Let us consider one of the most famous and polarizing men in the world — someone who has generated endless quantities of headlines and clicks. He’s a charismatic, autodidact genius with a powerful work ethic, and is particularly inspiring to young men. He’s behind multiple businesses in impressively disparate sectors, and racked up a fortune in first the millions, then the billions.
However, as his fame grows, he’s become prone to long, late-night posting jags on social media, with an increasingly grandiose/paranoid flavor, which spark ever-escalating controversy. At roughly the same time concerns have started to grow about how he’s taken his recent divorce, and what sort of home life he has.
Politically he started as a classic, progressive liberal, but the more time he spends online, the more right-wing he gets — latterly becoming vocally sympathetic to openly fascist organizations. He’s recognizable solely by his first, unusual name, he really loves Donald Trump, and he appears to have a weird obsession with Taylor Swift.
You know what? You sit writing a celebrity column long enough and it all starts repeating itself. For the person I am describing above isn’t just Elon Musk — who has done all those things, most of them recently — but also Kanye West.
Yes: if Elon ever wanted to know what happens if you become rich, cool and famous for one thing (writing pop songs; making electric cars), then spend so much time online you start believing you are the future of everything, including global politics, then Kanye walked (named his children Psalm, Chicago, North and Saint, ran for president in 2020, and wrote a song in which he claimed “me and Taylor might have sex, I made that bitch famous”) so that Musk could run (named his children Tau Techno Mechanicus, XÆ A-Xii and Exa Dark Sidereal, set up a government department under Donald Trump, and tweeted, in a way that wasn’t not rapey, that he would “give Swift babies”).
All this became very relevant this week, when Musk appeared to hit some kind of emotional and mental spin cycle. In a manic flurry of posts on X — the social media platform he bought for $44 billion, meaning his roughly 300,000 posts since 2010 work out at approximately $146,000 each — Musk has been chucking around some pretty wild thoughts.
He’s called Jess Phillips, undersecretary of state for safeguarding and violence against women and girls, “a rape genocide apologist”; binned off his former friend Nigel Farage; insisted that King Charles should “dissolve Parliament and order a General Election, for the safety and security of Britain”; and suggested Keir Starmer is “evil” and should be jailed for being “deeply complicit in mass rapes in exchange for votes”.
This all culminated in Musk running a poll, asking X users, “Should America liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government?” Nearly a million votes later, 61 percent were in favor.
Just to remind everyone again: Musk is famous for making electric cars. He’s essentially the 21st-century Clive Sinclair. But this week he has suggested that Trump’s government stage a coup in Britain, to remove a leader who won a landslide democratic victory just six months ago.
Musk has been chucking around some pretty wild thoughts.
Given how close Musk and Trump are, this suggests the American army is going to be busy come spring. Once more British women will be able to get pregnant by jazz-loving American GIs, posted here on a mission to capture the entire British government on the say-so of a guy who, like Kanye before him, launched his fragrance in 2022. Kanye’s was called Whatever It Takes. Musk’s, evocatively, was titled Burnt Hair.
So, you might be wondering — how does this all end? Will Musk convince Trump to invade the UK? Is his power unstoppable? Well, if Musk’s trajectory is anything like Kanye’s, the answer is: he’s super stoppable. And the thing that will stop him will be: Musk. Because the fact is that, in the end, money doesn’t like erratic, manic CEOs who are spending their “looking at spreadsheets time” pumping out wild, libelous conspiracy theories, and going on and on about pedophiles and fascism. It’s just not very … professional.
Kanye was once valued at $2.2 billion, only to lose three quarters of his fortune as various business partners, including Vogue, CAA, Adidas, Universal, Balenciaga, Gap, Foot Locker and TK Maxx, backed away, following West’s declaration that “there’s a lot of things I love about Hitler” and “I am a Nazi” and then founding a school where bins were banned. He was once one of the coolest artists in the world. Now he simply exists as the punch line to jokes. If he’s mentioned at all.
In the end money doesn’t like weird — and it particularly doesn’t like loud weird. I will be astonished if, in ten years’ time, Musk is still regarded as a brilliant businessman. Even a genius can’t run multiple businesses when his main gig is shouting “F U retard” at 7.30am on X. It’s all starting to look less like “a big personality” and more like something … diagnosable. The thing about disaster capitalism is you’re supposed to take advantage of it — not be it.
Caitlin Moran is a journalist and the author of More than a Woman, How to Build a Girl, and Moranthology
