The Shady Side Of Elon Musk

The following article includes mentions of mental health struggles and allegations of workplace sexual harassment, child sex abuse, racism, antisemitism, transphobia, and sexism.

The old adage says, "Put your money where your mouth is." Well, when it comes to Elon Musk, even his several hundred billion dollars cannot stifle his gift of gab. From his modestly well-off beginnings in South Africa, Musk went on to sow the seeds of his riches in the U.S. and was soon hailed the wealthiest person in the world in 2021. But what do you do when you have so much money you could probably end world hunger? Instead of breaking bread, Musk's starting beef. 

The Tesla CEO and SpaceX founder truly knows what not to say — and when to say it. Having built a trillion-dollar empire, he has allegedly engaged in some very shady practices along the way. After all, this is a man whose own brother described him as "a savant when it comes to business, but his gift is not empathy with people," per Time. But Musk's sketchy behavior extends far beyond the business world, having irked everyone from the president to the mother of his child.

Time's Person of the Year for 2021, the billionaire businessman often comes across as a naughty schoolboy who thinks he can get away with saying and doing almost anything. And, judging by his ever-burgeoning bank balance, it seems he can, as — in this world — money is everything. From unhinged posts on X, formerly known as Twitter, to allegedly ignoring the mistreatment of his employees, get ready for the shady side of Elon Musk.

Before Grimes — and Talulah Riley — there was Justine Musk (née Wilson), to whom Elon Musk was married from 2000 to 2008. In an essay for Marie Claire, Justine divulged some rather unpleasant details about her ex-husband. She alleged, among other things, that Elon forced her to dye her dark hair blonde and treated her like an employee. "If you were my employee," he supposedly told his then-wife, "I would fire you."

Claiming that she was a mere "starter wife" for Elon, Justine wrote that the billionaire initially appeared sweet and charming when he courted her. However, it didn't take too long for the tide to turn. She said he sneakily got her to sign what he called a "financial agreement" that was, in actuality, a postnuptial agreement. "There were warning signs. ... Elon told me, 'I am the alpha in this relationship,'" she wrote. "I shrugged it off, just as I would later shrug off signing the postnuptial agreement, but as time went on, I learned that he was serious."

A lengthy divorce followed, as Justine fought to regain the wealth she had effectively signed away via the post-nup. Speaking with CNBC (via HuffPost), she explained that when she signed the document, "I trusted that he wouldn't do anything that would put me in harm's way." In an article for Business Insider, Elon refuted his ex-wife's claims and said that he pays her $20,000 a month for spending, outside of spousal support.

The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated the lives of millions around the world, yet Elon Musk has repeatedly downplayed its severity. On the platform X, he has expressed skepticism about the deadly virus since the early days of the pandemic, claiming in November 2020, "Something extremely bogus is going on." He previously tweeted that March that "the coronavirus panic is dumb," and also propagated conspiracy theories that doctors were wrongly attributing COVID-19 as patients' cause of death to get more government funding, a conspiracy that has been thoroughly debunked by leading scientists, per Scientific American.

During his appearance on "The Joe Rogan Experience," Musk doubled down on his views, purporting that the COVID-19 death rate was far lower than the World Health Organization was reporting. He also dismissed deaths as being limited to those with "existing conditions." The entrepreneur claimed that "people really wanted a panic" and embraced the notion that nationwide lockdowns were an "infringement of our civil liberties."

In an interview with The New York Times, he echoed this sentiment, rallying against lockdowns and asserting that only clinically vulnerable people should quarantine "until the storm passes." When Musk was told that such measures would lead to many avoidable deaths, he curtly replied, "Everybody dies." In addition to his skepticism regarding the virus, he has espoused anti-vax sentiments, claiming that he would refuse to receive a coronavirus vaccine. However, he has since changed his stance and revealed that both he and his family are vaccinated.

Elon Musk has a long history of trolling his competitors, creating beef with some of the world's most successful tech companies and entrepreneurs. He went after Apple when he spoke with German publication Handelsblatt (via Business Insider): "They have hired people we've fired. We always jokingly call Apple the 'Tesla Graveyard.'" He also claimed the company doesn't have the skills to manufacture cars. When promoting the Tesla Cyberwhistle on X, he again managed to throw in a smattering of shade against the Silicon Valley company in an otherwise promotional post. "Don't waste your money on that silly Apple Cloth, buy our whistle instead!" he wrote.

He has also long had beef with fellow billionaire Bill Gates. When Gates revealed that he wasn't a fan of Tesla, Musk tweeted that he found Gates to be "underwhelming" company. The bad blood reached its pinnacle during the coronavirus pandemic, when Musk attacked Gates' vaccine initiatives. In a since-deleted tweet, Musk posted an anti-vax cartoon, entitled "The Plannedemic," which suggested that Gates was somehow responsible for orchestrating mass hysteria before planning a "mandatory vaccine rollout."

