The overwhelming newsflow that comes along with Elon Musk and his companies is perhaps most apparent to me when I come back from a vacation. And it’s weird to come back to a group of people who just all scream at each other constantly! Like, the Tesla bulls and Musk fans vs. the Tesla bears and Musk haters — they’re always doing Righteous Combat online and your girl just wants to look at some cat photos, you know?

There are essentially two distinct narratives when it comes to Musk generally and they are, in their simplest terms: (1) Elon Musk is a hero and (2) Elon Musk is a villain. To be clear, I subscribe to the far-less-interesting narrative that Elon Musk is, like, a guy, but with more money than usual.

Any time you try to take a big-picture look at Musk and his companies, you’re inevitably going to leave stuff out

One consistent thing, though, is that any time you try to take a big-picture look at Musk and his companies, you’re inevitably going to leave stuff out. “Musk is a hero,” “Musk is a villain,” and “Musk is, idk, rich” are narratives that all work with the same basic sets of facts. To support any of them, you choose to emphasize certain facts and de-emphasize others. You can accuse literally anyone writing about Musk in a big-picture way of cherry-picking and be absolutely right.

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I’ve wondered for a while why the narrative divide between “genius” and “villain” is so large and in trying to get back up to speed after two weeks off, I think I’ve hit on it. These are probably the two simplest ways to sort the dude out, and because the newsflow is so intense, it doesn’t really matter which one you pick because there will always be something happening that supports the narrative. For instance: if you think Musk is a hero, well, so does Neil deGrasse Tyson, a known Science Guy. If you think Musk is a villain, well, you have your share of lawsuits to pick and choose from.

I mean, just check out what happened in the last two weeks and see if you can assemble any kind of coherent narrative without leaving something out or resorting to hand-wavy explanations about Musk being (1) persecuted by haters or (2) protected by weak regulators:

Disclosures to potential lenders showed the company had positive earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of around $270 million for the twelve months through September, people with knowledge of the matter have said earlier. But that’s because it included amounts that customers had prepaid and because it excluded costs related to non-core research and development. Without those adjustments, earnings for the period were negative, the people said.

Is that all of it? I hope that’s all of it. All of this together makes clear how difficult it is to keep up with all the news that comes out of these companies — and how difficult it is to keep up with Musk himself.

Okay, but why isn’t my “a dude, but rich” narrative more popular? Well, a couple reasons. It implies a specific worldview regarding rich people. Here it is: money has a magnifying effect on some aspects of one’s life and personality — because people are less likely to say no to you, because you have the resources to pursue your weirdo dreams, and because you spend less time with people who aren’t wealthy and forget what their lives are like. That’s actually a pretty dense thing to use as shorthand, and it doesn’t simplify much.

These simple narratives give your brain a rest

Good and evil, though, that’s a simple primal narrative, and as a bonus, you can engage in righteous combat against anyone who doesn’t agree with you. These simple narratives give your brain a rest, and serve as a way to organize the frankly bonkers pace of news from Musk’s companies on a weekly — and sometimes daily — basis. Our brains are lazy, as a general rule, because thinking is work. This is why we form habits and do the same things over and over! Picking a simple narrative that reduces cognitive load is literally how you manage to get shit done on a daily basis. Also, complexity often makes for boring sentences.

The more news that comes out about Musk and his companies, I figure, the likelier it is that anyone who is paying attention will sort into one camp or another to decrease their cognitive load. Which means that if, let’s say, Tesla abruptly files for bankruptcy, or we wake up tomorrow and Neuralink has allowed someone to regain use of their legs — well, it won’t make a dent in the preconceived narratives people already use to help make sense of all the news that’s coming in.

My narrative — a dude, but rich — doesn’t let me presort news, so I have to do the work of figuring out what’s going on fresh every single time a story breaks. Whenever I see news breaking about Musk, SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, or Boring Company, the same sentence runs through my brain: It is happening again.