The Truth About Musk, From His Biographer

A viral Bluesky thread introduced tens of thousands around the world to a first glimpse of a forthcoming biography of Elon Musk. Here—in a single essay—is some of what the world just learned.

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1.

Elon Musk may be an unelected plutocrat, but in six weeks he’ll become co-President of the United States. Unfortunately, many people around the world are only just now beginning to research who Musk really is—not the mythos he spent decades carefully weaving about himself like a cloak, but the hard realities that define the actual man.

Most of what people think they know about Elon Musk is manifestly false. This essay, written by an Elon Musk biographer and based on OSINT research, reveals the truth—or at least a significant part of it. Rest assured that none of what remains is any better.

I’ve been a Musk biographer for two years now. In that time I’ve published hundreds and hundreds of pages of professionally researched content about the man—well over a book’s worth—here at Proof, an independent media outlet at Substack that ranks as a Top 25 U.S. Politics substack worldwide.

The longest report that I’ve published about Elon Musk so far is this one (see also the image-link below). It’s a novella in and of itself, despite being just one of many fully sourced reports on Musk authored by a bestselling historian and biographer whose focus before now was the political career—and political scandals—of Donald Trump.

As you will soon see, the parallels between the lives of Trump and Musk are jarring.

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The reason the report linked to above is so long is because it covers many different topics and subtopics.

One of its foci was on how Elon Musk got rich in business—a separate topic from how he had the money to break into the business world in the first place, a topic I’ll get to further along in this essay.

The simple fact is that Zip2, which brought Elon the massive financial haul he needed to do literally anything else in business in the United States, arose from an idea that he appears to have stolen. I say “appears” to have stolen because there are three separate potential sources for the idea for Zip2—and only one is Elon and his brother Kimbal.

The key one is a phonebook salesman, and another an entrepreneur who actually sued Elon for stealing the idea for Zip2. Both these well-documented claims are credible, even as the attempts by the Musk boys to discredit them and center themselves in the story of Zip2 are half-hearted and, in the judgment of this biographer, even laughable.

Indeed, these two claims are so credible that after Elon and Kimbal for years told the story of the phonebook salesman in a way that—if you can believe it—made it pretty clear that they took an idea he was pitching to the company Elon was then interning for wholesale, they suddenly realized how reciting historical events in this way came off and changed the origin story of Zip2 a hundred and eighty degrees. Suddenly, they were the heroes of it and (apparently to drive the coverup home) the salesman who’d conceived of the concept Zip2 would instantiate was a dope the Musk boys laughed at.

They’ve since enlisted family members to try to help them date the Zip2 idea as theirs; none of those claims are credible. Worse still, their own admission is that as they were materializing the Zip2 idea—again, an idea that sure seems stolen—they were acting wildly unprofessionally, in fact in ways that would make the jaw drop of anyone who has ever entered a professional workplace.

For instance, Elon and Kimbal used to engage in full-on brawls—brawls that produced blood and even hospitalization—inside the office. Not just in the office, but in front of employees. To repeat: open, barroom-style brawls; in the office; in front of co-workers; between two men who were supposed to be leading that office responsibly and sagely.

I know of no niceties of journalism that require me to say anything about this but the following: a boss who acts in this way is deranged. And presumably he’d be seen as such by any employee unlucky enough to work in an office so morally dilapidated.

But it gets worse. Elon and Kimbal took the Zip2 idea just to sell it and get rich off it; they hardly cared about its success. This is the context within which the report linked to above reveals that, by Kimbal’s own admission on a nationally disseminated TV program, while pitching their apparently stolen idea to investors both Elon and his brother were not just illegal immigrants but were hiding from prospective investors that fact.

Can you imagine the absolute gall that’s required to shop an idea that’s not yours for millions of dollars? And can you then imagine, moreover, the additional gall required to shop an idea that’s not yours for millions to investors you’re dissembling to about your immigration status, hiding that you’re eligible for immediate deportation (and your company thus eligible for immediate dismantling at any time, without notice)?

As noted above, we must add to all that preexisting gall the still further gall required to ask for millions and millions of dollars when you know that the workplace you’re running is one in which open brawls are taking place in full view of the employees.

If it sounds like a scheme cooked up by two obscenely wealthy, pampered rich kids, you’re right. The reason Elon has ruthlessly lied for years and years and years about how he and Kimbal even had the money to keep Zip2 going for long enough to seek investors is that the whole time they were funded by their rich, obscenely bigoted dad—a man who may be the poster-child for an unexceptional white man getting wealthy off racial apartheid in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s, when Elon and his brother were growing up under his care.

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2.

“With no Whites here [in South Africa], the Blacks will go back to the trees.”

—Errol Musk in a 2022 letter to his son Elon

Given who Elon and Kimbal’s father Errol Musk is, and what he believes about racial hierarchies, and how he made much of his money in apartheid-era South Africa, it’s no surprise that Elon and Kimbal didn’t want anyone to know that not only were they living in America off daddy’s money in the 1990s but they never would have made it in business without him and his cash.

Both Musk boys knew their father was a contemptible figure the likes of which no one in Silicon Valley would ever condone, so they lied about everything: their immigration status; the source of their startup money; their ability to conduct themselves in an office setting as professionals; even their personal politics, which were far right (Elon a bit more so than Kimbal), a fact they knew would never be accepted in California.

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But there’s also evidence that Elon may have taken student loan money from the U.S. government or private lenders and funneled it into his illegal startup enterprise, which he was desperate to get off the ground during the so-called “dot com” bubble—a time when even men of middling intelligence and no fresh ideas like he and his brother could strike it ultra-rich. That’s candidly all Elon ever wanted when he was younger, and a big part of what he cares about today (the rest is discussed also, infra).