When Musk usurped Jeff Bezos' spot as the world's richest man in 2021, he joked that he'd be sending the Amazon founder a silver medal, per Forbes. Speaking with the Financial Times, he threw further shade, suggesting that Bezos "should spend more time at Blue Origin and less time in the hot tub."

With a net worth of over $250 billion, as of this writing, one would be forgiven for thinking that paying a few billion in taxes would be a drop in the ocean for Elon Musk. Think again. When Senator Elizabeth Warren slammed Musk on the X platform for his supposed tax evasion, he retorted that he would "pay over $11 billion in taxes" in 2021. But as Representative Pramila Jayapal pointed out in an earlier tweet, Musk can make a whopping $36 billion a day.

That year, Musk, who has repeatedly referred to himself as "cash poor," took aim at a proposed "billionaire tax," in which the wealthiest would pay extra income tax to help fund social security programs and climate change policies, per The Wall Street Journal. "Eventually, they run out of other people's money and then they come for you," Musk tweeted in part in response to the proposals. Taxes, or lack thereof, have been at the center of many a Musk controversy. In 2018, it was revealed by ProPublica that his tax bill came to a grand total of $0.

As Vanity Fair argued in response to Musk's criticism of the proposals, he has been highly strategic in his wealth accumulation, opting to eschew a traditional salary in favor of a compensation plan that includes stock options. This is apparently how Musk has sometimes "been able to get away with paying zero dollars" in tax and a measly "$68,000 in 2015 and $65,000 in 2017."

"Everyone in Tesla is in an abusive relationship with Elon [Musk]," a former Tesla exec once told Quartz. Although Musk likes to wax lyrical about the conditions in which his Tesla employees work, many of them would have a hard time agreeing with him. In an exposé by The Guardian, it was revealed that many of his workers were seriously injured while "working 12-hour shifts, six days a week." As one employee put it, "The main export is injuries, not cars."

Sexual harassment is also allegedly rife in the Tesla workplace. Per Forbes, six female employees claimed they had been sexually harassed at Tesla, allegations the company apparently ignored. Meanwhile, Musk's other venture, SpaceX, has faced similar accusations. In a blog post for Lioness, Ashley Kosak claimed she had been subjected to relentless sexual harassment while working as a Mission Integration Engineer. "I reported each incident of sexual harassment I experienced to HR, and nothing was done," she wrote.

Additionally, accusations of flagrant workplace racism have been levied at Tesla. According to the Los Angeles Times, Black workers allegedly frequently had the n-word hurled at them by fellow employees, managers, and supervisors. It was also claimed, per the outlet, that Black employees were segregated and "had to scrub floors on their hands and knees, and they were relegated to the Fremont, Calif., factory's most difficult physical jobs." Tesla responded to the claims, arguing that they "always disciplined and terminated" those who engaged in racist abuse.

In 2020, Elon Musk made the bizarre decision to tweet that the "Tesla stock price is too high imo." The unprecedented move understandably raised more than a few eyebrows and ultimately led to a crash in the share price, which tanked by 12% in a single day. The following year, Musk posted a poll on the X platform, in which he asked his followers whether he should sell 10% of his Tesla shares to pay a tax bill. When almost 58% of voters opted for "Yes," Tesla stock plummeted $140 billion in one day, its biggest drop in a year.

Moreover, he has been accused of deliberately manipulating the market through his social media posts. As Vox pointed out, something very shady could be going on with Musk's tweets, since "a company's founder and CEO tweeting out meaningful information about the company arguably moves the price more than most." For instance, he's been accused of influencing the price of Dogecoin. In addition to tweets promoting Dogecoin, he even name dropped the cryptocurrency during his "Weekend Update" guest slot on "Saturday Night Live," referring to his on-screen financial expert as "The Dogefather." 

Following his stint on the show, the price of Dogecoin plummeted. As The Washington Post argued, "In a supposedly decentralized industry meant to be impervious to any single party's influence, market prices seem to soar or plunge based on the force of one man's tweets."

Among Elon Musk's innumerable grand ideas is the colonization of Mars. According to Musk, he wants to colonize Mars "just in case something goes wrong with Earth," he explained to Inverse. However, he has been heavily condemned for his plans. In his own interview with Inverse, film director Werner Herzog branded Musk's plans "an obscenity," arguing that people should "not be like the locusts." He went on to compare Musk's ideal to fascist ideology, describing it as a "master race [that] will dominate and improve our planet Earth and really improve humanity." Herzog also pondered why Musk was preoccupied with the idea of humans inhabiting Mars as opposed to working toward saving planet Earth.

