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Alchemy For LifeGet back Time Energy and Resources in your life. Experimental Psychology. Author: Author Mark Bradford
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What behavioral mapping reveals about Elon Musk
Saturday, 14 March, 2026
Disclaimer: this episode is based on my proprietary behavior mapping system. This system is used in conjunction with a discovery conversation I have with an individual. In the case of mapping public figures this is purely an independent analysis and opinion based on publicly available research. See citations below article. Transcript: You’re probably like me in that you’re a very visual person. (see below!) Well, hey there. Welcome back. Let’s talk Elon Musk. But before we do that, let’s talk about behavioral mapping and my book BeCAUSE!. Freud’s Pleasure Principle: Monsters and Unicorns Okay, wait. We have to back up from that and we have to talk about Freud’s pleasure principle. If you are an old fan of this show, you’ve probably heard me say this a bunch of times, but let’s sum it up really quickly. Freud’s pleasure principle is based on the fact that we are binary individuals. We seek pleasure, we avoid pain. Everything and anything we do is broken down into those things. I’ve had a number of episodes on this and the book BeCAUSE! is based on this, but I give the seeking pleasure and the avoiding pain a face. The seeking pleasure is a unicorn and the avoiding pain is a monster. They are neither good nor bad. They are not devils and angels. They simply are. Visualizing Behavior: My New Mapping Software After the book BeCAUSE! came out, I ended up developing patent pending behavioral mapping software. It’s software that allows me to actually map this stuff out. And you’re probably like me in that you’re a very visual person. This episode might be a little bit longer than my self-imposed 10-minute limit, so please bear with me. Paradoxically, when I talk about Elon Musk, I actually want you to not be thinking of him, but to be thinking of you. Every episode of this podcast starts out as an article on Alchemy for Life. This one is no different, and you’ll be able to see the visual mapping on the site if you’d like. You can follow along on there or if you’re listening in your car, you can just visualize based on what I’m telling you. Deconstructing Elon Musk: The Childhood Trauma Most people are familiar with Elon Musk. He’s a rather polarizing person. He’s someone who won’t stop talking about going to Mars and now the moon. He’s someone who created an empire. He owns Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, now X, the Boring Company, and X AI. He’s had some romances. He’s currently not married and he has a lot of children. What most people don’t know is what I actually found out in the map showing why all of this is happening. And again, because audio is literally linear, meaning you talk in a straight line, you stop it. You can’t go into branches and things like that. It’s a little harder in audio to tell you what something on a screen can tell you, but I’ll do the best I can. When he was young, the family dog bit him. It was actually a pretty vicious bite, but he was terrified that the dog was going to be put down. He needed medical attention, but he kept refusing it because he said, “You need to promise you’re not going to put the dog down.” Unfortunately, they put the dog down. And this was a very traumatic thing. And I can imagine for myself, and I’m sure you’re thinking about this, too, that’s a very traumatic thing to have to go through. You blame yourself. You think, well, maybe there’s something I could have done to not have the dog bite me. It’s horrible, horrible feeling. And it’s a feeling of losing something and someone that’s really important to you. You feel like you’re literally responsible for the death of a living creature. and that you have no control. So imagine that. It puts a pretty strong pleasure center. It puts a pretty strong unicorn in place that says, “Hey, follow me and you’ll have more control. You want more control.” Yes, I want more control. As with a lot of things, sometimes you also have the opposite in place. You have a monster that says, “It really feels bad to lose control.” And I’m sure you can understand that. I’m sure there are times in your life when you’ve lost control for some reason and you vowed to never lose that control again. Whether you were placed in a very unfortunate position due to your job or relationship or or even in your childhood The Teenage Existential Crisis when he was a teenager and we all remember just how wonderful and clear thinking we were as teenagers. He read both Shopenhau and Nietzsche. And I’ll tell you that Nichi is actually on my wall among five other people. But it’s not exactly something you would read out loud at like a children’s birthday party. So for him, he deeply regretted reading that stuff because it created in him an existential crisis. And imagine that’s essentially what being a teenager is, is having an existential crisis. You you question life. you’re halfway between being an adult and being a child. So reading that created in him a monster of avoiding the feeling of having existential dread and personal meaninglessness. We all want purpose in our life. Imagine removing that as a teenager. Imagine questioning all of that and saying, “Oh my god, this feels terrible. I I I can’t experience this.” So, conversely, it creates the unicorn that makes it feel really good when you feel purpose and meaning. It’s the same one most of us would have. The Scars of Bullying and Humiliation When he was in school, he was severely bullied and beaten basically to the point of not being recognizable. Some of us were bullied, maybe all of us were bullied. And it tends to shape us sometimes in bad ways and sometimes in good ways. But to compound this, when he came home to his father, his father blamed him for this and made him stand for 2 hours while he bered him and called him a loser. How would you respond to that? How would you psychologically speaking respond to that so that it would never happen to you again? You would have a monster that would be very strong in making sure you avoid humiliation and being vulnerable. And from the bullying, obviously you would have a monster that would say, “I’m never going to be bullied again. Never.” This is probably the first time you’re hearing about a lot of this stuff. Probably what you tend to hear about Elon Musk is his purchase or he makes a decision that you think is chaotic or egotistical. you’ve probably never heard any of this other stuff unless you have read his bio or multiple bios and things like that. Connecting the Trauma to the Billionaire’s Actions So, now that you know the monsters and unicorns that he has in place, what actions did these cause? Well, let’s go through them. If you’re trying to avoid the