Tesla CEO Elon Musk is fabulously wealthy. He chronically assumes risks his peers eschew by challenging every business or scientific orthodoxy and regularly achieving the impossible. Now, with his close relationship with President-elect Donald Trump and position heading the new Department of Government Efficiency, Musk’s advocates say he’ll apply his intellect and business talents to help rescue the United States from fiscal inanity.

But should we have such high expectations for Musk? The billionaire CEO has lofty ambitions but does, nevertheless, overpromise. For a decade, he has repeatedly promised to deliver fully autonomous self-driving cars without result.

Author Walter Isaacson’s 2023 biography of Musk gives the best insight into Musk’s singular personality, offering an explanation for how he achieved so much success but also casting doubt on whether his approach is what’s in need when it comes to governing the country and steering the nation’s course.

Musk’s work ethic verges on maniacal. His net worth exceeds a dizzying $400 billion. He was physically and mentally brutalized by a sociopathic father. He is emotionally and psychologically stunted.

Musk craves entertainment, not truth or justice. He professes preoccupation with saving human civilization: first, through interplanetary travel and colonization of Mars; second, through electric cars and solar panels to prevent climate destruction; and third, by preventing artificial intelligence from becoming a surrogate for humans. He instinctively believes that Neil Armstrong’s 1969 moon landing marked a turning point in history that he hopes to repeat.

But the moon landing did nothing to diminish injustice, war, poverty, bigotry, narcissism or philosophical emptiness, the scourges of mankind. We are made of crooked timber. Don’t we need to straighten ourselves out before carrying our pathologies to other planets?

Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, in 1971. Yet he has nothing to say about apartheid or Nelson Mandela.

He has nothing to say about chronic wars, genocide, widespread starvation, the transformation of the United States into a plutocratic, multitrillion-dollar permanent warfare-surveillance state or the impending clash between China and the United States that could escalate into global nuclear warfare. Musk can’t see the elephant in the living room because he is fixated on money and celebrity.

He is clueless that civilization is the marriage of justice and peace. The former is striving to make every person’s station in life correspond to their character and accomplishments. Perfect justice is illusory because our parents or birthplace are serendipitous. To an indeterminate extent, the latter influences who we are. But free will is paramount. As philosopher Samuel Johnson retorted to doubters, “All theory is against free will; all experience for it.”

The United States was born in a quest for justice. James Madison, father of the Constitution, taught, “Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society.”

Peace complements justice. Without it, the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. War legalizes what would be first-degree murder in peacetime. Peace confines violence to self-defense in vindication of the right of self-preservation.

Although war is the enemy of civilization, it has predominated throughout human existence. The Sermon on the Mount proved futile. Beating swords into plowshares and making war no more proved a fantasy. Genius Albert Einstein was stumped. He wrote Sigmund Freud, “Is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war?” Freud was clueless.

Madison had the answer — at least for the United States. Entrust the war power exclusively to Congress under the Constitution. It would have no incentive to exercise it except in self-defense against aggression that had already broken the peace.

Politics is informed by power. And congressional power shrinks during war. The executive, in contrast, is tempted to war to augment power.

Serial unconstitutional presidential wars are destroying the United States, as Madison knew they would. Isaacson’s biography concludes before Musk thrust himself into the political arena as Trump’s uninformed booster and ATM ($270 million during the 2024 campaign). Musk is over his skis, like Henry Ford’s ill-conceived Peace Ship in World War I. His plan to slash annual federal spending by $2 trillion is as far-fetched as a perpetual motion machine.

The wise man knows what he doesn’t know. Musk has many amazing traits, but wisdom is not one of them. His comet may fall sooner than you think.

Bruce Fein was associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan and is author of “American Empire Before the Fall.” His website is www.lawofficesofbrucefein.com and X feed is @brucefeinesq.