The Measure of a Man: How Much is Enough?

M

en like to measure things. It starts in adolescence and if not satisfying enough can cause someone to want to amass enough wealth and power to take him to the ends of the Earth or beyond.

In Elon's case possibly the most significant measure was in the eyes of his father. As a child, Musk was frequently targeted by bullies. In one severe instance, a group pushed him down concrete stairs and kicked him until his face was "a swollen ball of flesh," leaving him hospitalized for a week. In Walter Isaacson's book he describes Musk’s father, Errol, as a "charismatic fantasist" who subjected Elon to relentless verbal and psychological abuse. After his return home Errol reportedly made Elon stand for over an hour while berating him, calling him an idiot and siding with the bully who had attacked him.

This trauma amplified his innate introspective nature, leading to a profound existential crisis at the age of 12, where he grappled with dark thoughts and questions:

What's the meaning of life? Isn't it all pointless? 

Why not just commit suicide? Why exist? 

While immersing himself in religious texts and depressive philosophies from Nietzsche and Schopenhauer his depression and sense of despair only intensified. His search for meaning shifted positively only when he discovered Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: its irreverent humor and cosmic perspective flipped a switch, teaching him that life's deepest meaning emerges not from tidy answers (42) but from daring to ask the right, bold questions. Reshaping his worldview and fueling his later ambitions in technology and exploration. This revelation ignited his obsessive drive to expand human consciousness and chase humanity's biggest dreams: from electric cars to Mars.

His takeaway: 

If we are better able we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness, then we are better able to figure out what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe. 

And maybe we can find out the meaning of life or even what the right question to ask is.

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Hero to Villain 

Not too long ago, many bought into the narrative: Elon Musk was the real-life Tony Stark. He was the "Hero" archetype, using a massive fortune to drag humanity toward a sustainable future and a multi-planetary existence.

 via Gage Skidmore

But as we moved through 2025, that narrative had shifted into something far more Shakespearean. We are watching a man who has won at everything, the title of world’s richest man (soon the 1st trillionaire), enough kids for a sports team (14), the keys to the global town square, and the ear of the American presidency, lose that status. 

There is a dark irony in spending his fortune to reach the red rocks of a dead planet while the DOGE initiative he lead, once he got involved in supporting Donald Trump, ends up cutting 83% of USAID, funding that serves as a literal lifeline for millions of children in the world's poorest nations and has already lead to hundreds of thousands of children's deaths. By 2030: over 14 million additional all-age deaths, including 4.5 million children under 5. 

It cuts apart the very moral fabric of our hero's cape.

The Echo Chamber

Howard Hughes, the actual inspiration for Iron Man, has a lot in common with Musk: billionaire industrialist-visionaries, obsessive control-oriented managers and risk-taking innovators in automotive and aerospace technologies. Both exhibit extreme, eccentric, and unpredictable public behaviors, while leveraging massive wealth to pursue, and often disrupt, industry-changing, high-stakes ventures. And... both used drugs to balance out mental health issues.

The late Tony Hsieh, the Delivering Happiness Zappos mogul, reminded us of the tragic lesson: wealth can provide almost everything except a healthy body and mind if you are surrounded by "yes-men." Drugs and isolation warp reality.

Elon's apparent drug of choice is the same drug that lead to the death of Mathew Perry: ketamine. While we don't know what he is actually fueling himself with, he oftentimes seems beyond restless. 

And if everyone around you relies on your whim for their livelihood, no one will tell you when you’ve crossed the line from eccentric genius to evil villain.

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The Tesla Trillion

Elon isn't just the richest man in the world right now, he's also the most powerful. He spent hundreds of millions to support Trump getting into office and his businesses touch everything from the safety of our nation, with his government contracts, to the race to AI's next frontier. 

Grok generated

While Elon's trillion dollar contract for Tesla got approved, it's not necessarily the money he was after. Well, more than just the money. He anticipates that when Tesla begins mass production on Optimus robots in the near future it will be the most lucrative product ever!  

He's said he needs to own a significant percentage of Tesla stock when this happens so he can keep control over the army of robots:

I don't feel comfortable wielding that robot army if I don't have at least a strong influence.

