No wonder they’re man babies: neither Trump nor Musk received the nourishment boys need

When it comes to messed-up men, they don’t come more messed up than Elon Musk and Donald Trump. That these two found each other was inevitable; top predators in the human food chain are going to bump into one another, and so an uneasy alliance needs to be made. But from the first, they are eyeing each other as meat, and sooner or later that chilly fact will surface.

The term “bromance” might amuse the onlooking world, and in this case, that’s the entire world – but the protagonists would never have wasted a second on warm thoughts of the other. It’s just not in their DNA. The pathology that drives each could not be more different. The consensus on Trump’s narcissism diagnosis has been around since his days as a slum landlord. Narcissism is not something you were born with – it arises from traumatically cold mothering and a father figure who is punitive but performance-fixated.

It was a combination that you might imagine contributed to his brother Fred’s slow suicide by alcohol, and to Trump’s own slightly more adaptive response – an inability to live a day without human attention. Narcissism has categories, and Trump’s subtype is most probably malignant, involving degrees of sadism, and a strong capacity for ill-will and vengefulness. The hundreds of thousands of deaths happening from the closure of USAID will not trouble his sleep.

But Musk is a very different kettle of bacteria. He has a formal diagnosis of autism, of the subtype that used to be known as Asperger syndrome. And as my therapy teachers once told us, even the garbage guy would spot it. People born with Asperger’s – and I know because I am one too – can turn out to be wonderful human beings, contributing from their strengths while overcoming their limitations. And most do. But only if they have warmth and care from a devoted parent, and help with building in the people skills that are not intuitively present from the first.

Musk, of course, had none of these. His father was reportedly a horrific human being, whose biggest claim to fame was fathering children with his stepdaughter. Musk’s mother was a South African beauty queen, when that was an all-white affair, and the marriage did not last.

Tellingly, the nine-year-old Musk chose not his mother, but his father to live with. These little inflection points can bring a moment of deep sorrow for a small boy in such a bleak landscape. And within a year or two he was to be outrageously bullied, including hospitalisation after a beating from a boy whose father had just killed himself and was carrying some pain of his own.

The path to a happy boyhood and manhood is well mapped; I have taught it and confirmed it over nearly 40 years working in this space. Warm and loving nurture in the first six years, especially the first three, enable the actual brain growth that allows empathy and connection. Mothers or equivalent are irreplaceable – the bedrock of mental health.

After age six, dads who are kind, engaged and affectionate, and invest much more time than a corporate lifestyle could ever allow, are needed for masculine trustworthiness and quiet self-worth to emerge. And some decent men in the teenage years who supplement what a dad can offer and help the tricky transition into adulthood. That three-step process has been a timeless combo for the human male. Neither Trump nor Musk even came close to that kind of nourishment.

That Trump emerged as a broken, misogynist bully was no accident. There is hope for Musk, but absolute wealth is not a great source of abrasion to knock off the hubris or heal the hurt. This bromance never was and never will be. And when dinosaurs fight, it’s the grass that suffers. How awful that when we are getting so much better at raising boys, the very worst are the ones to rule us.

Steve Biddulph is the author of Raising Boys, published by HarperCollins. His latest book on overcoming anxiety, Wild Creature Mind, is published by Bluebird