As we will see throughout this essay, the money—and, admittedly, all that comes with it, like fame and unprecedented power(s)—is the overarching point of every Musk enterprise, not, as he falsely claims in his mythos, a means to an end.

Certainly, no Musk enterprise is about rule of law. For did I mention that it was illegal for Elon to be working on Zip2 at all, just as it was illegal for him to be in America at all for much of the 1990s? Did I mention that he and his brother both knew this, but also had that casual sense of entitlement rich young white men from South Africa have when they believe they are operating in a post-Reagan American culture tailored to their needs, and a subculture in that culture (Silicon Valley) easily suckered by two right-wing, apartheid-born kids willing to unctuously pretend they’re progressives?

But it’s not just that Musk entered the American business world lawlessly, setting the tone for decades of casual disregard for the rules everyone else abides by. It’s also that Musk entered the business world with lies, another hallmark of his half-century of life.

Here’s where we have to talk about Elon Musk’s educational background—which may be the single most lied-about aspect of his biography (and that’s saying something).

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3.

Understand first that Musk doesn’t believe in or care about education. Not at all. Not even a little bit. To the extent Musk has any core values, a dubious proposition indeed, this would be one: education of any kind is a waste of time. It’s one reason Musk now appears to be functionally media illiterate, functionally digitally illiterate, and lacking even the most basic knowledge about the world: certainly most of the knowledge we would expect from a high school graduate with even a nominal intellectual curiosity.

Instead of education—self- or otherwise—Elon believes in making money, and usually with the ideas of others and almost exclusively their labor. His aim is to use his dodgy skills as a hype man (like those of Donald Trump, more predicated on the idea that a sucker is born every minute than the flawed notion that he is especially persuasive or charismatic) to turn some money into more money, more money into obscene money, and obscene money into historic wealth that’s not just generational but history-making.

From the start—from his early childhood—Elon didn’t believe education (as opposed to networking) had anything to do with success. Did he come to this notion organically? Probably not. Elon isn’t particularly bright, so not surprisingly he was an indifferent student in South Africa; it may have been easier to develop a theory about education being useless than to accept that he was a mediocre intellect whose chief skill-set was the ruthless, unscrupulous, shamelessly grasping ambition he’d learned at his father’s knee.

Indeed, Elon was such an indifferent student in South Africa that he had to start telling lies to his biographers about reading multiple Encyclopedia Britannica sets all the way through—multiple, mind you! All the way through!—as a child to try to hide a human-average intelligence and an utter disinterest in organized education. It seems clear Elon’s real education came mostly from fantasy books and Dungeons & Dragons, which would be fine if they were coupled with an interest in philosophy (beyond some primitive ideas from Nietzsche and some fascistic ones from Ayn Rand), ethics, mass communications (including literacy), and the liberal arts (particularly history, writing, sociology, psychology, the creative arts, and critical thinking, some areas in which Musk’s publicly demonstrated skills should be assessed as junior high-school level).

After he graduated from high school as an indifferent student, Elon first flamed out at University of Pretoria—a school he now tries to elide from his biography altogether—largely because he didn’t want to be in South Africa at all. He had contempt for his home country, not for the reasons you might hope (apartheid) but because he believed it inadequately resourced to provide for the enrichment of an already ultra-rich young white man. His dad has since made clear that it’s a family view that the reason South Africa couldn’t provide for the Musk boys in the way they demanded was because it had an emerging highly politically engaged Black population and emerging Black political class in the 1980s that would, in the 1990s, become a Black government Errol believed illegitimate and (yes, due to race) incompetent. Errol, in interviews, ties the decline of the South African job market for well-to-do white citizens directly to Black empowerment there in the 1980s and 1990s, even as he also suggests that tourism was significantly hampered and crime significantly augmented by that very empowerment over the same period.

So not only did Elon Musk not want to be in South Africa at all, as it quite poorly fit his singular goal of becoming ultra-wealthy, but he had been taught by his father to (a) resent liberalism as the cause of the Musk boys’ inability to become even richer, and (b) be aware that if liberals believe you have far-right, apartheid-era views on race and associated topics, they won’t work with you in business and will try to stop you via government, the latter of which the Musks believe is in most nations run by only the laziest, most incompetent, and most corrupt people available (traits Errol appears to attach to non-whites and women in particular, and which Elon, in other venues, see the long link-list below, also pins to non-whites).

So not only did Musk, as he was flaming out at University of Pretoria, know that he needed to be in America to become filthy rich, he also knew he’d have to find a way to get to America while hiding from anyone he met there that he (like most if not all of his family, going back generations) had vile, horrifically regressive white-supremacist views on race, government, and business.

To obscure this, Musk concocted a frankly obscene story about choosing to leave his home country for North America because he was anti-apartheid. In fact, he was (and is) a white supremacist, which meant at the time he left South Africa not so much that he was incapable of having a non-white acquaintance with whom he was friendly but that (a) he had to that point lived a life steeped in overwhelmingly white communities and subcommunities where non-whites were deemed an unwelcome complication, (b) he wasn’t in any sense politically oriented and didn’t think or care much about the injustices of apartheid (and to the extent he did, his father was stuffing his head with the idea that the true victims of apartheid were conservative whites like the Musks), and (c) his regressive views on race and governance weren’t shaped by an education he was disinterested in but (i) his bigoted father, whom he idolized as a ruthless “alpha male” capable of helping his sons get rich, and (ii) his own inchoate sense that South Africa’s Black-run government had somehow made decisions that had rendered the country inhospitable to self-perceived white ultra-geniuses like him. He and his brother were, simply put, spoiled boys born on third base who believed that they had hit three home runs already in the game and effortlessly tripled in their fourth at-bat.

