"What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" — some homeless Palestinian Elon Musk is, at least on paper, the world’s first trillionaire. He reached that milestone on June 12, after SpaceX debuted as a publicly-traded company on the U.S. stock market at an initial offering of $150 per share. At the time of writing, that price has risen to about $185, taking Musk’s estimated net worth to $1.4 trillion as the company becomes bigger than Amazon. Depending on how you evaluate the historical Malian emperor Mansa Musa, Musk may be the richest person to ever live. Among pro-capitalist pundits, Musk’s ascension to trillionaire status has been the occasion for a round of sycophantic applause, as they all rush to tell us why it’s good for one individual to control this much of the world’s resources. At Fox News, we’re told that Musk “earned every penny,” and is living proof that “capitalism continues to reward individuals who create extraordinary value.” Similarly, an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times tells us that his SpaceX fortune is “a testament to human ingenuity, immigrant success and American greatness.” The National Review offers “Three Cheers For Elon Musk,” calling criticism of his hyper-wealth “revolting. Repulsive. Grotesque. Un-American.” Now, there are all kinds of political and economic reasons why these claims are wrong, and we’ve discussed them at some length elsewhere. Two of the most important are that by hoarding wealth, billionaires and now trillionaires are actively keeping other people in poverty, making the whole thing monstrously unethical, and that their vast fortunes allow them to buy political power and make a mockery of the word “democracy.” Both of these things are true of Musk, who has bragged about using his wealth to get Donald Trump elected and likely killed hundreds of thousands of people across Africa with his “DOGE” aid cuts. (If you start to count the lives Musk could save if he put his money to good use, the numbers get even more staggering.) But another, morbidly fascinating aspect of this whole moment is that, despite possessing wealth that rivals the emperors of the ancient world, Musk’s existence is a bizarre and cursed one in many important ways. His personal relationships with the people closest to him, by all appearances, are dysfunctional and abusive to varying degrees. He desperately wants to be adored by the public, but with every attempt, their approval slips further from his grasp. Instead of enjoying his money and leisure, he spends his waking hours obsessing over racist conspiracy theories and paranoid fantasies about the end of the world. And to add the final insult, he doesn’t even have a trillion dollars in any real sense; he just has to spend a lot of time and energy keeping up an elaborate fiction that he does. In a way, Musk’s fans are right: he’s a perfect example of capitalism at work, with its relentless drive for growth and acquisition at the expense of everything else. It’s just that those are terrible principles to base a human life on. You Can’t Buy Human Connection It’s an old truism that money can’t buy the things that truly matter in life. This is only sort of the case. Money can certainly buy you a lot of the necessities that make it easier to be happy, like stable housing, leisure time, and better health, and research suggests that up until you hit about $100,000 per year in income, money can indeed improve your life satisfaction. But it’s also true that just because you’re wealthy, it doesn’t mean anyone will like you, especially if your money and status corrupt your ability to have healthy relations with other people. Elon Musk’s first wife, Justine Wilson, has recounted what it was like to be married to him, and it was about as unpleasant as you might expect. Musk was initially charming, but she says that there was a disturbing warning sign when he told her during a dance at their wedding reception that “I am the alpha in this relationship.” Unfortunately, she said, “the will to compete and dominate that made him so successful in business did not magically shut off when he came home,” and in their family “Elon's judgment overruled mine, and he was constantly remarking on the ways he found me lacking.” When she frequently reminded him that she was his wife, not an employee, he would apparently reply “If you were my employee I would fire you.” Despite their “dream lifestyle, privileged and surreal,” Musk was a terrible husband, and she felt “disposable.” Wilson told him she wanted “equality, partnership, and “to love and be loved.” He was unwilling to provide them, and told her in effect that “our status quo works for me, so it should work for you.” When she made clear that it didn’t, he divorced her the next day. Within weeks of filing for divorce in 2008, Musk was dating the much-younger British actress Talulah Riley. The two married, then divorced, then married again, then divorced again, and Musk’s second wife, like his first, felt “she had given up her own career, while he frequently abandoned her for his.” Perhaps the trillionaire’s most high-profile relationship has been with the musician Grimes, with whom he shares three children —X Æ A-Xii, Exa Dark Sideræl, and Techno Mechanicus. (To be fair, some of the blame for the naming may belong to Grimes, who now says she’s changed Exa Dark Siderael’s name to simply the letter “y” or a question mark, representing “the eternal question... and such.”) This relationship, too, ended badly, spilling out onto Twitter, with Grimes reporting that she had been going bankrupt in a massive custody battle with Musk. These are not Musk’s only children. The prolific breeder has at least 14 by various mothers. (Plus those to whom he gives his sperm away, whose numbers are unknown.) Musk has made it clear that he values quantity of procreative output over the quality of his relationships with his kids. Ever the student of history, he decided to populate the world with as many of his genetic offspring as possible, reportedly “after reading that Genghis Khan had done something similar.” (Good role model, Genghis Khan.) He is terrified of population decline, and “really wants smart people to have kids.” Musk appears to hold the pure genetic determinist view that what matters is not whether you’re involved with a child’s life but whether you have Good Smart Person Genes, which he believes he does. He also reportedly believes that “your wealth is directly linked to your IQ,” and so encouraged “all the rich men he knew” to reproduce. Unsurprisingly, Musk goes about this project in the creepiest way imaginable, sliding into women’s DMs on the social media platform he owns, Twitter/X. The Wall Street Journal reports that he replies to lesser-known users and “sometimes interacts through direct messages, some of whom he eventually solicits to have his babies.” Social media influencer Tiffany Fong, for instance, noticed that Musk “started liking and replying to her posts,” driving engagement and revenue to her account, and then “sent her a direct message asking if she was interested in having his child,” even though they had never met in person. Fong declined, and when Musk found out that she had told others about his offer, he chastised her and unfollowed her, leading her new earnings to evaporate. Musk has even preyed on women who have worked for him, with a former employee saying he “asked her on multiple occasions to have his babies.” Shivon Zilis, a Neuralink executive and former project director at Tesla, testified in a court proceeding that Musk “was encouraging everyone around him at that time to have kids and he'd noticed I did not,” so he “offered to make a donation.” Zilis went on to have four of Musk’s children, and attained “special status” among the mothers of his “legion” (his name for his progeny) because he actually spends some time with her. Zilis has said that “I can’t possibly think of genes I would prefer for my children.” But note that she did not say “I can’t possibly think of a man I would prefer to raise my children with.” According to the Wall Street Journal, Zilis moved to “a compound in Austin where Musk imagined the women and his growing number of babies would all live among multiple residences,” although Grimes reportedly refused to move to the property. In 2022, Business Insider reported that Musk exposed himself to a flight attendant on his jet, rubbed her leg, and offered to buy her a horse if she would give him a hand job. (Note that many men do not have to offer to exchange horses for hand jobs, because there are women in the world willing to have sex with them for free, due to their winning personalities. Musk, lacking such an asset, must resort to equine bribery.) Tesla ended up paying the woman $250,000 to keep quiet about the incident. After the story broke, SpaceX employees posted “an internal letter protesting what they viewed as the company’s failure to take harassment allegations seriously,” after which eight of them were fired, leading them to file a complaint with the NLRB. It has to be said, this set of psychosexual preoccupations bears a striking resemblance to those of Musk’s fellow oligarch, the late Jeffrey Epstein. Musk seems to have a higher age preference, as all of the women he’s been publicly involved with have been over 18 (for instance, Riley was 22 and Musk was 37 when they began dating.) But like Musk, Epstein reportedly hoped to “seed the human race with his DNA by impregnating women” on a large scale, and had a compound of his own at Zorro Ranch in New Mexico for that purpose. Like Musk, much of his harassment took place on a private plane, where the women in question were a captive audience. There are even emails between the two, sent on Christmas Day in 2013, where Musk rather pathetically begged to visit Epstein’s properties. The common denominator between the two men is treating women as things to acquire and collect, rather than people. It’s a form of perversity that’s really