Inside Elon Musk’s Grievance-Fueled MAGA-morphosis: “What the F–k Is Wrong With Your Boss?”

The Tesla executive was beside himself on his call to Steven Cliff, administrator at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

“Why are we being excluded?” he asked, perhaps rightfully incredulous that Tesla would be left out of a White House event promoting electric vehicles in August 2021, according to a person familiar with the matter. Tesla, he noted, was an “American company making all electric vehicles,” the poster child for the type of renewable energy success story President Joe Biden was trying to tell months after taking office and making EVs a priority. The White House electric vehicle summit featured General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler parent Stellantis, the big three automakers whose EV sales paled in comparison to Tesla’s. It also included a Tesla foe in the form of the United Auto Workers (UAW), who had tried to unionize Tesla’s Fremont factory, which became the site of unfair labor practice allegations.

Was the snub intentional, the Tesla official asked, “or is this just a union thing?”

Numerous Biden officials ran interference in the meantime, according to a person familiar with the matter, trying to placate Rohan Patel, Tesla’s liaison to Washington, while explaining that the decision was above their pay grade.

“The president made a decision that he wanted to make sure that the UAW knew that he was there for them,” one said.

Musk could only sigh.

This retelling of Tesla’s exclusion from the Biden electric vehicle summit is based on the recollection of two individuals with direct knowledge of the events.

Two things could be true at once: Biden was trying to generate excitement for his plans among those who had not already embraced EVs, and space was limited at the White House South Lawn event at a time when many in attendance were still wearing masks to protect against COVID-19. Regardless, Biden officials seemingly underestimated the fallout and went out of their way to include Musk in future events.

But for Musk, the snub seemed to confirm a growing suspicion—raised years earlier when the National Transportation Safety Board investigated a fatal Tesla Autopilot crash—that powerful government forces were mobilizing against him. It would cement Musk’s metamorphosis from political opportunist to full-fledged supporter of the Republican Party, even if he’d go on to weaponize perceived personal slights to justify far more radical behavior in the political arena.

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More than a year earlier, Musk had sat in the Oval Office opposite President Trump, who was desperate to secure a victory for the domestic manufacturing industry he had promised to revive. Far from snubbing a top automaker, Trump was appealing to Musk directly, proclaiming himself a Tesla owner and emphasizing the importance of Musk’s company to the crucial domestic manufacturing aspect of his agenda. Still, Trump was far from the EV booster that his successor, who made electric cars a key component of his green energy domestic agenda, would become.

“Look, I don’t know about all this electric vehicle stuff,” Trump said, according to one source. “I have two Teslas,” but there was nowhere to charge them.

Musk turned to a Tesla executive in the room. “Can you take out your phone?” he asked.

The executive showed Trump a sea of red dots on his screen, demonstrating the extent of Tesla’s vast network of Superchargers, stations where drivers of the electric vehicles could quickly top up their cars’ batteries, before an incredulous president. This retelling is based on the recollection of a person familiar with the matter.

For all his skepticism, Trump needed Musk and Tesla. The electric vehicle manufacturer was deciding on a location for its next gigafactory where it would build such vehicles as the Cybertruck and the Model Y crossover.

While Tesla was strongly leaning toward Austin, Texas, or another location in the right-to-work states of the South, or a Plains state like Oklahoma—Tulsa, for example, made a strong push—the company informed administration officials that Mexico and Canada were also on the table. That prompted an intervention from the Trump administration that led to Musk sitting across from the forty-fifth president, a person familiar with the matter told me.

“You’ve gotta build here in the United States,” Trump said.

Was there anything the administration could do? For Musk, nothing immediately came to mind.

But here was the Trump administration giving Tesla the power to make a direct ask—in this case, working on an arcane federal emissions rule that had been languishing, correcting what Tesla regarded as an Obama-era mistake—as the administration negotiated for Tesla to locate its next factory in its home country. “What the hell are we waiting for?” Trump asked, setting the matter into motion.

In a post taking aim at Musk on Truth Social two years later, Trump revised history: “When Elon Musk came to the White House asking me for help on all of his many subsidized projects, whether it’s electric cars that don’t drive long enough, driverless cars that crash, or rocketships to nowhere, without which subsidies he’d be worthless, and telling me how he was a big Trump fan and Republican, I could have said, ‘drop to your knees and beg,’ and he would have done it . . .”

