Most of America is “at will”, so yes you can fire people for blinking. It gets more complicated with unions and companies internal policies, and you’d still need to pay severance.

But basically you can always do a musk. Pretend the firing was a resignation and let it drag slowly through the courts, and refuse to settle.

There are things you can manage, but they tend to be about controlling your environment.

JD Vance is the perfect example of someone that benefited from the military. Fit in (and let’s be honest being a straight white male still helps). Find a job that involves sitting behind a desk. Get some experience pulling a 9-5 for a few years, and then go to university for free. Don’t get injured. Don’t get PTSD.

All of this attitude with a capital A is too late. You can’t Attitude yourself out of a missing leg, and you can’t Attitude yourself out of PTSD. You can learn to cope better but coping well with PTSD is still worse than not having it.

Either have a plan to avoid danger or you need to be lucky.

The important thing is that musk is a classic libertarian grifter.

His cars are propped up by government subsidies (or they were, I think he’s running into problems), starlink is heavily used by NASA, and the boring company is just another way to extract government money.

He’ll pretend to be a global libertarian, but what he really wants is sky high tarrifs so he doesn’t have to compete with Chinese electric cars.