Theo Von joked on “The Joe Rogan Experience” that billionaires “look like aliens.” Their bodies are often funnily shaped and pale from lack of sunlight. They don’t seem quite like us.
We joke that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerburg is a lizard, X CEO Elon Musk is a Martian who’s just trying to get back home, and former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried is a robot.
Rogan wondered aloud whether this is the next stage of our evolution: technical brilliance and social incompetence. Could Musk do all he does and have room for normal human emotions? The danger, as Bankman-Fried shows, is that some aliens aren’t friendly.
Awkward and Brilliant
New biographies of Musk and Bankman-Fried, Elon Musk and Going Infinite, include passages where the protagonists must consciously learn what comes naturally to most children. Bankman-Fried had to teach himself to “smile when I’m supposed to smile.” He started saying, “Yup” and “Awesome,” regardless of whether he agreed with what was being said because people like affirmation. Musk only learned by reading books that people don’t always say exactly what they mean. They acquired the skills of making eye contact and expressing themselves through vocal intonation.
Both men preferred the order of STEM, and they both rejected traditional religious answers to life’s biggest questions. Yet their proximity to religion as children shaped their moral intuitions as adults.
‘I Didn’t Think Anyone Actually Believed in God’
Bankman-Fried’s parents weren’t much for traditions. They didn’t celebrate birthdays. They had celebrated
