I used the Dark Triad to look at Macron. The most common reply was: "Do Elon next. Richest man on earth, runs half a dozen companies, fights with everyone online. He must be the ultimate Dark Triad case."
I think he's close to the opposite. And the contrast teaches something important.
Quick reminder of the three traits. Narcissism: grandiosity, need for admiration, a fragile relationship to being wrong. Machiavellianism: strategic manipulation of people, long-term calculation, concealment. Psychopathy: low empathy, emotional coldness, indifference to the harm you cause. Not diagnoses, dimensions. What matters is how far you go, and in what combination.
Let's start with the one people will throw at me first: narcissism.
Elon obviously scores high on grandiosity. Nobody decides to make humanity multiplanetary with a modest ego. But grandiosity isn't the core of narcissism. The core is how you handle being wrong.
For Macron, being wrong is an injury. So the error gets defended, explained away, blamed on others.
Elon blows up rockets in public. On livestream. And his teams celebrate, because every explosion is data. He posts memes about himself, laughs at his own failures, says absurd things and gets mocked by millions, and keeps going. He doesn't take himself seriously. He takes the mission seriously.
That's the difference. A narcissist protects his image at the expense of reality. Elon sacrifices his image constantly in service of a goal outside himself. His ego is attached to the mission, not to the mirror.
Machiavellianism is where he's lowest of all.
A true Machiavellian calculates. He plays the long game with people, hides his intentions, builds alliances he plans to betray. Elon does the opposite. He thinks out loud, in public, in real time. He reacts. He says what he thinks even when it costs him advertisers, governments, or half his audience. A manipulator never shows his hand. Elon shows his hand dozens of times a day.
His strategic intelligence is real, but it’s pointed at physics, not at people. He reasons from first principles about rockets, batteries, and manufacturing. With humans, he doesn’t play chess. He defaults to trust.
The proof: he helped found and fund OpenAI as a nonprofit meant to keep AI open and safe. He trusted the people he built it with. Then he watched it turn into one of the most valuable for-profit companies on the planet. A good Machiavellian doesn't get played like that. He'd have locked it down from day one. Elon trusted, because that's not how he thinks.
Now psychopathy, and this is the most misunderstood part.
When Elon took over Twitter and cut most of the staff, people called it cold, even cruel. But there's a difference between callousness and rationality.
Being unable to fire someone who isn't doing the job isn't kindness. It's emotion in the wrong place. And someone always pays for it: the colleagues who carry the extra weight, the company that slowly dies, the people who lose their jobs later when everything collapses. It's the same pattern I described about progressives who can't punish: misplaced compassion is paid for by the innocent.
Elon puts emotion in the right place. Cold on individual decisions, burning hot on the big picture. And the big picture is the most pro-human mission you can imagine: make life multiplanetary, preserve consciousness, worry out loud about birth rates and the long-term survival of the species.
A psychopath doesn't lose sleep over what happens to humanity in five hundred years. Elon talks about little else.
So put the two side by side.
Both are very intelligent. But Macron's intelligence is verbal: building coherent systems and arguing for them. Elon's is physical: testing ideas against reality until they break.
Macron lives in a world without feedback. Nobody ever sends the State the bill.
Elon lives inside the harshest feedback loop there is. A rocket reaches orbit or it doesn't. A car works or it doesn't. Physics doesn't care about your narrative.
And here's my theory on all this.
When you don't max out these traits, the universe pays you back.
The Dark Triad is essentially a toolkit for power games. Manipulating, protecting your image, calculating alliances, crushing rivals. All of that is a game between humans, and almost always zero-sum. It's pure social construction. Every hour spent there is an hour stolen from reality.
People who don't play that game are free. Their energy goes into the problem itself. They can be wrong in public without collapsing. They can trust, get burned, and move on. They stay decorrelated from status games, and that's exactly where creativity comes from. Power games redistribute what exists. Building creates what didn't.
The Dark Triad can get you to the top of a system. It will never make a rocket land.
So be Elon Musks. Not Emmanuel Macrons.
https://x.com/brivael/status/2112279232399184275?s=20
I love human psychology. And there's one concept I keep coming back to when I try to understand people in power: the Dark Triad.
