Elon Musk Called Congress Members "NPCs." Is He The Main Character?

It's, YO, Kafka-esque meets Blade Runner.

Elon Musk reportedly refers to members of Congress as “NPCs” - non-player characters. In gaming, NPCs are pre-scripted, low-agency characters who move in loops, offer stock dialogue, and function primarily as obstacles or background. Musk’s use of the term is more than just snide gamer slang. It’s a full philosophical worldview - a digital insult wrapped in a god complex.

And it’s spreading.

To call someone an NPC is to call them unthinking. A drone. A placeholder. An actor without a will of their own. The term comes loaded with layers - well-deserved contempt for bureaucracy, yes - but also for human nuance. It flattens everyone outside the self into code. Into noise.

It’s, yo, Kafka-esque in the digital age (as Jessie from Breaking Bad might say).

The irony? Musk and his loyalists hate bureaucracy because it limits them. They see sluggish government systems as constraints on innovation. They want frictionless worlds. Infinite scrolls. Endlessly editable universes.

But in doing so, they begin to resemble the very thing they despise. They render everything outside themselves inert - lifeless pixels in a game of their own design.

And if everyone else is background? Then they’re the main character. Or so they believe.

But Is He Really the Main Character?

Sure, members of Congress often behave like NPCs - looping the same soundbites, frozen by donor strings, barely aware of the room they're in. Musk isn't wrong to see the stagnation. But the assumption beneath the insult is this: if they’re NPCs, he must be the main character.

Let’s pause there.

The main character in a video game doesn’t just get the action. They get the arc. They transform. They suffer, fall, rise, evolve. They’re changed by the story.

Musk? He doesn’t transform. He expands. He acquires. He buys new maps. He adds cheat codes. He multiplies his reach. But there’s no character development. No evolution. Just more.

That’s not a main character. That’s a system glitch. That’s a boss fight in Level 9 who still thinks he’s in the opening credits.

The main character earns their role by confronting their flaws - by losing, breaking, rebuilding. Musk avoids that at all costs. He doesn’t want a story. He wants a simulation he can’t lose.

So let’s be clear: calling others NPCs doesn’t make you the protagonist.

It makes you the gamer who doesn’t away from the screen long enough to realize he’s been coded, too. It’s Blade Runner all over again.

What NPC Really Means in Musk’s Mouth

This is not just a flex. It’s an epistemology.

To Musk, “NPC” is a way to discard the humanity of his critics. It’s not about government inefficiency - it’s about creating a world where only he, and those like him, have any narrative weight. The rest of us? Extras. Dialogue trees. Civilians in his empire-building simulator.

That kind of language matters. Because when you dehumanize the characters in your world, you start building systems that don’t account for them. You don’t plan for food stamps. Or mental health clinics. Or public libraries. You build tunnels for Teslas and declare the rest obsolete. You decimate them to achieve your end-game with no remorse.

This is the psychology of empire in late-stage decay. Not Caesar fiddling. Just a billionaire gamer with a god complex, modding reality like it’s a codebase.

And the scariest part?

Most people don’t even know they’re in his game.