In an interview earlier this year with Joe Rogan, Elon Musk quipped that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” He seemed to blame it, in part, for the decline of America’s cultural vitality. He said he believed in empathy but cast it as being “weaponized” by the woke.
For all his derision of empathy, Mr. Musk is quite good at employing it for his own needs. In fact, I’d argue he’s one of the most effective empathic operators in modern business and public life.
Though we often think of empathy as synonymous with kindness, that isn’t entirely accurate. Empathy is not the same as compassion. At its core, empathy is the ability to understand others’ perspectives — what they feel, what they think, what they fear, what they want. That understanding can be wielded in service of a greater good. Or it can be exploited, as Mr. Musk himself was arguing.
In psychological terms, empathy is not a singular skill — it comes in different forms. As researchers have shown, affective empathy (the ability to feel what others feel) is distinct from cognitive empathy (the ability to understand what others feel). Many people have both. Others, like narcissists and sociopaths, often possess only the latter, if they have empathy at all. And this is where things can get dangerous.
When I wrote my book, “Applied Empathy,” several years ago, I included Mr. Musk on a list of entrepreneurs who had leveraged their cultural understanding to create compelling businesses. He empathized with society’s collective craving for a future-forward vision and offered rockets (SpaceX) and self-driving cars (Tesla) as answers. Because these businesses responded to our needs, we wanted to come along for the ride. That’s empathy in action.
What I didn’t account for back then — and what we’re reckoning with now — is what happens when an understanding of human behavior is not used to uplift or support but to provoke or destabilize.
Across tech, media and politics, we’re witnessing a rise in leaders who reject empathy rhetorically while using it tactically. They discredit this vital skill as weakness, yet fine-tune their messaging to trigger precisely the reactions they need from investors, voters and followers. We’ve heard the ideological dog whistles. We’ve witnessed the fear-mongering and overreach shrouded in the guise of protecting democracy.
President Trump has long derided empathy as naïve, casting strength as synonymous with domination, suggesting that to care is to lose — and to control is to win.
But this perspective is not only ethically bankrupt, it’s also deeply impractical for leadership, particularly in business. A 2021 study found that employees who report having managers with empathic leadership skills are more likely to be innovative, engaged and resilient. According to one recent survey, toxic workplace culture, not compensation, is the leading reason for employee turnover. Empathy, applied with ethical integrity, is a driver of performance, not a drag on it.
Empathy that connects, that builds, that heals requires a code of ethics. It requires restraint. It requires trust. It asks the empathizer not just to understand others but also to honor what that understanding unlocks. When empathy becomes unmoored from ethics, it becomes coercion with a smile.
We see this now with artificial intelligence, where systems are increasingly trained to simulate empathic responses. Your chatbot apologizes for your frustration, your virtual assistant offers saccharine encouragement, your mental health app listens without judgment. But none of these systems feel anything. They just know what to say. We’re entering a world where “empathetic” algorithms outperform our managers at recognizing distress but lack a moral compass to decide what to do with it. And if we aren’t careful, we’ll soon mistake performance for presence. In doing so, we outsource not just emotional labor but our emotional responsibility to one another.
Empathy without accountability is not just hollow, it’s deceptive. It lulls people into false security. And it fractures the very trust it pretends to build.
And yet, we can’t write off empathy. That’s precisely what the provocateurs want. They want to reframe care as weakness, dignity as naïveté and trust as a liability. Let’s not take the bait.
If we want better leadership in business, politics and technology, we need to reclaim empathy as a responsibility. We need to teach it not just as a soft skill but as a disciplined practice, bound by ethics and rooted in our shared humanity. We must hold leaders accountable not only for what they say but also for how — and why — they seek to understand us.
So, yes, Mr. Musk is an empath. Just not the kind we need.
Michael Ventura is an author, speaker and adviser on empathic leadership to corporations, universities and institutional clients around the world. He is the author of “Applied Empathy: The New Language of Leadership.”
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