One single word exposes who billionaire Tesla boss Elon Musk really is
He’s the world’s richest man who many consider a genius – and now, Elon Musk has inadvertently revealed one very telling detail about himself.
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OPINION
In 1905, after Andrew Carnegie became the richest man on the planet, he donated the world’s first full dinosaur skeleton to a museum and helped build more than 2500 libraries.
Solomon and Peggy Guggenheim built galleries stuffed to the gunnels with incomparable art. John Paul Getty too. John D. Rockefeller paid for the discovery of the meningitis vaccine.
And our richest man in 2025?
Elon Musk’s been playing around with power tools like a four-year-old with a plastic Makita and is probably about this close to sending out his private jet to do a pizza run.
Now, one word has exposed who – or should I say, what – Mr Musk really is: a teenager.
The 53-year-old is still in the midst of the most protracted bout of adolescence known to modern medicine.
Let us consult the patient’s notes.
This month, conservative influencer Ashley St Clair went public, claiming that last year, she had secretly given birth to Mr Musk’s 13th child.
According to Ms St Clair, Mr Musk’s suave dating move to woo her was him saying, “wanna have a ride on my plane?” – proving he has the patter and slickness of a ninth-grader standing too close to a copy of Juggs magazine.
Then, this week, new claims surfaced that Ms St Clair had allegedly set out to get knocked up by Mr Musk. He responded with maturity and consideration and … as if.
He just posted “woah” next to one story about this on his personal fiefdom of far-reich fanboying, X, and “yikes” to another.
(This is not the first time he has used “woah” to respond to a negative story about Ms St Clair).
Further proof came when Mr Musk appeared at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland on the weekend, where he wielded a chainsaw and awkwardly yelled, “This … is … the chainsaw for bureaucracy. CHAINSAAAW!” (Language taken from the CPAC YouTube broadcast, I’ll have you know).
The erudition, the high-level thought, the sophistication of it all.
Watching a boy-man wave that chainsaw around, how can anyone deny the only things truly separating him from a 15-year-old is a lack of subcutaneous acne and his $400 billion fortune?
When he’s not out yelling “CHAINSAAAW!” at raucous Trump-o-philes stacked into convention centres, Mr Musk is living the dream life of a high-schooler.
He once admitted to drinking eight Diet Cokes a day, but in breaking news, in 2022 a photo he posted of his bed side table showed he has switched to the caffeine-free variety.
My bedside table pic.twitter.com/sIdRYJcLTK
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 28, 2022
The same shot shows he’s clearly into guns – weird, given he would already be surrounded by high-calibre bearing bodyguards.
Mr Musk has posted about his love of kebabs and says he eats a doughnut every single morning.
He is dead into things that make you go vroom, like rockets and cars – the bigger and pointer the better. (Ahhh, Dr Freud, thoughts?)
He built himself a Cybertruck that looks like it was designed using Meccano.
In 2022, he bought Twitter, staged a stunt carrying a toilet into the company’s headquarters and has since then mashed around at the levers and controls, making the social media site into his grubby, hate-filled plaything.
He has said he is “almost always” sober when he does his wee hours X posting, suggesting there are times when he is not.
Then there is his dating type – fawning acolytes decades his junior who can get suitably worked up about “woke-ism” and whom he seems to rotate in and out as often as most of us take the recycling bin out.
The Tesla boss might be the only person on Earth who could make Leonardo DiCaprio’s streak of romances with whichever Victoria’s Secret model has just strolled down the runway in a pair of angel wings look positively Phyllis Schlafly-approved.
In January this year, Mr Musk took himself off to Washington when Donald Trump was returned to the White House to head up the ha-ha-ha-bro, jokily named Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Since then, he’s been rampaging around with all the unabashed glee of an 18-year-old finally allowed inside a Hooters, because the 400-times billionaire clearly gets off on attention and wreaking havoc and mayhem.
When he got to DC, he didn’t surround himself with dyed-in-the-wool-suit, budgetary slash and burn Republicans who knew how to really swing an axe to wasteful things like food stamps and foreign aid budgets.
Instead, he took with him a programming posse of 18-25-year-old neophytes who are barely qualified to reroute your office printer and who keep getting their lunchtime chalupas all over the federal employee pension scheme.
One dude, Edward Coristine, 19, is known online as “Big Balls” and named the company he started at 16 “Tesla. Sexy”. This is who Mr Musk chooses to surround himself with.
All of which does, I suppose, put him in perfect alignment to work for the President who has never looked happier in four years in office than when he was allowed to have a go in a fire truck and whose “poison”, according to a new book, is pawing through a basket of sweeties.
Mr Musk is not a man motivated by some deep-seated ideology or any sort of coherent belief system. He just reacts and responds like someone whose prefrontal cortex has not finished developing (and which doesn’t usually until men are in their mid to late twenties, seriously), without anything so troubling like a moment’s thought or consideration.
His life is all about chaos and Cokes and cars and crash-tastic billion dollar cosmonaut vanity projects and Conservatives who can at least fill out a C-cup. He eats junk, has fallen asleep on the floor (namely in his Tesla office) and is really into loud, noisy toys.
His extreme wealth (he was at one point $US144 billion richer than the next richest person, Mark Zuckerberg) insulates him from anything like the consequences of his rat-a-tat-tat madness and ever having to eat green vegetables.
He has never had to grow up, like the Peter Pan of crypto-evangelists. And like Peter, he is now getting around Washington trailing his own Lost “Big Balls” Boys and empty Diet Coke cans, leaving thousands of traumatised civil servants in his wake.
Mr Musk’s obvious delight with his DOGE-meddling and general norm-rupturing with zero shred of empathy for the tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people it is affecting only confirms his deeply adolescent self-centrism and his ego.
Really, what he’s doing is playing.
Playing, playing, playing like a kid left unsupervised in front of the federal government Xbox.
Or to put it in language Elon might understand: Woah!
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles
Originally published as One single word exposes who billionaire Tesla boss Elon Musk really is
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