So the story—which Proof debunked—is still told today about Elon Musk regretfully leaving South Africa to avoid having to do a racism in South Africa’s military. It’s all garbage, and finds no solid base of support in any interview with his contemporaries.

It seems, instead, that Elon, like Trump, saw military service as being for suckers—and as he knew he wouldn’t become (even) richer staying in South Africa, he simply fled.

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It’s worth mentioning here that the Musks were indeed obscenely wealthy when Elon was a boy. Obscenely wealthy. Luxury cars, private jets, one of the nicest homes in all of South Africa. Elon made it his goal to get to America because the obscene wealth the Musks already had wasn’t enough for him—he wanted a level of wealth that would make him both famous and powerful as well, an ambition that had eluded his politics-dabbling father (a man embittered by his perception that the end of apartheid had robbed him of power he already had, and new powers and profits he urgently sought).

Elon, in other words, wanted to be filthy rich.

So Elon emigrated to Canada, where he did—well, no one really knows. All timelines he’s offered about his early months in Canada have fallen apart. His biographers can’t make heads or tails of it. In fact, there’s an entire lost year where his whereabouts are unknown, which lacuna he waves away with—per usual—unprovable, patently absurd self-mythologizing.

Though he claims he had no money when he arrived in Canada, and also claims his relatives there were eagerly offering him a place to stay, he alleges, on no paper trail whatsoever, that for a year he wandered Canada like Cain instead, doing odd and suspiciously alpha-male-like blue-collar jobs that offered little money, no housing, and had no paper trails but did conveniently establish (when relayed by biographers many years hence) his desired persona as a self-starter, dreamer, and man willing to work primarily with his hands. Which he is not.

But there’s simply no evidence any of it happened. In some timelines, there isn’t even evidence it could have happened, because the dates Elon claims for it were dates he was actually elsewhere.

There is evidence he enrolled in school...

…specifically, Queen’s University, where he once again flamed out without finishing.

At Queen’s University Elon didn’t study, by his own admission rarely went to class, and spent his time...well, partying and networking. Which makes it inexplicable and a bit suspicious that (according to his own telling) he would be accepted to Penn on a transfer with a full ride.

But per usual, all the facts surrounding Elon’s time at Penn are now fully contested.

Sometimes Elon says he had a full ride to Penn; sometimes he whines that he had to take out massive loans. Sometimes he says he graduated on time; sometimes he admits the truth—that he left Penn without graduating (if you’re counting at home, the third school he flamed out at) and didn’t get his degree until years later when his investors pulled strings to make it happen under dubious circumstances. Sometimes Elon claims to have been resident in Philly for his whole time at Penn, and sometimes he admits to hardly being there at all (which seems to be the truth of the matter). Sometimes Elon says he had help from his dad to survive at Penn financially, but sometimes he insists that he didn’t. Sometimes he admits to working on Zip2 while at Penn—which would have been illegal given his immigration status at the time—and sometimes he doesn’t.

We know this much: his dad would’ve been powerful enough to pull strings at Penn to help him get in, as he was at once wealthy and charismatic and well-connected in the United States (not to mention arguably a locally influential political figure in South Africa); Elon was certainly inexplicably flush with cash his whole time at Penn; and while he was at Penn he once again—in the continuation of a lifelong trend—didn’t give a whit for academics and mostly partied. And oh, how he partied! He somehow had the dosh to rent out two separate mansions (yes, really), one to live in and one to run as a nightclub with his mother Maye Musk as an employee, confirming Maye as being little more than a mute adjunct to the Musk men at that point in her life and candidly still today, with all of her public attention being wholly conditioned on the continued fame of her husband and (much more so) sons.

Creepy? Yes. Unusual? You bet. Explained by the Musk Family being ultra-rich white supremacists willing to be gauche, reckless, contemptible and possibly even lawless to make their way in the world as grasping poseurs? Indeed. Thus we find that Elon may have been resident at Penn for as little as 12 months and still left without a degree.

Yet again.

While we have no idea where Elon’s oodles of in-Penn money came from, it is clear it wasn’t targeted at his education, given that he was at once running the equivalent of a nightclub and was also, apparently, preparing (and more than preparing) for the effort that would become Zip2. In some instances, he apparently handed in papers from afar, as though he’d somehow gotten permission to do independent studies or to complete certain courses without final grades but a final project to be handed in long after the semester ended.

The most likely scenario, based on the data we have and with no help whatsoever from the many divergent and often implausible tales Elon himself has told, is that his dad and/or unknown connections helped him get into Penn with some sort of scholarship and that scholarship, coupled with money from his father and possible additional sources—see below—paid for all his lavish Pennsylvania living expenses. Elon may well have electively taken out additional loans, money he did not need whatsoever, to use as seed money for Zip2. Presumably he would not have been eligible for any U.S. federal loans, and we have no idea what sort of private lenders the Musks could have called upon such that Elon could later claim to have over $100,000 of debt from a period of school potentially as short as a year of residency. Oddly, Elon’s father has offered a much, much higher figure for Elon’s expenses at Penn, a staggering quarter of a million dollars, which raises significantly the odds of private lenders fundamentally bankrolling Elon’s entrepreneurial escapades rather than anything having to do with Elon’s education—an education, once again, he actually had no interest in at all.

Elon was rarely in Philly, it appears, instead spending an inordinate amount of time in a state he now loves to hate on, California. His dorm room at Penn has been described by those who knew him at the time as barely lived in at all. Little more than a bed.

