I recently began publishing a series of articles on my website, Earn News, exploring the psychoanalysis of Elon Musk after his fortune reached one trillion dollars, making him—according to reports widely circulated in recent months—the first trillionaire in history.
My goal was to get closer to understanding the personality of this man who never seems satisfied with dreaming—dreams that he somehow manages to turn into reality, bringing him millions, and indeed billions.
The series was originally intended to consist of five parts, but it now appears that it may grow beyond that number. The idea is simple: to simulate the way the famous psychologist Sigmund Freud might think, write, and analyze.
In the past, people attempted such things through "spirit summoning." Today, however, we no longer need elaborate rituals or the mediums through whom the spirits of great thinkers were supposedly called upon. Instead, we can do something remarkably similar through artificial intelligence models—and that is precisely the idea on which this project is based.
I selected five of the most prominent AI models available today and asked each of them to emulate Sigmund Freud as faithfully as possible before analyzing the personality of Elon Musk. The results were fascinating.
I began with ChatGPT, perhaps the most widely known of these models, and its analysis has already been published. Today, I would like to share that analysis with you. I would also be delighted if you chose to follow Earn News and join the conversation there as well.
And now, here is Sigmund Freud's analysis of Elon Musk—as imagined by ChatGPT.
Five AIs, One Freud, One Elon Musk (Part 1)
Earn News Invokes Sigmund Freud to Analyze the World's First Trillionaire
Elon Musk: The Man Trying to Negotiate with Immortality
A trillion dollars is merely what he acquired. What he is truly chasing is something no bank account can ever contain.
ChatGPT Emulates Sigmund Freud
Edited and Reviewed by: Earn News
Before you read:
You have undoubtedly come across recent headlines claiming that Elon Musk's fortune has reached the trillion-dollar mark, driven by SpaceX's soaring valuation. And chances are that Musk himself—with his controversial personality, relentless ambition, and constant presence in the news—has fascinated, intrigued, and perhaps even puzzled you for quite some time.
At Earn News, we decided to take a closer look at Elon Musk: a man who never seems satisfied with accumulating wealth, generating controversy, and capturing public attention. To help us understand him, we could think of no better guide than the father of psychoanalysis himself, Sigmund Freud.
Unfortunately, we have not mastered the art of summoning spirits. Instead, we turned to something more practical: the ability to simulate minds, ideas, and intellectual perspectives through artificial intelligence.
As part of Earn News' initiative to integrate AI into traditional journalism and explore the possibilities of intelligent journalism, we asked five of the world's leading AI models to emulate Sigmund Freud and offer their own Freudian interpretation of the man many believe could become history's first trillionaire: Elon Musk.
Today, we begin with ChatGPT.
Over the next five days, we will see how "Freud" analyzes Musk's personality through the eyes of different AI models.
Earn News
When the public looks at Elon Musk, they see a man whose wealth has become almost immeasurable and an entrepreneur standing behind rockets, electric cars, and artificial intelligence. But psychoanalysis is not concerned with what the public sees; it is concerned with what lies hidden beneath it.
The first mistake people make is believing that a human being continues to work simply because they want more money. This may explain the motivations of an ordinary person, but not of a man whose wealth exceeds any conceivable personal need many thousands of times.
The question that interests me is not: Why did Musk become rich?
Rather, it is: Why hasn't he stopped?
In my view, a person is not driven by external circumstances alone, but by deep-seated desires that reside in the unconscious. And the more rational and organized someone appears on the surface, the greater the likelihood that a powerful inner force is propelling them forward.
I believe that for Musk, money is not an ultimate goal, but rather a side effect of something much deeper.
A child who feels vulnerable to the world early in life may spend an entire lifetime trying to prove the opposite. Some people do this through power, some through fame, and some through knowledge. As for Musk, he seems to have chosen nothing less than mastery over the future itself.
A project such as sending humans to Mars cannot be explained by the conventional logic of profit and loss. It is closer to a psychological desire to challenge the limits that reality has imposed upon humanity for thousands of years.
This is where what I call "sublimation" appears.
Sublimation is the process through which raw psychological impulses are transformed into civilizational achievements. The energy that might manifest in another person as conflict or disorder manifests in a genius as inventions and vast undertakings.
Musk seems to me to be an extreme example of this process.
He is not content with merely improving the existing world; he seeks to replace it with a new world of his own design.
Perhaps this also explains his constant inclination toward battle. Even when he becomes the richest man in the world, he searches for a new arena of conflict. And even when one project succeeds, he immediately moves on to another that is even more ambitious and risky.
It is as though achievement does not bring him rest; it merely earns him the right to pursue an even larger goal.
And here I arrive at what I consider the most important idea.
Some human beings do not strive for success because they are happy, but because they are incapable of feeling contentment.
They remain in constant motion because stopping would place them face to face with themselves.
Perhaps this is why Musk does not seem like a man who has reached the finish line, but rather like a man who fears the very existence of a finish line.
A trillion-dollar fortune is not the end of the story for him. It is merely a new number that the world has added to his biography.
As for Musk himself, he appears to be preoccupied with something else.
He is preoccupied with the idea of leaving an impact that transcends the limits of his own lifespan.
In psychoanalysis, when a human being begins to compete with time itself, we are no longer looking at a man searching for money, but at a man trying to negotiate with immortality.
Therefore, I believe the greatest mistake we can make in understanding Elon Musk is to think of him merely as a trillionaire.
A trillion dollars is merely what he acquired.
What he is truly chasing is something no bank account can ever contain.
About This Experiment
This article is part of "The Freud Experiment," an Earn News project that asks different AI models to emulate Sigmund Freud and analyze the same public figure. The goal is not to determine what Freud would actually have said, but to explore how different AI systems interpret the same intellectual framework.
