I've been seeing this interview with John C Reilly going viral and was touched by it myself. Fuck yea, empathy matters so much! Let's love and care for our fellow man. But it felt a little too clean — left good, empathetic, right bad, uncaring — so I had to look into what Elon actually said about empathy.
What I found was real points about how human empathy can be exploited by bad actors. I still disagree with a lot of Elon's conclusions about what would cause great good in the world. But what I didn't see was Elon saying ignore empathy, fight for your own success. His actual argument is more like: there is a lot of power in looking at the person standing right in front of you, and that can be distracting from missions that serve the common good.
To be clear, that's me steelmanning his harsher framing that empathy is a bug being actively exploited. But even that version is more worth examining than dismissing.
Who/What is shaping our decisions in any given moment?