People Are Stupid. And I Can Use Them. — Elon Musk Series Part 2
People Are Stupid. And I Can Use Them.
The most dangerous line of code — and where it first showed itself.
In Part 1, I wrote about the operating system installed in a boy before he turned ten. The loneliness. The father. The mother. The $500 that first said: I can survive alone. I am free.
I also mentioned there was one more line of code I hadn't shown you yet. The most dangerous one.
Here it is.
This isn't something Elon Musk has ever said out loud. He probably never would. He may not even know it's in there. But it's there — in every company he's built, every person he's hired and discarded, every relationship he's entered and exited.
Where did it come from? The same place everything else did. The child who watched his father control people through fear. The child who was hit at school by boys who sensed his weakness. The child who learned, as directly as a body can learn something, that the world splits into two kinds of people: those who hold power, and those it gets used on.
Somewhere below consciousness, he decided he would never again belong to the second group. And the only way to guarantee that was to believe the first group was the only real one — that power over others wasn't a choice but a law of nature. That people, at bottom, are resources. Variables to optimize.
The boy who got hit because no one was protecting him grew into a man who makes sure he's always the one holding the protection. The problem is, he stretched that logic over every relationship he ever had.
Stanford: Two Days
In 1995, Stanford accepted him into its PhD program in energy physics. He enrolled. He left after two days.
The reason he gave was rational, and probably true: "The internet can change the world more than five years of research." It was 1995. The web had just opened up to the public. Something enormous was starting, and with the clarity of someone who'd spent his whole life reading systems, he recognized that being in a classroom meant being outside the moment.
But there's something else worth looking at here.
Stanford — the top institution in his field — couldn't hold him for 48 hours. Not because he lacked the ability. My read is, an institution, in some form, asks you to submit to authority. It asks you to accept that someone else knows more. That someone else sets your timeline. That someone else decides when you're ready.
For someone raised by an authority figure who used that position to damage him, submitting to authority isn't just uncomfortable. It's physically intolerable. The mind can rationalize it. The body remembers.
So he left — before anyone could tell him he wasn't ready. Before anyone could set his timeline. Before anyone could stand in the spot his father used to stand in.
Before starting his own company, he applied to Netscape. Walked into their lobby. Stood there. No one ever called him back.
Most people experience that as rejection. They wait. They try again. They adjust.
Musk's response was to build his own company. This is the OS running in real time — "people make each other fail. I won't wait for someone to let me in. I'll build my own door." Not arrogance. Something older. A child who learned that waiting to be protected means never being protected.
When Netscape didn't answer, he stopped asking. He never asked again — for anything, from anyone.
Zip2 — The Office-Floor Years
He and his brother Kimbal started Zip2 in 1995. The idea was putting local business directories online. The budget was around $15,000, mostly borrowed.
People look back at this period and call it extraordinary dedication. I want to be more precise about the psychology underneath it.
This wasn't a man pushing past his comfort zone. It was a man who had no comfort zone to push past. Discomfort was already his baseline — physically uncomfortable, financially thin, emotionally alone since childhood. What looked like sacrifice from the outside was, to him, just Tuesday.
The Night Rewriting — The OS Made Visible
As Zip2 grew and started hiring engineers, something happened that's worth examining closely — because it's the clearest window into his psychology this whole period offers.
Musk had been coding the product himself, self-taught, working through nights. When professional developers arrived and looked at what he'd built, one of them described it as a "hairball" — code so tangled and personal it could barely be worked with. The engineers rewrote most of it.
Then, after the developers went home, Musk would go back and quietly rewrite their code his own way. Without telling anyone. Without asking. Every night.
The engineers would come in the next morning to find their work changed.
Think about what this reveals.
He hired people specifically because they could do something better than he could. Then he undid their work at night. My read is, he needed them, and at the same time couldn't quite accept their version standing — couldn't tolerate the idea that someone else's solution was better than his.
He hired people to do what he couldn't do alone, then undid their work in the dark. That isn't management. That's someone who can't let go of control — because control was the only thing that ever kept him safe.
This is the "people are stupid" code running in real time. Not stupidity as an intellectual judgment — stupidity as a felt reality: I can't trust what you build. I can't trust you'll get it right. I can't trust you won't fail me. So I'll do it myself. At night. When you can't see.
The child failed by every adult around him became the founder who couldn't let any adult around him succeed without his intervention.
The Performance — For Investors
To attract investors, Musk needed to look more established than he was. So he took a regular PC and fitted it into a large plastic case on a wheeled stand — made it look like a miniature supercomputer. Every time investors visited, out it rolled.
