“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit,” Musk said. “There it’s they’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.”
-Elon Musk, Feb 28, 2025

“In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trials 1945-1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”
-Captain G. M. Gilbert, the Army psychologist assigned to watching the defendants at the Nuremberg trials

https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/05/politics/elon-musk-rogan-interview-empathy-doge/index.html

Elon Musk wants to save Western civilization from empathy

Americans are still in the dark about the scope and scale of what Elon Musk is doing with DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, which is working to drastically shrink the size of government by aiming to cut $1 trillion or more in government spending.

CNN
@nazgul
Is Musk a sociopath or a psychopath?

@Christo_459 @nazgul Basically, they're the same thing. "Sociopath" is the term psychologists invented as "psychopath" had entered common use and the meaning was being skewed by films and fiction, so they wanted a term for the medical use that psychopath started as.

(As explained by my neuropsychology or clinical psychology lecturer some 30 years ago.)

I don't know if Musk is clinically a sociopath or just a really nasty, self centred guy.