When Elon Musk sat across from me on the eve of his federal deposition, I expected bravado. I got something more unsettling: a man who could recite every dollar DOGE had cost his companies but couldn’t say a word about the 793,000 lives attributed to its policies. The silence told me everything his data could not.
When Dario Amodei walks into Dr. Peterson’s office, she expects another leader in crisis. What she finds is something her taxonomy of moral failure never anticipated: a man who held his ground and is being destroyed for it, carrying the unbearable knowledge that his creation was already used to generate targeting lists he swore it would never produce.
Michael Fiddelke walked into my office carrying twenty-two years of institutional loyalty and a silence he could not explain. In our session, I watched a man who had merged so completely with his company that when the company went mute in the face of crisis, he discovered he had no voice of his own. Some mergers, I have learned, cost more than they appear on any balance sheet.
Marc Benioff walked into my office wearing the Hawaiian shirt like a man still flying the flag of a country that no longer exists. What began as his attempt to reframe bad jokes and political endorsements as communications failures became something far more unsettling: a confrontation with the possibility that twenty years of performed conviction had replaced the conviction itself. I have rarely watched someone discover, in real time, that they cannot tell the difference between who they are and who they have been pretending to be.
When Elon Musk sat across from me on the eve of his federal deposition, I expected bravado. I got something more unsettling: a man who could recite every dollar DOGE had cost his companies but couldn’t say a word about the 793,000 lives attributed to its policies. The silence told me everything his data could not.
