An Open Letter To Elon Musk

Dear Mr. Musk:

I first heard of you about 10 years ago in connection to Tesla. By that point, my father had purchased, then later resold, a Tesla S. I'd had an opportunity to drive that car, and it was whisper-quiet and drove like a dream. So I assumed, like most people, that you knew a lot about electronics, cars, and business.

I heard about SpaceX. At the time, I wasn't sure why you didn't just invest in NASA, which was already performing space missions before you were born, but I, like most people at the time, shrugged it off and assumed you at least had lots of experts working under you doing the actual design of the missions.

Then in 2018, a cavern in Thailand flooded, leaving children trapped inside. Your suggestion for how to get the children out was not followed. Instead of accepting, like a normal adult, that there were many such plans and that the team could only choose one of the many, you accused a member of the rescue team of pedophilia. It was at this point that I realized the kind of person you really are. Normal adults do not accuse people of heinous crimes over something this petty.

I have come to realize that you do not understand what normal friendships are like, possibly due to your schooling at a place where bullying was rampant. You cannot conceive of a situation in which people work together equally and cooperatively. For you, everything is about competition and being the best.

You bought an entire social-media platform because you wanted people's approval. Two years later, the only people still on X are the people who were already sucking up to you when it was still called Twitter. This is because approval isn't a thing that can be bought. You earn approval by doing things that people approve of.

Your recent Path of Exile 2 controversy shows that you do not understand what expertise is. Expertise, also, is not a thing that can be bought. You earn it through hard work and experience with the thing you want to acquire expertise in. There is no shortcut or substitute for this. You can use your money to hire people with expertise, yes, but that doesn't make you an expert. You can hire someone to teach you and help you gain expertise in that way, but for some reason you don't seem to have tried that. You can buy the best items in the game, hire someone to get your character to the highest level, but if you, personally, have not played the game before, everyone will be able to tell that you don't know how to play the game because you have not actually acquired expertise. The gamers that people admire are the ones who played a game for tens of hours to get genuinely good at it, not just the ones with all the Cool Stuff.

I can't help but feel sorry for you. You didn't listen to your kids, so now several of them are estranged from you, because they don't want to talk to a person who doesn't listen to them. You've bought a social-media platform, a car company, and your very own president. You've founded a financial company, an AI company, and a space program, yet you still do not have people's approval. People call you weird because you believe genuinely weird and awful things. You try to look like an expert on everything, but only come across as extremely pathetic because you don't have expertise in most subjects.

You are, in fact, the most pathetic human being on earth. You may have more money and material assets than anyone else on the planet, but in terms of relationships and self-worth I am wealthier than you. I am 14 years younger than you, but act at least 25 years more mature. You've never grown up. You've never struggled to do anything and felt the satisfaction of eventual success. You are a petulant man-baby who doesn't know what to do with your wealth and power.

Please, I'm begging you, grow the fuck up.

--Laz