Setting things up to allow him to become the world’s first trillionaire.

The important stuff is about crippling regulatory mechanisms, opening up huge government contracts, and dismantling workers rights. Everything else is just smoke and mirrors.

In all seriousness, he strikes me as someone who’s compelled to act out something from his past, maybe even his childhood… if true, that’s very scary given the immense power he has today, that he simply can’t be reasoned with like with a healthy-minded person.

ETA Even scarier, the same appears to also be true of Trump, and the two of them have now paired up together.

Apparently, at both SpaceX and Tesla, he had a habit of going around demanding random changes because he was convinced he was the smartest person on the planet and whatever he came up with 2 seconds ago was far better than what the seasoned engineer who had spent months designing it had come up with. They had to make a team of people to try to keep him away from useful work because it was so destructive to what they were trying to do. There is no plausible explanation for that, to me, other than that he genuinely believes his own hype.

He could literally have the best and most qualified people in the room with him to explain virtually anything he wanted, for unlimited time, any time he wanted. He doesn’t want that. He just wants to take some random bullshit he found on Twitter combined with his own prejudice about how things work, and act on it, taking pleasure in people getting upset about him not being supposed to do that.

I am sure there is more complex stuff at work than is obvious, but I think probably, a pretty huge chunk of it is just that he genuinely believes that the whole US government is fucking up because it’s staffed with morons, and he’s such a genius that he can fix it, and that’s what he’s currently doing. I do think there’s some pathology at work in why he’s so motivated to do it: He has insecurity about whether he is actually the smartest man on the planet, it creates unsettledness, and so he has to go out and take some drastic action to prove to himself that he is. Because would anyone but the smartest person do all this stuff? It’s unprecedented. And therefore, he is smart on an unprecedented level, as he always knew, and he doesn’t need to be unsettled. And then, the next day, the unsettledness returns.

I think most of it pretty simple. It’s just “never been told no” syndrome coupled with societal reward to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, an army of fans, a record of “success” on his resume, and so on.

Destabilising regions and install pro-tesla/anti-regulation government, doing whatever the latestage capitalism is doing. The billionaires lining up behind him like a dog is the proof.

Not playing whatever that game is that he said he’s really good at but actually doesn’t even play

I once heard a talk by Bill Gates about his charity work through the Gates foundation. He described how he and Melinda had dedicated tens or hundreds of millions to causes. But the best money he could spend was in petitioning the government to join the cause. Because for all the wealth and power and notoriety held by the billionaire class, it was still a drop in the bucket compared to what world states could do. It’s a difference of orders of magnitude. The difference between a thousand dollars and a million dollars? That’s the same as the difference between a million and a billion. World governments operate in the trillions.

This is a coup.

Musk the Billionaire is small potatoes compared to Musk at the levers of government finance. It’s like a leaky faucet compared to a firehose. The one holding that firehose controls where it goes.

This is a coup. It is establishing an unelected oligarchy at the core of the Federal Government with the power to influence and manipulate policy, and execute unofficial policy through financial pressure. It’s not anything new to history, and it’s not 5-D chess. It is just people in power grabbing more power for themselves at the expense of all others including elected officials. In other words, a coup.

He’s being a Nazi

My guess is dismantling citizen protections to allow him to do as he pleases to create a long lasting legacy. The guy probably realizes the sky is the limit and wants to be able to do anything he wants without laws and other frivolous things in his way. Especially if he is controversial his name will ring out through history as “influential” whether it’s good stuff or bad (seems like he’s okay with bad)

This

As others have said, money is most of it.

But I also remember that what seems to have prompted his last few years of total unhinged behaviour was his daughter turning her back on him. That seemed to be the point of no return for him.

So there is part of me that thinks he wants to have access to and control over data. The whole nazi salute wasn’t about money, it was about ideology and I think controlling data will allow him to go after communities of people as part his ideology.

He doesn’t know either. People give these fuckers far too much credit. He doesn’t have any sort of big strategic vision. He just acts out his base impulses and does whatever will feed his narcissism the most at any given moment.

Ketamine. He’s doing ketamine mostly, everything else is just stuff he hires someone else to do. So I guess hiring people whilst doing ketamine.

I think he’s an actual Nazi, trying to turn America into a Nazi system.

Your intuition is spot on.

Elon is gutting USAID because they were investigating him over starlink. Elon is gutting the government agencies that oversee electric car regulations and safety regulations. Elon is going after the SEC for investigating him. Elon is using the government’s databases to amass data to target political and business competitors and to further the far right propaganda campaigns as well as build list of deportees and political targets. Elon is gutting every TLA he can to ensure his taxes decrease and yours increase. Elon is tearing through decades of support and opportunity programs designed to help the less fortunate/less abled to live comfortably so he can live more comfortably.

Everything he’s doing, is for his own benefit and personal gain, to the extreme detriment of the entire country. He’s neither qualified nor elected. His actions should amount to treason, but they’re being enabled by a traitorous, treasonous, felonious criminal, the shittiest president this country has ever seen.

I honestly think he just wants to go to Mars. I think he is convinced that he can be the one that makes humans an interplanetary species and he thinks that humanity will be forever changed for it and that he will own the bridge and he will become king of mankind. But he needs more resources to get there, cuz the engineering just isn’t there, the research hasn’t even been completed yet. So in order to speed things up he is dismantling the US government and giving himself cyber truck deals and space x rockets contracts so that he can funnel it into rocket research.