In reality, it was Trump who was asking for the favor, and Musk was happy to give the appearance of obliging.

By the end of 2020, Musk had officially moved to Texas, thereby cementing his breakup with the state where he’d made his fortune.

Soon, Musk was showing off a belt buckle and cowboy hat, adopting the faux cowboy persona to match his new digs. Contrary to the combative, unappreciative progressives on the Left, Texas’s right-wing politicians like Senator Ted Cruz and Governor Greg Abbott embraced him with open arms.

Musk was entering a new phase of his public life, one where he defined the limits of acceptable behavior and where it seems the only thing worse than being crass and rude was being inauthentic, dishonest—an NPC (a video game term short for “non-player character,” i.e., generic and unimportant). “Individuals should always wonder who wrote the software running in their head,” he’d later remark. “Don’t be an NPC.” He had tried obeying the rules, and where had that gotten him? It was, after all, Musk’s defiance of government authority that had gotten the Tesla factory reopened only months earlier. And the SEC had tried to bring Musk to heel—in the tech mogul’s view—for a tweet that wasn’t even entirely inaccurate. (Musk, as his blog post had made clear, was saying he really had been negotiating with the Saudis about an investment at the time of the “Funding secured” tweet.)

Now, two years after the settlement, Musk was beginning to make clear—in the strongest possible terms—that he saw the SEC’s enforcement as unjust.

“He just basically has a complete disdain for any authority period, and he doesn’t believe that he should have to answer to any authority,” said investor Ross Gerber in an April 2023 interview with me. “I have a completely different opinion about the hubris of thumbing your nose at the people that could really hurt you.”

To Musk, the authority that had emerged was the liberal establishment—the one that powered the mainstream media and regarded him with increasing scrutiny, that dominated the political culture wars seeping into movies and TV shows, and that was reshaping the limits of acceptable speech and humor.

Musk had already essentially told the SEC to fellate him. But it was another tweet sent later in July 2020 that would finally pierce his inner circle.

“Pronouns suck,” Musk posted on July 24, a shot at the transgender community and wider society’s adoption of gender-inclusive identifiers.

Musk’s girlfriend, the singer Grimes, was appalled.

“I love you but please turn off ur phone,” she wrote in a since-deleted reply. “I cannot support hate. Please stop this. I know this isn’t your heart.”

Musk was in the middle of an ideological transformation.

Politically, he had identified as a Democrat for years. He was, after all, the most visible response to climate change the business world could have produced: someone who had not only popularized electric cars but made them cool as well. He hastened green technology’s transformation from a pipe dream to an inevitability. Musk was hardly a devotee to the Republican causes of the moment: he had made repeated overtures to the Chinese government—increasingly the United States’ top competitor on the global stage and the subject of a Trump trade war—in conjunction with his effort to make the world’s most populous country a key hub for Tesla manufacturing. Tesla was eyeing Mexico, too, for a new manufacturing plant.

For all of Musk’s criticisms of censorship and political overreach, it was rare to see him utter a negative word about China. Meanwhile, he was exerting control over not only the future of car manufacturing but also the United States’ space ambitions, often with the help of government contracts and subsidies. On top of that, his start-up Neuralink sought to implant computer chips into people’s brains.

As such, it would have been hard to imagine a bigger candidate for right-wing bogeyman than Elon Musk. His climate advocacy wasn’t merely passive—in fact, he was such a climate hawk that he had left two of President Trump’s advisory councils over the administration’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords. (Musk had faced pressure to leave earlier over Trump’s travel ban but had opted to stay on then.)

But as was the case for Trump, conservatives seemed willing to trade ideological purity and notions of relatability for the refreshing sight of a person willing to thumb their nose at the establishment. Musk was hardly a blue-collar guy. He was a celebrity dating a famous singer, a tech nerd who had hung out with Kanye West and Joe Rogan, and he commuted between offices via private jet.

Something about his frenetic online posting, however, gave people the impression that Musk was one of them. He lifted memes. He slung impulsive insults. He wasn’t afraid to float conspiracy theories, no matter how irresponsible, merely because he’d stumbled on them and found them compelling.

