The age of Confidence Men
Musk, Trump, and their house of cards
On a little road trip the other day my friend said he wanted to listen to an Errol Musk interview. Errol is famous for owning part of an emerald mine, and for being Elon’s father. This particular interview interested my friend because it reveals quite a bit about the psychological environment the world’s richest man grew up in. When it first came out listeners were struck by how Errol openly admitted that even as a boy Elon was a little sociopath, making fun of another child whose dad had recently died by suicide then crying bully when the kid beat him up. And that’s just one bit of this two-hour podcast.
What I noticed listening to Errol Musk wasn’t his anecdotes about Elon, many of which I’d already read about in my over-consumption of social media. What I noticed was that the man is a liar, and not particularly good at it. The lifelong South African talked about how of course he opposed apartheid, then two minutes later spoke about being personal friends with the entire apartheid regime. He said that no one wants to go back to the apartheid era, then talked minutes later about how society was better off back then.
So not only was his racism made clear, but his rambling dishonesty was constantly on display. And Errol didn’t seem to notice. It would appear that a combination of wealth and confidence, bolstered by being a white man in South Africa, allowed him to spend his life doing whatever he wanted and being successful while lying constantly. On the podcast he even admitted that much of his emerald business was illegal, one of several lessons Elon might have absorbed along the way.
Despite it all, despite some of his wealth being based on crime, despite his unpersuasive lies, despite his terrible politics and obvious racism, Errol was confident. After a life of unearned rewards he is entirely unaware of the possibility that someone might not believe what he was saying. His bluster and confidence reminded me of a fact that’s been bouncing around my head recently, which is that con man is short for confidence man. The origins of the term provide a remarkably clarifying look into how cons and con men succeed. Namely, every successful con man inspires confidence in his marks, then abuses it.
The paradigmatic example is William Thompson, for whom the term con man was coined. His particular swindle looks absurd now. Thompson’s con was based purely on confidence. He would go up to wealthy men on the street and give them a warm, excited greeting while pretending they knew each other from their schools days. A conversation would ensue, and after having won their faith Thompson would ask if they had enough “confidence” to lend him their watch. When he got the watch, Thompson would make his escape. He did this for nearly a decade before getting caught.
The whole thing seems ludicrous. These victims participated in Thompson’s confidence scam willingly, completely willingly — which is in fact the hallmark of a con. 175 years later his legacy lives on in spectacular fashion.
Today’s biggest cons happen on a scale infinitely larger than taking the occasional watch. Our era is marked by how common mass swindling is, and how these schemes still rely on confidence and trust given willingly to people who don’t deserve it. In fact, some might say that our economy is increasingly defined by cons that essentially steal from millions of people, and often do so legally.
We could start with the most obvious cons, the crypto industry swindling millions of people out of billions of dollars. Some crypto schemes have been criminal, but now that the industry has (legally) spent $130 million on the last election, and won every race they dumped money into, including the presidential, the age of their cons being outlawed appears to be over. Trump himself, or his lackeys, recently did a “crypto rug pull,” which is where a crypto coin gets hyped up, a lot of people invest and send the value soaring, then several of the biggest backers sell suddenly, cashing out while many more small players lose money.
Trump & co. did exactly this. His crypto coin, $Trump, launched just a month ago and nearly a million people instantly bought in, sending the value soaring and making the President billions richer overnight. Then, just weeks later, big players sold their holdings. The coin lost over $2 billion in value and over 810,000 people lost money. Meanwhile, the Trumps made over $100 million in trading fees alone.
Here is one of the premier confidence men of the modern era. Trump has ridden the confidence people place in him to the White House, and scammed countless people out of billions along the way. And Trump isn’t alone. His first buddy Elon Musk has used the same ploy repeatedly, and even more effectively. Tesla is the perfect example. As I wrote recently, “Tesla is one of the most overvalued companies in the world. Its market cap is about 20x that of General Motors, even though GM made $6 billion in profits last year while Tesla made only slightly more at $7 billion.” That discrepancy, the vast gap between actual profitability and stock value, is the measure of the confidence people have in Musk. And it’s immense — the faith that both Wall Street and hoards of young men have in Elon Musk translates into trillions.
And these investors are all putting money down based on their confidence in Musk and his companies’ futures. It’s all legal, or most of it is, but it’s one big confidence scheme built upon a house of cards nonetheless. These investors believe in Musk largely because he, like his father, is a relentless liar who refuses to back down once his dishonesty becomes glaringly obvious. His lies are so numerous that we have to pick out just a few examples. First, in 2011, Musk said he’d put a man on Mars in the next ten years. As we all know, 14 years later, that hasn’t come remotely close to happening. But people did give Musk and SpaceX their confidence, and money.