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But if Errol Musk’s money is what actually kept Elon afloat in Canada, then America, not odd jobs Elon lied about or loans he lied about or a dodgy nightclub operation his mom worked at or unknown and unknowable private lenders or a scholarship he lied about, where did all that money come from?

We do have a likely answer on this score.

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A significant amount of the Musk fortune Elon enjoyed growing up, and which his dad used to support him in Canada and America—and this will explain why Elon for years lied about his father’s support, even to the point of falsely implying he had written his father out of his life entirely—came from illegal apartheid-era mines in Zambia that exploited their Black workers but made the Musks fantastically wealthy.

The Musk Family refused to pay taxes on these mines or reveal their interest in them for a reason that makes sense if you know that the Musks comes from generations of white supremacists and some of them—e.g., Elon Musk’s grandparents—were even open Nazi sympathizers. Simply put, the Musk Family scions didn’t believe any Black-run government could be deemed legitimate or competent or worthy of basic respect (let alone admiration or fealty), whether that government was in South Africa or Zambia, so Errol Musk saw no need to acknowledge Zambia’s government and its powers of taxation when he bought a substantial share in a network of illegal emerald mines in the country by trading away one of his many private jets.

(Note that Errol Musk has called into question the legitimacy of Black governance in South Africa as recently as this year, and that Elon’s suspicion and perhaps even instinctive hatred of any non-white leftist government may have informed his open warfare against Brazil’s government this year, which was breathtakingly aggressive and unhinged. This said, it is clear that the primary basis for Musk supporting any government is if it’s autocratic, kleptocratic, and oligarch-friendly—which explains the lavish praise he has heaped on Argentina’s Javier Milei, Narendra Modi in India, and of course Vladimir Putin. Errol Musk has explained that the primary requirement the Musks have for any government is that it be instantly, even unquestioningly subservient to rich entrepreneurs; as we will soon see in discussing the relationship between Elon Musk and Barack Obama, even the instinctive Musk Family suspicion of non-white governance can be overcome by obscene amounts of money.)

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The dim view of non-white governance that Errol Musk holds appears to be a view that Elon holds as well, which is why when his mother Maye went on TV a few weeks ago to describe the sort of people Elon planned to fire from the federal government she used language that echoes the coded adjectives Errol uses in speaking of women and non-whites broadly writ—lazy, incompetent, corrupt, avaricious, irresponsible, lethargic—and which Elon himself uses in describing any class of persons that’s disproportionately non-white, female, left-leaning, or committed to public service rather than private enterprise over the long term. For his part, Errol has made clear that (a) he’s a rich white far-right man who Elon regularly uses as an adviser, and (b) Elon shares his (Errol’s) view that rich white far-right men with an interest in private enterprise rather than public service should run every government—men like Donald Trump, Errol explains, stating plainly that he knows Elon feels exactly the same way.

Thus, a network of apartheid-era emerald mines that exploited their Black workers, paying them only a pittance, which mines Errol Musk had no intention of ever telling either the Black-run Zambian government about or the newly established Black-run South African government whose very legitimacy he contested in family discussions (at a minimum) from the start.

As for Elon, he has lied about the Musks’ fantastically lucrative mines for most of his life. I say “most” of his life because—incredibly—Elon was the first person to reveal the existence of the mines to major media. Per usual, he was showing off, bragging, trying to make himself sound interesting rather than the immature dolt he actually often is. So despite the fact that he was passing himself off as a liberal to major media at the time, he couldn’t resist slipping into not one but two interviews a startling fact he didn’t instantly grok would garner him negative attention: that his family owned an apartheid-era emerald mine in Zambia.

(For more information on Elon Musk’s personal racism, see all the exhaustive Proof reporting here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. For more information on his obsession with white-run autocracies, see here, here, here and here. This essay also draws explicitly from Musk’s public Twitter feed, his interviews at major tech conferences that have been audio- and/or video-recorded, the long list of anonymous implicitly neo-Nazi and white supremacist accounts he often amplifies on Twitter, the Walter Isaacson and Ashlee Vance and Zoë Schiffer and Kate Conger and Ryan Mac biographies of Musk, and major-media reports on the many lawsuits brought against him and/or his many companies, which include suits alleging racial discrimination, union-busting, sexual harassment, fraud, willful violation of federal safety regulations, and contempt for all government regulation.)

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6.

The evidence that Elon knew of his family’s illegal Zambian emerald mine, visited the mine, knew his family was rich from the mine, knew the mine was illegal—et cetera, et cetera—is legion, but he still now denies all of it (after first revealing all of it) because he doesn’t fundamentally believe in the concept of a stable truth and he hasn’t since he was a boy obsessed with fantasy books, Dungeons & Dragons, and his dad’s tall tales.

Also, up until very recently he was worried it wouldn’t play well with Tesla customers.

Usually, a child of such ambient imagination learns to harness his energies through a rigorous understanding of, and application of, the knowledge and skills endowed by a study of the liberal arts, but Elon doesn’t believe in the liberal arts. He believes only in what he can get away with, which these days is almost anything. He can sue anyone out of existence and more or less now uses this as his first and only recourse when he knows he’s in the wrong. His second recourse appears to be thinly veiled death threats.

But as with every aspect of Elon’s life, this all gets worse.

Elon didn’t just know everything about his dad’s emerald mine, he was in fact obsessed—for years and years—with the idea that he could get rich by working alongside (or as an agent of) his father selling illegal gems in the United States for beaucoup profits.

Yes, really.

This is why the two periods—one of which was while he was an illegal immigrant—in which Elon fell off the map while living in Canada and then the United States are so unnerving. Because we know Elon sold illegal gems for his dad in NYC at least once (yes, really, see links above) and that he aimed to keep doing it afterward, having made thousands of dollars at one jewelry store in just a few minutes as a teenager. So did he?

