We explore Elon Musk’s recent claim that “empathy is the fundamental weakness of Western civilisation” – what does it mean, where does it come from, and is there is any truth in it?
During a recent podcast conversation with uber-bro Joe Rogan, in which he subjected the world to more of his ‘thoughts’ about a wide range of topics, Elon Musk made the assertion that “empathy is the fundamental weakness of Western civilization”. This immediately caught my eye – firstly because even by his own standards this seems remarkably like something only a Bond villain would say, and secondly because the mention of empathy clearly brings it into my sphere of interest. (I also have a particular long-standing and grim fascination with Musk’s attitude to philanthropy). So, I thought it would be worth picking this statement apart to see what it actually means, where it comes from, and whether there is any truth in it. In particular I want to consider three questions:
- Is there anything fundamental about empathy?
- Is it particular to “Western civilization” in any meaningful way?
- Is it a weakness?
Is there anything fundamental about empathy?
The Dutch-American primatologist Frans de Waal argued that “human morality is unthinkable without empathy”. And many would agree with him that empathy represents something important about what it means to be human. The ability to comprehend and to care about the suffering of others certainly tends to be an important element of the sorts of acts of selflessness and heroism that most of us would consider examples of ‘humanity at its best’.
This does, however, still leave open the question of whether the empathy we demonstrate is part of our fundamental nature (i.e. we cannot help but feel empathy), or whether it is a societal construct of some kind (i.e. we have to learn to be empathetic). It also leaves open the question of whether empathy is actually a good thing: it is usually assumed that the answer is “yes”, so the debate becomes about whether we can assume that people will demonstrate empathy if left to their own devices or whether we need to incentivise them (or force them) to do so somehow. However, clearly not everyone thinks empathy is a good thing (Elon Musk for one, although he is not alone in this) – and if that is your view, then the debate may well be reversed: i.e. can we safely assume that people will act in callous self-interest if left to their own devices, or do we need to teach them how not to care? (I’m mildly caricaturing here but not that much tbh).
This is part of a long-standing argument about fundamental human nature, which has been framed in many ways over the years: are we selfish or generous? Altruistic or egoistic? Competitive or collaborative? (And before anyone starts penning a Sternly Worded Letter, I do realise that all of these framings are not entirely equivalent, and that the terms in them are not synonymous; however, I think it is fair to say that they are all part of the same basic family of arguments, and that is enough for our present purposes). These are not just theoretical concerns either, since beliefs about fundamental human nature still play a major role in driving political thought, and in shaping many policy decisions and actions that affect all of our lives.
In terms of political philosophy, this debate is often traced back to the differing views of the state of nature offered by Hobbes and Rousseau. Hobbes thought that we were all basically awful, so that left to our own devices the lives of men would be “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short”. His core argument in Leviathan is that the creation of a state which can bind us all in acceptance of laws, and is able to wield force to enforce those laws, is the only thing that stops us all killing one another and stealing things. Rousseau, on the other hand, took the opposite view: he thought the state of nature was a collectivist utopia in which “noble savages” (his words, very much not mine) live in harmony with each other, and that it was only the emergence of private property, governments and laws that ruined things and made us all compete. Similar ideas were put forward by the Russian anarchist thinker Peter Kropotkin when talking about the concept of mutual aid:
“The mutual-aid tendency in man has so remote an origin, and is so deeply interwoven with all the past evolution of the human race, that it has been maintained by mankind up to the present time, notwithstanding all vicissitudes of history…. And whenever mankind had to work out a new social organization, adapted to a new phase of development, its constructive genius always drew the elements and the inspiration for the new departure from that same ever-living tendency. New economical and social institutions, in so far as they were a creation of the masses, new ethical systems, and new religions, all have originated from the same source, and the ethical progress of our race, viewed in its broad lines, appears as a gradual extension of the mutual-aid principles from the tribe to always larger and larger agglomerations, so as to finally embrace one day the whole of mankind, without respect to its diverse creeds, languages, and races.”
Most people would probably struggle to be quite this positive about human nature, given the ample evidence of human beings’ ability to be awful to each other. (Although, there are certainly those who make regular efforts to return to Kropotkin-esque levels of optimism – Rutger Bregman’s 2019 book Humankind springs to mind as an example). But even if you can’t get fully on board with the idea that “people are all just super nice”, that obviously doesn’t mean the only option is to plump for “we’re all bastards” instead. In reality, most of us sit somewhere along a spectrum from Hobbes to Kropotkin when it comes to our views about fundamental human nature.