Others have called Musk's colonization plot "dangerous." During a talk with fellow scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson (via Sky News), British chief astrophysicist Martin Rees said, "The idea of Elon Musk to have a million people settle on Mars is a dangerous delusion." Tyson agreed, echoing Herzog's stance by emphasizing that it would be "much easier to make Earth return to Earth again rather than terraforming Mars."

Musk himself has admitted that many potential Mars settlers will die on their journey to the planet. "You might not come back alive," he confessed to XPRIZE. "But it's a glorious adventure." When Captain Kirk called space "the final frontier," he probably didn't envisage a billionaire sending people off to their final frontier.

Elon Musk has a history of apparently being anti-union. For instance, in 2018, a Tesla worker told The Guardian that Musk cultivated a work environment where the mere mention of unions was sacrilege. "Elon Musk says he's neutral toward the union. ... They've been anything but neutral," they claimed. "Anything union or pro-union is shut down really fast." Musk's apparent war on unions didn't end there. Robert Reich tweeted in March 2022 that Musk "illegally threatened to take away stock options if employees unionized."

Per Business Insider, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that Tesla was guilty of repeated labor law violations in 2021. The company was accused of "coercively interrogating" employees who attempted to unionize. According to The New York Times, Tesla employee Richard Ortiz was fired in 2017 after Musk discovered his unionization efforts. Subsequently, Tesla was ordered to reimburse him for lost wages. Musk was also ordered to delete a tweet in which he wrote, "Why pay union dues & give up stock options for nothing?" This was viewed as a threat against employees.

Also in March 2022, Musk tweeted, "I'd like hereby to invite UAW to hold a union vote at their convenience. Tesla will do nothing to stop them." The tweet was in response to Kiss frontman Gene Simmons suggesting that President Joe Biden has overlooked Musk's business contributions due to Tesla being "non-union." As argued by The Guardian, Musk's vow to allow workers to hold a union vote is incongruous with his past actions.

On-and-off odd couple Elon Musk and Grimes have been in no shortage of contentious moments. And their dalliance has kept getting weirder. In a March 2022 interview with Vanity Fair, Grimes divulged all manner of bizarre things about the man she termed her "boyfriend," yet with whom she no longer lived, including the revelation that they had welcomed their second child into their lives, a daughter named Y — or Exa Dark Sideræl Musk. But perhaps the most alarming claim Grimes made about her on-again-off-again beau was that he supposedly made her live "below the poverty line." It should be noted that Musk's net worth at the time had surpassed $300 billion.

Musk's insistence on living well below his means (and then some) apparently had negative consequences on the mother of his children. As Grimes explained to Vanity Fair, Musk refused to buy a new mattress even when her side of the bed featured a gaping hole. "Bro does not live like a billionaire," she said. "Bro lives at times below the poverty line. To the point where I was like, can we not live in a very insecure $40,000 house? Where the neighbors, like, film us, and there's no security, and I'm eating peanut butter for eight days in a row?"

The claims came at a time when the notoriously frugal Musk, who once lived on a $1 a day food budget, revealed that he was relinquishing all of his seven homes, opting to "own no house," per Sky News.

In January 2022, Elon Musk began heavily investing in X, formerly known as Twitter, making a series of moves that saw him acquire the company at a cost of $44 billion. The deal closed that October — and the following month, he began massive layoffs, firing close to half of the staff. Days later, Musk introduced the Twitter Blue subscription service (later called X Premium), which charged $8 per month for the blue checkmark indicating a user is verified. This resulted in a rash of celebs — ranging from LeBron James to Chrissy Teigen — declaring their refusal to pay, along with a tsunami of fake celebrity accounts, courtesy of those $8 checkmarks. 

Musk courted further controversy when he changed Twitter's name to X. Meanwhile, the layoffs continued; as of May 2023, only 1,000 or so employees remained of a workforce that had been 7,500 when Musk took over. Musk's moves didn't do a whole lot to increase the company's share price; that October, X announced its current value was $19 billion — less than half of what Musk paid for it. 

With the guardrails and guidelines on content also essentially removed, it didn't take long for X to become a platform for all manner of racism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, disinformation, etc. Arguably, the icing on the cake came in December 2023, when Musk made the highly controversial move to reinstate the account of Alex Jones, who had previously been ordered to pay $1.5 billion in damages to families of the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting for spreading conspiracy theories about them, per Reuters.

While Elon Musk's relationship with his daughter, Vivian Wilson, may be strained, a whole other situation arose with his youngest kids, whom he shares with Grimes. That situation led to a lawsuit, filed by the Canadian singer-songwriter (whose real name is Claire Elise Boucher) in the fall of 2023, accusing Musk of refusing to let her see one of their children. As the Los Angeles Times reported, she'd filed a "petition to establish parental relationship." 