His impulse to shitpost was apolitical (“69 days after 4/20 again ha-ha,” Musk wrote on June 28, 2020), but suddenly it was brushing up against his increasing frustration with the Left.

Musk said he had voted Democrat in the 2016 election, casting his ballot for Hillary Clinton. In 2020, he’d do the same for Biden, he said. But on the heels of COVID-19 restrictions and California officials’ decision to shut down his factory, his frustration was evident.

“The left is losing the middle,” he said that summer.

Musk seemed to see himself as a common-sense voter, a man above partisan politics—similar to a populist presidential candidate who urged the parties to simply work out their differences. He didn’t hesitate to align himself with government officials who could help him advance his companies and ambitions, regardless of party. Politics itself was an inconvenience.

“I’m neither anti-conservative nor anti-liberal. Just don’t like group think. Ideas should be considered on their own merits,” he wrote once.

But of course, by 2020, it was difficult to remain apolitical.

On May 25, George Floyd, a forty-six-year-old Black man and father who lived in Minneapolis was murdered by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck and back for more than nine minutes as Floyd gasped for breath.

The country erupted in protests and riots, as the anger over Floyd’s death spilled into the nation’s largest cities. Musk weighed in, writing “#JusticeForGeorge” and urging that the other officers at the scene be charged.

As the protests raged on, so did a sweeping movement for racial justice, heightening public awareness of policing’s disproportionate impact on Black communities. The movement soon reached Tesla’s front door. That year, companies across the United States decided to honor Juneteenth, the holiday marking the end of slavery.

The morning of the holiday, the same day as a planned protest for racial justice, Tesla’s human resources chief Valerie Capers Workman sent an email to the company. “Tesla fully supports Juneteenth for any US employee that wants to take the day off to celebrate, reflect or participate in events that are meaningful to you.” It was the next line that struck workers as unusual. “This is an unpaid PTO and excused absence,” read the email.

To Tesla workers who had lobbied for better treatment at a company accused of a pattern of racial discrimination and harassment in the past, the message was an insult, in the recollection of a person familiar with their reaction.

Workman, a Black woman, was surprised to have been appointed to the role in the first place. Jerome Guillen, Tesla’s former president, had lobbied for her hiring.

She had seen Tesla’s shortcomings in dealing with workers, particularly workers of color, and challenged Musk to do things differently. She served as an example of how speaking out could earn Musk’s respect and how he didn’t simply surround himself with so-called yes-men. Even so, when she was called into a meeting to be told about her promotion, she thought she was being fired.

In mid-2020, however, Workman’s name was being signed to a litany of controversial decisions made by upper management, from COVID-19 to racial justice.

Some employees had already arrived at Tesla’s facilities that day for work as they read the update, which started off fairly standard. Once they saw how Tesla was treating the holiday—as a concession, almost a favor to workers—it was hard to look at the company the same way.

Nathan Murthy, a software engineer who was working for Tesla at the time, said the period—with the combined effect of the pandemic and Floyd protests—laid bare Musk’s feelings on the issues important to his workers; matters they regarded as life-or-death propositions appeared to strike the CEO as mere business inconveniences.

“We saw with definitive proof his true colors,” Murthy said. “I don’t know if he doesn’t want to empathize or if he feels he’s just too busy to empathize.”

By January 2021, the country was once again in turmoil. As if the pandemic response and racial justice protests hadn’t done enough to inject politics into every facet of American life—a climate in which simply the decision to wear a protective facemask or not became a divisive political statement—the outgoing president had refused to acknowledge he’d lost the election.

When thousands of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol grounds on his behalf, Silicon Valley was suddenly faced with pivotal decisions. Trump had practically fomented an insurrection with social media posts. In the eyes of tech leaders, there wasn’t much of a choice.

Twitter and Facebook booted Trump off their platforms.

Musk, no Trump supporter at the time, had made no secret of how he felt about these interventions. A year earlier, during the COVID-19 shutdowns, he had derided Silicon Valley as “Sanctimonious Valley. . . . Too much the moral arbiter of the world.”

Now he hinted at the massive backlash coming against Silicon Valley’s seemingly arbitrary content moderation decisions, on the heels of the Trump ban as well as Twitter and Facebook’s decisions to censor an explosive New York Post story about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop. “A lot of people are going to be super unhappy with West Coast high tech as the de facto arbiter of free speech,” Musk wrote.

