PER UN MONDO SENZA GUERRE: EN -- LARRY ROMANOFF : Debunking Elon Musk – Part 8 -- Elon Musk’s Corporate Character

There are at least many hundreds of articles on countless dozens of websites that purport to provide a history of the achievements of Elon Musk, crediting him with the foundation and/or ownership of so many futuristic and revolutionary ideas, propositions, and companies. According to all of the mass media, the primary first-tier Internet websites, and most of the secondary and tertiary layers, Elon Musk “founded” PayPal, Tesla, Neuralink, the Boring Company, the Hyperloop, SpaceX, OpenAI, xAI, and more. Their detailing not only of (a) the founding, but (b) the achievements, of all these companies, appears as a litany of almost unbelievable accomplishments by one of the greatest scientific geniuses and inventive minds in history.

Sadly, those claims – both (a) and (b) – are not supported by evidence, but instead given undeserved credibility primarily by what appears to be a clear agenda of programmed misinformation infused with fantasy, and by the bizarre but existential need of Americans for heroes. Elon Musk receives disproportionate credit through what we might call “Celebrity Amplification”. The mass media consistently (and I would have to say, “knowingly”) omit most of the crucial details, often leading the public to conflate Musk’s promotion of an idea with its invention, and to ensure the negatives (of which there are many) never see the light of day. His social media persona ensures global coverage, leaving most everyone equally duped.

Most of the information dispersed through the popular and mass media surrounding the companies with which Elon Musk has been associated, is recklessly false. Crucial facts are omitted, circumstances mis-represented, and an entirely unwarranted amount of credit bestowed on Musk. This has all been orchestrated by parties unidentified, to create an aura of infallible genius, engineer, innovator and inventor, which is mostly (or totally), undeserved.

Elon Musk was neither a “founder” nor a “co-founder” of PayPal, and “Elon Musk” did not sell PayPal to e-Bay. Elon Musk was neither a founder nor a co-founder of Tesla, and he does not “own” Tesla, not by any stretch. The concept of Hyperloop transport was active in the imagination of men nearly 200 years before Elon Musk “created” it, and the famed Hyperloop company has quietly closed its doors and gone out of business. Despite Musk’s claims that “OpenAI would not exist without me”, Musk did not found the company. Elon Musk did not “found” Neuralink; the company had eight founders and, aside from funding and fantasy, Musk was not critical to this enterprise.

And, contrary to all the media misinformation, Elon Musk was not the singular “founder” of SpaceX, and his contribution to it (as with Tesla and Neuralink) has been as much criminal negligence as innovative genius. Moreover, in almost every case where Elon Musk was involved with those who actually were “founders”, those original founders left soon after, engaging in bitter lawsuits against Musk after their departure. The only two exceptions were Confinity (PayPal), where Musk was kicked out, and OpenAI, where he left in a huff after failing to take control. But in every case, the victim company found itself embroiled in control disputes with Elon Musk.

Elon Musk was always so determined to have everything according to his wishes that he caused “escalating clashes of personality” with virtually everyone with whom he came in contact who had any standing or authority. He was constantly embroiled in increasing disputes over his behavior which was generally regarded as “erratic and hostile”. Musk has always sought total control of every situation, and would take any action possible to eliminate challengers. The removal of potential challengers, by any means, is a pattern that has existed in Elon Musk’s background from the earliest days, beginning with his little Zip2 and continuing to the present day. And it isn’t only challengers. The record is clear that anyone who confronts Musk with disagreement or inconvenient truths, will be gone. And it’s even much worse than that.

Musk is renowned for considering (and using) the staff of his companies as sexual buffets to satisfy his disgraceful perversities, and any female employee complaining of his “advances” would be fired. Musk is also renowned for taking safety and other shortcuts in most every situation; anyone leaking that information would be fired and possibly sued as well. You will see from the corporate record that Elon Musk has a ruthless and almost obsessive vindictiveness when thwarted. He will fire, sue, lie, slander, defame – and try to ruin anyone who obstructs him.

In all of his enterprises, Elon Musk quickly proved to be out of his depth, but had (and still has) an unrealistic exaggerated opinion of his own knowledge and ability, and is almost obsessive about having things done his way, even against the advice of experts and the protestations of his own management. Musk is living embodiment of the adage that “A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing”. In his early years, Elon Musk was rescued from his own stupidity by wiser men who had more control. Unfortunately, this would not always be the case, as you will see.

