Imagine a dystopia in which it is perfectly normal for people to play Russian roulette. Most people die early. But some survive — and we call those people “’successful”. But what if they just got lucky for longer? And what happens when that luck runs out?
Consider the odds. If you use a gun with six chambers, the chances of surviving a single round are a little over 83%. By time you have reached round four, your survival chances will be roughly 50-50. From then on, things deteriorate swiftly, and by round 25, should you have survived that long, your chances are around 1%. Now assume that everyone in the US is playing this game. By the time the trigger is pulled for the 70th time, there are only approximately 1,000 survivors playing. That also happens to be the number of billionaires in the US. Elon Musk and Donald Trump are among them. Both think they are really good at the game and they’re still playing. But how long can their luck hold out?
Musk’s chances of survival aren’t looking too healthy. He spun the barrel of the gun one time too many when he decided to start a public spat by criticising Trump’s big, beautiful budget bill. It was an impulsive move that might work in business, where visionaries are rewarded for disruption. But in politics, the chamber is loaded more often than not.
Perhaps you object to my Russian roulette comparison. It’s too random. Success, in business and politics, you think, isn’t the result of luck. These guys have skills. Musk is intelligent; Trump is street-smart. Success in the real world is often a mixture of skill and luck.
This is all true. But my thought experiment makes an important point about big gambles that is often lost in journalistic narratives. Skill is important in everything we do, but few of us, including the most intelligent and best educated, are possessed of skills that no one else has. We mistake survival for superiority. Yet what makes the difference between success and failure comes down to the opportunities we grasp and the risks we take. Success is often the result of choices we made a long time ago, and which set us up for life.
This is certainly the case for Musk. He is the world’s richest man because he gambled on the success of two businesses: investing early on in Tesla and founding SpaceX. These two shots paid off. But the odds of that happening are incredibly small. In our game metaphor, this is like hitting the lottery jackpot twice, or getting to round 100 in two Russian roulette games. The odds of that happening are vanishingly small. But once you’ve made it that far, it’s tempting to believe it wasn’t luck at all — that you were just better than everyone else.
Musk, for his part, has not been so successful in politics. And that is in large part because of a cognitive error that successful people are especially prone to — the fallacy of composition. This is the mistake of thinking that something that is true for me and my world is true for everybody. Musk made the mistake of thinking that what worked at Tesla and Space X would work in politics. He assumed that his outstanding success in this world, and his disregard for convention, would be transferable to politics. But what made him excel at business has made him clumsy, even self-destructive in politics.
He’s not unusual to think like this. I know several successful investment bankers and business consultants who were plucked from obscurity to become the finance ministers of their countries. They were, the story goes, good at numbers. But they had only ever known Goldman Sachs or McKinsey, and the world of politics functions according to very different rules from the boardroom. Almost all of them failed because their skills didn’t translate to politics. They were not stupid, but they were ignorant.
Musk’s DOGE experience is the perfect example of this. If you want to save money in a large company, it’s pretty straightforward: you start with cutting waste. But fixing a bureaucracy is different. You do not start with what you see, but with the laws and regulations that are the root cause of the waste. These aren’t immediately obvious. It takes time and requires patience and attention and a deep knowledge of how these things glue up the system. These are things that Musk doesn’t have in abundance.
“If you want to save money in a large company, it’s pretty straightforward. But fixing a bureaucracy is different.”
Politics and business don’t only look at waste differently, they see risk differently too. Bankruptcy is the extinction event you risk in finance, but it happens rarely. In politics, however, extinction events occur all the time: just look at Liz Truss. I do think she was unlucky: she made a grave error at the wrong time. But it is much harder to hedge risk in politics than in business or finance. Political risk is harder to hedge, harder to model, and almost impossible to bounce back from. Musk is learning this the hard way. He took a gamble by investing heavily in Trump’s win, and then burning bridges with the administration: he is left with two companies whose fortunes are heavily intertwined with regulation that Trump ultimately controls. Trump has the gun to Musk’s head.
Originally, Trump was the same as Musk. He was a businessman who had never really dabbled in politics. He thought money talked. As a result, he has been prone to fallacy-of-composition type errors: he, too, thought he could run the administration like a business. But he learnt — believe it or not — that he had to be more cautious. He knows it’s not all about luck. He knows that he is the elected CEO of a democracy, not the dictator for life in the boardroom. Yet Musk is still thinking like a business dictator whose companies will do exactly what he wants. And unlike Trump, he will not get a second term.
There is also a more subtle difference at play that one billionaire now understands and the other does not. In business, money rules. But in politics, money only matters. Just because you’re rich doesn’t mean you can remake politics according to whim; you can’t buy votes. You may be, like Musk, one of the true creatives in our economic life: you can succeed in business even if 51% of the population absolutely hates you. But to succeed in politics, you need to build coalitions of voters, or parties, that constitute a majority.
Musk had the good chance — and terrible fortune — to be the owner of a large social media platform at just the right time: it gave him the power to enter politics when the odds were heavily stacked against him. But it was also part of his downfall. In politics, you have to be prepared for people to disagree with when you try to get anything material done. Opposition leaders will challenge you and tell different stories. A debate in parliament couldn’t be more different from a trip down the X hole, where you can spend an entire day having discussions with people who reinforce your views. Musk, rarely away from his smartphone, believed what it told him.
This echo chamber effect is particularly pernicious in our current moment. It has left leaders in the dark as to what voters really think. Spend too much time talking to your own people, and reality disappears from view. We saw it only the other week during the Polish presidential elections. The supporters of the losing candidate, Rafal Trzaskowski, the liberal mayor of Warsaw, were absolutely convinced that their man was going to win — even though the polls were too close to call. We saw it, too, during the Trump-Harris race last year. The liberals keep on talking to themselves and massively misjudging the strength of their opponents, along the way disregarding the will of the people. The same also happened in the run-up to the Brexit referendum in 2016.
Today, X and Truth Social, Musk’s and Trump’s media platforms, are the Right-wing counterparts to the Left-leaning metropolitan newspapers. And when the inhabitants of each are surprised by a result they didn’t expect, they don’t accept the result — they look for someone to blame. So the Russians get fingered. Today, the delusions on each side are being amplified. And such is the disconnect that, from the talk in his little echo chamber, Musk is now convinced he can use his money to create a new political party at the centre of US politics. He should probably look at what is happening to Emmanuel Macron and his party, perhaps the most daring political experiment of radical centrism we have seen in an advanced Western country. There’s plenty of money, and there’s no support. It has failed to appeal to voters. Trump knows this. He is the antithesis of all centrist politics. He knows how to disrupt, but he also has a keener understanding of how politics works now: unlike Musk, who got lucky, but thought that luck was enough.
Here is my prediction about Musk. He will continue to make reckless bets unshaken in the belief that he can’t fail. In my Russian roulette example, we can expect only one person to be alive by round 107. That person will be Trump.