To some extent this is a subjective question since, on an individual level, our views about whether people are fundamentally empathetic or callous; selfish or generous; collaborative or competitive etc, will be shaped by our own personal experience, and will quite probably change over time as we recalibrate in light of new experiences (or even just what kind of day we are having…) But it should be clear that there is also an objective aspect to the question, since we can look beyond the boundaries of our own experience at what empirical evidence can tell us about fundamental human nature or what a “state of nature” might be like.
What, then, does empirical evidence from various fields have to say about empathy and altruism?
Economics
At the heart of classical economics is the idea of a rational individual agent (the idealised homo economicus) seeking to maximise their own personal gain. As a result, the notion of altruism presents a real challenge for classical economists because the idea of individuals giving resources away to others in such a way as to disadvantage themselves makes little or no sense. The economist James Andreoni, who is one of the leading experts on the economics of charitable giving, puts it thus:
“Philanthropy is one of the greatest puzzles for economics. A science based on precepts of self-interested behaviour does not easily accommodate behaviour that is so clearly unselfish. How can unselfish behaviour be reconciled with self-interest?”
In order to understand why altruism presents such a challenge to classical economics, it is important to understand the distinction between public and private goods. Economists tend to classify goods along two axes: whether they are excludable (i.e. whether those who have not paid for the good can be prevented from benefitting from it) and whether they are rivalrous (i.e. whether use by one individual reduces the availability to others). In these terms, a private good is one that is excludable and rivalrous (i.e. “I’ve got it, so you can’t have it and there’s less left to go round” and a public good is one that is non-excludable and non-rivalrous (i.e. I’ve got it, but you can have it too and there’s still the same amount to go round).
When it comes to private goods, it is fairly obvious why classical economists have such a problem with altruism: If I give an asset away and thereby procure a private good for you, it results in an immediate loss for me because I no longer have that asset, and I cannot benefit from the good. So, from an economic point of view, it is entirely irrational to act altruistically in this case. But when it comes to public goods the situation is more complicated: if I give an asset away and thereby produce a public good, I have lost the value of the asset but I can still benefit from the good produced so there is not a straightforward loss. In fact, the benefit I get from the public good might well outweigh the cost of the donation, so one could argue that it makes rational economic sense to act altruistically in this scenario. Unfortunately, according to classical economics, what makes even more rational sense is not to give at all and simply benefit from the public good anyway (on the assumption that a sufficient number of others will contribute towards it). This is known as the “free-rider problem”, and has often been taken by economists to present a major challenge to the idea of altruism.
The concern about “free-riding” is borne out by many of the laboratory experiments conducted to test economic theories about altruism. But the problem for the theorists is that the real world proves stubbornly unwilling to fit their predictions: the incidence of free-riding behaviour when it comes to charitable giving and other altruistic acts is actually far lower than expected. People seem to go against what classical economics tells us is the “most sensible” way to act; and instead indulge in perverse behaviour like being nice to each other.
Does this mean that classical economics is flawed, and that the assumption that individuals are guided by self-interest is wrong? Not according to the classical economists themselves: they argue that examples of apparent altruism which run counter to their predictions do not undermine their theories or assumptions, but just mean that we have to look harder to find the relevant self-interest. This has led to a number of theories which posit various forms of enlightened self-interest; where seemingly selfless behaviour is reinterpreted as self-interested at a deeper level. This is an idea with a long intellectual pedigree: in a 2006 essay for the New York Times Magazine entitled “What Should a Billionaire Give – and what should you?”, the philosopher Peter Singer recounts the following story about Thomas Hobbes’s efforts to recast his own apparently altruistic act as a selfish one:
“On seeing him give alms to a beggar, a cleric asked Hobbes if he would have done this if Christ had not commanded us to do so. Hobbes replied that he would, that he was in pain to see the miserable condition of the old man, and his gift, by providing the man with some relief from that misery, also eased Hobbes’s pain.”
This reluctance to accept altruism at face value has led some to ridicule classical economics. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Samuelson, for instance, wrote that:
“Mesmerized by Homo economicus, who acts solely on egoism, economists shy away from altruism almost comically. Caught in a shameful act of heroism, they aver: “Shucks, it was only enlightened self interest.”