Yesterday I argued that Macron isn't cynical, that he sincerely believes in a worldview built on false axioms. A lot of you replied: "Sincere? Come on." Fair challenge. So let me go one level deeper, because I think both things are true at once, and the Dark Triad explains how.
First, what it is.
The Dark Triad was described by psychologists Delroy Paulhus and Kevin Williams in 2002. It groups three personality traits that overlap but are distinct. Important point: these are not diagnoses. They're dimensions. Everyone sits somewhere on each spectrum. What matters is how far along you are, and in what combination.
The first is narcissism. Grandiosity, a sense of being exceptional, a deep need for admiration, and above all a fragile relationship to being wrong. For a narcissist, admitting a major mistake isn't an intellectual update. It's an injury to the self.
The second is Machiavellianism. Strategic thinking applied to people. Long-term planning, reading others to use them, a willingness to do whatever the objective requires. The Machiavellian is patient, calculating, and treats relationships as moves on a board.
The third is psychopathy, in its subclinical form. Low empathy, emotional coldness, a certain detachment from the consequences your actions have on others. Not the serial killer from the movies. More the person who can make decisions that hurt thousands of people and sleep perfectly well.
Researchers have found these traits overrepresented in positions of power. Which makes sense: the path to the top often rewards exactly the qualities that make someone harder to live with.
Now let's look at Macron through this lens. Not a diagnosis, nobody can give one from the outside. Just his public behavior, measured against the three dimensions.
Narcissism is the easiest to see. Before he was even elected, he explained that the presidency should be "jupiterian," a president above the fray, like the king of the gods. He built a movement from scratch with his own initials. He speaks in long monologues, in a register of someone explaining things to people who haven't quite understood yet.
Machiavellianism shows up in the strategy. In 2017 he walked into a political system dominated by two parties and dismantled both of them in a matter of months. "At the same time" is not just a slogan, it's a method: occupy every position so nobody can occupy any. The 2024 dissolution of the National Assembly was a pure chess move, taken almost alone, with consequences the whole country is still living with.
The third dimension is the one I'd be most careful with. But there's a pattern in his words. "People who are nothing." "I cross the street and I find you a job." "We spend a crazy amount of money on welfare." "Gauls resistant to change." "I really want to piss off the unvaccinated." Each one, taken alone, is a slip. Together, they draw a relationship to ordinary people that is distant, abstract, sometimes contemptuous. People as variables in a model, not as lives.
Now here's where it connects to yesterday's thesis.
The Dark Triad doesn't contradict sincerity. It locks it in place.
Remember the gear spinning in a vacuum, the flawless reasoning built on false axioms. Why doesn't he ever stop and say "I was wrong"? Because for a high narcissist, that sentence is almost unbearable. Admitting the axioms are false would mean admitting the last fifteen years were a mistake. So the dissonance doesn't get resolved. It gets defended.
Machiavellianism then does the rest. Sincere about the ends, ruthless about the means. You can genuinely believe you're saving the country and still treat every institution, every ally, every election as a tool.
And the emotional distance makes the cost invisible. When reality hurts people, a more empathetic person would feel it and start doubting. When you see society from far above, the pain stays abstract. It doesn't reach you. It doesn't correct you.
The last ingredient is intelligence. Macron is clearly very intelligent, but it's a specific kind: verbal, academic, brilliant at building coherent systems and at arguing for them. Much less at testing them against reality. And research on motivated reasoning points to something counterintuitive: intelligence doesn't protect you from self-deception. Often it makes you better at it. The smarter you are, the more convincing the justifications you build for what you already believe.
Put it all together: a strong verbal intelligence, high narcissism, strategic coldness, and an emotional distance from consequences. You get someone who can't see that he's wrong, who has every tool to stay in power anyway, and who doesn't feel the cost of his mistakes.
That's not a villain. It's something more dangerous: a brilliant mind sealed off from feedback, with no internal mechanism that would ever force it to change course.
The real question isn't whether Macron is good or bad. It's how a system ends up putting this exact profile at the top, and why it keeps doing it.