pain of bullying and the monster keeps getting in the way and saying, “You’re going to be bullied. Don’t do that.” Wouldn’t you be a bit combative on social media? Wouldn’t you make sure that in an interview you’re not going to be bullied? Wouldn’t you make sure that when you are dealing with the feds or other court systems or other CEOs that you would tend not to back down? In fact, maybe even not back down even when it’s to your detriment. If you’re avoiding the pain and fear of scarcity because of what happened with your dog and that you had no control over that, and you’re avoiding the pain of humiliation and especially vulnerability and bullying because of the place you’re in as someone who is almost a trillionaire, would it not affect your approach on forming a family? If you are married and have children, you are in a position of vulnerability. You have more vulnerability right now than someone who, let’s say, doesn’t have children or isn’t married. If you’re in a loving relationship, that’s part for the course. It comes with the territory. It’s something you welcome. But if you combine a fear of scarcity and you’ve developed a sort of pleasure for having absolute sovereignty and control of any and all outcomes and you have a terrible monster that makes it feel horrible. If you are losing control, you would be in a unique position to want to perpetuate the human race, but not in a traditional way that causes vulnerability. which is why he has 14 children across four different women and he is presently not married to any of them. This monster for avoiding pain and the fear of scarcity, working together with this pleasure of having absolute sovereignty and control and this extremely strong unicorn pulling him towards the feeling of purpose and meaning would obviously lead him to the creation of Space X so that he could continue to make the race multilanetary. Oh, and that monster telling him that scarcity feels bad, he helps as well. And guess who’s also looking over his shoulder? The monster that’s avoiding him having the feeling of existential dread and personal meaninglessness. You’re definitely listening to that monster if you are trying to perpetuate the human race on another planet. If you are avoiding losing control and you certainly enjoy the absolute sovereignty of being able to change the outcome and you enjoy the feeling of purpose and meaning and you’re terrified of having existential dread and personal meaninglessness, would you not purchase the most well-known social media platform in your attempt, at least according to you, to save free speech? Mapping Your Own Monsters and Unicorns Whether you’re a fan or not of Elon, whether you’re completely neutral or not, you can’t help but empathize with some of the things I’ve described. And like I said, you’re more likely to think of you than of him in these situations. What would you do? What have you experienced? What emotional turmoil have you gone through? What horrible things have you gone through in your childhood, in your teens, and even in your adult life that have shaped who you are? Those things just don’t go away. They stay with you for life. Your monsters and unicorns sort of show up and they take residence in your brain. If it sounded a little bit like I was all over the map, well, quite literally, I was. I worked through the visual map that I’m looking at right now and it’s the same one you might be looking at or that you will look at after the podcast. I found the research on this fascinating and I did find that things logically led to other things. It the pattern, the map, it all just sort of unveiled itself to me based on what I have created and what I have established. I didn’t run into any dead ends. I didn’t find something that contradicted something else. It all actually made sense. And that’s what led to the writing of BeCAUSE!—it all just continued to make sense and make sense and make sense and sometimes in an unnerving way. Look, I understand we don’t want to be deconstructed. We we we want to feel whole and sometimes thinking about monsters and unicorns and little programmatic psychological building blocks can sometimes be a little bit unnerving, but it can also be revealing. And the beauty of this is that it’s neither good nor bad. Sure, you can have a monster in place that’s doing something that’s really messing up your life, but that same monster might also be helping you in another aspect of your life. It’s about you recognizing it and not allowing it to have the control over your life that you don’t want. And ultimately, you stay in the driver’s seat. Conclusion So, I hope you enjoyed this. I did. I certainly enjoyed mapping all this out and doing the research. In fact, I did this for two other people. It made me reflect on my own monsters and unicorns, and I hope it did the same for you. If you’re indeed curious, feel free to pick up a copy of BeCAUSE!. And if you’re curious about your own map, let me know. The behavioral mapping done, purely as an independent analysis and opinion based on publicly available research. Episode Sources & Citations: The Childhood Bullying & His Father’s Reaction: * Source:Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson (Published September 2023). Context: Isaacson’s authorized biography details the specific incident where Musk was beaten so severely by bullies he was hospitalized for four days. Upon returning home, his father, Errol Musk, made him stand in front of him for two hours, called him a “loser,” and sided with the boy who attacked him. The Teenage Existential Crisis (Schopenhauer and Nietzsche): Source: Multiple interviews, including a notable deep-dive interview detailed in CleanTechnica (2018) and referenced in Isaacson’s biography. Context: Musk has publicly stated multiple times, “We happened to have some books by Nietzsche and Schopenhauer in the house, which you should not read at age 14. It is bad, it’s really negative.” He credits this period of reading with triggering a severe teenage existential crisis, leading to his lifelong obsession with finding “the meaning of life” and “understanding the right questions to ask” (which birthed the Unicorn of seeking purpose). The Dog Bite Trauma: Source: Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson (2023). Context: The biography details the incident where a young Elon was viciously bitten by a dog. He refused medical treatment until he was promised the dog wouldn’t be put down. The adults broke the promise and put the dog down anyway, cementing his early trauma regarding powerlessness, scarcity, and broken trust. Family Structure (14 Children / 4 Women): Source: Forbes Billionaires Profile (Updated March 2026). Context: Forbes officially verifies that Musk, driven by his vocal fears of population collapse, has fathered 14 children with four different women (including multiple sets of twins and triplets) and is currently not married.
