Thread by @SethAbramson

I have no quarrel with Tosca, but she's not objective in this.

Many people are worried about Musk, and my opinion—just as a person, rather than a historian, attorney, journalist, retired professor, editor, author, and biographer of her brother—is that he needs his family's help.

I'm not a doctor, psychologist or psychiatrist; my PhD is nonmedical. But I was also a public defender for years and years, so I have worked for and with and around individuals suffering from mental illness more than most readers will know. Musk is acting in a very troubling way.

His employees came close to calling in a police-conducted wellness check, per a recent book. He has admitted to both being mentally ill and being under medical supervision for it via experimental drug therapy. He has admitted to crippling stress. And he is acting in a manic way.

Candidly—and again I'm just saying this as someone who's worked with hundreds and hundreds of people suffering from mental illnesses—I suspect most mental health professionals following his conduct as closely as I have as his biographer would be deeply concerned about his health.

This has nothing to do with policy positions he holds that I disagree with. Mental illness has nothing to do with whether Musk wants more tax cuts for billionaires or an end to the EV tax credit.

I never link legitimate policy positions and medical distress. That'd be offensive.

Nor do I aim to do more than aggregate in my pinned report some of the indications that he's in distress—ranging from being a man who runs a dozen companies yet publicly says he spends nearly all his time playing video games to the harrowing family court issues he's recently had.

I understand that no Elon Musk fans will read this fully sourced report, even as I'm reasonably sure Elon and his family will.

Anyone who reads the Elon Musk section at PROOF will understand that I'm meticulous as his biographer and have aggregated thousands of reliable sources.

The one thing I have said I will not do is interview Elon Musk—and there is a very good professional reason for that. When I became a Musk biographer, it was in part because I saw that he had lied to all his previous biographers in ways that destroyed the integrity of their work.

When you are dealing with a pathological liar like Donald Trump (who I wrote three national bestsellers about) or Elon Musk, you do not sidle up to them and try to become their friend or someone they approve of. You do not use them as a source.

To do otherwise is unprofessional.

When I see Isaacson credulously insisting in interviews that all Elon cares about is bettering the world—even though all the evidence available to any Musk biographer points in the opposite direction—I am sad for him.

He (pre-)sold out his research to ensure he'd get interviews.

I do not care about interviews. I've given so many in my life that I've no desire to give another. I refuse all interview requests; I ignore them. So I can write the truth as my research reveals it, not worrying about future profits or media exposure or the approval of Elon Musk.

I don't aim to be a friend of Elon Musk, any more than I aim to be the friend of Trump. But neither am I an activist. I am a journalist who speaks candidly about what his research reveals to him—and beyond any question of policy, both Trump and Musk are *extremely* dangerous men.

The people who dislike what I say have in 99% of cases never read a single word of it. No one who reads the exhaustively researched content at PROOF has any doubt that I have pursued the research in good faith and with comprehensive attention to accuracy and breadth of knowledge.