Elon Musk has a net worth of $220bn – rounded off nicely by a bounty of government subsidies. Yet he has not taken cues from any of his billionaire peers. Jeff Bezos rarely ever shows his face on the internet, Bill Gates defers most of his public statements to his charity and Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t even have a Twitter account. But Musk has never been able to overcome a need for attention that churns away at the core of his being. He has been offered an incredible pedestal by his wealth, and he is committed to use it as obnoxiously as possible.
By now we’ve become accustomed to his blend of churlish gamer patois and casual prejudice. In the past week on Twitter, Musk has challenged Vladimir Putin to one-on-one combat, derided the Ukrainian solidarity campaign as a movement for sheeple and alluded to the idea of moving to Mars by 2029.
Only two weeks ago, Musk was promising satellite internet support to those trapped in Kyiv, but as the wind blows, so does the bluster. His ethical tentpoles don’t last for long, because he hasn’t given them much thought in the first place. Now he believes supporting Ukrainians is some kind of woke cause célèbre. He’s speculating that Netflix will commission a series starring a “Black Ukraine guy” and a “transgender Russian soldier”. In another post sheathed in repellent 4Chan iconography, an “NPC” – the meme representation of a brainwashed, CNN-addled liberal – brandishes the Ukrainian flag, against a background that contains flags of other causes including transgender pride and the LGBTQ+ rainbow. “I support the current thing,” it reads – suggesting that people who feel horrified at the brutal deaths of thousands of Ukrainians are only doing so as some kind of political trend rather than basic human instinct.
There is an idiom people repeat about American presidents: that the pressures of the Oval Office tend to reveal the fundamental character traits of its current occupant – that same logic applies to Musk. This is a man who has directed much of his enormous capital to pulpy sci-fi schemes. He hopes to colonize Mars, he wants to build hundred-mile tunnels deep in the Earth’s crust, he believes that we may be living in a simulation. It’s a portfolio that would make the most inveterate Redditors on the internet proud, so is it any surprise that when a genuine humanitarian crisis spreads across Ukraine, Musk treats it like a video game? One which ends up with Musk in a big final-boss martial showdown against Vladimir Putin.
Musk’s latest agitation coincides with yet another bizarre chapter in his personal life. Last week, the Canadian musician and Musk’s on-and-off partner, Grimes, revealed that the couple had a second child together in December. (Her name, of course, is Exa Dark Sideræl Musk.) Grimes also confirmed that the pair had since broken up, and reports quickly leaked that she was in a relationship with the whistleblower Chelsea Manning.
It probably isn’t a coincidence that Musk retorted with a transphobic meme on his timeline. His brand is a toxic milieu of personal grudges, retrograde politics and old-fashioned mean-spiritedness. (Remember when Elon Musk slandered the diver who rescued the 12 boys trapped in a Thai mine as a pedophile, after he dismissed help from the billionaire?) He posts with the same motivation as the teenage boys who look to get a rise out of each other in the bowels of the most vengeful forums on the internet. The morbid difference is that Musk has accumulated enough money to wield genuine global influence.
Elon Musk is far from the only grotesque rich guy in our society. Browse through the rogues gallery of NFL franchise owners or intercontinental energy barons and you will discover plenty of bleak tales, for there is nothing scarier than a man who has the power to actualize all of their ghastly quirks and tics. (Consider: Donald Trump’s golden toilet, or David Geffen isolating on a superyacht during the darkest days of Covid.) But Musk is the only one who routinely pulls the curtain back, revealing that behind all of the rich public loans and seed funding ventures, there is a CEO who has insulated himself against reality. Still, it’s ominous to watch Musk gleefully double down on his shallow, Q-baiting rhetoric, particularly after Americans just witnessed a presidential term where a man seized power by consolidating the angry, paranoid propulsion of the internet. It’s all feeling very familiar.