Musk’s profile, meanwhile, was exploding. He was now the richest person on earth, making him a much easier and more convenient target for left-wing activists that railed against the excesses of billionaires and the massive wealth disparities in American society, people who were keenly aware of concepts such as greenwashing and who would gladly trade a Mars mission for solving homelessness or, say, ending world hunger. (Musk, for his part, said he would give up Tesla stock to solve world hunger, if the United Nations World Food Programme could outline a clear path for doing so.)

He seemed to take much of the criticism personally. Musk, all the while, demonstrated little self-awareness of his potential to become the type of concentrated center of power he’d previously condemned. He was still operating as if he were the little guy. How could the world’s richest person—who’d made his fortune on tech investments, benefiting from years of Wall Street hype and cozy government relationships—credibly argue that it was the tech demigods who had been exerting excessive control? Not him, but those other guys.

In a securities filing that year, Tesla announced that Musk and Tesla’s chief financial officer Zach Kirkhorn had been granted new titles, as Musk thumbed his nose at the stuffy, straight-laced establishment-rooted culture he sought to dismantle.

Musk would henceforth be officially known as “Technoking of Tesla.” His deputy also received an arcane new title: “Master of Coin.”

“Elon and Zach will also maintain their respective positions as Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer,” the filing said.

The new titles were said to be “Effective as of March 15, 2021.” Elon Musk was crowned Technoking on the Ides of March.

Tesla’s August 2021 omission from the Biden White House’s South Lawn event illustrated how Musk’s political relationships could turn on a dime.

At the time, Musk was dealing with problems on multiple fronts: inflation was rising, the pandemic-related supply chain woes that had hobbled other automakers were finally catching up to Tesla, and a prounion president suddenly seemed intent on freezing out Tesla and SpaceX.

Tesla’s stock declined in the months following Biden’s inauguration, as these pressures continued and the Trump administration’s historically lax regulatory regime came to an end. Biden’s Transportation Department already showed early signs that it would increase scrutiny on Tesla and Autopilot.

That year, some vocal Tesla fans had begun to notice a peculiar trend: the most electric vehicle–friendly administration in history wasn’t capitalizing on the most popular EV automaker—and its celebrity CEO—to meet its ambitious goal of making half of US passenger vehicle sales electric, plug-in hybrid, or fuel cell by 2030.

Now Musk was taking notice.

“Is this just because you guys don’t like Elon?” a Tesla executive asked when the company wasn’t included in the electric vehicle summit on the White House lawn.

That apparent slight, in August 2021, kicked off an increasingly bitter barrage of criticisms of the president. Biden, said Musk, was “biased” against Tesla. The man who had neglected to include his company was “a UAW [sock] puppet” (Musk used the emoji for socks).

But his most biting criticism was reserved for another apparent oversight—this time regarding SpaceX. After the company sent four civilian astronauts into orbit as a charity fundraiser for St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital, Musk floated a theory as to why Biden hadn’t yet offered his congratulations.

“He’s still sleeping,” Musk wrote, a riff on the “sleepy Joe” meme popular with the Right.

The Biden administration, wanting to tout its union-friendly reputation and keep its distance from a man who was increasingly a political lightning rod, did little to dispel the notion that it was hostile to Musk. Biden, unlike Trump, never hosted Musk one-on-one at the White House, though administration officials did meet with him in downtown Washington—so close to the White House as to make it seem obvious they were trying to avoid a spectacle—to discuss a Biden charging initiative.

Though he unleashed on Biden frequently, Musk was much more reserved in his criticism of Republicans, if he jabbed at them at all. Earlier that month, Tesla faced pressure to protect its employees after a Texas law banning abortion after six weeks took effect. Musk held his tongue. But when Governor Abbott took to CNBC and said Musk “consistently tells me that he likes the social policies in the state of Texas,” Musk had to respond. “In general, I believe government should rarely impose its will upon the people, and, when doing so, should aspire to maximize their cumulative happiness,” Musk wrote. “That said, I would prefer to stay out of politics.” A diplomatic—and safe—statement that reflected Musk’s ability to reasonably disagree and strike a tone of civility.