That petition followed some curious statements she posted (and then deleted) on Musk's X platform. Grimes responded to a photo posted on X shared by Walter Isaacson — the aforementioned author of the biography "Elon Musk" — in which Musk is pictured with two of his kids. "Tell Shivon to unblock me and tell Elon to let me see my son or plz respond to my lawyer," Grimes tweeted, referring to Shivon Zilis, the mother of twins that she and Musk welcomed in November 2021, after he'd split from Grimes. "I have never even been allowed to see a photo of these children until this moment," she claimed, "despite the situation utterly ripping my family apart."

Interestingly, Business Insider subsequently reported that, just days before Grimes filed her lawsuit, Musk took legals steps to attain full parental rights of the ex-couple's three kids, claiming that he's had "actual care, control, and possession of each child since the birth of each child."

To say that Elon Musk's apology for his tweet agreeing with an antisemitic tweet fell flat would be an understatement. In addition to being hit with backlash, Musk was also hit with a wave of powerful companies pulling their ads from the social media platform. In fact, the advertisers who fled X included Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount Global, and Apple. Those companies were soon joined by others, with Walmart following suit. "We aren't advertising on X as we've found other platforms to better reach our customers," a company spokesperson told Bloomberg. 

All those advertisers exiting the platform en masse proved led to devastating predictions about the slumping ad sales on X, which had already been consistently decreasing in revenue since Musk's takeover, while also experiencing a 30% drop in users actively tweeting prior to that. 

While Musk apologized during an appearance at The New York Times DealBook Summit, he also offered a defiant message to the advertisers who'd pulled out. "Don't advertise," Musk said, as reported by Global News. "If someone is going to try and blackmail me with advertising? Blackmail me with money? Go f*** yourself." Musk also took direct aim at Disney CEO Bob Iger — who'd appeared at that same conference prior to Musk's interview — for pulling Disney advertising off X. "Go f*** yourself, is that clear? Hey Bob, if you're in the audience. That's how I feel, don't advertise."

A number of high-profile people exited X, formerly Twitter, during Elon Musk's tenure as owner, a list that's included musicians Jack White and Trent Reznor, model Gigi Hadid, comedian Stephen Fry, and "Grey's Anatomy" creator Shonda Rhimes, to name a few.

In November 2023, that list grew to include Anne Hidalgo, mayor of Paris. She issued two versions of a lengthy tweet (one in French, of course, and the other in English) to explain her decision to quit. With Paris hosting the 2024 Summer Olympics, Hidalgo cited the uncontrolled disinformation, racism, and antisemitism that had been flourishing under Musk's watch. "Twitter, far from being the groundbreaking medium that initially made information accessible to the greatest possible number of people, has in recent years become an impressive tool for destroying our democracies," she wrote in part. "This platform and its owner intentionally exacerbates tensions and conflicts."

Hidalgo held nothing back when she added, "This medium has become a gigantic global sewer, and we should continue to wade into it? ... I refuse to endorse this evil scheme."

When Elon Musk's takeover of X resulted in an exodus of users, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg — a longtime Musk rival — responded by unveiling his own social media platform called Threads, pitched as an alternative. This kicked off a war of words between the two tech moguls that threatened to turn physical in June 2023, when Musk commented on Zuckerberg taking up MMA fighting as a hobby by tweeting, "I'm up for a cage match if he is lol." Zuckerberg's reply came in the form of an Instagram Story, in which he captioned a screenshot of Musk's tweet with the declaration, "Send Me Location." 

That led to some truly bizarre exchanges between the two, with Musk at one point tweeting that the match would be held in Italy, showcase ancient Rome, and be livestreamed on both platforms. While Zuckerberg shared numerous videos of his grueling MMA training, Musk posted a 53-second video of himself curling a 45-lb dumbbell. 

Musk then appeared to back down, tweeting that he was getting an MRI and might require neck or upper back surgery, which would postpone the fight. Zuckerberg, however, was raring to go. After Musk continued to make excuses to delay the fight, Zuckerberg called it off. "I offered a real date. [UFC president] Dana White offered to make this a legit competition for charity," Zuckerberg posted on Threads that August. "Elon won't confirm a date, then says he needs surgery. ... If Elon ever gets serious about a real date and official event, he knows how to reach me."

If you or anyone you know may be the victim of child abuse or sexual assault, has experienced a hate crime, or needs help with mental health, contact the relevant resources below:

• The Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-Child (1-800-422-4453) or contact their live chat services.
• The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network website or contact RAINN's National Helpline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).
• The VictimConnect Hotline by phone at 1-855-4-VICTIM or by chat for more information or assistance in locating services to help. If you or a loved one are in immediate danger, call 911.
• The Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741, call the National Alliance on Mental Illness helpline at 1-800-950-NAMI (6264), or visit the National Institute of Mental Health website.