The Sleepless Empire: Napoleon, Musk, Kanye, and the Economics of Exhaustion

Napoleon didn’t sleep. Neither does Elon Musk. Kanye West once bragged that sleep was “the cousin of death.” Each built an empire by staying awake — and each watched it unravel the same way.
What connects them isn’t just genius; it’s the delusion that energy is infinite.

The sleepless myth isn’t about ambition. It’s about extraction — of body, mind, and time — the same logic that drives capitalism itself.

The Original Insomniac

Napoleon Bonaparte slept barely four hours a night.
He napped on horseback, in tents, even mid-conversation. To his officers, he was a machine — a man whose brain could replace an army. He once said:

“Six hours for a man, seven for a woman, eight for a fool.”

But his body disagreed. He suffered chronic ulcers, insomnia, and later, collapse. After his death, arsenic was found in his hair — likely from the “restorative tonics” and medicines of his era. Those tonics contained arsenic, antimony, or strychnine — proto-stimulants of the 19th century, meant to revive the fatigued elite. They didn’t heal him. They simply let him burn longer.

By the time he reached St. Helena, Napoleon’s empire had conquered everything except his own exhaustion.

From Tonics to Tesla

Two centuries later, the same pattern persists — only the stimulants have changed.

Elon Musk, the modern Napoleon of technology, admits to doctor-prescribed ketamine “every other week.” Reports suggest Adderall and caffeine stacks sustain his 16-hour days. He once claimed he slept only “about six hours,” after learning that five made him “too tired to think.”
Kanye West, during his manic creative highs, worked through nights fueled by painkillers and ego. Sleep deprivation pushed his productivity — and his psyche — to collapse.

Each generation finds its own version of the same drug: whatever makes exhaustion feel like genius.

The Marketization of Fatigue

The modern economy rewards sleeplessness.
Wall Street calls it “grind culture.” Tech calls it “founder energy.”
In reality, it’s a market model — extracting more hours from fewer bodies.

Sleep is no longer rest; it’s a variable cost.
You can chart it like GDP: fewer hours of sleep, more hours of output — until the system breaks.

Neuroscience shows that under six hours of sleep, creativity and decision-making decline by up to 40 percent.
Yet investors celebrate founders who stay awake for 72. The invisible cost is mental health, burnout, and the slow erosion of the mind’s ability to think abstractly — the very thing that made them valuable.

The Economics of Arsenic

Napoleon’s tonics, Musk’s stimulants, and Kanye’s mania share one logic: the conversion of life into labor.

In the Industrial Age, arsenic was a stimulant for the elite. In the Information Age, caffeine, Adderall, and social validation fill that role. Each is an accelerant in a machine that never stops — the human engine of perpetual production.

This is the financialization of energy: time and attention treated as commodities.
Sleep becomes inefficiency. Rest becomes resistance.

The Empire Always Falls

Every sleepless empire collapses in the same arc:

• Napoleon in exile, poisoned by his own medicine.
• Musk, oscillating between brilliance and burnout, tweeting through breakdowns.
• Kanye, stripped of endorsements, undone by the same mania that once fueled his art.

All three traded longevity for momentum. The crash was inevitable — not moral punishment, but metabolic math. You can’t run a brain like a factory forever.

The Rebellion of Rest

The true revolution isn’t sleeplessness — it’s sleep.
To rest is to reject extraction. To slow down is to reclaim ownership of one’s time.

Napoleon believed that “glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.”
He was wrong. Glory dies fast. Obscurity is what peace feels like.

The future of genius won’t be sleepless. It will be sustainable — a rhythm where ambition coexists with recovery.
Because the empire you conquer means nothing if you can’t wake to enjoy it.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI tools under human direction and editorial oversight. Learn more