This is clearly a caricature. Most modern economists who seek better explanatory mechanisms for charitable behaviour do so not because they reject the notion of altruism outright, but because “pure altruism” is just as flawed a model in the real world as “pure selfishness” (despite the best efforts of Ayn Rand and generations of young men who keep rediscovering her to promote the latter). Consider, for example, the fact that a donor motivated by “pure altruism”, and thus solely concerned about improving the welfare of others, would be entirely neutral as to whether that came about as a result of their donation, someone else’s donation or through taxation-funded public spending. Yet in the real world, you would have to go quite a long way to find a donor who thought like that.
That is why there has been a lot of focus on finding hybrid models of “impure altruism”, the best known of which is the “warm glow” theory put forward by James Andreoni. Here, the motives of those engaging in altruistic behaviour are interpreted as at least partly to do with the enhanced sense of personal satisfaction and self-worth they receive as a result (the so-called “warm glow”). This overcomes the free rider problem by introducing a private element to the good being produced. It would no longer make sense to free ride when it came to charitable giving, because although one could still benefit from the public good being produced, one would not get the private benefit of the warm glow that came from making the gift.
Of course, if we just posited the warm glow as an explanatory mechanism without any further proof that it actually exists, then it would be little more than a deus ex machina to make giving fit within classical economics. However, there is a growing body of evidence that giving to charity and other altruistic behaviour does in fact cause identifiable effects in the brain that are associated with pleasure and reward, so it seems as though the warm glow is very much a real thing. That doesn’t necessarily answer the question of whether the relationship between altruism/empathy and the warm glow is one of correlation or causation of course; or, if it is causation, which way the causation flows (do we give to get a warm glow, or do we get a warm glow because we give…?) But those are probably questions best left for another day!
Evolutionary Biology
Another place that altruism and empathy have presented a frustrating puzzle is in the field of evolutionary biology, where many have struggled to square Charles Darwin’s foundational ideas about evolution by natural selection with the existence of altruistic behaviour in the natural world. Darwin himself realised that altruism poses a special problem for his theory, because the principle of natural selection suggests that organisms which act altruistically, by sacrificing their own reproductive fitness in order to benefit others, will be less able to compete for resources and mates, and are therefore less likely to pass their genes on to their offspring. As Darwin put it, “He who was ready to sacrifice his life, as many a savage has been, rather than betray his comrades, would often leave no offspring to inherit his noble nature.” So, the theory suggests that altruistic traits will quickly die out within populations. But in fact, we see many examples of altruistic behaviour throughout the natural world.
Darwin’s proposed explanation for this paradox was that perhaps natural selection also operated at the level of groups as well as single organisms, and that at this level altruism conferred an advantage. He never really fleshed out this theory, however, and it gained little more than uneasy acceptance for the next hundred years, until in the 1960s it seemed to have been blown completely out of the water by a new theory: inclusive fitness (or kin selection). This was based largely on the work of W.D. Hamilton, who suggested that the puzzle of altruism would disappear if we took into account kinship relationships when assessing behaviour. The basic idea is that a seemingly-inexplicable decision to help another individual at the expense of one’s own reproductive success can in fact be understood, as long as that other individual is sufficiently closely related to you that they share the majority of your genetic material; because this means that any action you take to enhance their chances of reproducing successfully ensures the continuation of your genes almost as much as reproducing yourself would.
Inclusive fitness essentially performs the same trick that we saw in economics, of reinterpreting apparently selfless or altruistic behaviour as self-interested, and thereby neatly making it fit the traditional theory of evolution by natural selection. This has proven to be an enormously popular and influential idea; accepted and cited by numerous evolutionary biologists over the last 50 years, and popularised in books like Richard Dawkins’s 1976 best-seller The Selfish Gene. In recent years, however, controversy has once more erupted within the world of evolutionary biology, as some have begun to question whether inclusive fitness really works as a theory, or whether we need to return to a version of the group selection idea first put forward by Darwin.
I don’t feel particularly qualified to come down on one side or the other in this debate, but the salient point is that altruism remains a highly contentious subject within evolutionary biology, as it does in other fields.