Did he become a daring, transnational gem smuggler like his father? Did he dabble in the very thing that made him admire his father so much—and choose to live with him over his comparatively less ambitious mother?

We don’t have a final answer on that.

We just know that during the period such clandestine sales of smuggled gems would have happened, Elon (a) had way, way more money than can be explained, and (b) was lying about where his money was coming from. It’s certainly reasonable to believe he helped his dad with his gem-smuggling business, given that we know that business existed, we know Elon once participated in it, we know Elon was aware of how very lucrative it was, we know Elon wanted to be involved with it and urged his father to move to the United States to make that possible, and that while Errol declined to do so his onetime gem-sales agent Elon did end up in America with fabulous wealth he’s not only never explained but has ruthlessly lied about for decades.

The point is, Elon Musk flamed out at Penn—leaving without a degree—but did have the money available to flee to California, now an illegal immigrant without any status as a protected in-program student, and to begin taking an idea he had heard during a surprisingly and even suspiciously long out-of-state mid-undergrad internship into a condition where it could be sold to someone who actually cared about it for millions and millions of dollars.

The Penn flameout was Elon’s third higher-ed failure, but not his last. Because in order to hide his illegal immigration status, Musk had to tell decades of lies about attending Stanford University—which he absolutely didn’t.

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Elon did look into going to Stanford for a doctoral program as a means of retaining his in-program status as a legal immigrant, but he did so well knowing he couldn’t actually be admitted because, please remember, he had no undergraduate degree at all. Elon may even have had a professor at Stanford vaguely interested in his desired area of doctoral research, a man who might have been willing to help Elon get into Stanford if Elon had had an undergraduate degree (or, alternatively, perhaps he had a professor who did help him because he had been falsely led to believe Elon was qualified to matriculate).

The point of all this, yet again, is that Elon Musk does not care about education. He cares about money, and to the extent that lying about your education can help you get money, that is about the most you can hope for from it—thus Elon in the 1990s as a spoiled young rich-kid illegal immigrant with no undergraduate degree and no plan for getting one but selling himself to potential investors as somehow still connected to two of Earth’s most renowned institutions of higher learning, Penn and Stanford.

But Elon Musk never intended to go to Stanford, and never matriculated at Stanford.

He simply needed the lie that he had matriculated at Stanford once, or was about to do so, in order to explain why he didn’t leave the United States after flaming out from his third college because he spent all his time skipping class, partying, and networking. If Elon had matriculated at Stanford as he’s insisted, the Registrar’s Office there would have evidence of it; instead, Elon waves about a letter from a professor who possibly was interested working with him, which is literally not how you prove a matriculation.

Ever.

So it’s important that we have this understanding of Elon Musk at the dawn of his first big “success” in business: he was a spoiled rich kid who had lived in the lap of luxury his whole life; he’d already begun systematically lying to acquaintances about his views on race because they were jointly formed by growing up under apartheid and his hideously bigoted father; he was an illegal immigrant lying about that fact to investors he was seeking millions of dollars from; he was at the time subject to instant deportation (and possibly even a ten-year ban on reapplying for admission to the U.S.), making the company he was trying to sell for millions that he didn’t care about at all—built off someone else’s idea—essentially worthless, as it could have been be forced to shut down at any time and was the product of work done illegally by illegal immigrants.

He was being supported by his bigoted father, whose money he well knew came from an illegal emerald mine in Zambia that exploited its Black workers; he and his equally spoiled brother were, unbeknownst to their would-be investors, acting like spoiled rich-kid brats in the workplace, to the point that they were openly brawling in front of their employees; and he was telling the truth about his political views, his educational history, and his personal history to no one at all. Surely he knew that if the world were to decide, at that moment, with all the above in place, as to a man like him, to reward him with hundreds of millions, it would wrongly convince him that lies and fraud and other forms of systematic deception could, deftly deployed, pay very handsomely.

So what did the world do? It made him a multimillionaire, validating his every vice.

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8.

This may be the right moment to note that, as a Musk biographer, I can’t find a single component of the man’s biography he hasn’t lied about. And not just lied about—lied ruthlessly about. Shamelessly. For decades. Without any integrity or fidelity to truth at all. And every lie has the same purpose: to hide what a deceitful, fundamentally bad person he is. And this is important to remember because, for all that many Musk fans (or simply people indifferent to him and/or not particularly knowledgeable about him) may have known little about his early years before reading this essay and others like it, it seems that everyone wants to give him credit for more recent business exploits.

Surely we don’t see the same patterns in these more recent courses of behavior that we find in the first quarter-century of Elon’s life?

Alas, we do.

So, for instance, for all that some readers may still want to give Elon credit for Tesla, don’t. Simply put, Elon used emerald-mine money and a likely stolen idea—certainly, a fraudulent investor pitch (as he was an illegal immigrant)—to make money off Zip2; then got himself fired as CEO of Zip2 because he was as crazy, arrogant, and impossible as anyone who knew his real story would have readily deduced he would be; and the people who fired him were so eager to get rid of him (and perhaps he was so eager to be fired and bought out, because Zip2 meant nothing to him) that he got a massive payoff to do so. And Elon used that payoff to start a tiny company called “X” that was later the tack-on to a merger involving a larger and far better thought-out company called PayPal—which Elon somehow connived to become CEO of before he was yet again summarily fired because he was as crazy, arrogant, and impossible as anyone who had ever learned his real story could have readily deduced in advance.

