My Current Model of What Happened to Elon Musk

This is cross-posted from my Substack

Elon Musk appears to have gone crazy. What happened?

There are several hypotheses to explain his behavior:

• Sleep deprivation
• Subclinical bipolar

I thought both of those might be the cause, but after researching it more deeply, I think it’s actually:

• Drugs could explain a lot. Chronic ketamine use causes delusions and paranoia and he admits to earlier use.
• Politics being the mind-killer. His “insane conspiracy theories” map pretty well onto normal MAGA beliefs. Politics regularly makes otherwise rational people believe crazy things.

Let’s dive more into why it’s more likely this than the other theories.

Bipolar spectrum is probably a thing and it’s probable he’s on it

Bipolar is a spectrum, just like autism or a large number of other mental illnesses. Bipolar I is the most extreme version of bipolar, bipolar II is less extreme, and bipolar III is the even more mild version.

People have long suggested there be a bipolar IV, which is much like the more extreme versions, except instead of having discrete manic episodes, they have a “hyperthymic temperament”. This means that they’re chronically hypo-hypo-manic. They are:

• Confident to the edge of grandiose,
• Extremely goal directed
• Have a million started projects and ideas,
• Often think they’ve figured out something nobody else has
• Sleep less than most people

Typically they’re related to somebody with bipolar 1-3, and this is in keeping with the theory that a lot of disorder among humans is because a less extreme version of the trait is actually advantageous. Hypo-hypo-mania sounds awesome.

But . . . they still have depressive episodes. People then diagnose them as having depression instead of bipolar because they’ve never had a manic episode. This might explain why some depressed people don’t respond to anti-depressants but do to mood stabilizers. The underlying chemistry is different.

Now, if this sounds like Elon to you, you’re right.

In his biography, Isaacson literally describes him in 2017 “oscillating between depression, stupor, giddiness, and manic energy.”

I actually put decently high odds on Elon having this.

The main reason to not think it’s the cause of his strange beliefs is because bipolar IV as an idea is currently more a theory rather than empirically studied. It’s not part of the DSM (although I find the whole DSM to be largely arbitrary and have terrible epistemics, it’s still something). Bipolar IV is extremely understudied. It could also easily just be yet another example of people trying to pathologize normal human traits.

So just on base rates, you should not expect it to be this.

There’s also the real possibility that his episodes of depression are actually warranted. This man has more stressful events before breakfast than most people have in an entire decade. (Usually self-inflicted, I’ll grant, but still. That amount of stress probably should cause the occasional collapse.)

Additionally, even if he has bipolar IV, that could explain his overconfidence, but it doesn’t explain his wild proclamations online. A hyperthymic temperament does not include paranoid delusions or conspiracy thinking.

Finally, if he does have it, he’s likely had it since his late teens or twenties. It doesn’t explain the onset.

Monthly share of Musk's judgeable posts meeting each criterion, as three-month averages. Each panel is scaled to its own maximum — hostility peaks near 18%, conspiracy near 5% — and all four peak together in February 2025, after sitting at or near zero through 2016 to 2021.

However, let this hopefully nerdsnipe some research psychologists into studying this potential disorder more.

Sleep deprivation

Elon Musk is not a good sleeper. Based on Twitter posting patterns, he’s regularly getting far less sleep than is recommended. Could he just be chronically sleep deprived, which has all sorts of side effects on intelligence, impulse control, irritability and lashing out, etc.

Alas, it does not explain the crazy posting, since he’s always been this way. He varies between 3-6 hours of sleep, usually 6, but often long periods of 4 or 5. And he has since we have public information about it.

It could be an exacerbating effect, and if you care about his mental health, this would certainly be something to work on. But it’s unlikely that it’s the cause.

It could be drugs

He said he took ketamine and lots of other drugs. One of the side effects of chronic ketamine use is paranoid and delusional thinking.

He had a bladder issue which apparently is very much the side effect of prolonged ketamine use. And bladder issues tend to happen two to three years into heavy use. If you look at when he got the bladder issues, it lines up with two years after he started to increase his unhinged posts (roughly 2022).

Now, he says he’s just been taking ketamine as prescribed by a doctor, once every few weeks. However, I have heard from a source who knows him that he’s seen a lot of evidence that this is very much not the case.

Now nothing is guaranteed, especially with any sort of diagnosis based on public evidence. He has said inconsistent things about his use. But given what’s available, this seems like a plausible explanation.

Politics is the mind-killer and the most plausible explanation

I can’t tell you how many extremely rational people I know who will calmly discuss the effects of the replication crisis on interpreting psychology research and in the next breath, believe a person is irredeemably evil based on a single misleading quote.

Politics brings out the tribalism in the best of us. Epistemics goes to all hell when it comes to yelling about the out-group. This is on both sides of the American politics.

And when Elon Musk started to spout “crazy opinions” is when he got more into politics. And they’ve almost all been pretty standard MAGA fare.

Examples:

• Democrats are importing migrants to manufacture voters.
• Mass non-citizen voting.
• Fauci belongs in prison.
• The federal government is riddled with fraud.

It sucks that this is standard MAGA fare and that this is such a large part of American politics these days, but that’s just how it is. Now you could think that about a quarter of the country is mentally ill, on drugs, or sleep deprived, and it affects just them and not the other side, but it seems to be just that he joined a political tribe and is doing what political tribe members do.

He’s always had weird ideas. It just used to be that they were mostly confined to engineering or business, or it was stuff that most people didn’t care about (e.g. the best way to prevent extinction due to AI was to start a company to build it faster than the other guys). Or it was viewed as crazy by the other side (e.g. climate change), but sane to the left, and so the left didn’t hate his views.

So a lot of the “he believes crazy things now” might actually people hating on and dismissing the out-group. Ironic, since that’s most of his crazy posting too, just on the other side.

Now, I’m not saying that his posts aren’t crazy. I’m just saying they’re normal politics crazy. You don’t have to postulate drugs or mental illness about a political person, when tribalism explains it perfectly well. Especially when most of the opinions are held by a sizeable chunk of the population.

If somebody believes in an invisible force that can read your mind and cares about the type of sex you have, we don’t call it mental illness, because this is run-of-the-mill religion. Likewise, if somebody believes the federal government is deliberately importing migrants to manufacture votes, we don’t call it mental illness, because it’s run-of-the-mill MAGA.

Both of them can be wrong. I think they are both wrong. But you don’t need to be mentally ill or on drugs to believe untrue things. Believing untrue things is the default for humanity. It’s believing true things that needs explaining.

And Elon started getting into politics in 2020 due to the woke extremism at the time, and then further got into it in 2022 when he was disowned by his trans child. Which roughly lines up with when most people think he started to say more whacky things.

I think given the priors of politics making you go crazy and that his particular brand of crazy matches the current right wing so well, this is a better explanation than drugs.

So there you go: Elon Musk has started spouting crazy things online because he got into politics. He always believed out there beliefs, but we just didn’t notice as much because it was in areas we agreed with him or where it was a niche area most people didn’t care about. There’s also the possibility of chronic ketamine use.

This is cross-posted from my Substack