Anthropology
The other type of evidence that people tend to turn to when arguing about whether empathy and altruism are fundamental or not is found in anthropology. Details about early or primitive societies are often seen as important because these societies are assumed to be closer to the original ‘state of nature’, and therefore how people behave towards one another in these societies is taken to be more closely reflective of fundamental human nature. In practice this often comes down to the question of how primitive societies have chosen to organise themselves; since hierarchical societies are assumed to lend weight to the Hobbesian view (on the basis that systems of top-down control are developed out of necessity as a way of curbing our base impulses to murder and steal), whilst more horizontally-organised societies are assumed to lend weight to the Rousseau/Kropotkin view (on the basis that they show that we can to rely on our natural drive towards mutual aid and empathy, and therefore don’t need centralised or top-down control).
The problem with this kind of anthropological evidence – even more so than with evidence from economics or evolutionary biology – is that it is possible to cherry pick examples to demonstrate pretty much any point you want to make, and this tends to undermine any grand claims that “humans are fundamentally X” based on evidence about how primitive cultures have chosen to do things. In their 2021 book The Dawn of Everything, the late anthropologist David Graeber and the archaeologist David Wengrow took on the Hobbes/Rousseau debate and used a wide range of examples to argue that both camps are basically misguided. There is no such thing as a “state of nature”, they claim, because the diversity of forms that primitive societies have taken makes any such claim nonsensical. For every warlike society there is a peaceful one; for every highly competitive society there is one based on collaboration; and for every hierarchical society there is a horizontally-organised one. In fact, to complicate things further, many societies have combined aspects of both sides of these apparent binaries: Graeber and Wengrow, for instance, document examples of societies in the Pacific Northwest of America that would vary their societal structures entirely on a seasonal basis. In the crop-growing season they would come together and live in hierarchically-organized groups based on agriculture, whilst the rest of the time they would disperse into leaderless or horizontally-organized groups of hunter-gatherers and fishermen.
What does this mean for debates about philanthropy today?
At this point you might be thinking: “that’s all very interesting but does it actually matter in terms of debates about philanthropy today?” So here is the point where I try to convince you that it does, because what we believe about the fundamental nature of altruistic or empathetic behaviour shapes all of our other beliefs. Is empathy something that reflects fundamental nature, or something that only exists as an artefact of social structures we have created? Is altruism something that will occur naturally, or does it need to be incentivised/compelled (or, if you are Elon Musk, stamped out)? The answers we give to these questions will play a big part in determining our views about the nature and role of philanthropy, as well as the approaches we adopt when doing it.
The challenge, however, as we have seen, is that it is difficult to find clear-cut answers. There is a lot to be gained from exploring what fields such as economics, evolutionary theory and anthropology have to say; but whilst this undoubtedly enriches our understanding, at the same time it adds to the complexity, because no one can agree on much of anything! Maybe this shouldn’t be all hat surprising, given that we are essentially trying to determine the fundamental nature of what it is to be human – so the fact that there is no clear consensus even after hundreds of years of argument is probably to be expected. But what it does mean is that we should be wary of anyone making confident assertions either that we are all fundamentally altruistic or fundamentally selfish as the basis for their argument.
Is Empathy Uniquely “Western”?
Going back to Elon Musk’s claim, the clear implication (as I read it) is that empathy is somehow particular to Western civilization, and that this is a bad thing. So, is empathy uniquely “Western”, or at the very least more likely to be found in “the Western world”? I’m tempted to say “no, that’s clearly a stupid and borderline racist idea” and just move on, but I suppose we need to linger a little bit longer on this claim.
Certainly, from the point of view of anyone familiar with the study of global cultures of philanthropy and giving, the idea that empathy is uniquely Western in any sense seems patently absurd. OK, historically speaking, there has definitely been an assumption at certain times and in certain quarters that philanthropy is a uniquely Western creation (we Brits certainly displayed a healthy dose of self-congratulatory exceptionalism on this front in the 18th and 19th centuries, before handing the baton over to our American cousins). However, that has never been the case in reality, and in recent years there has been a growing appreciation of the rich traditions of giving and generosity in cultures all around the world. You might want to argue that not all of these necessarily reflect empathy per se, and are instead based on other starting points; but if we’re going to go down that road then I would argue that plenty of Western philanthropy has not been motivated by empathy either – but by pity, egoism or paternalism. Which is not to suggest that all Western philanthropists are somehow awful either – just that the underlying motivations for acts of philanthropy tend to be complex and multi-faceted, and this applies across all cultures.