So his father’s poisoned money, his own immigration lies, a likely stolen idea and two successive failures as a CEO made Elon Musk rich. He failed upward, over and over, via lies and money that wasn’t his and ideas that weren’t his and in-office conduct so odious people paid him—a lot!—to go away. No one wanted anything to do with him.

This is—excuse my language—a batshit-crazy way for a man with few obvious skills to make hundreds of millions, especially when he has no degrees (save one co-orchestrated by spooked investors), no temperance, and no track record of succeeding as a manager in business and is lying to everyone about everything from his immigration status to his relationship with his father to his views on apartheid to every component of his wildly checkered educational history to how he comports himself in an office to where any of the cash supporting him came from.

So at the dawn of his investment in Tesla, Elon was a man who had flamed out at four universities and gotten one years-late degree—at Penn—in 1997 because his investors for Zip2 had pulled strings to make it happen as part of a desperate bid to ensure the now-revealed illegal immigrant could remain stateside.

And after they apparently pulled strings to get Elon his undergraduate degree years late they had to fire him anyway because—as noted—crazy. But Elon didn’t like that narrative, so in 2002 (for instance) he was still telling the SEC in a federal filing that he got a degree from Penn in 1995 under his own steam, which he manifestly didn’t.

So at the dawn of his involvement in Tesla, Elon had been fired from every job he had had, graduated under his own steam from precisely zero schools out of four, and was fueled by (1) dad’s dirty money, (2) others’ ideas, and (3) the desire of serious people to pay him large wads of cash simply to go away when they realized how unprofessional he was.

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9.

And what was Tesla at the time? A company that already had a name, and founders, and a business plan, and had done significant work toward its first release—but was failing. Was it failing because it was a bad idea? Because its founders were idiots? Of course not. It was failing because it was the 2000s, and therefore very early for EVs.

Any company in the position Tesla was in at the time would have needed aid.

And the aid any such company would have needed was of one sort only: money.

Tesla needed nothing else Elon Musk had or could offer. His track record in business was abysmal except for somehow falling into payoffs he didn’t deserve. He had no special expertise in cars. So Elon gave lots of money to the Tesla founders and struck a deal under which he could call himself a “founder.” Calling himself a co-founder was of course ridiculous, as he had played no part in Tesla’s formation whatsoever, but it was as critical a lie for Elon Musk as he tried to weave a mythology of success around himself—think of Donald Trump and The Apprentice—as was the idea that he had a Penn degree (he did not), or that was about to matriculate at Stanford (he was not), or that had come up with the idea for Zip2 entirely by himself (he seemingly had not), or that he was a progressive visionary with no retrograde views on key subjects potential investors would find odious (he was not), or that he knew how to manage a business and act properly in a workplace (he did not), or even such a basic a lie as the idea that he was an enterprising young South African who was working in tech in the United States legally (he was not).

And of course as the years went on Elon Musk would embellish all of this still further, to include a supposedly open opposition to apartheid (no such open opposition ever existed, and certainly is not what caused him to leave his home country), a supposed near-miss as a videogame developer (a lie with a rather skimpy factual basis, but still useful to gaining his cred in the gaming community he so adores), and a more recent idea, that had he not “slept on the floor” at Tesla’s factory the entire company would have gone “bankrupt”—a premise that rakishly implies that Elon was a major value-add to the company when no one can precisely articulate what it is he does except wreak needless, puerile havoc with outrageous demands and even more outrageous misapprehensions of what’s possible or legal or wise.

In fact, he’s a terrible boss. Most of his companies have failed or are failing. He clearly can’t succeed at any company while simultaneously (a) following the law and (b) telling the cold, hard truth about timelines and product specs to employees, major media, or prospective customers. He is a serviceable hype man, but neither his coding skills nor his skills as an engineer nor—such as they are—his “design” skills have ever added much value to his companies, which have scores of people more qualified and talented in all of those areas than Elon is.

These days Elon’s reckless public behavior is only saved from being a massive value drain on any company he’s associated with by his newfound political corruption: by purchasing Twitter for $44 billion, which he now publicly admits was a politically motivated play, and by donating hundreds of millions to the Trump re-election effort in 2024, he has gained access not only to a co-presidency (see below) but a level of self-dealing that is likely to retroactively erase the last decade of it being conspicuously the case that Elon disgraces and therefore costs profits at every company he works at (whether it is because of the many lawsuits in which he is a defendant, his outrageous actions toward various women, his smoking marijuana on camera, or other unhinged and/or un-CEO-like behavior online and off).

This said, (a) Tesla has made a lot of money due to the perception (not reality) about it that Elon created, which perception he was in a position to create (sometimes via lies) only because he accrued enough money early on to buy his way into a company and an idea he had nothing whatsoever to do with otherwise. And (b) he was very successful at using backchannel lobbying during the Obama administration to undercut NASA long enough and in significant enough ways—mostly via promises he couldn’t keep—to get SpaceX past its awkward early phase and into the sort-of successful state it’s in now. That lobbying was made possible by access, and that access was made possible, notice the running theme here, by (i) money Elon had already accrued either through failures or the ideas of others, (ii) an ability as a hype man that had nothing to do with the talents he claimed to have and claimed to be proud of, and (iii) misrepresentations in the hype regarding what he could do and how quickly he could do it and whether he would need to violate state and federal safety laws to do all that he hoped to do.

Was Elon smart to bet on EVs? Sure. But to think Elon alone saw a future in EVs in the 2000s is preposterous. Elon was part of a massive cadre in California who thought EVs could one day be successful; the sole difference was that Elon had lots of money and was reckless with it, maybe in part—the irony!—because he knew he didn’t deserve it.

