The man on track to become the world’s first trillionaire is complaining that his material success hasn’t brought any joy into his life.
“Whoever said ‘money can’t buy happiness’ really knew what they were talking about,” Elon Musk wrote on X late Wednesday. He included an emoji. It was a sad emoji.
Forbes estimates the SpaceX CEO’s current net worth at $852,500,000,000. That is bigger than the GDP of Switzerland, Israel, Kazakhstan, Egypt, Argentina, and Australia. It is, in fact, bigger than almost every country in the world, save perhaps the top thirty.
Musk spent much of last year overseeing government cuts that critics warn will cost millions of lives. SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images
Late last year, Tesla shareholders voted to approve a stock-based compensation package for their founder with a theoretical max value of about $1,000,000,000,000 over the next decade. That figure represents a non-trivial percent, roughly 0.22 percent, of all money in existence.
Musk, who has at least 14 children, did not include the full extent of the proverb in his tweet: “Money can’t buy happiness, but it can buy comfort.”
It has been a busy few years for the Tesla CEO. A period that has solidified his descent from stargazing Trump skeptic to Dark MAGA’s edgelord supreme, dogged by allegations of sexual impropriety toward employees, Nazi salutes, conspiracy theories, pervy deep fakes and what is, reportedly, a wicked ketamine habit.
Musk’s social media platform X is currently under fire for generating sexually explicit images of a woman killed by federal agents in Minneapolis. KEREM YUCEL/AFP via Getty Images
That trajectory arguably began in earnest with Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, now rebranded as X, in October 2023. In the months and years since, users have quit the platform by the millions amid an explosion of fake news, disinformation and hate speech spurred on, in many cases, by Musk himself.
X has come under ever greater fire in recent weeks after users began tasking Grok, the platform’s AI chatbot, with generating sexually explicit images of children and non-consensual pornographic images of women. These reportedly included pictures of Renee Nicole Good, the widowed mom-of-three shot dead by an ICE agent in a Minneapolis street last month, wearing a bikini.
Musk abandoned his prior support for the Democratic Party after an attempt on Donald Trump’s life in 2024. He subsequently poured more than $280 million into the Republican leader’s campaign.
The Tesla CEO’s relationship with the president imploded last year, with Musk accusing Trump of covering up Epstein’s crimes because of his past association with the sex trafficker. The Washington Post/The Washington Post via Getty Im
Those efforts paid off. Trump won, and appointed Musk head of his administration’s cost-cutting “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) initiative. It would go on to axe between $2 and $10 billion in federal funding, along with eliminating an estimated 300,000 government jobs.
Among the most decried casualties of DOGE’s crusade against government spending was USAID, the world’s largest humanitarian organization. Independent studies have since found that Musk’s decision to effectively dismantle the agency could contribute to 14 million deaths around the world by 2030. Of that number, around a third would be children under 5.
Much of Musk’s time as Trump’s government efficiency czar came after a February 2025 appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast, in which the Tesla CEO described empathy as “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization.” In the same interview, he referred to welfare programs as a “Ponzi scheme.”
Musk’s name has since featured in freshly released documents on the financier’s crimes. Rick Friedman/Corbis via Getty Images
A federal judge ruled Tuesday that Musk will be required to sit for depositions in a lawsuit brought by former USAID employees, who claim his gutting of the agency was unlawful given what they describe as Musk’s lack of any formal authority to do so.
Trump and Musk enjoyed a close relationship on the campaign trail and during the president’s first few months back in office. Musk once even went so far as to say, “I love [Trump] as much as a straight man can love another man.”
The warmth of that bromance was subsequently matched by the viciousness of the pair’s public divorce in June of last year, after the SpaceX founder blasted the MAGA leader over spending proposals he claimed would undo all of his work at DOGE. Amid an escalating war of words, Musk accused Trump of refusing to publish fresh documents on the crimes of late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein because his name features prominently in those files.
Musk’s comments have since proven more prescient than he might have expected. The latest releases from the ‘Epstein Files’ have indeed featured the president’s name, but also that of the Tesla CEO.
“What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?” Musk wrote to the convicted sex trafficker in one missive. “I’ve been working to the edge of sanity this year and so, once my kids head home after Christmas, I really want to hit the party scene in St Barts or elsewhere and let loose,” he added in another.
The SpaceX founder has since sought to distance himself from that correspondence. “No one pushed harder than me to have the Epstein files released and I’m glad that has finally happened,” he wrote in an X post over the weekend.
“I had very little correspondence with Epstein and declined repeated invitations to go to his island or fly on his ‘Lolita Express,’ but was well aware that some email correspondence with him could be misinterpreted and used by detractors to smear my name,” he added.
The Daily Beast has reached out to Musk’s representatives for further comment on his existential quandaries.