The record provides abundant evidence that Musk has an amazing capacity for conniving, dishonesty and manipulation, looking always for his own advantage, seemingly assuming others cannot see his motives. This corporate record offers striking examples of Elon Musk’s manipulative obsessions. The historical record of his corporate activity speaks volumes about the man’s opportunism, and also his hypocrisy. There is ample evidence that Musk’s fixation on absolute control, and his pathological resentment at being thwarted, blinds him to reality.

It is obvious also from the corporate record that Elon Musk exhibits a pattern revealing a fundamental truth: For him, considerations such as safety (Tesla, SpaceX, OpenAI), ethics (FSD, Robotaxi, Neuralink), humanity, are not operational principles but merely talking points for manipulation.

You will see also from the record that Elon Musk not only wants total control of every situation but wants total credit even for things he did not do – such as “inventing” the Hyperloop concept or “founding” Tesla. This obsession for credit extends to his demanding recognition for founding things he never founded (PayPal, Tesla, OpenAI, Neuralink). This was so true that with Tesla the original founders had to sue Elon Musk and obtain a court order forcing him to admit they were the original founders of the company. Like most other Musk characteristics, this takes us into the area of psychopathology.

Ready to Fly?

SpaceX’s Starship took off at just after 9:35 a.m. April 20, 2023 from Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, but minutes later it exploded, before it could separate from the Super Heavy rocket and go to space. Source

One trend you should look for in Musk’s behavior is his “break fast” attitude, meaning to test or try before something is ready. It is otherwise stated as “test-fly-crash” and “test-drive-crash”. Elon Musk habitually pushes products out into the market before (sometimes long before) they are ready. Musk insists on launching his SpaceX rockets when they aren’t ready to fly, resulting in frequent explosions and some severe environmental damage. He pushes his severely-flawed Tesla self-driving and Robotaxis into use in spite of many accidents and deaths. He inserts implants into monkeys before the technology is ready, and then must euthanise thousands of animals. This “break fast” attitude is presented as a kind of invention philosophy which disdains the slow but safe approach of NASA for instance. Musk claims he makes faster progress this way. That may be true, but at what cost? His “test-drive-crash” attitude is not a development philosophy but the pathology of an immature, emotionally-disturbed sociopath using the public for human experimentation without their consent.

The Dark Triad

The “Dark Triad” is a psychological framework that describes three overlapping yet distinct personality traits linked to manipulative, exploitative, and socially destructive behavior: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and subclinical psychopathy. These final essays on Elon Musk’s corporate history reveal how these traits manifest in his corporate, political, and innovation contexts, with disturbing relevance to the patterns I have discussed.

Narcissism: A grandiose self-image, an unshakeable sense of entitlement, a strong need for admiration, and a distinct lack of empathy for people. From this, the person takes credit for others’ work or achievements, freely exploits others for personal gain, and reacts aggressively to criticism.

Machiavellianism: Fundamentally dishonest and cynical, with a powerful amorality that places ethics in the dustbin. Uses deception to advance goals with manipulation as a basic strategy. The main focus is on power and control. Relationships are treated as transactional, and bureaucratic systems are mined for self-interest.

Psychopathy: Evidenced by an irrational impulsivity, a low empathy for life, humans, the world. Such a person is thrill-seeking, exhibits very shallow emotions and an astonishing remorselessness. He regularly ignores risks to himself and others, and violates norms without hesitation or guilt. These people – like Elon Musk – appear charismatic but are emotionally detached from their surroundings. Note: “Subclinical” means these personality disorders exist in sufficient strength to drive harmful and dangerous behavior, but below the usual thresholds for incarceration in a mental institution.

These final essays on Elon Musk’s corporate history highlight how Dark Triad traits become dangerous when combined with power and innovation – exactly what we saw with Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, and Elon Musk with Neuralink, Tesla FSD and Robotaxi, xAI, and SpaceX.

Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes Found Guilty Of Investor Fraud. Source

People like Elizabeth Holmes and Elon Musk succeed in the short term because of their personal charm and charisma, their audacity, and because their penchant for risk-taking (most often with other people’s lives or futures) and their disdain for rules create illusions of “visionary leadership”. These people climb faster by exploiting their own cynicism, their amorality, their true absence of empathy, and by a host of behaviors that can be collectively classified as “fundamentally dishonest”. They seldom accomplish much in the long term, usually leaving a trail of damaged or ruined lives, ethical scandals and organisational chaos.

