— and the part he gets right. On the difference between empathy for humanity in the abstract, and empathy for the person in the room.
When I introduced the Needs Compass on LinkedIn, I asked where empathy lives within it. The answer: the entire compass is a tool for empathy — and empathy is what we gain when we learn to navigate with it.
Every need on the compass is a way of seeing what a human being is reaching for. Turn it toward the person across from you and you begin to see them — not their position, but the need they are yearning to meet. Turn it toward yourself and you see your own internal needs with the same clarity. So, the compass moves in two directions at once: outward to the other, inward to the self. Wisdom, in my experience, is the life-long practice of learning to navigate both.
Most of us start adulthood by leaning outward. Early in our careers we attune to others, learn to read the room, find our place in the group, and meet our need to belong. Then, as we grow into leadership, we often turn inward toward personal conviction: we find a mission, a vision, a sense of the work that is ours to do — and a great deal of our energy springs from that core.
That turn inward is necessary, and it carries a cost. We are not the only ones with a vision, and visions collide. A healthy system can absorb the friction — and this dynamic between people who have each found their own north, yet hold their egos lightly, is a powerful generative force. But the same drive that powers a mission can narrow our vision, until people who can help us start to look like obstacles.
There may be no clearer public case study of this phenomenon than Elon Musk.
Anyone who has been gripped by a mission knows the strange thing it does to your vision: the bigger the cause, the smaller the people. In an interview on Joe Rogan's podcast, Musk gave that pattern public expression. He called empathy “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization” and spoke of “civilizational suicidal empathy,” a phrase he borrowed from the psychologist Gad Saad. The setting was a debate about immigration, which I won't relitigate here. What holds my attention is what he said alongside it: you should care about people, but your empathy belongs to civilization as a whole — and not in a way that risks its survival.
Viewed through the lens of the needs compass, it reveals exactly where he stands. Empathy for the abstract whole; suspicion of empathy for the concrete individual.
That is not the absence of empathy. It is empathy that has travelled all the way to one pole and abandoned the other.
He gets credit for being half-right. Empathy can be exploited. Empathy without discernment — disconnected from our own needs and our own ground — can be turned into a lever others use to move us, in ways that do not serve us. But that is not a flaw in empathy. It is a flaw in empathy that has lost its roots. The repair is not to care less; it is to care in a way that keeps us connected to ourselves. Marshall Rosenberg spent a career insisting on exactly this: that empathy must flow toward the self as surely as it flows toward the other.
There is a deeper irony in how Musk frames it. He warns against being “programmed like a robot” by your own compassion — yet the cool, system-optimizing, everything-is-a-problem-to-be-solved approach he prizes is another mechanical mode of mind. The psychiatrist and neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist has written extensively on this phenomenon: a way of attending to the world that grasps, abstracts, and manipulates — brilliant with systems and categories, but blind to the unique person who cannot be reduced to a data point. In this mode Empathy is at risk of being edited out.
Here is where he is right, and it matters more than where he is wrong. His mission — a future in which technology meets human needs at scale — is not the work of a man without empathy. It is empathy, aimed at humanity in the abstract. The care is real. It has simply been pointed at the species rather than the person.
And that is not a deficit; it is a seed. A person who cares this much about humanity's future already holds the raw capacity for care — the whole question is its target.
The growth edge is not to care more. It is to bring the same care from the abstract future to the concrete present — from humanity as a species to the individuals near and far. Not a transplant of something he lacks, but the germination of something already there. That move, from the abstract to the concrete, from the mission to the person, is the integration this stage of leadership asks. Not of Musk especially, but of all of us who have ever held a vision tightly enough to lose sight of the people it is meant to benefit.
So here is the thread running through the whole model: Wherever you find yourself, the move toward the next stage is rooted in empathy — but its direction depends on where you stand. If you have lost yourself in the group, the growth edge is empathy for yourself. If you are locked onto your mission, the growth edge is empathy for the people around you. The compass always points toward growth. The next landmark depends on where you are along the road.
Musk is not wrong to fear a version of empathy that leads to collapse; fixated on a part, any virtue taken to an extreme blinds us to the whole. His mistake is to name empathy as the enemy, when the real culprit is tunnel vision or a loss of balance. Mature leadership does not mean caring less. It means a disciplined, grounded empathy — rooted firmly enough in the self that it can be spent generously on others, and on the future, without ever running dry.
I have no personal connection to Elon Musk. Observation and analysis is based on his public persona and media presence, not his private character or personal life.