The recurring themes we see in all of the above—lies, “passing,” possible fraud, a sort of violence, incompetence, stolen glory—continued into Elon’s time at Tesla and then at his aforementioned most successful original venture, SpaceX, which survived its rocky start trying to buy used rockets in Russia and Eastern Europe to become the regulation-breaking, perpetually tardy company it is today only because Musk convinced the federal government to abandon faith in NASA and put its faith instead in hype men-cum-entrepreneurs (along the way giving him billions in taxpayer monies, none of which caused him to do anything but continue to be one of the biggest critics of the very hand feeding him).

He went from brawling with Kimbal to convincing an employee to let him impregnate her (and failing to convince others); he went from lying about his immigration status to, according to his ex-girlfriend Grimes, all but kidnapping their child so she could not see him. He began shedding his progressive image (never matched, as Proof has shown, by his history of utilitarian political donations) and revealing himself to be a drug-abusing, employee-abusing, law-abusing, pathologically deceitful man whose core principles, such as they are or even exist, have never been conducive to rule of law, America’s fundamental belief in diversity being a strength, or Western democracy.

I’ve previously published at Proof, and across social media, all the links to the trail of broken promises the Boring Company has left behind it. And the unethical testing at Neuralink. And the hilarious switcheroos Elon pulled to make Optimus seem viable rather than a rehashing of ideas about robotics from many decades ago. And all the backroom lobbying against NASA that allowed SpaceX to rise despite Elon’s routinely lied-about deadlines and reckless evasion of federal safety regulations. And the bait-and-switch he pulled with his involvement in AI, sliding seamlessly from sponsoring OpenAI to openly trying to destroy it so that his own hilariously tardy xAI venture could thrive. And his contemptuous ruination of Twitter, once the digital era’s most useful social media platform. And the dangerous lies he has told about “FSD” and the Cybertruck and...

...well, it goes on and on. Few non-Proof readers have seen, all in one place, the truly staggering mountain of evidence that Elon isn’t just an unethical businessman but a bad boss, a bad businessman, a bad leader, and—fundamentally—a very, very bad man.

But on top of all this, he is also a TESCREAList.

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10.

The TESCREALists are a cadre of far-right billionaires—supported by some of the craziest pseudo-academics pseudo-academia has ever seen—who want to destroy humanity as we know it, in ways so scary that I’d rather link to articles than discuss it, as I’ve actually had people call me (not Elon) deranged because what’s contained in the reports about TESCREALism and its gurus, like Curtis Yarvin, is that insane. (We are speaking of, not to be coy about it, the genocide of humankind. Go see for yourself.)

You have to read this link to understand what the Yarvinists want to do to you and to your family. You have to read it because you won’t believe it if I simply tell it to you.

The point is that for a long time the lies Elon Musk told—perhaps even some of the disgusting things he did, like disowning and deadnaming his trans daughter, or offering a horse for a handjob, or using “DOGE,” a fake government department, to launch the most contemptible self-dealing grift in U.S. political history—seemed to be in service of maintaining and/or amplifying his money, power, popularity, vanity, and fame. But his vision has of late become much darker, now that he has been in secret contact with Vladimir Putin for two years, has learned that his satellites can help control geopolitics, has learned that helping to buy a U.S. presidential election with lies and propaganda can increase his already historic net worth by 50% almost overnight, and now that he can flatly ignore court orders to appear to answer for his conduct out-of-hand without consequence.

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Elon’s big aim, now, isn’t Mars—Mars is a misdirection, as every scientist has told Musk that while humanity can get people there, we can’t keep them alive there and therefore there will never be a significant non-research-based Mars colony (neither should there be, a fact Musk seems to draw ever closer to finally admitting online)—but two goals much more preposterously vainglorious and also, not coincidentally, much closer to his heart: (1) becoming the de facto ruler of Earth and (2) becoming literally immortal.

In short, Musk’s secret war is against life and humanity itself.

When you read up on so-called “Yarvinism” and TESCREALism, which combines transhumanism, narcissism, white supremacy, misanthropy, techno-idealism, neo-feudalism, authoritarian fascism, plutocracy, kleptocracy, nihilism, fatalism, and a desire for the creation of the world’s first formalized Christofascist kakistocracy, you suddenly realize that there’s an amount of wealth, power and fame one can achieve which—if it’s achieved by a man as bad as Musk is—leads to madness, not vision. That’s especially so if the achiever is an abuser of drugs and misogynist who deems himself above the law and better (certainly more important) than almost any human.

Elon appears to have found that he needs to do things both horrible and audacious just to keep himself interested in life—with the fallback that he is also willing to do horrible and audacious things to defeat life itself and become the first-ever immortal.

If you wonder why Elon Musk keeps bizarrely trying, on Twitter, to convince his Elongelicals that there are so-called “Extinctionists” out there who want to destroy humanity—And why would anyone want that? No one ever seems to ask him—it’s because, in Muskworld just as in Trumpworld, every accusation is a confession. Elon Musk and the TESCREALists are the first cabal of narcissistic transhumanists who actually do want most of humanity to die, and their guru Curtis Yarvin has stated this openly (while also offering a fallback plan that would involve the sinister enslavement of almost all of humanity).

These are far-right, rich white male billionaires who want to rule forever in a techno-dystopia where they’re immortal—something they believe will be possible sometime in the next fifty years with sufficient advances in robotics, bioengineering, quantum computing, and artificial intelligence, coupled with a billionaire’s access to the best healthcare available on Earth—and most of humanity has been wiped out or enslaved in a virtual world identical to (really!) the “Matrix” depicted in the film of that name.

So the man about to become co-President of the United States is not just an enemy of America, though with his active undermining of democracy, his conspiring with our enemies, and his contemptible bid to control all geopolitics via investments in every industry that is required for such control, he most certainly is an enemy of America.

