Early in his career as the prototypical Hustle Bro, Alexander the Great was faced with an opportunity: untangle the famed Gordian Knot, and his startup conquest of all Asia was guaranteed to make it from zero to one. In a move that led countless lyric poets to describe the ascendant young bro as “an outside-the-box problem solver,” Alexander simply cut the impossibly complex knot rather than even attempting a traditional solution. In reducing a challenging intellectual problem to an unexpected application of brute force, the Macedonian conqueror left a powerful metaphor for a path to power that would inspire every subsequent hustle bro from Julius Caesar on down through history.

As the pre-eminent example of this type of bro in our time, Elon Musk has cut many a Gordian Knot in his rise to whatever it is exactly that he has become. And because his field of conquest lies in engineering, design and public perception, rather than hacking his fellow bros apart with sharpened bits of bronze, much of his metaphorical knot cutting takes on certain characteristics. Specifically, it involves ignoring the kinds of tradeoffs that so much of engineering, economics, and life itself demands we either balance or optimize for one side of, and convincing people that an elegant solution exists that allows us to have our cake and eat it too.

This ability to sweep away knotty challenges with a brisk new, seemingly tradeoff-free approach has always been the beating heart of Tesla’s success. Electric vehicles were mired in entrenched adoption challenges related to high costs for modest commuter vehicles and the psychological thicket of “range anxiety,” when Tesla swept them away with its vision of large lithium-ion batteries that would magically make EVs a drop-in replacement for internal combustion cars. Similarly, Musk cut through the thicket of legal and safety problems that prevent a car from being an actual platform for a third-party app ecosystem by simply making Teslas look and feel superficially like smartphones, in the same way that automakers in the ’50s evoked the boom in aircraft technology with tailfins rather than actual flying cars.

The main theme that runs across these genuinely brilliant triangulations is that Musk gives people the sense of experiencing transformative new technologies, while cramming them into the familiar forms that require no change on the part of the public. This is most clear in the way that Tesla has incorporated driving automation into its traditional automaking business: rather than following the technology where it can actually be successful, namely fleets of geographically-constrained taxis or trucks using expensive perception hardware, Musk turned it into a sales pitch for privately owned cars. Pay me $10,000-$15,000 for software, goes the nearly decade-old pitch, and your car will work for you as a taxi while it would otherwise be sitting unused.

The problem with taking a satisfyingly creative slash at a seemingly intractable knot is that you’re not actually solving the problem. Alexander the Great gets credit for creatively “solving” the Gordian Knot thanks to purely teleological logic: he conquered all Asia and thus fulfilled the prophecy, therefore his solution to the knot must have been valid. The financial media has spent much of the last decade engaged in the same kind of sophistry with regard to Musk, interpreting a rising stock price as the ultimate validation of his announced “solutions.” The point at which Musk triangulates between two seemingly unreconcilable points is always one of popular perception rather than technical insight, recognizing that like the prophecies of the ancients if enough people believe it then it might as well be true.

But even if Alexander really did hack history at Gordium, in the end history hacked back. Though he more or less conquered “all Asia” as it was then understood by the Greeks, there turned out to be a lot more of Asia than anyone realized and eventually he had to turn back. More importantly, his use of violence as an early example of “growth hacking” turned out to have the same longer-term drawbacks that all growth hacking seems to eventually run up against. Though history records Alexander as a great conqueror, his empire was one of the most fragile ever recorded, dissolving into internecine warfare from the very moment of his death. Alexander’s glib “solution” to the Gordian Knot may be epic inspo for the hustle bros, but in the sweep of history it’s also a fascinating warning about the ephemeral nature of such shallow “solutions” to tough, complex problems.

Elon The Great is increasingly becoming an object lesson in this timeless truth, as the emotionally-resonant paths he seemed to have hacked through techno-cultural complexity run up against stubborn realities. With EV adoption crashing on the rocks of high prices (even at low or negative profitability), the idea that big batteries are a panacea demands some serious re-appraisal. With Waymo operating fully driverless taxis in a growing number of challenging domains, Tesla’s fruitless approach to driving automation increasingly comes across as a fraud perpetrated on the technically illiterate. As an automaker, the idea that Tesla could mimic software platform-style profits by endlessly updating the same vehicle bodies has run its course, as CapEx-light refreshes to its core lineup fail to revive demand.