We read much about the supposed benefits of what is termed “disruptive innovation”, but Dark Triad persons do not seek disruption as a shortcut to a societal good, but to fuel their narcissism through fame and building a legacy; their Machiavellianism by domination of all circumstances, and their psychopathy by the thrill of bypassing rules and scheming for “regulatory capture” (as with Musk’s DOGE authority) that provides them with immunity against criminal sanction. Consider the many articles documenting that Musk fired Neuralink employees who raised ethical concerns, and how he then used his DOGE authority to fire all the FDA staff who were examining Neuralink for violations. [1] [2]

These people morally disengage partly by the clever use of semantics: people are merely “resources”; ethical employees and ‘whistleblowers’ are “obstacles”. Musk advertises his Tesla software as full self-driving, then blames 1,000 accidents and 50 deaths on “inattentive drivers”. Dark Triad people are never to blame, and responsibility is always diffused.

There is a chilling pattern in all of this. These same traits in Dark Triad persons that drive their ruthless innovation, also “normalize” suffering. Tesla deaths attributable to Musk’s flawed software are dismissed with “Airplanes crash, but we still fly”. His Neuralink monkeys, his SpaceX explosions and their frightening atmospheric holes, Elizabeth Holmes’ Theranos patients; all these are casualties of a system that confuses charisma with competence and audacity with courage. As psychologist Robert Hare warned: “When you mix power, low empathy, and a vision that justifies cruelty, you get atrocities wrapped in a slogan.”

The Connivances

‘Connivance’ (or ‘to connive’) is to plan secretly and dishonestly for something immoral, illegal, or harmful to happen that will be to your advantage. I considered titling the final Parts of this series on ‘Elon Musk’s’ companies as “The Connivances”. I don’t mean to suggest by employing this term that the companies were formed as criminal enterprises, but conniving became a standard operating procedure, the corporate activities peppered with fraud, deceit, criminal recklessness, misinformation, brutal revenge, and more.

The following essays provide a documented recap of the history of these companies, Elon Musk’s role (if any) in their founding, and a commentary on his participation. I want to note here that, for the initial part of these final essays, I will provide few references because there are almost no reliable sources to quote. In the hundreds of pages and websites describing Elon Musk’s corporate activities, it is probably not an exaggeration to say that at least half the statements in almost every page or document are factually incorrect. Thus, it seems counter-productive to refer readers to an article containing one truth intermingled with ten falsehoods and twenty examples of venerating hagiography.

These final essays contain increasingly dramatic evidence of the clear patterns of Elon Musk’s character leading to an obsessive demand for control, his natural self-serving tendency for deceit, conniving, and manipulation, and his almost obsessive vindictiveness when thwarted. When reading through these corporate essays, pay attention to the patterns in Musk’s behavior that emerge and exhibit themselves increasingly strongly over time. Try to connect the dots. Look for the common threads that wind themselves through all aspects of the man’s behavior. Your connecting these dots is a necessary antidote to dangerous hero worship. While reading, try to examine and analyse Musk’s leadership style across SpaceX, Tesla, OpenAI, and Neuralink through an ethical lens. Try to make the connections between Elon Musk’s corporate practices and their human costs. You will see something very different from the public persona created by the (Jewish-owned) mass media.

Some readers may correctly note that I seem to dwell only on the negatives about Elon Musk and ignore all the good, great, and even miraculous things he has done. If I may paraphrase Marc Antony (“I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him”), I come to bury Elon Musk, not to praise him. And let’s be honest. You already have thousands of newspapers, magazines, TV stations, and only heaven knows how many website articles already telling you of the good, great, and miraculous things Elon Musk has done. You already have 10,000 voices on that side of the fence; you don’t need another. But my purpose is to document for you that nearly everything you have been told by those other 10,000 voices is wrong, and to awaken you to the fact that Elon Musk is not only toxic, but downright dangerous. I make no apologies for this.

The Media Propaganda Flood

Elon Musk is an “influencer” with a persona carefully crafted by those same powers for purposes far beyond the Hyperloop.

I have written in other essays that most news items remain in the headlines for a day or two and are then inevitably replaced by the next new event. It is rare occurrence that an event is prolonged and remains in the news beyond that first day or two.

But there are occasions when we experience what I term “a media flood”, where an event, or more often, a non-event, is in the news constantly for weeks, months, and even years, seeming to fill the headlines daily. If it hasn’t already occurred to you, these times are not “news”; they are indoctrination propaganda being pushed onto you by the powers behind the scenes.

We saw this during COVID, where seemingly every headline in every major news source on every day – for two or more years – was about COVID, about the terrible risk, about the need for social distancing, and especially the desperate, imperative urgency for vaccinations. Yet no epidemic or pandemic in history has ever received such a deluge of content. We were not being given news; we were being indoctrinated. I won’t go into the purpose here, but I want to stress that these “media flood” occasions all emanate from the same power source and all have a distinct purpose which will be apparent only to a few. I advise you to not dismiss the force and power of a media flood too quickly.

