Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

Elon Musk. Elon Musk. Elon Musk. The richest person on the planet. The first trillionaire in human history.

Elon Musk is responsible for the deaths of anywhere from hundreds of thousands of people to millions of them.

Musk gets involved with Doge.

The conservative estimates that say the cuts to USAID should amount to something like 500,000 excess deaths this year.

They have cut 80, 90% of the life-saving programming going on overseas.

It is a holocaust of starvation and suffering and death.

Musk has a real talent for burying all of his most repulsive scandals by creating new ones. So much of what Musk deals with is like self-inflicted.

This guy who is famously good at thinking from first principles now falls for like conspiracy theories and anti-Semitism.

One of the things I love about reading the Stoics or the ancients is how they were always taking the lives of great men and women and putting them up for review.

You hear Seneca talking about Cato, what he did well and where he fell short.

You see Plutarch talking about Alexander the Great and Demosthenes and Caesar.

They would look at the people who moved history, who changed the world, and look at what they did well,

and look at where they fell short. Look at their virtues and their vices, right? And they did this not so much to judge,

not to feel superior, but in fact, to see, to discuss, to make clear what a good life and a bad life looked like. I thought it would

be worth maybe doing that with someone who's actually my neighbor in Bastrop. I'm talking about

someone maybe some of you work for or admire. Talking about Elon Musk, who is decamped to Bastrop where

I live. And there's no question Elon Musk is a great man in that sense, right? He has

dented the universe. He is a modern figure straight out of the pages of Plutarch. But as Plutarch

would remind us, great and good, very different things, that it's possible to be quite successful

and not virtuous, possible to be quite virtuous and not successful. Like I would argue looking at Elon Musk, it's very clear that all the money in the world can't buy virtue, clearly.

But I thought we could look, because again, the lives of the greats, of the big figures, the ones we know about,

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