“I once described him as somebody who can jump off the edge of a cliff and invent a parachute on the way down. I think he thrives on chaos.”
Pivot (Kara Swisher & Scott Galloway) · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · October 2026
Kara Swisher asked Justine Musk how to reconcile the two public images of Elon Musk: a genius bent on domination, or a hapless agent of chaos. She says everything for him is life and death, and that when things get too comfortable he goes looking for chaos.
Transcript
…in this film was to at once communicate the deadly seriousness of this massive oppression of power. And at the same time, understand that there is fundamentally something so unserious about him, you know, in terms of his perspective or his ability to see the world in some kind of holistic fashion.
…one of the things you wrestle with these two contradictory ideas the public has of him. One is that he's a genius set out for world domination. The other that he's kind of a hapless chaos agent and cannot pay attention to details and succeeds in spite of himself. How do you reconcile them, Justine?
I once described him, this was many, many years ago, but this is what comes to mind. I once described him as somebody who can like jump off the edge of a cliff and invent a parachute on the way down. I think he thrives on chaos. I think when you read about PTSD, when you get to know more about how that reshapes the brain, I mean, that makes a lot of sense to me because if you listen to the language that he uses and like even taking into account that a lot of it is a pitch, it's performative. But everything is very, very urgent. We're going to die. The world is going to be destroyed. It's suicidal, almost a suicidal apocalyptic. Yeah, everything is life and death. And I think he really lives like that. He really lives with that pitch of intensity. And that's a place where he feels comfortable. And so if he's too comfortable, he looks for that chaos. And he brings it with him and he has a way of sucking you into it. And at…
A trickster. Yeah.
Yeah. And, you know, I think there's a lot of engineering of language, you know, engineering of belief systems. You know, like to take that from that kind of systems thinking is like working with something physical and tangible. Then, you know, if you've put rockets into space, then let's go after…
So every episode we get a question from an outside expert. Here is yours. Hi, it's Kirsten Grind. I'm an investigations reporter at the New York Times, and I've covered Elon Musk for a lot
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