The Ones Who Yell and the Ones Who Go Quiet — What Musk Teaches About Relationships
The Ones Who Yell and the Ones Who Go Quiet
What Musk Teaches About Relationships
Everyone carries the thoughts Musk carries.
People are stupid, make others fail, waste others' time.
Men are vicious, can't be trusted, strong, etc.
Women are weak, can't be trusted, etc.
I carry these thoughts too. So do you. The only difference is how deeply they're buried in the unconscious — how invisible, how unwanted to look at, how much they leak out as behavior. That part is different for everyone.
When someone like Musk has money and power, their unconscious doesn't stay private. Whether they know it and refuse to fix it, or don't know it at all, everyone who works with them absorbs the effect. There's no escaping it. If it were just a family member or a close friend, only they would suffer — and friends are easy enough to distance yourself from. But the people who have to work with this person every day can't run.
My professor taught us to first look at what you're thinking, at who you are. In class, we filmed ourselves and watched each other's performances and work — did we play the character honestly, did we analyze the piece one hundred percent on its own terms, without our own thoughts bleeding in. We trained constantly to see our own thoughts, and to see other people's.
That's where I learned there are two kinds of thoughts.
Unfinished thoughts are the ones you don't look at, don't want to look at. Finished thoughts are the ones you look at, acknowledge, and release.
Here's why it matters — a baby's brain is soft. Placed between a mother and father whose brains are already carved with grooves, the baby's brain gets carved with the same grooves. So the child grows up watching the mother and learns "what is a woman," watching the father and learns "what is a man," watching the family and learns "what is a person." Concepts like life, can't, don't, must, want, shame — all of it gets carved in during that time.
Then the child goes to school, watches friends and teachers, and starts believing their own thoughts are the truth — or acting in ways that make them true. They spend a lifetime proving it. When this stays invisible, when it never finishes — that's unfinished thinking.
When your head is full of unfinished thoughts, there's no room left for a character's thoughts. You end up performing yourself, not the character. Emptying that space was its own training — putting myself on a tightrope of thought, every single day, standing on it to find calm and see things straight. I fall off it. A lot. I regroup and climb back on.
Directing works the same way. When a director's own life is too strong, it bleeds straight into the play. Their own story leaks out through the acting, through the work.
I think acting and directing are about making something out of nothing, and then turning that something back into nothing. When you watch a well-crafted performance, a well-made piece of work, you find space to slip your own life, your own thoughts, into it. That's when it starts communicating with the audience emotionally.
Take someone with a strong belief that people can't be trusted. That belief was carved in by their parents, and every experience since keeps confirming it: "see, people really can't be trusted."
But think about it. It's true that there are many people in the world who can't be trusted. It's also true that there are people who can be trusted. Someone whose belief is too strong can't recognize a trustworthy person even when one shows up — instead, they run psycho games, or waste that person's time and energy.
I was once a young woman with a strong belief that men can't be trusted. My father cheated, lied a little, and I watched my mother cry more than once. I met my husband at twenty-one, in England, and we moved in together right away — right around the time I started studying acting and directing at drama school, right when I'd begun analyzing my own thoughts. For those two years living together, I tested him constantly. He must have gotten sick of it, must have been exhausted. But my husband just stayed beside me through my whole process of analyzing myself. He watched my behavior, tried to understand what I actually wanted, and stayed, steadily.
Watching him, I realized: oh, men can be trusted too. My belief was so strong I couldn't even tell the difference anymore.
I call this finishing of thinking. Thoughts are just thoughts — but you wouldn't believe how much of people's lives and time they eat up.
The unfinished thoughts inside me react to the unfinished thoughts inside someone else.
Psychology named this a long time ago. Gestalt therapy calls it "unfinished business." Psychoanalysis describes how one person's unprocessed feeling gets thrown at another, and the other person unconsciously picks it up and reacts. If I don't have that button inside me, it doesn't matter how hard someone presses — nothing happens.
So the work of finishing a thought is the work of continuing to look at it and release it. Once that's in place, you can sense — even see — the unfinished thoughts in the other person. You can see why they're yelling like that, what they're afraid of, what they're trying to prove.
Then I can set myself down in a calm state. I stop reacting to the other person's unfinished thoughts. And even if I do react, I can catch myself and come back quickly.
This actually happened. During his Tesla years, he was known for screaming at employees — hourly workers and executives alike — so often that people on his leadership team joked about "who's he going to devour this week." On one call, he reportedly told an entire team their work was "complete garbage," and someone quit on the spot. After he took over Twitter, he cleared out employees who'd criticized him with firing emails sent at 4:30am. One employee reportedly found out he'd been fired from Musk's tweet before he ever got the internal notice.
This is what shameless use of power looks like. Someone who believes the people working under him don't even deserve the minimum — basic respect, a normal conversation about their own job.
But even this man — what about when he's alone with himself? Musk knows all of this about himself. In a capitalist world where money is power, he's used his own damage extremely well, framing it as "I overcame hardship like this." Even Mars — maybe he mocks the fools chasing a dream, all while somehow knowing he's one of those fools too, and keeps running anyway.
When will humans actually live on Mars? Musk himself says 2029. But most space experts put it much later — the mid-2030s at the earliest, and even that would just be "leaving footprints." A genuinely self-sustaining settlement is generally expected no earlier than the 2050s.
Does planting a flag make it your land? No. The world already signed a treaty in 1967 — no nation, and by extension no individual, can claim ownership of territory in space. There's no way governments would let an individual control that. Makes you want to say — screw Mars.
