Wielding a Chainsaw While Ignoring His Child:

Holding the Contradictions of Elon Musk

“Grimes, mother to three of Musk’s children, took to X on February 20, 2025, pleading with Musk to address an unspecified ‘medical crisis’ involving one of their children. In now-deleted posts, she warned of ‘life-long impairment’ if Musk didn’t respond, and even asked him to designate someone else to handle it if he wouldn’t talk to her directly. This came while Musk was at CPAC, waving a chainsaw on stage.” - Grok

After reading that quote, I can’t get the image out of my mind. (A quote I gathered from Grok, Elon Musk’s AI, when I asked: “What was going on with Elon’s baby daddy situation?”)

A mother frantically pleading for the father of her children to step in and save their child’s health while he waves a chainsaw on stage in front of a cheering crowd. It’s absurd. It’s dystopian. And yet, it’s real.

And it cannot be squared with the idea of Elon Musk being uplifted as a cultural icon for the direction we want to take masculinity.

In fact, as I was writing this article, Elon Musk shared this post about the war on modern masculinity, in which JD Vance says the following:

“My message to young men is don’t allow this broken culture to send you a message that you’re a bad person because you’re a man, because you like to tell a joke, because you like to have a beer with your friends, or because you’re competitive. The cultural message, and I think the President’s and mine is the exact opposite, but our cultural message is I think that it wants to turn everybody, whether male or female, into androgynous idiots who think the same, talk the same, and act the same. We actually think God made male and female for a purpose, and we want you guys to thrive as young men and as young women, and we’re going to help with our public policy to make it possible to do that.”

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1893356577307939002?s=42

How do we reconcile?

Elon Musk is a paradox. To some, he is a visionary saving the world, redefining technology, space travel, and human potential. He is also seen as a symbol of masculine success and legacy—a man who fights for free speech, warns of population collapse, and challenges the status quo.

But there is another narrative, one that undermines the very work being done to restore masculinity. Musk’s chaotic relationships, his inability to model stable fatherhood, and his fragmented family structure reflect the very societal decay that strong men are working to heal.

How do we hold these two narratives at once?

Why We Need Right-Hemisphere Thinking

The modern world has trained us to think in binaries—hero or villain, success or failure—which is the result of left-hemisphere dominance. The left hemisphere seeks certainty and a singular, comfortable narrative. It does not want to hold contradictions, paradoxes, or multiple truths at once. It wants a clear, linear story that aligns with its pre-existing framework.

• Left Hemisphere Thinking: Musk is either a hero or a fraud. Either he is saving civilization or he is an irresponsible, selfish billionaire. This thinking collapses all complexity into one comfortable position, rejecting doubt and contradiction.

• Right Hemisphere Thinking: Musk is both a force for good and a deeply flawed man. He is someone who advances human progress while also embodying the weaknesses that undermine masculinity. The right hemisphere can hold doubt and competing truths without needing to resolve them into a single answer.

Both sides of the culture war—the pro-Musk camp and the anti-Musk camp—are operating from a left-hemisphere mindset. They each have their simple, inference-based narrative and refuse to engage with the uncertainty and contradiction inherent in reality.

The Cognitive Dissonance of Modern Masculinity

The war on masculinity has left men searching for role models. Musk presents an image of strength and rebellion, a counterforce to the cultural attacks on men. But does his personal model of masculinity actually contribute to the restoration of strong men? Or does it signal that strength is merely about power and defiance, not responsibility and stability?

This is the core tension: Musk is both an inspiration and a warning.

1. He proves that men can still build, innovate, and disrupt—that masculinity is vital for human advancement.

2. He also proves that without structure and responsibility, masculinity risks becoming performative, rather than deeply rooted in leadership and family.

Can we hold these two truths in mind without defaulting to blind admiration or outright rejection?

The Path Forward: Cognitive Freedom

If we want to heal masculinity, we need to practice cognitive freedom:

✅ Acknowledge Musk as a cultural force who challenges globalist narratives and inspires men to think bigger.

✅ Recognize that he embodies the very weaknesses masculinity must overcome—instability in family, neglect in personal responsibility, and prioritization of ambition over presence.

✅ Develop the right-hemisphere capacity to hold both realities and navigate them without cognitive collapse.

Final Thoughts

I can’t get the image out of my mind. Grimes frantically trying to reach Musk, pleading for him to intervene in his child’s medical crisis, while he waves a chainsaw on stage at CPAC. The sheer emotional chaos of it. The way it distills so much of what is wrong with the way we process figures like Musk.

This is why the right has missed Musk’s contradictions all along—why groupthink has allowed them to see only the visionary, not the fractured man behind the mask. It’s why the go-to response by many on the right has been to shame the women as grifters and whores.

The left has been just as blind, rejecting him wholesale without grasping why he resonates with so many.

This is the practice: the ability to hold contradiction, to see the full complexity of a figure like Musk without collapsing into one narrative or the other. If we cannot do this, we do not have cognitive freedom—we are simply reacting, playing the same game over and over again.

Elon Musk represents both the fight to reclaim masculinity and the ways in which it has been undermined. If we are serious about healing masculinity, we must be willing to engage with both aspects of his influence—not as contradictions to be resolved, but as truths to be held together.

The challenge is not just to analyze Musk, but to develop the cognitive ability to navigate the world without falling into ideological entrenchment.

Can we do it?