I’m eager to see Alex Gibney’s ‘Musk’, although I doubt it will change many devotees’ minds. Nearly four hours is a considerable investment in someone whose public conduct already supplies ample reasons to dislike him. I suspect its most appreciative audience will be people settling into their seats with the horrible expectation that they have been insufficiently appalled.
Gibney’s interviewees include Justine Musk, Ashley St. Clair and journalist Kara Swisher; Musk did not participate and has criticised the film. I want to see the incidents gathered together, without each arriving separately, accompanied by volunteers explaining why everyone has misunderstood him.
On 15 October, Tesla demonstrated a Roadster capable of brief airborne stunts. The previous day, reports described restrictions affecting Ukrainian military communications using SpaceX technology. Reuters subsequently reported unnamed officials saying the order originated inside the White House; who gave and implemented it remained unidentified. While people were being invited to admire a car leaving the ground, a country at war was confronting its dependence on a connection it could not control.
First, though, some unfinished business in a dungeon.
The World's Richest Incel
Musk’s gaming controversy is a small masterpiece of unnecessary humiliation. Nobody demanded that he become an elite monster exterminator. The public would probably have accepted that a man running several companies might occasionally lose at a recreational activity.
In January 2025, the gamer NikoWrex published a video of what he said were private messages with Musk, apparently released with Musk’s permission. Asked a combined question about other people playing or boosting his ‘Path of Exile 2’ and ‘Diablo IV’ accounts, and purchasing equipment, Musk replied with a 100 emoji. He explained that accounts at the top of the leaderboards require multiple players.
The Guardian could not independently authenticate the original messages. Musk reportedly reposted the video and said he had never claimed to have personally achieved all his accounts’ progress. The exchange appeared to acknowledge boosting, other people advancing his characters, without establishing payments or equipment purchases. His streams showed him playing, he pointed out. Grimes defended his genuine ‘Diablo’ skill.
Good. He can kill the monsters. Some may simply have been killed by a colleague.
These are games about developing powerful characters and collecting equipment. Musk’s explanation introduced the staffing requirements of the dungeon. Somewhere in the infernal depths, a demon must wait for the appropriate member of the Elon Musk operation to come on duty.
He could enjoy being quite good at a game. Instead, his gaming reputation needed a public explanation separating his own clicking from everyone else’s. What gets me is the apparent hunger for one more certificate of excellence. Owning companies and commanding attention still leaves room for a dispute over whether the public sufficiently respects your monster account. The aggrieved outsider survives every promotion.
Twitter gave him rather more power over the insufficiently appreciative. In December 2022, the platform suspended several journalists during a controversy over an account tracking his private jet through public flight data. Musk had previously advertised a commitment to free speech broad enough to include that account. He said the journalists had violated anti-doxxing rules and put his family’s safety at stake.
Protecting people from dangerous exposure of personal information is a legitimate responsibility. Accounts were subsequently restored following a Musk poll, although some reporters had to delete posts to recover access. The people were invited to vote on whether the journalists could come back. An impressive democratic flourish, once the owner had decided who needed permission.
Apparently owning the platform is a small consolation when it continues to contain opinions.
Revenge of the Unfuckables
In his second poll on restoring the journalists, after dismissing the first poll’s options as too numerous, Musk offered two choices: now or in seven days. Close to 3.7 million votes were cast. Immediate restoration won with 58.7 per cent; 41.3 per cent favoured keeping the journalists suspended for seven days.
We do not know who those voters were or why they voted that way. A substantial share of the participating audience nevertheless chose another week’s suspension. The proprietor had made other people’s access something to vote on.
Buying Twitter gives an angry admirer a magnificent fantasy: imagine owning the place where people keep telling you that you’re wrong. That, to me, helps explain the most resentful strain of Musk fandom. There are perfectly ordinary reasons to admire engineering; an interest in rocket launches does not enrol someone in a misogynist militia. I mean the pleasure of watching a powerful man put disliked people in their place, then treating their objections as proof that he is winning. The admirer needs nothing beyond an account to borrow the boss’s authority.
For someone convinced that women or journalists have acquired an outrageous power to judge him, this promises a satisfying reversal. WIRED’s reporting on the manosphere describes an industry selling explanations for male grievance. It tells us nothing about the identities of Musk’s followers, but it describes a business with a usefully renewable product: somebody else to blame for your disappointment.