When one investor asked about his commitment level, Musk reportedly said: "My mentality is that of a samurai. I would rather commit seppuku than fail."
He later denied saying it. Said or not, the fake supercomputer is documented. The performance is documented.
Here's the thing most Musk analysis misses.
He isn't simply a visionary who occasionally exaggerates. He's someone who learned, very early and very completely, that reality isn't fixed — it's what you can get people to believe. His father built a version of reality where Errol was always right, always powerful, always in control, regardless of the actual facts. Musk watched that. Learned it. Uses it.
The fake supercomputer. The "samurai seppuku." The full-self-driving claims that keep arriving years after the promised date. The Mars timeline that's been sliding forward for two decades. These aren't exactly lies. They're a man who genuinely can't tell the difference between what's true and what he needs to be true — because his father taught him that whoever controls the story controls the reality.
In theater we call this magical thinking — a character believing that saying something loudly enough makes it real. It's usually a symptom of a character who experienced early powerlessness. If you can't control what actually happens, you learn to control the story of what happens instead.
Errol Musk controlled the story inside his household. Nothing was ever his fault. Everything was justified. The narrative was always his.
Elon Musk controls the story inside every company he builds. Full self-driving next year. Mars in five. Hyperloop. Neuralink solving paralysis. The story always runs ahead of the reality. The narrator is always the one in control.
My read is, he isn't a liar. He's someone who learned that whoever controls the story survives — and he's been controlling it since he was old enough to speak.
Pushed Out. Fought Back. The Pattern Begins.
In 1996, investors put $3 million into Zip2 with a condition attached: Musk had to give up most of his equity and step aside as CEO. An experienced executive, Rich Sorkin, took over. Musk became CTO.
He'd been demoted in his own company. By people with money. By people with power over him.
The OS registered this as the most fundamental kind of threat — not a business setback, but the original wound reactivated. Someone in authority had decided he wasn't enough. Someone with power had put him in a smaller seat. This was Errol. This was the schoolyard. This was every powerless moment he'd spent his life running from.
Two years later, when Sorkin pushed a merger Musk opposed, Musk went to the board, made his case, and won. Sorkin was removed.
He did to Sorkin exactly what had been done to him — quietly, through the board, with no direct confrontation. The child who learned to survive by absorbing power games grew into an adult who plays them fluently.
$22 Million — Demoted, Fought Back, Still Took Home the Most
7% of the company. $22 million at 27. He lost the title. He kept the equity. He always keeps the equity — a board vote can't take it, and it's the one form of power that doesn't need anyone's permission to hold.
His reaction to the $22 million wasn't celebration. He later called Zip2 "the biggest failure that felt like success." The vision — reshaping how the internet connected to local life — hadn't been fully realized. The money was real. The proof felt incomplete.
My read is, money was never really the point. The point was closer to being undeniably right — making the world say: you were correct. You were enough. You were more than enough.
$22 million didn't say that loudly enough. So he took every dollar of it and bet it all again.
In drama school, the director's role was never to command an actor — it was to help one. The whole cast would sit in a room together, discussing each character's life, asking each other and ourselves questions without end, building the character together. It wasn't easy. There were moments feelings got hurt, moments that felt unfair. But even through all-night analysis and friction, there was never a command. Never a raised voice.
Leadership didn't come from one person. We were all, each of us, leading toward the same thing.
Makes me wonder — do people actually only move the way you want them to if you yell, if you get angry?
The Superiority Complex — And What's Underneath It
Before Part 3, one thing worth saying plainly.
Musk operates from a felt sense of superiority. People are stupid. I see what they can't. I'm the one who understands. You can see it in how he treats employees, how he talks about regulators, how he dismissed SpaceX engineers who pushed back, in his public contempt for anyone who disagrees with him.
But here's something watching people for a long time has taught me about anyone who feels superior to everyone around them:
In my experience, superiority complexes are almost always built on top of inferiority complexes. It isn't an established clinical law, but it's a pattern I keep seeing after years of watching people.
A child raised on being told he's not enough doesn't grow up feeling like enough. He grows up feeling like he has to keep proving he's more than enough. Superiority isn't the original feeling. It's the defense built over it — the shield over the wound.
"People are stupid" isn't what Musk actually believes at the deepest level. What's installed underneath, before he had language for it, is something far more painful: I might not be enough. I might be exactly what my father said I was. Everything that came after — the companies, the rockets, the trillion dollars — is the argument against that original fear.
My read is, he isn't superior, and he knows it. He's terrified — and he's built an empire to prove otherwise. The empire is real. The terror underneath it is real too. Both are true at once.
The Game
"They removed him during his honeymoon. He still walked away with the most money. And then he bet it all again." →
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