“Elon Musk” by Walter Isaacson: Jekyll-and-Hyde Inheritance

“Both Elon and Kimbal, who no longer speak to their father…say their father is a volatile fabulist, regularly spinning tales that are larded with fantasies, sometimes calculated and at other times delusional. He has a Jekyll-and-Hyde nature, they say…(1, p. 4).

“Elon’s moods would cycle through light and dark, intense and goofy, detached and emotional, with occasional plunges into what those around him dreaded as ‘demon mode’…(1, pp. 4-5).

“When he recalled these memories [of his father], he would zone out and seem to disappear behind his steel-colored eyes. [His second wife] said, ‘I think he wasn’t conscious of how that still affected him, because he thought of it as something in his childhood, but he’s retained a childlike, almost stunted side. Inside the man, he’s still there as a child, a child standing in front of his dad’ ” (1, p. 5).

Comment: In multiple personality (a.k.a., dissociative identity), which starts in childhood, the most common kind of alternate personality is childlike. Of course, if Elon Musk had multiple personality, it would be the high-functioning kind, not the diagnosable mental illness.

1. Walter Isaacson. Elon Musk. New York, Simon & Schuster, 2023.

Added Sept 23: The above about "demon mode" and a child inside reminds me of the following from a memoir by the wife of novelist Philip Roth:

“…he turned toward me with the face of an uncontrollable and malevolent child in a temper tantrum; his lower jaw thrust forward, his mouth contorted, his dark eyes narrowed. This expression of out-and-out hatred went far beyond anything I could possibly have done to provoke it. I remember thinking, with total clarity,‘Who is that?’

“That feral, unflinching, hostile, accusative, but strangely childlike face would appear increasingly in our years together, sometimes without warning, frequently without provocation, always out of proportion to the events that had given rise to it…

“Just as I feared the appearance of this ‘other’ Philip Roth to such a degree that, in order to avoid him, there was almost nothing I wouldn’t have done to make him disappear, I also feared to lose the Philip who was my dearly loved companion” (1, pp. 158-9).

1. Bloom, Claire. Leaving a Doll’s House: A Memoir. Boston, Little Brown, 1996