Musk can't not know this. And yet he keeps running toward it. Maybe what he's chasing isn't Mars at all — maybe it's just the thing that lets him not look at what he doesn't want to see, for as long as the chase lasts.
Today's Musk knows exactly who he is, and he uses it perfectly: "work with me, and do what I ask." What's frustrating is that those of us on the other side of that power — we don't use our position as well as we could. Musk's style is easy to read, which almost makes it easy to work with. There are far scarier types out there — people who quietly, invisibly, cut you out without you ever seeing it coming.
The old me would have said "yeah, right" and thrown down my resignation, wished them a good life, and walked. But now, I want to tell people something else: become a cold fox.
If there's something I need to get from someone like that, I check first whether my purpose is clear, whether I understand my own urgency — especially the financial kind. Even when it's hard on the inside, I do my best to keep my own calm, my own internal tempo, deliberately different from theirs, and calculate from there.
When these people yell and rage, it serves two purposes. One: it's a signal that they still need something from you. Two: it's meant to collapse your mental state so you stop trusting yourself.
Some yelling is just trash passing through. You ignore it and move on.
But when someone with money and power yells, it's hard to treat it like trash.
Musk uses this — all of it — extremely well.
It's absurd. And also, somehow, admirable.
I work as a cashier at a food court inside a Korean supermarket. The customer is revenue. I know it, and they know it too.
In America, the idea that everyone is equal is the default setting of daily life. But some customers, even while their bodies live here, are still mentally stuck in the time and place they came from. They don't learn the manners and standards of this new place — they just bring what they had before. And the moment they realize they're revenue, they use that power to push the line of what's acceptable wherever suits them. They get angry. They complain. I'm the one without power here, so I can't say everything I want to say. And they know that too — that they can do whatever they want.
A few days ago, this happened.
The booth where I work was seven minutes from closing, and it was chaos. I handed a customer her change, and a coin hit the counter with a clink. She said I'd thrown it at her rudely. I said I hadn't. We went back and forth, right and wrong, until she shouted that I was being rude because she was Black.
I told her — I have color too.
Oh. So that's what this was. Now I understood.
She demanded a refund. I gave it to her. She left, then came back and started filming me and the booth on her phone. I got angry too and yelled — post that online and I'll sue. I filmed her back.
My booth had closed, but the food court inside the Korean supermarket stays open until the store itself closes. She was sitting at one of the open tables, still eating.
From the very start — from the moment she complained that I was being rude — I shouldn't have given her what she wanted. Somewhere inside her was the belief that "people are rude," that "people are just infuriating." And I reacted straight into it. By yelling back, by matching her, I proved her belief true with my own hands.
Every day, I do my best to notice what I'm thinking and what the other person is thinking, and to not play the game they want me to play.
This time, it broke in an instant. By giving her exactly what she wanted, I knocked my own balance to the ground and filled myself with anger. "People are cruel and rude" — that thought took over my whole head. But right then, the alarm on that tightrope went off. This only costs you.
So I walked over to where she was sitting. I said let's clear this up. I apologized first for what was mine to apologize for. Then I accepted her apology. We exchanged names — I was Young, she was Gina. She turned out to be a genuinely decent person. There are a lot of decent people in this world.
Now we treat each other with more care, keep our manners with each other — a customer and someone who works there. We say hello, ask how the kids are doing. A normal, ordinary relationship where we both hold up our end.
This is what becoming a cold fox actually means. It isn't never yelling. It isn't perfect restraint. It's being able to catch yourself and come back — even after you've already reacted.
With people like this, I wear a mask. A mask that doesn't crack no matter how loud they get.
Stay on your own tempo, don't get swept into theirs, read them cold — and give them what they want. Give it all, even when it kills you. That's a wise way to handle it too. Find exactly where they itch, and scratch it.
Behind the mask, I don't break. In front of it, I give them what they came for.
Doing both at once — that's the real skill of dealing with someone who holds the power. The moment they yell and rage, it actually means they need something from you. Once you know that, you're already ahead — even from behind the mask.
So you answer coldly, with calculated intent.
"Can't you see you're making me fail to make you fail. It just needs time."
Never let yourself get swept up in the speed of their emotional wave — ride it instead. Riding it means, first, stabilizing your own emotions as much as possible, and second, focusing entirely on what the other person actually wants. Stay coldly focused, and you'll feel it, even sense it instinctively.
Then say the essential thing.
"You are making me fail to make you fail. It needs time."
Stand tall, and believe in yourself. The other person is waiting for the exact moment you stop believing in yourself.
Stand tall. Don't be afraid of the expertise and skill you actually have — give it everything. If you give it everything, even the most stubborn, cruelest person will know it. And they'll know, too, that time is the answer.
If you gave it everything, even failure won't leave you a single ounce of shame. A failure you gave everything to becomes good compost — fuel for the flight you'll take one day. The joy of having given everything can fill a whole life, even when the failure still hurts.
This isn't only Musk's problem. I have it. You have it. All of us have it. The problem is the thought itself. I call it unfinished thinking.
It isn't only Musk. People like this are everywhere — your boss, maybe, or your client.
So let's do it too — wisely, as ourselves.
Believe in yourself. You are the universe.
Right now, the world is rushing toward Mars, toward the stars. But more than any of that — you are the universe. Because you look at your own thoughts, and correct them. Because you keep growing yourself, on your own. Because you know how to love yourself, and how to love others.
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