only available to the super-rich. Musk is an objectively terrible father to his “legion.” Many of his children he appears to have little interest in communicating with at all. When he was asked what was so great about having children, he said that kids were “delightful” but “struggled to come up with any other reasons that had anything to do with building a relationship with the children themselves.” Musk has ignored Grimes, who had pleaded to keep their son X out of the limelight and protect his privacy, instead dragging his toddler in front of TV cameras repeatedly. The worst example of Musk’s parenting, though, is his disavowal of his 22-year-old trans daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson, whom he has publicly condemned, saying “she was ‘not a girl’ and was figuratively ‘dead,’” alleging that “he had been ‘tricked’ into authorizing trans-related medical treatment for her.” Musk’s transphobia is so extreme that he says he got into right-wing politics specifically because of Wilson, and his public attacks on her are even more galling given that when he comments negatively about someone online they tend to receive threats. For her part, Wilson says that her father “would harass her for exhibiting feminine traits,” on one trip “constantly yelling at me viciously because my voice was too high.” He was neglectful and absent, but also “cruel” and “cold” when present, “uncaring and narcissistic,” as well as “quick to anger.” (This is consistent with accounts of how Musk treats his employees as well.) Wilson notes that she doesn’t actually know exactly how many half-siblings she has, along with the extraordinary fact that “if I had a nickel for every time I found out I had half siblings through Reddit, I'd have two nickels... which isn't a lot but it's weird that it happened twice, right?” The influencer Ashley St. Clair, who had one of Musk’s children in 2024, said that while Musk seemed “very normal” before she got pregnant, “it just got so f—king weird.” When the child was born, Musk requested to keep his name off the birth certificate, while one of his deputies pressured her “to sign documents keeping the father of the baby and details regarding her relationship with Musk secret in return for[...] a one-time fee of $15 million for a home and living expenses, plus an additional $100,000 a month until the baby turned 21.” But after St. Clair expressed support for Musk’s trans daughter, Musk said he was “filing for full custody today” because her “support for trans ideology meant that she was ‘implying she might transition a one-year-old boy.’” He also “sought a gag order in New York to force Ms. St. Clair to stop speaking publicly.” In other words, in addition to his cruel treatment of his trans daughter, he threatened to keep one of his other children from seeing their mom because St. Clair disavowed transphobia. Again, the theme of treating people as possessions returns, because Musk is interested in his children only if they turn out the way he prefers; otherwise, he’ll cast them aside as he might a defective rocket engine. Building a healthy, loving family, then, and building normal human relationships, are something Musk has no interest in, and likely couldn’t achieve even if he did. His vast wealth allows him to treat people like dirt and suffer few consequences. When the mother of one of his children displeases him, he can threaten to ruin her with a costly custody battle. When he is accused of sexual harassment, he can cut a check. But the end result of all of this is multiple failed marriages and an ever-growing brood of biological children who will lack any kind of meaningful parent-child relationship with their dad. You Can’t Buy Cool If his relationships to the people close to him are a train wreck, Musk’s relationship with the public isn’t much better. As the years go on, it’s become clear that he badly wants to be seen as cool, funny, and popular, and yet the harder he tries to win everyone’s admiration, the less cool he becomes. Lately, his public antics just exude a desperate, sweaty energy that makes him painful to watch. There was the godawful “let that sink in” joke that he used to announce his arrival to Twitter’s headquarters, carrying a physical porcelain sink; the stupid X-shaped jumping jack he kept doing for a while, apparently to resemble the logo of “X the Everything App”; the cowboy hat incident; the photo he posted of his bedside table with a huge gun and four cans of Diet Coke on it; the poem (Maybe religion’s not so bad / To keep you from being sad). In his comprehensive, largely flattering biography, Walter Isaacson writes that Musk’s “jokes tended to be filled with smirking references to 69, other sex acts, body fluids, pooping, farts, dope smoking, and topics that would crack up a dorm room of stoned freshmen.” (More like a classroom of sixth-graders.) At one point, Musk admitted that he pays other people to write his tweets.

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