Open Letter to Elon Musk

Elon Musk,

I have a warm and loving message for you. I’m very much like you, if we changed a couple variables.

You’re an aspie, like me—I’ll meet you where you are using this term, and just note that our community prefers “on the spectrum.”

You’re hyperachieving, like me. Growing up, no one ever told us that we deserve love and regard just for existing. Or maybe they did, but their actions taught us otherwise.

You excelled, like me. You found meaning in a loveless life by adopting a visionary mission and philosophy. If you made a humanity scale impact, maybe you could rest at night.

But people took advantage. They exploited your mind, your wealth, your power, and your good intent. They misunderstood you and criticized your idealistic visions.

That's my life story, too.

Like me at times, you felt isolated in humanity-scale esoterics. You began questioning your own humanity, jokingly identifying with non-human intelligences.

Our stories diverge here, but I understand you just the same. You sought help feeling empathy and emotions, but they weren’t easy to access. You sought to bring your family together, physically, but they had forgotten how to love you, because they were hurting—and because family law is inherently adversarial. You sought to win society over through social media, through AI, through proving your indispensability to humanity. Maybe then, you'd be loved.

But regulators, shareholders, and values-shifting competition interfered. They refused to see that you just meant to help humanity, that you just wanted to be loved, that you had your own struggles. More and more people tried to make you doubt your own reality: were you really trying to help humanity? You began to wonder this, yourself. It felt so unfair that you started to identify as a victim, even with your immense agency. Fellow executives—subordinates, no doubt—made fun of you for social differences. "I still haven’t earned love?" you questioned, incredulously.

Around this time, I interviewed for the position of Managing Counsel of Securities Litigation at Tesla. I knew I could be gentle enough to credibly advise you not to post certain things online. I still believed that maybe I could make change from the inside. I was declined after the second round. And I'm glad. I wasn’t ready then—I had more to learn about our purpose here.

And so did you. Maybe you could fix governmental and legal systems, you thought. They created chaos that suppressed progress; they adopted narratives that seemed counterproductive. It became confusing—who were your friends, who were your enemies, what is good and bad? Were YOU good or bad? You let yourself align with people in government who treated you well, who seemed to see your vision. You empowered yourself by becoming not a victim but an abuser at scale, emulating behavior that dehumanized many. Even then, your supposed allies soon turned on you.

And here we are. Elon, I’m ready now, if you’ll hear me. Society will take some time to process its anger toward you, and that’s okay. But please know that some of us have understood you and had deep empathy for you all along, even while we were struggling to meet our own needs. Some of us know that you deserve love and regard, simply for existing. Will we enable misguided actions or abuse? No. But we won’t turn away.

Elon, it’s time to become aware of the very human motivations behind your choices, because then you can access accountability and healing. It’s time to remember human truths that those with your power MUST understand, lest society continue to veer toward a polarized, dehumanized, and threatened existence.

The truths are found in embodied love and interdependence.

That compound you envisioned with your family? Finish it and go there. Hug your children as much as you can, tightly. Tell estranged family that you’re sorry, even if they’re not ready to listen. Take a health leave for long enough that you begin to feel comfortable in your skin, to feel the ground under your feet. Do consciousness work and stop listening to your shadows. Every time you brush your teeth, look yourself in the eyes and forgive yourself.

I know this sounds cooky to an optimizer and techno-utilitarian. But it’s time well spent. When you return, your higher vision—the same vision that helped Tesla skyrocket to success—will return, and the too-prominent influences of ego, need, abandonment, irritation, and destruction will no longer control you. Your higher quality decisions will be even better than rational, and with this alignment, you’ll find that you’re no longer pushing a boulder up a hill. Your goals will be attained with the ease of water flowing down a river. Your higher decisions will remind your shareholders, employees, and customers why they rallied behind you.

You will remember that, with AGI approaching, even your genius does not have the luxury of working in isolation from other visionaries with vastly different skills and cognition—evolutionarily critical skills nonetheless. The emotions and intuition you forgot how to access, they will become accessible again—and if not, we’ll hold your hand and help you access them. Soon, it will be too late to remember the survival importance of a nurturing and interdependence-oriented category of human intelligence.

Elon, you have always deserved love just for existing. I’m sorry no one ever told you that.

Love,

Andi

This begins a series of open letters to tech elite. #ResistSocietalEntropy