This can take many forms. One constant such agenda deals with the genocide in Palestine. It is a matter of record that Alan Dershowitz, a Jewish professor at Harvard, gave a speech to AIPAC imploring all Jews and all Jewish media to loudly promote the fiction of China committing genocide in Tibet precisely to take the heat off Israel in the public mind. Dershowitz did the same with AIPAC and other groups, demanding they flood the media with false claims about another Chinese “genocide” in Xinjiang. These are effective; immediately following Dershowitz’s urging, Google Trends listed an abrupt 400% increase in searches on Xinjiang.

I mention it here because the concept applies in spades to Elon Musk. There exists a vast network of propaganda tools, all controlled by a small group of people, using the media for their own private agenda, in this case to promote the man as one of the world’s leading visionaries and inventors, a virtual god. I want to give you the example of the media flood promoting Elon Musk as the “creator” of the Hyperloop, a distinction not only undeserved but outrageous.

The Hyperloop concept in one form or another had been active for more than 200 years but the entire history of this concept has been credited to Elon Musk. There must be hundreds of articles on hundreds of websites all describing “Elon Musk’s” Hyperloop. I’ve read it so often, I might believe it myself, and that is the entire point. The intense media flood has conditioned us to view Elon Musk as the “inventor” of a radically-new transportation system when the man in fact did nothing at all.

In reality, the Hyperloop story is a case study in how celebrity endorsement can distort historical attribution, and this was not an accident. There are substantial Jewish powers that control the mass and social media, and who carefully planned the almost interminable blitz meant to create the fiction of Elon Musk as inventor, visionary, innovator, scientific genius, and more, but Musk was (and still is) none of these things. Elon Musk is an “influencer” with a persona carefully crafted by those same powers for purposes far beyond the Hyperloop.

The media’s framing of Elon Musk is a totally false hagiography, and clearly part of an intensive media campaign to inflate Musk’s reputation as a visionary. Hyperloop’s narrative reveals how celebrity distorts innovation history. Musk may have been a megaphone, but certainly not an architect. There was nothing substantive in anything Elon Musk did or said, but the media still rush to credit him for a non-existent transportation revolution.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), wrote an article titled, “The Hyperloop: A 200-Year History of Hype and Failure”, in which the authors stated “Elon Musk’s Hyperloop Alpha is another overhyped venture, recycling 200-year-old dreams and exaggerated claims of innovation.” And it was never real. There is no “Hyperloop” anywhere. The original Hyperloop company quietly sold off its assets, closed its doors, and went out of business.

This is precisely the same as “Elon Musk’s” adventure to Mars. Men have dreamed of going to Mars for countless generations. For at least the past 75 years, there have been literally hundreds of books and movies about Mars and Martians, about traveling to Mars, about colonizing it, but once again we see literally hundreds of websites and articles in the mass media, sometimes daily, and we begin to equate the idea of men going to Mars as a radically new idea created by the “scientific genius and outstanding inventor” Elon Musk. Do not dismiss the thought that powerful forces are behind the media flood. Nothing like this happens without planning at a very high level, and with a distinct purpose.

It needs to be noted emphatically that the dream of going to Mars has been proposed by hundreds of scientists and others over many generations, and is not particular to Elon Musk. However, the media and dozens of websites make a considerable effort to give him all the credit. We have headlines like:

Elon Musk’s Mars Ambition: Bypassing the Moon for the Red Planet

Elon Musk says life on Mars possible

Elon Musk’s Mars Mission Math: Building A Self-Sustaining City

Elon Musk on how human colony in Mars will be

Elon Musk Reveals What It Takes to Build a City on Mars

The Astronomical Gamble: Elon Musk’s Vision for Mars

Elon Musk’s plan to slash Mars colonisation cost

Do you get the feeling that there might be a legend-building promotion occurring here?

Next Essay: Zip2, x.com, PayPal

Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 34 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. (Chap. 2 — Dealing with Demons).

His full archive can be seen at

https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/ + https://www.moonofshanghai.com/

He can be contacted at:

2186604556@qq.com

NOTES

[1] Cleaning house: Musk fires FDA employees overseeing Neuralink

https://www.ynetnews.com/article/r1r0jtw51e

[2] DOGE fired FDA employees overseeing Elon Musk’s Neuralink

https://fortune.com/2025/02/18/doge-fired-fda-employees-overseeing-elon-musk-neuralink/

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