Elon Musk: very rich isn’t the same as smart
I spent more than 20 years working for law firms advising the largest companies in the world, which involved a great deal of time sitting very close to very rich men. Then I became a psychotherapist.
Back then, I was struck by a couple of things. One was that the very rich didn’t seem especially smart: usually, very obviously not the smartest guys in the room. Very often, they’d struggle to follow what was going on and cover it up with irritation. And that was the other thing I noticed: they seemed pretty discontented.
Impatience can be an effective tool for getting things done, if you have the power to get away with it, but this didn’t seem to be strategic like that. It was more like there was very often something peevish and fretful about these people, something about them as individuals which they’d carry around with them wherever they went. Surprising, given how much they had of the things that usually make people feel good.
What they did all seem to share was a highly evolved ability to spot an opportunity for gain; they could see the angles as quick as anyone else. And then their real talent kicked in – going after it, digging in, squeezing the pips, getting right down the bottom of the jar and scraping the sides. And recruiting other people to do it for them.
I was reminded of this by a recent quiz in the Guardian ‘Are You Smart Enough To Work For Elon Musk?’.[1] According to this article, the favourite interview question of the world’s richest man is: You’re standing on the surface of the Earth. You walk one mile south, one mile west and one mile north. You end up exactly where you started. Where are you?
Apparently, the North Pole is the most common correct answer but if a candidate answered successfully, Elon would ask them ‘where else could it be?’ And, since there is apparently an infinite number of locations around the South Pole that could fit the bill, this game could go on for some time.
At a practical level this strategy might make seem to make sense: if you’ve set your sights on achieving something extraordinary, look for people who can go a step further. At the same time, ‘correct isn’t enough’ is quite a revealing perspective: the sides of a jar are being thoroughly scraped. What is that about? What’s that impulse to go further? Is it just about getting more out of the jar?
Not really: the pay-off with being very rich isn’t buying expensive things – that’s not what does it for the super-rich. It is about being able to buy expensive things but that’s just one example of being able to do (more of) what you want: it’s about closing-down the range of options not available to you because you can’t afford them and it’s about being able to get other people to do what you want. It’s about control and the more money there is, the further its purpose moves away from buying things and towards the idea of control.
The idea of being able to exercise control is always a very powerful one because it reduces anxiety. Because it is such an effective mechanism for managing anxiety, and they have this extra tool of great wealth to allow them to use the idea of control in this way, the very rich come to depend on the idea of control to manage anxiety much more than people who don’t have so much money. And it really does become very important to them. One of the hallmarks of high-end consumption – fine dining and luxury hotels and resorts - is that things have to be ‘just so’: slick, ordered, smooth. That’s because that’s how the customers need things to be: when things go wrong in these places, when control slips, customers tend to find it personally offensive. That’s because it’s an insult to their money and an affront to their self-esteem. Their money is supposed to be able to control things; that’s what it’s for; to make them people this doesn’t happen to.
The problem with this is that the idea of control through money is just an idea and it’s largely illusory. Money doesn’t really control the things that actually matter most to anyone: health, the people close to them or their own states of mind. It never can, it always fails. Even on a daily practical basis, the effort of trying to maintain this level of control is exhausting and always disappointed: things get away from you, little details unravel, nothing can be that right. The result is anxiety and irritation. But if you have enough money – so much more money than other people – the idea that it ought to be possible persists and the more money there is around, the larger it becomes.
When what people have come to depend upon to manage their anxiety lets them down, that creates a great deal of anxiety. And if they’ve become over-dependent on control to manage their anxiety, and money as the lever to achieve it, that’s what they’ll double down on when they feel anxious. Fast track, VIP access, private jets and all of it ordered and sumptuous. Ridiculous tour riders – the bigger the star the more absurd the demands because the more important control, for its own sake, has become. And because it all feels so precarious it has to be tested – will they really take all the brown M&Ms out for me? The very wealthy can come to fetichise the idea of control. Mussolini made the trains run on time, Bernie Ecclestone says he would take a bullet for Putin and Hitler was able to get things done[2].
And once people have become dependent on such a powerful mechanism, it’s very difficult to do without it. Money as a vehicle of control (and being able to buy things is just a small sub-set of that control) becomes far too important. Look at what Ghislaine Maxwell was prepared to do in order to cling onto it.[3] Or the marriage between 67-year-old ex-supermodel Jerry Hall and 91-year-old billionaire Rupert Murdoch, reportedly terminated by email because of financial mistrust amongst his family.[4] ‘Money can’t buy you happiness’ doesn’t really cover it.
It is an extraordinary achievement to build enormous wealth and lots of other people usually do very well out of the process (even if plenty may get damaged too). But the very rich are still dealing with the same issues as everyone else and the strategy on which they inevitably come to depend is a bad one.
It’s a fantastic irony: the only people who are capable of creating enormous wealth are the ones who can never enjoy it, even if they’re so caught up in their stratagems, they rarely taste the full extent of their own unhappiness. If you can make that kind of money, that more or less guarantees you will live a peevish, discontented life. That isn’t the same as smart.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/jun/27/can-you-solve-it-are-you-smart-enough-to-work-for-elon-musk
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/jun/30/bernie-ecclestone-id-take-a-bullet-for-putin-formula-one-good-morning-britain-interview
[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/guymartin/2022/06/30/decoding-ghislaine-maxwell-how-her-attempt-at-a-sentencing-hearing-apology-works-to-recast-her-as-an-epstein-victim/
[4] https://www.express.co.uk/celebrity-news/1634361/jerry-hall-rupert-murdoch-marriage-divorce