Weeks later, Rohan Patel was placing a call to the top aide of Senator Ron Wyden. At a time when Tesla was at the height of its valuation, Patel was in the unenviable position of putting out a four-alarm fire of his boss’s making.

Musk had just tweeted a US senator—not just any senator, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee—a vulgar comment about his Twitter display photo, or profile picture, in response to a post calling for a billionaires’ tax.

“Why does ur pp look like u just came?” Musk wrote on November 7, 2021.

At Tesla, employees had increasingly begun to arrive at a new conclusion: their boss was a nutcase, according to a person familiar with the matter, who detailed the fallout from the Wyden tweet. They had scrambled to respond to one too many episodes like this. In this instance, Musk’s offensive tweet had struck during crucial discussions about the Inflation Reduction Act, President Biden’s signature climate bill that was still being written and which Tesla had been actively engaged in discussions about. If ever there was a time to fire off the lewdest possible joke about a powerful senator, this was not it.

Tesla’s policy team in DC was aghast and began lighting up Patel’s phone. This was an emergency. “Can you help us?”

Patel placed the call to Wyden’s top aide soon after. He tried to explain, but there wasn’t a script for this kind of thing.

“I’m super sorry about this,” he said. The Wyden aide was understanding.

“What the fuck is wrong with your boss?” she asked. “I don’t even know,” he replied.

A Wyden spokesperson denied such an exchange took place.

On April 18, 2022, Musk faced a new rejection he blamed on the Left, this time a personal one. That day, Musk’s eighteen-year-old daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson, a trans woman, filed paperwork with California Superior Court. She had adopted her mother’s maiden name and wanted to have her name change officially recognized.

In the section asking the reason for the name change, Wilson wrote: “Gender Identity and the fact that I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.”

The Daily Beast captured Musk’s public reaction. “She does not want to be a public figure,” he told the outlet. “I think it is important to defend her right to privacy. Please don’t out someone against their will—it’s not right.”

The statement read as that of a supportive father. But over the preceding two years, Musk had publicly railed against measures aimed at building inclusive environments for trans individuals. In 2020, a few months after his “pronouns suck” tweet, he wrote: “I absolutely support trans, but all these pronouns are an esthetic [sic] nightmare.” When some questioned his commitment to LGBTQ rights, Musk pointed to Tesla’s 100/100 score on LGBTQ equality in a Human Rights Campaign index.

Behind the scenes, a person in Musk’s orbit said, the matter weighed heavily on him. Being disowned as a father turned what Musk had previously regarded as a political crusade into a personal issue. Years later, in a 2024 interview with psychologist Jordan Peterson, Musk removed any doubt as to whether he’d supported Wilson, alleging he’d been duped into signing paperwork for gender-affirming care and arguing that Wilson was “killed by the woke mind virus.” He said, “So I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus after that.”

Wilson had her say soon after in comments on Threads, Meta’s social media site that emerged after Musk’s Twitter takeover. She lit into her father as few could have after Musk described her as “not a girl” and described apparent aspects of her childhood that included an early preference for theater and a propensity to describe clothes as “fabulous!” Wilson dismissed these statements as “entirely fake” and an assortment of “gay stereotypes.”

“This entire thing is completely made up and there’s a reason for this,” Wilson wrote. “He doesn’t know what I was like as a child because he quite simply wasn’t there, and in the little time that he was I was relentlessly harassed for my femininity and queerness.” She continued: “As for if I’m not a woman . . . sure, Jan. Whatever you say. I’m legally recognized as a woman in the state of California and I don’t concern myself with the opinions of those below me.”

Wilson’s Threads posts caught fire, and she was suddenly swarmed with thousands of new followers, many of whom expressed support and applauded her bravery for speaking up.

It was her final word on the Peterson interview that she pinned to the top of her profile, visible to more than one hundred thousand followers: “I look pretty good for a dead bitch.”

With the approach of the 2024 presidential election, Musk would make a break with the Democratic Party. He believed it was an activist-fueled party, and it was Democrats—not him—who had shifted, leaving him and people like him behind. For someone who felt increasingly targeted by the Left, who was exhausted by the perceived infiltration of speech, humor, and corporate governance, there was one clear choice: Florida governor Ron DeSantis , the antiwoke crusader who, unlike Trump, demonstrated a commitment to seeing his agenda through.