Is Empathy a Weakness?
What, then, of the final part of Musk’s assertion – that empathy is somehow “a weakness”? What should we make of this?
I’ll put my cards on the table at this point: if it wasn’t already clear, I don’t think empathy is a weakness at all – in fact I think it is one of the greatest strengths we have, and we could do with a lot more of it in society right now. But Musk’s idea has not come out of nowhere; there is a long history of people arguing that too much empathy is problematic – and that has often taken place in the context of debates about philanthropy. There are at least four different strains iof argument we can determine, which lead to different types of thinking about philanthropy. I’m going to call these the “Rationalist”, “Nationalist”, “Misanthropic” and “Eugenic” perspectives; and I think you can identify elements all of them in Musk.
Rationalist philanthropy: “The wrong people are being helped because they are undeserving”
Throughout the history of philanthropy, one of the key recurring themes has been a concern from donors about their resources ending up in the hands of those who are “undeserving”. As I detailed in an earlier WPM article, at times (such as in Victorian Britain) this became something of an obsession, and shaped attitudes and approaches to philanthropy in ways that are still very strongly echoed in a lot of philanthropy even today. It was often argued by those who worried about the perils of “indiscriminate philanthropy” that an excess of empathy was part of the problem, as this led people to give in ways that were too emotional and not sufficiently careful to distinguish between the “deserving” and the “undeserving” poor. As the English economist Willian Stanley Jevons put it in his 1880 “Primer on Political Economy”:
“Take the case of so-called charity. There are many good-hearted people who think that it is virtuous to give alms to poor people who ask for them, without considering the effect produced upon the people. They see the pleasure of the beggar on getting the alms, but they do not see the after effects, namely, that beggars become more numerous than before. Much of the poverty and crime which now exist have been caused by mistaken charity in past times, which has caused a large part of the population to grow up careless, and improvident, and idle.”
We still hear very similar arguments today made by those who are critical of social welfare payments, as well as of philanthropy. And Elon Musk’s repeated and unfounded claims about the scale of welfare fraud in the US, which he has used to help justify the damage he is doing through his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), make it clear that he is very much of this mind. It becomes even clearer if you have the unfortunate experience of reading the writings of Gad Saad, the Canadian academic whose arguments about “suicidal empathy” seem to have informed Musk’s recent thinking. Here’s just a little taste:
“My forthcoming book Suicidal Empathy further examines the descent to madness by highlighting the inability to implement optimal decisions when our emotional system is tricked into an orgiastic hyperactive form of empathy, deployed on the wrong targets.”
Which obviously sounds totally normal, and not at all like a load of hateful reactionary pseudo-scientific bullshit.
Nationalist philanthropy: “The wrong people are being helped because they are foreign”
Another recurrent theme in the history of philanthropy is a variation on the idea that money is going to the “wrong” recipients, but this time because they are foreign. Critics have taken aim at what they saw as “telescopic philanthropy” – where attention was focused on the poor and suffering overseas at the expense of those in need nearer to home within the donor’s own country. Empathy was once again taken to be a big part of the problem, because an ability to empathise and thereby feel care for those in other countries, or whose life experiences were very different to your own, could lead you – so it was argued- to ignore the crucial (and much-misinterpreted) dictum that “charity begins at home”. In the 1798 poem “The New Morality”, for instance, the future British Prime Minister George Canning compared ‘philanthropy’ (which he saw as a universalist trait based on misguided empathy, and suspiciously French in nature…) unfavourably with ‘charity’ (which he saw as a laudable, nationally-focussed act of good British Christianity):
“First, stern PHILANTHROPY: not she, who dries The orphan’s tears, and wipes the widow’s eyes;
Not she, who sainted Charity her guide, Of British bounty pours the annual tide:
But French PHILANTHROPY ; whose boundless mind Glows with the general love of all mankind;
PHILANTHROPY, beneath whose baneful sway Each patriot passion sinks, and dies away.”
Criticism of telescopic philanthropy can be seen throughout the 19th century into the 20th, in both the UK and the US. A 1912 poem in the US satirical magazine Puck, entitled “The Higher Philanthropy”, for instance, opens:
“Thrilled with the joy of pity,
Glad of the chance to give,
Show us a “stricken city”,
We’ll make the dying live!
Heavens! A quake in Rome!