The Paradox of Trust and Robotics

Musk wants to put an Optimus robot in every home. He wants us to trust his AI with our vehicles, our global defense and eventually our brains (Neuralink). But trust is not a technical specification you can program or something you can buy; it’s a social contract. If he continues to fund and help to dismantle the trust in institutions and sway elections with the force of data manipulation and wealth, the public will eventually recoil. People will not welcome a robot into their living space if they fear the man who programmed them has no soul. 

 

If he thought there was pushback to Tesla's brand when he got involved in politics, he needs to ponder who will let an oligarch trillionaire with ties to the most powerful men in the world, who have recently been exposed by the Jeffrey Epstein files, into their homes, let alone near their children?

We want a C3PO companion who serves us, not that is there being controlled by someone we can't trust behind closed doors with their bros.

                                                   

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The Ultimate Guide: Rubble or Redemption ?

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the quest is built around knowing the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything is famously 42. But as the characters discover, the answer is useless if you don't know and understand the question. 

For Elon Musk, the quest of his life has been the pursuit of Mars, but the question he’s forgotten to ask is: 

What is the point of a backup drive (plan) if the original file is too corrupted to save?

Many of the ultra-wealthy have invested in Billionaire Bunkers. But what good is hoarding funds, becoming loathed, dividing people, and messing with the world order, when it will eventually leave you no place to hide. If any of them think a bunker will save them when chaos takes over they haven't thought through their plans. 

 

If the billionaires and their circles keep hoarding wealth and buying off/blackmailing politicians, business leaders and destroying the good there is in the world, they need to read a little more about revolutions and repercussions. Usually doesn't end well for the them.  

What does end well? A good redemption story! There is nothing we love more than someone reevaluating their place in the world and working to redeem themselves. We begin to root for them.

                                     ...
We are about to enter a time that it's possible to have prosperity for all or more obscene wealth and power for a few. If the greedy continue with their ways and Capitalism remains broken, AI becomes a weapon, not a tool. And if we don’t reform things now before inequality deepens and AI bends every rule, we won’t survive the crash… economically, socially, or even biologically.

Elon can leave behind more than just a trillion-dollar empire. He can leave behind a blueprint for a humanity that didn't just survive its transition into the age of AI, but thrived because its most powerful man chose to heal. The measure of a man isn't found in the inches of a tape measure or the digits in a bank account; it’s found in the answer to the most basic question: 

Did you leave our world 

better than you found it?                                                  *leaving to go to Mars doesn't count 

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The New Measure

So how can Elon get back on track and choose this other more noble path? 

Well like most things in life it takes a team. And I don't mean a PR or marketing team or a seat on his companies boards. Or even his current friends and colleagues. No, he needs people to challenge not his quarterly goals, profits or checklist for launch; he needs a group that will stand up to him and serve as his conscience and better angels. 

He needs a 

Council of Elenchus

Elenchus (əˈleNGkəs) is the central technique of the Socratic Method, a form of cooperative argumentative dialogue used to stimulate critical thinking and expose truth and contradictions in a person's beliefs. 

He's going to hate this, and she will too, but he needs Kara Swisher on this council. They have been at odds, to say the least, for the last few years but only because she is a true devil's advocate for her industry. Someone who sees who he is and speaks the truth of his potential and the damage she sees him doing. That’s how you can tell who cares, they don’t want to see you cause harm to yourself or your community and our world.

Intelligence isn't the measure of IQ points, bank balance or even the ranking at the top of Forbes List. It's how smart you are at living a life worthy of the gifts we are given. 

Elon has been brilliant enough to write the manual that will someday, with or without him onboard, take us to Mars. But until then, we need him here using his brilliance and fortune for the good of all. 

History is waiting to see if he will be remembered as the man who gave us the stars or the man who burned things down while we were still on the ground. He can still be the hero. He can still be the Godfather of Space Exploration. But first, he must remember the measure of a good man on Earth.

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[Note: This is part of a project of mine: AI COVERS. This is not an actual FORBES cover, nor is it endorsed in any way by their publisher/owners.]