With Tesla’s fortunes now tied entirely to AI and autonomy, Musk is attempting to cut through the tangle of these failing “solutions” one last time with two bold new hacks: connecting all the GPUs in all the Teslas sold around the world into a distributed AI compute cluster, and launching a purpose-built robotaxi. These are classic Muskian stock pumps: wild-eyed,, dorm-room style visions aimed at inspiring excitement rather than serious consideration, and with the stock up in the immediate aftermath of their announcement the old trick clearly still works on some people.

But if we leave the teleological justifications to Bloomberg and actually examine these proposals on their merits, we find that Musk’s hacks are not just violating the hard realities of engineering and technology (which they’ve always done), but the logic of his very own threadbare “solutions” as well. Even if we completely suspend disbelief and assume that these hacks are technologically possible or economically useful, a generosity he does not deserve to be perfectly clear, they are failing on the abstract world of popular perception where he always finds his solutions. Musk’s proposals can violate common sense or technological reality with impunity, but when he violates the lore and internal logic of the Elon Musk Cinematic Universe, watch out.

As I put it during the earnings call livestream I hosted yesterday, Musk’s second-order hacking has reduced his once-resonant (if not plausible) autonomy pitch to outright parody. Tesla’s core models were never designed to be taxis, so the introduction of a dedicated robotaxi model that Tesla will own and operate signals that the company plans on competing with its own customers, on an uneven playing field. Instead of your car working to earn you money as a taxi, it will be out-competed by Tesla’s robotaxis and therefore continue to sit idle so Tesla can wear out its battery and GPU training AI (or mining Dogecoin or whatever) for their exclusive corporate benefit. Having hacked so many Gordian Knots, only for the underlying problems to persist over the long term, Musk is now tying their remains—and himself—back into ugly, unconsidered tangles.

At the heart of this new re-tangling is the biggest Gordian Knot of all, whose hacking animates Tesla’s entire history: the tension between Tesla’s need to serve consumers and its need to serve investors. Musk’s core business philosophy, which he repeats again and again, is that if you make truly great products everything else takes care of itself. This classically glib reconciliation of the fundamental conflict between providing value to consumers and returns to shareholders elides the reality of Tesla’s history, in which the needs of investors have roundly defeated the needs of consumers again and again. This was clear early on, when Tesla investor forum-dwellers would attempt to censor owners sharing important information about defects out of the fear that it would help short-sellers, and it’s become undeniable as “Full Self-Driving” turns out to be a scam on the consumer side and the only remaining bull thesis on the investor side.

Maybe Musk simply forgot to mention that, like the original robotaxi scheme, Tesla would split future compute revenue with the customers whose hardware and energy make it (theoretically) possible. The call covered a lot of ground and ketamine is notoriously hard on the memory, so perhaps it merely slipped his mind. But the absence of any form of consumer value in his new vision of dedicated robotaxis and distributed compute, with all the generated value of these schemes flowing exclusively to Tesla (and its investors), marks a dark new turn for Musk’s once reliably populist dreamweaving.

Meanwhile all of this abstract hype merely distracts from the unprecedentedly successful but now deeply troubled startup automotive empire Musk built, which like Alexander’s realm seems destined to slip through his fingers. Building a nearly two million unit/year car business out of pure hype is a truly Alexandrian accomplishment, but it appears to mean nothing to the man who built it now that it’s no longer in hypergrowth. To throw away a global automaker and powerful brand in favor of these hare-brained schemes which no longer even hold up as populist narratives (let alone as serious technological proposals, which they’ve never been), suggests that he still lacks the most basic grasp of what an industry is or how it works.

Cutting the Gordian Knot destined Alexander to conquer an empire. Perhaps if he’d taken the time to actually untangle it, he might have been destined to rule one.