “if cream of mushroom soup had a personality” while trying to fit in with the younger generation.
No offence to cream of mushroom soup.
But while this new meltdown from Elon Musk is just part of the course for one with no emotional intelligence whatsoever, Musk is also the perfect example for something I don’t feel is brought up all that much.
He is the perfect case study of a man who demands validation from others, obsesses over it to the point that he is one of the most weirdest and unlovable beings out there. Setting aside the legions of fans of his who would take a bullet for him, this is a man who can’t keep a relationship at all, who has kids who likely don’t want anything to do with him (one of them changed their last name to remove any association to him), while also being one of the richest people in the world and is a big deal in celebrity culture, and the planet as a whole.
People say we shouldn’t be platforming the guy, but Musk has positioned himself in such a way that he is the platform.
And by god is he a bad one.
I can’t blame people for bringing this man to this point. They say we gravitate towards these rich and powerful people because we can relate to them. When they win, it feels like a win for us. And Elon Musk is someone we can all kinda relate to.
I can relate to the sort of awkwardness that he has.
But those who lean into that and are true Musk fans likely can connect with something that very few people reported or highlighted about that recent meltdown.
It has to do with Musk’s constant responses and then pauses as he looked out to the crowd of people throughout the interview. From that famous line, the “Let Earth be the judge of it” line, to so many other statements he made, he consistently looked out to the crowd for constant validation.
He was met with silence in the crowd sure. But no doubt many of his defenders and fans would have his back on that. They might laugh at some of his statements or cheer him on when he told advertisers to “go fuck yourself.”
To many some would see him as this badass owner who won’t tolerate anything.
It’s this particular behaviour that I want to highlight because for so many of us we experience this on a smaller scale than this. Where we vie for approval from those around us or passersby.
And that sort of dependence can be more of a hinderance on our lives. After all, we can look at Elon Musk as an extreme example as to why that can be a problem.
Fishing For Outside Validation Stings More
To begin, seeking validation from those around us can sting more and have a greater influence on our lives than we can imagine. For a lot of us, we experienced this with the rise of social media.
We all know the dangers of it and how social media can be addictive when we see the number of likes and comments going up and up. It gets to a point where people are hooked to social media and are making post after post in the hopes of being validated online.
But out in the real world, that behaviour is muted in some cases and more extreme in others.
For example, our validation ground for reactions would be much smaller in the real world, but also more important. We can get the same reaction from a family member or friend as we would from tens or hundreds of people on the internet.
Elon Musk’s performance on stage is an extreme example.
Billionaires themselves are pretty weird and normally they have little disregard for people. But here is a man who is both rich, but also seeking constant validation from people.
The man locked himself in his office after being booed at a Dave Chapelle show.
Stellar emotional intelligence there.
When your approval grounds is on such a massive scale it’s mentally draining. Even for us normal folk we can relate to knowing someone or experiencing ourselves how seeking validation can mess with someone’s or our mind.
Seeking validation from a parent by getting good grades. Landing a job that pays well. Hoping that your parents or friends approve of your romantic partner.
Similar events like that can change the trajectory of a lot of things in our lives.
I can relate to this myself, as I studied accounting because I thought my parents wanted me to do that rather than sit in the house all day. That wasn’t the case, but that chapter of my life would’ve been very different if I didn’t think I had to seek validation from my parents by becoming an accountant.
Imagining it similarly for Musk, it makes sense why he behaves this way. At least to some degree. The man is still weird. But we can see why he got to this stage because he was constantly adored by others.
And now that his empire is crumbling little by little, he’s losing himself.
Getting Constant Approval Makes Us Complacent
Another issue with getting constant approval or seeking it out is that we get rooted in our own ways. We devise a plan for how to get that approval and hope that it is enough to get it.
Normally in cases of validation seeking, people don’t make that many changes. Sure there might be a compulsion to perform better at something — like aiming for straight A+s on report cards rather than straight A’s might improve one’s study habits — but it doesn’t change the nature of the work itself.
Whether you’re seeking or you’ve obtained that approval, there is this sense of dedication to that methodology. And it’s that dedication, for better or for worse, that can cause problems in our lives.
While I don’t regret the path I took to becoming a bookkeeper, I wouldn’t be stuck with student debt if I knew I could take my time and think things over about my career.
And in the case of Elon Musk, he wouldn’t be in this mess if he continued to be this revolutionist we all thought he was.
Because there was a time where it seemed like he cared about humanity way more than he does now.
He made Tesla patents public knowledge and his reasoning for doing that is simple:
“If we’re all in a ship together, and there’s some holes in the ship and we’re sort of bailing water out … and we have a great design for a bucket … even if we’re bailing out way better than everybody else, we should probably still share the bucket design. Because we’re all going to sink.” — Elon Musk
He’s not wrong about that.
But since then, his buckets are faulty. Between his companies he didn’t work to improve working conditions in his businesses (allegedly), he fires people all the time, and his products aren’t as great as they’re made out to be.
Any sensible person would take them back and let them cook for a bit longer. They would hire more people to work on these things and trust their council. And you’d create a space where they would be excited to work there in the first place.
Especially when you know that any new industry you “created yourself” wouldn’t be a monopoly forever.
But Musk is stuck in his ways. Needing the approval of other people that he cares about on a particular day, his decisions are scattered and disjointed. And it was his lack of adapting that has ended up with him in this situation.
For a lot of us we would end up in a similar situation, just on a smaller scale. Like I said for me, it could be a case of regret, a financial set back, or something else. But the larger your approval ground is, the more damaging it can be when you don’t get that fix.
How To Not Be An Elon
Of course, the severity also depends a lot on how much you care about that validation in the first place. Similar to social media, if you don’t care so much about getting a constant stream of likes then you can mentally barrier yourself.
You can curb your expectations and ensure that social media doesn’t rule over you.
But in the public it’s much harder. Take it from emotional intelligence expert Elon Musk.
Based on some of his reactions to public disapproval I do feel a tinge of pity. But then I remind myself this guy is a weirdo control freak with a bad sense of humour and I shouldn’t care that much about this guy despite his social standing.
All in all, how he handles it and how he seeks validation is all wrong. Clearly.
In order to defend yourself properly against this, some things need to change:
- First is to be okay with validation in the first place. All of us on some level are going to seek validation. Every action that we take is some cry for validation. This ultimately changes our behaviour for validation because so often when reading these articles or seeing people hungry for validation makes us think we should purge that need for validation. We can’t and it only makes things worse.
- Second is to look at our actions and see who we’re trying to prove our actions to. Behind our overall goals we are always trying to do that to impress someone, or ourselves, in some sense. A good example is some people try weight loss training in order to improve sex in the bedroom. It might not be the primary reason for weight loss for someone but it could be a small factor for some. The point is finding out who you are trying to impress.
- Third is to evaluate how big of a deal it is to impress that person. Whether it’s yourself or someone else, it’s important to look at how big of a deal it is for you to complete this goal in the context of whether you impress this person or not. While there are plenty of benefits for doing something, if the goal is to have said person notice you or acknowledge you, you’re probably moving farther away from who you are.
At the end of the day, validation is something we can’t live without. We care about approval to some degree but what is important is to temper that expectation. To not have it control our behaviour, habits, thinking, and way of life.
To care about validation that much is to pull an Elon. A man who on the best of days is completely disconnected from reality and thinks that the crumbling of a social media empire that he spent way too much money on and purposely made worse would make humanity bring absolute hell to whomever this pasty Pillsbury dough boy’s father’s, brother’s, nephew’s, cousin’s, former roommate points to.
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