But he is also an enemy of humanity itself—and life itself—under the guise (because of course) of being a Savior.

From DOGE (executive authority) to Starlink (mass comms), from SpaceX (offworld and interplanetary authority) to Tesla (green energy), from xAI (AGI) to Neuralink (bioengineering), from the Boring Company (mass transit) to Optimus (robotics), from his clandestine outreach to the worst autocrats on Earth (international diplomacy) to Twitter (global propaganda), from Dogecoin (encrypted currency and markets) to the idea of “X” as an “everything app” (networked global transactions), Elon Musk seeks to create a situation in which no government is willing to brook him via regulation or criminal enforcement because they depend on him too much; no group is willing to oppose him because he can frivolously sue them out of existence; no person is willing to cross him because his fans are borderline psychotic, and may soon become over-the-borderline homicidal (through his own deliberate radicalization of them via persistent disinformation online); and no industry required to digitally map and then download a consciousness to a robot infused with artificial intelligence and bioengineering-based enhancements enabling superhuman capabilities isn’t under his control.

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Conclusion

If this sounds crazy, it’s because it is. It is crazy.

If it sounds like something a supervillain would think up—or simply a spoiled rich kid who spent all his time living in a fantasy world and grew up to be a man who spends much of his time trying to become the world's top Diablo player—it’s because it is.

And Elon Musk is—a supervillain, that is.

He’s the Big Bad in every fantasy book he read as a child, the final boss in every video game he plays, the campaign-ending demigod at the conclusion of every months-long Dungeons & Dragon session.

He has more money than any human has ever had—and aims to be the world’s first-ever trillionaire, a status he’s expected to reach by 2029—and his designs are thus unlike any designs any human being has ever had. His public schtick of wanting to save humanity is the most audacious long con any human has ever devised, and yet any biographer who researches his life without blinkers on can see that that’s just what it is: a con. Just as Donald Trump was told he was committing a grave betrayal of his country as he plotted January 6, or told that he was violating U.S. tradition and law as he tampered with DOJ and took impermissible gifts and leaked classified intel to anyone he hoped to do business with post-presidency—but he ignored them all because he saw no consequences would follow from doing so and he was in the midst of running a Savior long con—Elon Musk has been told his Mars plan is a joke and that his testing at Neuralink is unethical and his ever-changing timelines at SpaceX are dangerous and that his supposedly self-driving Teslas are killing people and that his “DOGE” gambit is unconstitutional, but he ignores all these people smarter and more knowledgeable than he is in these fields because he doesn’t like what they’re saying and to slow his roll would be to slow, far more importantly, an ongoing, lifelong con.

Elon doesn’t like the truths people tell him over and over and over again not because he’s courageous and a maverick but because he’s corrupt and conniving and he knows he’s a plutocrat. If there’s one man Elon’s good-guy schtick isn’t fooling, it’s the man himself.

So as a Musk biographer, I cannot overstate how dangerous the coming months and years will be for all of us who believe in truth and humankind—for we have two men now coming for both, headquartered in the United States, with no obvious means to slow their advance. And there’s grave doubt among many, this author included, that America as a nation can survive the dual onslaught of Elon Musk and Donald Trump, two of the most venal and unscrupulous but also (oddly) bleakly undereducated and incompetent men alive.

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Coda

This essay can only touch the surface of the depravity of its subject. But suffice to say that a man who would ruthlessly lie about one child, arguably kidnap another three, lie about the death of another one, attempt to have several more with an unwilling woman then under his power, abuse another employer-employee relationship to have three more kids, lie about his relationship with his father, publicly encourage his own brother to lie about his life—in short, when a man lies so recklessly and routinely about the people closest to him, and in such a callous way, why in the world would anyone believe anything he said on any business topic, even were it not the case (and it most certainly is the case) that he’s been caught lying about his companies or products scores or even hundreds of times?

This is a man who, despite being the wealthiest human alive or to ever live, gives so little to charity that it actually violates the law and worse still, almost all the money his so-called “foundation” does give goes to… himself! It’s a level of avarice that not only is literally beyond belief (following the law and giving generously to others would cause Musk so little of his net worth he might not actually even know it was missing) but confirms that wealth, not the salvation of all or a significant portion of humanity, is his endgame. It’s his ultimate tell, yet one he only intermittently gets called out on it and one that apparently no Elongelical minds it at all.

And it’s not just that he lies about himself or lies to romantic partners; nor is it just that he lies about his children and asks relatives to lie about him; it’s not just that he carefully hides certain of his familial relationships or digests potentially dangerous drugs without proper medical supervision while running sprawling companies the mismanagement of which could destroy lives, it’s that he lies about even the most basic details regarding himself.

To then add to this that he’s the owner of what is often deemed the largest purveyor of disinformation in the world and is himself often deemed one of the biggest purveyors of disinformation on Earth brings forcefully to the foreground two equally disturbing possibilities: (i) either we live in world in which the biggest liar on Earth can create a cult that believes him infallible and is willing to give him authority over hundreds and hundreds (even billions) of innocent lies merely on the basis of their Big Important Feelings as cultists, or (ii) we now have the first-ever human to accumulate so much wealth that a world that fully understands him to be a dangerous fraud can do nothing about it.

Neither of those possibilities are remotely acceptable. But they do underscore that nothing at all this man says or does can ever be taken at face value—because if he would lie about holding his dead child in his arms he is capable of any lie, no matter how monstrous. It’s not unreasonable to call Elon Musk the world’s first authentic, comic book-style supervillain. Not just as a matter of style but ambition, ethos, and substance.

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