Loneliness hurts. Encouraging a disappointed man to regard women’s independence as something stolen from him is a filthy way to make a living. It saves him considering whether a woman who rejected him might have had perfectly adequate reasons.
A happily partnered man can enjoy someone else wielding power over a critic; a lonely man can find it repulsive. What I loathe is dressing spite as intelligence. Someone who would be unbearable in a group chat acquires the glamour of someone who might buy it.
Once defending him becomes a way to annoy people you dislike, you need only establish that his critics are angry. It is an embarrassingly low standard for a hero, especially when he starts telling other countries how to vote.
I’m Not a Nazi, Trust Me Bro
On 9 January 2025, Musk hosted Alice Weidel, leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany, on X and encouraged Germans to support her party in the forthcoming election.
Eleven days later, at a celebration of Trump’s inauguration, he struck his chest and extended his arm straight outwards and upwards, palm down, twice. The gesture prompted Nazi-salute comparisons. Musk rejected that interpretation; the Anti-Defamation League described an awkward gesture and urged caution, while other historians and observers disagreed. Associated Press reported extremists’ enthusiastic reception, irrespective of his intention.
The argument about the gesture can swallow the endorsement preceding it. Nobody needs a protractor to understand an interview encouraging people to vote for a far-right party. It comes with sentences.
Supporting AfD does not establish formal Nazi affiliation. It gives his admirers a political choice to defend. I would rather hear that defence than another account of how unfairly he has been treated. Musk gave Weidel an audience and his endorsement. Anyone enjoying the outrage from elsewhere could log off; Germans would have to live with the election result.
What Went Into the Wood Chipper
In early February 2025, Musk publicly supported shutting down the United States Agency for International Development, better known as USAID. He said Trump had agreed and wrote that they had spent the weekend feeding the agency “into the wood chipper”.
I despise the satisfaction in that phrase. An agency whose work included disease prevention and life-saving assistance had become something to enjoy shredding.
Associated Press reported that DOGE, the government-cutting initiative associated with Musk, sought access to USAID systems as Trump administration staff helped dismantle the agency. The administration held executive responsibility; Musk participated and publicly championed the attack. He later acknowledged that DOGE had “accidentally canceled” Ebola prevention work, while saying it had been quickly restored. Agency officials disputed the restoration. Accidentally cancelling Ebola prevention is the kind of fuck-up that ought to end a victory lap.
Research published in ‘BMJ Public Health’ in July 2026 documented health-programme disruptions following the aid freeze in Colombia, Kenya and Nepal. Researchers were examining work that had already been interrupted.
On 16 October, Reuters reported a $25 million US–UNICEF stopgap programme for maternal and newborn supplies after approximately 18 months of disruption. Supplies included medicines such as oxytocin and amoxicillin, with the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti and Mali among the countries covered.
Getting medicine where it is needed is an unexciting achievement until it stops happening. Someone has to buy it and arrange delivery. From far enough away, those people are easy to dismiss as bureaucracy. Rebuilding part of the supply system more than a year later is a less thrilling announcement than feeding an agency into industrial machinery.
A 2025 peer-reviewed study in ‘The Lancet’ projected approximately 14.1 million additional deaths worldwide over 2025–2030 if severe USAID defunding persisted under its scenario, including approximately 4.5 million children under five. It used historical links between funding and mortality to forecast the effects of sustained cuts. The overall uncertainty interval ran from approximately 8.5 million to 19.7 million.
Brooke Nichols’s Impact Counter uses a different model, estimating effects across health programmes over one year. Under its funding-discontinuation assumptions, it projects 262,915 adult deaths and 518,428 child deaths: 781,343 in total. These figures cannot be added to the broader ‘Lancet’ forecast. Both models give conditional projections, not counts of observed deaths, and neither assigns Musk a personal death toll.
The eventual toll is uncertain. The interrupted programmes and the need to restore supplies for mothers and newborns are already being documented. Aid spending should be scrutinised and ineffective programmes challenged. Musk chose to celebrate demolition. Delivering medicines was always going to take more care than the wood-chipper boast allowed.
A Car in the Air, a Country on a Connection
On 15 October 2026, Tesla demonstrated its new Roadster. Reports described a suction fan enabling upside-down driving and thrusters producing brief airborne stunts. Musk called it a flying car. Production was said to be planned for 2028.
