Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and member of the “PayPal Mafia,” has shared his verdict on Elon Musk’s “supernova burnout” personality on this week’s episode of The Daily Beast Podcast.
Having worked together at PayPal and OpenAI, Hoffman described Musk as a modern-day Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—a volatile provocateur with radical confidence in both his global achievements and less-than-tasteful behavior.
On the “Jekyll” side, Hoffman praised Musk’s visionary mindset, his unshakable belief in “seeing the future with absolute clarity,” and his success in transforming industries like space, satellites, and electric vehicles.
However, Musk’s unchecked confidence has a darker “Mr. Hyde” type edge. He condemned Musk’s dissatisfaction with OpenAI, accusing him of making “unbased, completely slanderous assertions” against CEO Sam Altman and himself, seemingly out of frustration that the company succeeded without him.
He called Musk’s actions—like amplifying false conspiracy theories about the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul—“immoral and irresponsible,” describing them as a rallying cry for dangerous individuals.
It is a duality that Musk has touched on in the past. As the billionaire said on SNL, “To anyone I’ve offended, I just want to say: I re-invented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you also think I was gonna be a chill, normal dude?”
Despite this, Hoffman remains “fundamentally optimistic” about technology, comparing AI’s transformative potential to the printing press, which reshaped how we think and remember.
In his new book Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right With Our AI Future, Hoffman contemplates this looming “existential reckoning.”
“You don’t need a great memory now,” he notes. “You just need to know where to find things.” Like Musk, the future feels inevitable—but so does the fallout.
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