5 Celebrities with Truly Unhinged Amounts of Self-Confidence

5 Mark Wahlberg Thinks He Would Have Stopped 9/11

What a classic. When Calvin Klein tells you that the entire world wants to see the outline of your dick, and it turns out they absolutely do, it’s going to be hard to ever dial things back down. Maybe the peak moment of Wahlberg’s limitless belief in self, though, was when he claimed that if he had been on any one of the commercial airliners involved in 9/11, it would have never happened. According to Marky Mark, if he so much as smelled a boxcutter, he would have gone Raging Bull on every hijacker and done everything but parachute out of the plane with the entire cabin and crew nestled safely against his plump pectoral muscles.

It’s such a pervasive, classic quote because it comes from such a genuine level of confidence. You know when he said it, he was not being hyperbolic, or trying to express anger. You know, in the knot of your soul, that Mark Wahlberg truly, unimpeachably, believes that he would have stopped 9/11, and that his absence on those planes is a great universal mistake. There’s no way to know, maybe he truly would have stopped the hijackers. I don’t know, though. Fighting terrorists is a long way from sucker-punching a middle-aged Vietnamese man.

4 Kanye Will Never See Himself Perform Live

Remember when Kanye was fun? Remember when we were all enjoying his weird tweets about airplanes from his Twitter which, in a beautifully narcissistic touch, followed precisely zero people? Sure, he always seemed a little insane, but much more of the “weird public park preacher” variety than the “screaming about blood libel” variety. There’s not much entertaining about anything he says anymore these days, given that it’s gotten to the point where even pseudo-centrist alt-right YouTubers are kicking him under the table to cool it on the Jew stuff.

But back in those golden days, when we thought College Dropout would surely never be actively disturbing to listen to, we got some all-time quotes. One of the best, uttered with what we can now be sure is absolutely zero sarcasm, was “my greatest pain in life is that I will never be able to see me perform.” All that money and nobody told him about mirrors.

3 Mariah Carey Gave Birth to While Listening Her Own Music

I do not fully believe that Carey is of this Earth, and I am not sure that she does either. She’s notorious and beloved for her diva behavior, and endless stories of outlandish requests and habits that sound like something a queen whose brain was ravaged by syphilis would demand. She bathes in cold milk, refuses to be photographed without sunglasses in fluorescent lighting and swims in evening gowns and heels. We are not exactly in salt-of-the-earth territory.

My favorite story, however, is from when she gave birth to her twins. Which, side note, of COURSE Mariah Carey had twins. Apparently, she had her own playlist to listen to while giving birth, I assume while laying in some sort of gigantic seashell or hollowed-out diamond. The song reserved for the moment of truth? Her own live performance of “Fantasy” from Madison Square Garden, explaining that she wanted them to enter the world to applause. 

2 Michael Jordan’s Petty Hall of Fame Speech

Despite the strong narcissism, it’s pretty inarguable that all the people on this list are genuinely successful and talented. Wahlberg is one of the world’s most recognizable actors, Kanye did really have a massive impact on popular music and Carey can sing like a goddamn angel. All three, though, might pale slightly in comparison when it comes to undeniable, proven superiority in a field when stacked up against our next narcissistic number-bearer: Air Jordan himself.

I’m not going to argue about whether Jordan or LeBron is the greatest of all time because I don’t have three hours of sports radio air to fill. The fact is, if you’re talking about not only the greatest basketball players, but the greatest athletes of all time, Jordan is a Family-Feud approved safe bet. He’s also a member of the NBA Hall of Fame, in the same way that the Pope is a member of the Catholic Church. But his acceptance speech during his enshrinement is famous not for the reasons everyone would want — being a tearful, historic moment in basketball history — but for Jordan using the immortalizing of his own legacy to be a huge dick.

Instead of “thank you, this means so much to me, this is all I ever dreamed of,” yada yada, MJ instead took the opportunity to basically tell everyone who was ever weird to him to fuck off. He even invited Leroy Smith. Who’s Leroy Smith? Well, you might know the famous story of Jordan not making the varsity basketball team his sophomore year of high school. Leroy Smith was the guy who made the team instead. Leroy Smith is also the alias Jordan would repeatedly use to check into hotels while traveling for the NBA. At this point, I’m surprised Leroy Smith isn’t known as The Man With A Restraining Order Against Michael Jordan.

1 Psycho Motivational Speaker Tom Cruise

Finally, to the shark-eyed king himself, Tom Cruise — the undeniable, quintessence of the movie star. And shockingly, a massively weird dickhead. Cruise takes the run-of-the-mill celebrity psychosis and couples it with an unsettling Scientology au jus for a feast of truly outlandish behavior. If you’ve got nine minutes to spare for a disjointed interview that feels pulled from the X-Files, check out this interview Cruise did for the Church of Scientology where he spouts all sorts of insanity backed by approximately half of the Mission: Impossible riff on repeat.

A couple particular gems to keep your ear out for are Cruise explaining that they are “the authorities on the mind” and claiming that when a scientologist drives by a car accident, that they are “the only ones who can truly help.” It would not be the first occupation I was screaming for from a ball of mangled steel, but who am I to judge? The guy might be cuckoo bananas, but he was born to jump out of a plane on camera.