What craven tight-wad tarries?
We have no poor at home!”
Again, we can still very much see these sort of criticisms today – most recently in the assaults on international aid and development by the Trump administration that saw Elon Musk gleefully declare that he had “put USAID into a wood chipper”, and where the decision to dismantle the world’s largest aid agency was in part justified on the grounds that spending money overseas rather than in the US was unjustifiable unless it directly furthered the US’s own national interests in some way.
Misanthropic philanthropy: “I care about humanity, but I don’t like individual humans”
A recurrent criticism of philanthropists over the last few hundred years is that sometimes they get so caught up in grand schemes to solve humanity’s problems that they appear to lose sight of the need to act decently towards individual humans, and can become disgruntled when their efforts are not sufficiently appreciated. As an editorial in the Times put it in 1914:
“And the philanthropist, in this matter of the heart, often seems to overlook the individual in his passion for the general. Or rather he dis- likes men because they fall short of his conception of what man ought to be. Man in the abstract and man whom it is his mission to love and to do good to would recognize his mission and submit to his good intentions, but concrete men persist in treating him just as if he were one of themselves.”
The philosopher Robert Nozick suggested in his seminal 1974 book Anarchy, State and Utopia that it was not an altogether uncommon phenomenon to find this kind of gap between concern for humanity in the abstract and empathy or liking for individual people among philanthropists:
“Sometimes indeed, one encounters individuals for whom the universal eradication of something has very great value while its eradication in some particular cases has almost no value at all; individuals who care about people in the abstract while, apparently, not having such care about any particular people.”
According to a number of sources, this would be a pretty accurate description of Elon Musk – whose professed mission to “extend the light of human consciousness to the stars” is not accompanied by noticeable concern for actual humans. As one of his biographers, Ashlee Vance, said of Musk in 2015: “He has the weirdest kind of empathy. He doesn’t have a lot of interpersonal empathy, but he has a lot of empathy for mankind.” Or, as the founder of The Mars Society, Robert Zubrin put it a few years back, “He [Musk] is a humanist – not in the sense of being a nice person, because he isn’t. He wants eternal glory for doing great deeds, and he is an asset to the human race because he defines a great deed as something that is great for humanity.”
The thing is though, that whilst this sort of view of Musk as a slightly distasteful weirdo who is nonetheless, on balance, a good thing for humanity thanks to the technological innovations he is helping to drive through his companies might have made sense once, it is pretty hard to maintain at this point. Given that it is now clear that his plans for achieving his goals involve the wholesale destruction of US democracy, the pollution of public discourse and the suffering and possible deaths of thousands of people around the world, it is difficult see him as anything other than a threat to the human race, rather than an asset, I would say.
Eugenic Philanthropy: “I care about humans, that’s why I think there should be less of them (or less of the kind I don’t like)”
Things can go one step further if those who take a misanthropic view of philanthropy start to believe that humanity itself needs to be “improved” for its own good. There is a clear warning from history here in the shape of the murky relationship between philanthropy and eugenics that existed from the late 19th century well into the 20th. I have written about this at some length in another WPM article, so I won’t go into detail here, but suffice it to say that some bad things have been done by philanthropic funders in the name of humanity’s best interests. And this is a risk that I would argue we need to be aware of once more, as the rise of concerns about falling birth rates, combined with racist scaremongering about a “great replacement”, and tech-driven visions of ‘transhumanism’ are providing fertile soil for discredited eugenic theories to re-emerge in new guises. (Or, sometimes, basically the same old guises). The idea put forward by Musk that empathy is somehow a “weakness” which needs to be overcome is an important part of normalising these kinds of ideas, as it makes it possible for people to rationalise things that might otherwise sound straightforwardly awful.
What now?
I am not always sure it is helpful to subject the pronouncements of people like Musk and Trump to that much analysis, since it is not always clear that they actually mean what they say, or that they understand it even if they do mean it. However, in this case I do think that Elon Musk’s dim view of empathy is worth examining properly – both to understand the many ways in which it is flawed, and because it sits within a wider set of views about human nature and philanthropy that have plenty of precedents, and thus might give important clues about where Musk’s actions might go in the future. Given the power he is wielding in the new Trump administration, and the impact his actions are already having on philanthropy and nonprofit organisations in the US and around the world, it seems like any knowledge that might help us to be forewarned and forearmed is valuable.
