Apparently, at both SpaceX and Tesla, he had a habit of going around demanding random changes because he was convinced he was the smartest person on the planet and whatever he came up with 2 seconds ago was far better than what the seasoned engineer who had spent months designing it had come up with. They had to make a team of people to try to keep him away from useful work because it was so destructive to what they were trying to do. There is no plausible explanation for that, to me, other than that he genuinely believes his own hype.

He could literally have the best and most qualified people in the room with him to explain virtually anything he wanted, for unlimited time, any time he wanted. He doesn’t want that. He just wants to take some random bullshit he found on Twitter combined with his own prejudice about how things work, and act on it, taking pleasure in people getting upset about him not being supposed to do that.

I am sure there is more complex stuff at work than is obvious, but I think probably, a pretty huge chunk of it is just that he genuinely believes that the whole US government is fucking up because it’s staffed with morons, and he’s such a genius that he can fix it, and that’s what he’s currently doing. I do think there’s some pathology at work in why he’s so motivated to do it: He has insecurity about whether he is actually the smartest man on the planet, it creates unsettledness, and so he has to go out and take some drastic action to prove to himself that he is. Because would anyone but the smartest person do all this stuff? It’s unprecedented. And therefore, he is smart on an unprecedented level, as he always knew, and he doesn’t need to be unsettled. And then, the next day, the unsettledness returns.

I think most of it pretty simple. It’s just “never been told no” syndrome coupled with societal reward to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, an army of fans, a record of “success” on his resume, and so on.