A few macho males are dominating the news headlines lately and, as usual, they’re inherently unpredictable. At any moment, you never know what they might say or do.
The richest man in the world, Elon Musk, suddenly looks like a dysfunctional business owner. He spent $44 billion on an over-valued company that he might just ease into bankruptcy. After letting go most of the Twitter overseers – the ones that keep the “twits” off Twitter – he told his staff to get “hardcore” about work or leave. In other words, be macho like me: Commit every waking minute to your job, no matter how bad the mental decline.
Musk appears to have been in decline for quite some time now. The man has a son named “X Æ A-12" (pronouncing it will take effort). He clearly wants childhood to be difficult for the little guy.
Perspective appears to be lost on these narcissistic personalities. Donald Trump, a prime example, longs for the spotlight more than his country’s stability. Many Republicans say they no longer want the man leading them, wanting a Trumpy candidate instead of Trump. But what is that? In my view, that’s just a Republican. To be Trump, you must be willing to say whatever’s on your mind at 2 am in the morning, democracy be damned!
Then there’s the relatively new face to the macho male club, Sam Frankman-Fried. This thirty-year old, who has said reading books is a waste of time, ran a 32-billion-dollar cryptocurrency giant called FTX. His company was so cool that they approved expenses in chat rooms, most notably, with emojis.
What most people didn’t know, including the celebrities who endorsed him, was that he doesn’t know much about running a multi-billion-dollar company. It turns out, reading books might have helped. I don't pretend to be smarter than the average investor, but let’s just say that currencies created by computers, managed by a thirty-year-old, bears risk.
These macho males share one common trait: they never know when to quit. The dice has rolled in their favour so many times, they think it will always go their way. But it doesn’t. Just ask Vladimir Putin how the war in Ukraine is going.
Some of them fail early like Frankman-Friedman, although I doubt this is the last we hear of him. Others, like Putin and Trump, can’t stop gambling even in their 70s.
Whether we like it or not, the macho male is part of life, continually rising to the top of our news headlines. The stable ones – the men and women who keep society intact – don't make the news because, well, they’re kind of meh (by news entertainment standards, boring).
Macho males fascinate us to no end because power and unpredictability don’t normally go together. For obvious reasons, these types typically don’t last long. You can only flip a coin so many times and get heads. Tails is always in the offing.
And when it does happen, the consequences can be... well, consequential. Lives and livelihoods are at stake. Whole nations are at stake.
For obvious reasons, we like more than anything to watch the macho male fail. I would certainly hope for failure in the case of Trump and Putin. And it already happened to the no-book-reading Frankman-Fried.
As for Musk, don’t count him out just yet... I read he plans to test a brain implant in humans next year.
Lord help us all.
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