A 20-step Guide to His Personal Philosophy
December 27, 2025
hero of the absurd.
20 attributes of Elon Musk’s thinking are widely under-appreciated.
Most debates about him miss all of them:
1. He is obsessed with the meaning of life – the very nature of reality & consciousness.
2. He is much more philosophical than people realise.
3. He reframes the lack of higher meaning in a positive way: a lack of meaning becomes a source of purpose.
4. He accepts the absurdity of life but does not give in to it.
5. His response is both highly rational and emotional.
Why this matters: if you are either certain of or indifferent to life’s meaning, you cannot be motivated in the way Musk is.
Where does his sense of purpose come from?
6. His philosophy – to be curious – is very simple but it is so intense that he calls it a religion.
7. He channels the absurd and confronts uncertainty by being creative and self-critical.
8. The scientific method is his mantra.
9. He turns the search for life’s meaning into a line of scientific questioning.
10. We can exercise our individual consciousness to increase our collective consciousness and so we must.
Why this matters: faced with uncertainty, it is better to assume the answers are out there and act to find better questions, than to assume that you already have the right question and need only find the answer (usually in your head).
What beliefs flow from this?
11. Genuine curiosity forces one to engage with reality and thereby change it.
12. Creativity is our human superpower.
13. Nothing is more rewarding than using your consciousness to make things which increase our consciousness (that includes babies).
14. Using free markets to scale creations is the optimal way to be useful and do good.
15. Spreading out into the universe and creating superintelligence will have huge impacts on the scope and scale of consciousness.
Why this matters: if you want to be like Musk, don’t try to be a successful businessman; be obsessively curious, develop a philosophical foundation and reengineer the world around you.
How does Musk’s politics fit in?
16. Musk is allergic to any ideology that – unlike science – claims immunity from criticism.
17. He aligns with right-of-centre parties as he sees identity politics & political correctness (aka wokeness) as a secular religion that is practised by people desperately seeking meaning in their lives.
18. His project to increase consciousness depends on civilisation being curious, creative and critical and that depends on democracy which in turn depends on free speech.
19. He is obsessed with freedom (thought, speech, markets) since the pursuit of truth depends on the ability to make and test conjectures, to err and to learn.
20. He passionately believes that tech platforms must allow ideas to compete with one another, even if it sometimes gets ugly (collective consciousness is not the same as collectivist consciousness).
Why this matters: Musk is first and foremost an engineer but his engagement in politics is not an aberration. It stems from the same philosophical foundation that celebrates curiosity and compels him to create with the zeal of a fanatic.
If you disagree with Musk, don’t waste your breath to say that he is not really an engineer or that he is an oligarch. He has a method, however mad it may seem. Understand it first, then challenge it by testing your ideas against his. You never know, he might even change his mind.
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Check out The Curious Mind of Elon Musk to understand the 9 connected ways that Musk thinks differently.
Discover more from Charles Steel
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