Then, in 2013, Musk predicted that Tesla would be building a self-driving car by 2016. His cars still do not have full self-driving capabilities twelve years later. Musk has repeated this promise many times over the years, and yet a human still needs to be present and wary when Teslas use their limited self-driving abilities. But what can rightfully be seen as a broken promise is more accurately described as an effective con. Musk was never attempting to be accurate, but rather trying to inspire faith among investors, and when we assess him along those lines he’s been a stunning success.
Musk, like Trump, is ultimately a confidence man. And he’s operating on a scale that William Thompson back in old New York City couldn’t fathom. The stock market, which runs on faith, is the perfect playground for a sociopathic liar like Musk to utilize the confidence of millions. Buying a social media platform didn’t hurt his scheme either. He now feeds lies to millions of people on a scale that is once again difficult to fathom.
But now he’s engaged in a riskier game. He persuaded millions of people that he suddenly was struck by the altruistic urge to pare down government waste. This time, however, confidence isn’t enough. The faith of investors will send stock prices up and make people rich overnight. But cutting government services helps no one other than the .0001%, who ultimately plan to step into the void left by axed public services and turn a profit. Along the way, however, millions of people will be hurt, many of them Republican voters. Much like Trump’s crypto scheme, those who had faith in Musk and the President will be among the most hurt by the chainsaw DOGE is trying to take to the federal government. Confidence could be replaced by immense anger.
In some cases, it already has been. Republican Rep. Rich McCormick was thoroughly and loudly booed throughout a town hall meeting he held in his Georgia district this past Thursday, hundreds of people jeered him, specifically angry at the cuts to jobs and services enacted by DOGE. Four other Republicans have also faced anger from constituents over DOGE at recent town halls, and another six GOP representatives have had protests at their offices. Cuts to basic service and the loss of thousands and thousands of government jobs isn’t what people voted for. And they know it’s Musk at the heart of this unexpected disaster because he’s eagerly made himself the face of it all as the smell of power excites his lizard brain.
And people are starting to respond to the billionaire con man in other ways as well. They’re protesting Tesla, defacing cyber trucks, and suing DOGE. In quite a few circles, confidence in the confidence man is running out. The weak lie of the richest man on Earth having a spontaneous desire to improve government efficiency has been punctured in record time. More and more people are seeing his desire to avoid regulation, hand himself money, and privatize public services.
Seeing the truth about this particular con man is just the beginning. Because Musk’s confidence schemes took him all the way to the halls of power, all the way to a coup, we now have to dislodge the world’s richest man from our government. We have to shake him loose and kick him out and make sure he can never return to power. And that will take a fight. It’ll take working with the disillusioned, the conned, those who have lost confidence. In fact, those who have been conned could emerge with as much anger at this swindler as anyone.
But even that anger isn’t enough, just like losing confidence and wanting Musk gone isn’t enough. It’s going to take a push, and it’s going to require seeing that the system that enables con men to climb to these heights, to such wealth and power, isn’t one we can allow to continue. Capitalism has created a world economy where capital sets the terms, even if those terms are divorced from reality. This has led to the establishment of financial mechanisms layered atop financial mechanisms, massive gambles stacked atop massive gambles, a system that is more and more disconnected from the reality of actual material resources, a house of cards that sits on a shaky tower of confidence. And in this system profit drives all, even if that means it acts as a torrent ripping its way through our lives. Under capitalism most of us are the marks and the billionaire class plays the con man. And this is how we wind up with the Elon Musks of society ruling the world
So we must take our anger at being conned, at our government being attacked with a chainsaw in Musk’s coup, and build a movement of immense power. It must shake loose the world’s richest man, present a powerful and clear alternative to fascism where our needs are met and real democracy is built in the ruins of oligarchy, and replace our failed economic system. Instead of an economy increasingly premised on the gambles of the ruling class, where con men win and everyone else loses, we need a system where our real, concrete needs are taken care of.
We must see that endless growth requires endless confidence schemes, deception, and manipulation that always comes crashing down. In short, we must see that the capitalist experiment has failed us. At this stage, the harsh truth of who gets rewarded and who suffers has been painfully laid bare, and we must now look to replace it if we want democracy, a sustainable future, and a world where we’re not ruled over by con men. We all deserve this better world, but it can only be ours if we organize and fight for it.
Ways to help fight back
Support Federal Workers United: https://www.federalunionists.net/
Protest Tesla: https://www.teslatakedown.com/
More on targeting Tesla:
Fight the coup: https://indivisible.org/coup
Stop Musk: https://socialists.nyc/stop-musk/
We are in the age of “confidence over competence” both in corporate and government leadership. Great essay, it really lays out well how the system works and shows that the system, capitalism, can be a confidence scam as well as individuals.
We’ve also become a people (in general) that is easily conned. Maybe that was always the case, or maybe social media has contributed immensely to this. We feed into the hype, the age of ego.