Um. Thinking back about my post about brain issues..
The first time I realized that something seemed out of kilter was when Musk went over the edge when the Fremont factory was closed down because of COVID. Before then he seemed neither left nor right leaning, but just this entrepreneur worried about getting product out the door, disrupting industries, and, as a strong sideline, Saving the World.
A more.. balanced.. approach might have gotten his factories open in CA in about the same time frame that they were eventually opened up. But he went.. combative. It worked.. kind of, but stepped on a lot of peoples' toes that perhaps didn't deserve getting stepped upon. And, in the end, was perhaps more than a little self-defeating.
That struck me as odd at the time, and out of character. Since then, I've happened to talk to people associated with his companies, and they report odd behavior (at least, odd to me, an engineering worker bee) as well.
The behavior has continued to change. Yeah, political leanings can change. Work habits can change. Being changeable is part of the human experience. So it's not difficult for people to come up with explanations for behavior, be it thinking that a person is playing multidimensional chess (which is the vaguely generic opinion around these parts) or is a fraud (TeslaQ style). But this dive-to-the-right behavior seems incongruous when compared to his behavior before 2020.
And that's the point. As I mentioned before, my father passed some years back from Lewy Body disease, a form of dementia. In 20-20 hindsight, the family realized that his behavioral changes had started some 20 years before his diagnosis, which only happened around the time when things had degraded to the point where he was as likely to walk backwards as forwards (it had gotten to his muscle functions). Until that point, the family had explained away his behavior as that of, well, an irascible old man. And that included his spouse.
With many forms of dementia, the first things to go are higher brain functions. Introspection is one of those things. When you ask somebody in the early throes of this kind of problem, "What are you doing? What would other people think?" you get back.. nothing. It doesn't compute for them. A number of the family literally asked my father that and had no answer from him, just this.. weird pronouncement, repeated, that didn't fit with the person we thought we knew.
Right about that time, or a little later, he stopped admitting that anything he said or did was wrong. Which was, again, odd: People make mistakes all the time, and, while he had been a little slow admitting to the odd mistake or other, after a bit, he never admitted to any error.
Mind you, he was in a highly technical field. He was still doing research, writing papers, and editing journals.. but it slowed down over time, gradually. While people around him got more and more irritated with the man and, after several years, he was forced out. A decade or so later, he lost the ability to do math. And then to string words together. And, eventually, lost the ability to swallow. This progression is not something that's easy to forget.
A couple of years ago I was wandering through the American Museum of Natural History in New York and came across an exhibit that detailed this progression. It was, well, enlightening, in a rather morbid sense. And explained quite a bit about what had happened to my Dad.
Musk is in the right age range for something like this to happen to him. I'm not kidding: I wonder if he should see a neurologist?
