and the reason is insane…

There's something fascinating about watching powerful men lose their minds in public, and it's rarely about what they claim it's about. The official reason is always something that sounds principled, something about values or vision or protecting the future. But the actual reason, the one you can't see, is usually uglier and more personal.

They're threatened by someone they can't intimidate, can't buy, and who doesn't give a shit what they think. When that person happens to be a woman doing work that directly challenges their vision of how the world should work, the mask comes off fast. Elon Musk's attacks on Amanda Askell over the past few weeks are a perfect example.

Male power melts down facing independent women

Musk has built an empire on the idea that he alone should control the future. He owns a platform that controls how hundreds of millions of people talk to each other and has spent years acting like he's the one person who should get to decide how AI shapes humanity.

So when the Wall Street Journal ran a profile of Amanda Askell — the philosopher Anthropic hired to give Claude, their AI chatbot, a genuine moral framework, and the headline said "Meet the One Woman Anthropic Trusts to Teach AI Morals," Musk didn't ignore it. He couldn't.

His response was to post: "Those without children lack a stake in the future." Not an argument about her philosophy or her approach to AI ethics, just a pathetic attempt to disqualify her because apparently being a sperm donor eleven times makes you more qualified to build AI than someone who's spent years studying ethics.

Amanda responded by saying she cares about people thriving even when they're not related to her — that caring about strangers is itself a form of having a stake in the future. Musk told her she couldn't grasp his point until she had children, comparing it to someone who's never loved trying to understand love.

Elon musk attacks anyone he cannot dominate

The audacity of that coming from him specifically is almost impressive, because the man who said it has a daughter who legally changed her name to sever all ties with him. Vivian Wilson, his transgender daughter, legally petitioned in 2022 specifically stating she no longer lives with or wishes to be related to her biological father in any way, shape or form.

She has publicly called him a "pathetic man-child" and described him as absent, cruel, and incapable of seeing past his own ego when she came out as trans. This is the man telling a philosopher she doesn't understand love because she hasn't had children.

Men like Musk lose their minds over this one specific thing, and it's not that women are in charge of important things now. It's that women are in charge and doing it without needing men to approve of them first. For generations, successful women in male-dominated fields had to play a specific game — be competent but not too competent, smart but not smarter than the men around them, confident but still deferential enough to keep male egos intact.

Amanda Askell doesn't play that game. She's a philosopher shaping how one of the most important AI systems in the world thinks about ethics, and she's doing it on her own terms without apologizing for it or catering to insecure men. That's what Musk can't stand. It's not her work itself that bothers him, it's that she's doing work that matters and she doesn't seem to give a damn what he thinks about it.

His convictions follow money not morals

This isn't just about one philosopher at one AI company getting under his skin. It's about what she represents and what that says about the version of himself Musk has been selling to the world for years. He needs people to believe he's guided by principles, that when he talks about the future of AI or humanity or whatever else, he's coming from a place of genuine conviction.

But anyone paying attention to how his beliefs change depending on what's profitable or popular can see through that pretty quickly. His own daughter certainly has.

Just look at the track record. He was a liberal when Silicon Valley liberalism was the cool thing to be. He was openly pro-LGBTQ+ when he needed support from those communities. He talked endlessly about the environment when Tesla was collecting government subsidies and EV tax credits.

Then he realized where the real power was, he found a new audience in right-wing culture war politics, and suddenly he's using his platform to attack trans people, cutting the very government programs that made his companies rich, and using the word "woke" like it's the worst thing a person can be.

When your product sucks you attack the competition

His own daughter has said his liberal past was never real — that it was always a marketing scheme. And if you look at the pattern, it's hard to argue with her. He doesn't hold beliefs. He holds positions that are useful to him at a given moment, and he drops them the second they stop being useful. He now lectures the world about the importance of fatherhood and children as the measure of whether someone cares about the future.

The real issue is much simpler: his AI company is getting destroyed in the market by Anthropic and Open AI, and he can't handle it. Anthropic just raised billions at a valuation that put them ahead of almost everyone else, and their approach — hiring people like Amanda Askell to build ethical guardrails into AI is working better than his "move fast and fuck the consequences" philosophy.

So he calls OpenAI "ClosedAI" and Anthropic "Misanthropic" like a middle schooler making up nicknames for kids he's jealous of. He screams about hypocrisy while his own belief system changes every time there's profit in it. Musk wants to control AI development, but the companies actually succeeding are the ones building thoughtfully with ethicists involved, and watching that happen is probably the most humiliating thing he's experienced in years.

To get notified when I publish, follow Forward Press. If you found this article useful, you may also like:

For more stories about women defying powerful men, shaping the future on their own terms, and standing up in male-dominated fields like AI, follow Fourth Wave. Have you got a story or poem that focuses on women or other targeted groups? Submit to the Wave!