Musk was soon all in. He privately mobilized behind DeSantis for 2024. “In the past I voted Democrat, because they were (mostly) the kindness party,” Musk wrote months before the 2022 midterms. “But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican.” Musk declared he had cast his first Republican vote for Mayra Flores, the Texas Republican who won an upset bid for US House in a special election in a Democratic-leaning district. In June 2022, he tweeted that he was leaning toward DeSantis in the 2024 presidential race. Trump, he said, was simply too old, as was Biden. “Trump would be 82 at end of term, which is too old to be chief executive of anything, let alone the United States of America,” he said, after having earlier noted “it’s time for Trump to hang up his hat & sail into the sunset.”

He was effusive in his praise for the Florida governor, however, as he pushed his favorite candidate as almost a shoo-in for the job. “If DeSantis runs against Biden in 2024, then DeSantis will easily win—he doesn’t even need to campaign,” he said.

Earlier in the year, Musk explained his political transformation with a Twitter post showing a cartoon meme created by writer and evolutionary biologist Colin Wright. It depicted three stick figures standing in a line representing the political spectrum. In 2008, the stick figure representing Musk, labeled “me,” stood slightly to the left of center. By 2012, the figure representing Musk remained in the same spot, but the center and left had shifted beneath his feet. Musk was edged closer to the center, and the figure termed “my fellow liberal?” raced leftward, extending the left wing farther out in that direction. By 2021, the center had again shifted beneath Musk, placing him on the right of the spectrum, as the “woke-progressive” called him a “Bigot!”

“I strongly supported Obama for President, but today’s Democratic Party has been hijacked by extremists,” he wrote.

Musk, meanwhile, had also soured on Biden, the president who was pushing major infrastructure and social spending bills as inflation was wreaking havoc on the economy.

“Biden’s mistake is that he thinks he was elected to transform the country, but actually everyone just wanted less drama,” Musk wrote.

There were plenty of Americans in 2024 who felt alienated by the nation’s politics. Musk, though, had money, fame, and power—and other wealthy friends who encouraged him to do something about it. The Left, they said, had gone too far and needed to be reined in.

The latest outrage came when Starlink, Musk’s satellite-based internet service that had been launched in Ukraine after Russia’s brutal invasion, was allegedly told “by some governments” to block Russian news sources, according to Musk. Musk was defiant, saying it would not do so.

“We will not do so unless at gunpoint. Sorry to be a free speech absolutist,” he wrote. It was hardly an unreasonable stance. But to members of Musk’s circle, the tech mogul had latched onto the central issue of the times—one that the future of humanity depended on, to put it in terms he could appreciate.

Musk’s close friend and confidant, former Tesla board member Antonio Gracias, texted Musk at the time, in March 2022, that he was 100 percent in the right. “To the fucking mattresses no matter what,” he wrote in a text message. This “is a principle we need to fucking defend with our lives or we are lost to the darkness.”

Musk “loved” the text, appending a heart to it in reply.

It was only later that month that matters truly came to a head. Musk’s favorite social media platform—the one that had booted Trump a year earlier—made another controversial content moderation decision, one that may have altered the course of history: banning Musk’s favorite satire site.

Twitter suspended the Babylon Bee, a conservative, self-described Christian satire site, after it referred to a transgender woman in the Biden administration, a health official, as “Man of the Year.” The site refused to delete the tweet, effectively making the suspension permanent.

Musk’s partner, Grimes, had urged him to rethink his tweet about trans-inclusive pronouns. But this time, it was his ex-wife Talulah Riley who seemed to have his ear. Riley, an English actress whose two marriages to Musk had ended in divorce, had kept in contact.

“America is going INSANE,” she wrote on March 24, according to text messages revealed in court records. “The Babylon Bee . . . suspension is crazy . . . It was a fucking joke. Why has everyone become so puritanical?”

Then she asked: “can you buy Twitter and make it radically free-speech?” “Maybe buy it and change it to properly support free speech,” Musk wrote back seven minutes later.

Then Musk tapped the “like” button, attaching a thumbs-up to Riley’s text asking him to buy the most influential social media website in the world.

From Hubris Maximus: The Shattering of Elon Musk by Faiz Siddiqui. Copyright © 2025 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

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