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Elon Musk: Empathy or Evil? [1]

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Date: 2025-03-24

In an interview with Josh Rogan on February 28, 2025, Musk said, “So that we’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on. And it’s like, I believe in empathy. Like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for civilization as a Whole and not commit to a civilizational suicide. The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response. And I think empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot. …Empathy is the issue. Yeah, weaponized empathy.” (Source: https://www.happyscribe.com/public/the-joe-rogan-experience/2281-elon-musk) He had expressed similar sentiments in an interview with Tucker Carlson on October 7, 2024.

Musk is parroting ideas advanced by Gad Saad, a Lebanese-Canadian professor and author of “The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense (2020).” Saad has a Ph.D. in marketing, although he held the chair of Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences and Darwinian Consumption at Concordia University for a decade until 2018. His background in this discipline is not at all clear. It is hard to take Saad’s extreme ideological, un-academic views seriously, though Musk does. Both men argue that empathy is an infectious idea that undermines rational thought. Saad frequently uses immigration as a focal point, claiming that the left’s progressive stance on open borders exploits empathy, yet the majority of Americans do not support such policies. This is an oversimplified strawman argument that ignores the broader complexities of immigration policy. Ironically, both Saad and Musk are immigrants themselves, with Musk having illegally overstayed his student visa when he dropped out of college to start a business.

A recent Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research (Source: https://apnews.com/article/immigration-poll-deportation-trump-border-security-40b2a28e34f8d0c76b4a6589f3db1ba3) found that 50% of those surveyed say border security should be a high priority. When combining those who say it should be a high or moderate priority, support increases to 82%, with 73% of Democrats agreeing. This suggests that rationality and common sense are still prevalent in American attitudes toward immigration. However, when asked if all immigrants in the U.S. illegally who have NOT been convicted of a crime should be deported, only 37% said this should be a high priority. This outcome illustrates how empathy—combined with pragmatism and rationality—shapes public opinion. A significant 63% of Americans recognize the value of illegal immigrants to the economy and feel that deporting them if they are law-abiding would be neither sensible nor fair. Empathy, far from being a weakness, is essential for social cohesion and the survival of communities. It has been a vital aspect of human evolution; without it, we would have destroyed each other long ago.

Musk is deluded when he says, “I believe in empathy,” because his mass firings of federal employees do not exhibit empathy. Nor do his actions exhibit rationality or pragmatism. He is clearly doing what he did at Twitter: fire, ready, aim. Twitter, apart from becoming his personal megaphone and extreme right-wing ecosystem, is a failed company. His approach to leadership mirrors the “move fast and break things” mentality of early Silicon Valley, where mistakes are treated as opportunities to correct coding. This model, however, fails when applied to human beings or government organizations. People are not software code; their lives and livelihoods are dramatically affected by the decisions made by powerful individuals.

Musk’s disregard for empathy and rational decision-making raises significant ethical concerns. While it may be an overreach to label him as outright evil, there is no question that he is on the road to evil. Where he is on that road will not be determined by his actions alone but by the consequences of his actions. The consequences—intended and unintended—will likely be extreme. It is as if he is at war with the American government—in a take-no-hostages mode. His destruction of USAID has resulted in blood on his hands, and that river of blood will become deep, wide, and long over time. He is killing America to save America—to save it for the elite, not the masses. In a Fox News interview on March 18, 2025, about the protests and vandalism against Tesla, Musk said, “I’ve never done anything harmful; I’ve only done productive things.” (Source: https://www.facebook.com/llllProAmericallll/videos/4009472972632591) That may have been true before he used DOGE to destroy USAID gleefully and began firing thousands of federal employees. His lack of empathy makes it impossible for him to see the massive harm he is doing.

Musk’s technocratic, I-know-better mentality is as absurd as it is dangerous. His belief in weaponized empathy and the resulting civilizational suicide allows him to rationalize the harm he is doing. His lack of empathy enables him to dehumanize the impact of his decisions—people are expendable, and the massive pain and suffering he is causing is irrelevant. His assertion that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme is further evidence of how out of touch he is with wealth inequality. The real Ponzi scheme is a tax code that dramatically benefits the top 10% at the expense of the bottom 90%—a fact that this “genius” ignores. We know this is true because tax increases for the wealthy are never on the Musk-Trump agenda.

Musk’s dismissal of empathy as a weakness contradicts the essential role it plays in creating a just and functioning society. In contrast, figures like Gustave Gilbert, the American psychologist who interviewed Nazi leaders at the Nuremberg Trials, correctly associated evil with a lack of empathy. Gilbert observed Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, and noted his “schizoid apathy, insensitivity, and lack of empathy.” (Source: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_H%C3%B6ss?utm_source=chatgpt.com#cite_note-35) This lack of empathy is a hallmark of evil, and by disregarding the impact of his decisions on people, Musk risks embodying the very traits Gilbert described in Nazi war criminals. The true test of Musk’s legacy will be shaped not by his technological achievements but by the consequences of his actions in the real world.

While Elon Musk’s advocacy for empathy may seem admirable on the surface, his failure to apply it in his actions raises serious ethical concerns. The dangerous rhetoric of “weaponized empathy” espoused by Musk and Saad threatens to undermine the values that have long underpinned human progress and social cooperation. Empathy, when properly understood and applied, is a vital force for good. If dismissed, however, it can become a tool for harm, as history has shown. The consequences of Musk’s actions—both intended and unintended—will likely result in the societal decay he warns against.

Time left to January 20, 2029: 1,398 days

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