The engineers have made a car do something alarming and impressive. I’m happy to admire the stunt. The prototype has yet to demonstrate sustained, practical flight, and nobody has been handed a commercially usable flying car. Musk’s description is getting ahead of what the machine has shown it can do.
On 14 October, Reuters had reported Ukrainian officials’ accounts of restrictions affecting SpaceX-linked military communications, including a speed restriction affecting drones travelling above approximately 160 km/h. Connections and drone missions were interrupted.
The principal military system was Starshield, SpaceX’s military version of technology developed for its Starlink satellite service. Reuters subsequently reported anonymous US and Western officials saying the restriction order came from inside the White House, without identifying who gave or implemented it. Musk said US military and government authorities controlled Starshield usage limits; both he and Trump denied personal responsibility.
On 19 October, four US Democratic senators demanded records from SpaceX by 2 November to establish what the company had done and what its contracts required. Their letter was an inquiry, not a finding against Musk.
The reporting does not establish that Musk personally ordered a cutoff or struck a bargain linking it to the Roadster. His companies were in the news for two very different reasons. Viewers could enjoy the car stunt and move on. Ukrainians needed the connection to work.
I find that dependence much more important than the stunt. A country defending itself cannot postpone its needs until everyone has sorted out the paperwork. SpaceX has built services important enough for military missions to depend on them. The people using them deserve to know who can impose restrictions, whatever Musk’s personal part in this order turns out to have been.
People, Rather Than a Legion
Musk repeatedly urges people to have more children and warns about population decline. I find those appeals harder to listen to alongside the accounts of people already involved.
At the Venice festival in September, Ashley St. Clair alleged that Musk had texted her about wanting “a legion of children before the civil war”. In the documentary and related reporting, she also made allegations about confidentiality and financial-support arrangements. These remain her claims, not established contractual terms; PEOPLE reported Musk’s rejection and criticism.
A legion is an extraordinary ambition to attribute to a parent: children assembled ahead of a conflict. St. Clair’s account is contested. Musk’s public words about Vivian Jenna Wilson need no acceptance of it.
In his July 2024 interview with Jordan Peterson, Musk described his transgender daughter as figuratively dead, saying she had been killed by the “woke mind virus”. He also claimed he had been tricked into approving gender-affirming care.
Vivian Jenna Wilson is alive. In a 25 July 2024 interview with NBC News, she disputed the claim that he had been tricked, saying he knew what he was agreeing to. She described him as an absent and cruel father. Those descriptions of their private life are her testimony. Musk had spoken about an ideological casualty; Wilson spoke about her life.
Whatever estrangement a parent experiences, publicly describing a living child as dead is vicious. She is still there to hear it. He has made her life sound like something terrible that happened to him. Wilson owes nobody a reconciliation to make this story more comfortable. She need not become a flawless representative of anyone else’s cause, either. She has spoken for herself and has a life beyond answering him.
Someone so keen for more people to be born ought to be prepared for them to develop minds of their own. A daughter may reject his politics and dispute his recollections. None of that gives him the right to discuss her as though she has died.
I’ve Had Enough of the Excuses
What keeps getting me is how unnecessary so much of the cruelty was. Nobody forced Musk to celebrate an aid agency’s destruction with a wood-chipper joke. He could have listened when officials disputed his reassurance, or simply refrained from congratulating himself. With Wilson, he could have said nothing about her in that interview. Instead, a living woman heard her father use her supposed death to explain his politics, then had to decide whether to answer publicly.
I am sick of hearing his achievements offered as an answer. It asks people on the receiving end to wait while his admirers finish explaining his importance. Being expected to leave someone alone starts to sound like an intolerable burden on a remarkable man.
His companies reach into people’s lives far beyond anything a product demonstration can show. The reported White House origin of the Starshield order matters, as do the unanswered questions about SpaceX. Making a car briefly take off answers none of them.
He does not have to be responsible for every disaster near his businesses to deserve my contempt. His celebration of destruction and his account of a daughter who is alive to contradict him are quite enough. He had money enough to get advice and freedom enough to keep his mouth shut. He chose to make other people’s lives material for his boasts and grievances. I think Elon Musk is a fucking bastard.
