TFG: Elon Musk

The first time I heard Elon Musk's name I was in an office full of engineers absolutely losing their shit over the Tesla Roadster. This was 2010. The words "real-life Tony Stark" were deployed without a trace of irony. I was intrigued enough to go home and do what I do when someone gets handed a hero narrative without earning it — I went looking for the part of the story they didn't put in the press release.

What I found was Justine.

Justine Wilson was Musk's first wife, a Canadian fiction writer he'd met at university. In 2010 she published an essay in Marie Claire titled "I Was a Starter Wife." Not a rumor. Not opposition research. A woman sitting down and writing, in plain and careful prose, exactly what it was like to be married to the man my coworkers were busy turning into a religion. On their first dance at the wedding reception, he leaned in and told her: "I am the alpha in this relationship." She thought she could file that away and move on. She was wrong.

What followed was eight years of a woman being methodically converted into a prop. He pressured her to go blonde, then blonder, eventually platinum. He told her at some point — and I want you to sit with this — "If you were my employee, I would fire you." When their first son Nevada died of SIDS at ten weeks old — their infant, ten weeks — and she grieved openly, the way humans grieve when their child dies, he informed her that this was "emotionally manipulative." She was at an IVF clinic within two months of Nevada's death. When she finally asked for counseling to save the marriage, he showed up for one month and three sessions before delivering his terms: fix this today or I divorce you tomorrow. He filed the next morning. Six weeks later he texted her to let her know he was engaged to someone else.

That essay told me exactly who this person was. I have not been surprised once in the sixteen years since.

In 2022 — because apparently one woman telling you in a nationally published magazine wasn't enough — his daughter Vivian confirmed it again, in a courthouse. She filed to legally change her name and drop his surname, stating for the record that she no longer wished to be related to her biological father "in any way, shape or form." She took her mother's name. She had his legally erased. And what did Elon Musk do with that information — about his own child, who by Vivian's account had him present maybe ten percent of the time while growing up? He went on Jordan Peterson's podcast and announced he had "vowed to destroy the woke mind virus." He bought Twitter four months later. He blamed the school. He blamed the ideology. In no documented account did he ask what role a father who treated his wife like a subordinate and her grief like a manipulation might have played in producing a daughter who needed a court filing to get away from him.

Same move, different decade. Justine's grief was emotionally manipulative. Vivian's estrangement was the woke mind virus. This man has never once turned the scrutiny inward.

Today, this fucking guy becomes the world's first trillionaire.

SpaceX went public this morning on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX, at a valuation of $1.77 trillion, the largest IPO in financial history. The rockets are real. Starlink is a genuine business generating real revenue. I want to say that clearly, because the bull case isn't fabricated — it just isn't the whole story. When you buy SPCX today you are also acquiring xAI, which burned through $7.8 billion in cash in the first nine months of 2025 and posts quarterly losses so large that "cash furnace" has become its informal name in financial media. You're also getting X, formerly Twitter, which now generates roughly half what it did before he bought it. Both have been folded into SpaceX's corporate structure. One bundle, one share. That share comes wrapped in a dual-class structure and a Texas incorporation engineered specifically so that when shareholders try to challenge his compensation — the way a Delaware court did when it voided his Tesla grant — they'll find the door welded shut. The man who told his wife "I am the alpha" wrote the same clause into his IPO.

The Starlink growth numbers look great until you read past the subscriber count to revenue per subscriber, which has fallen from about $99 a month in 2023 to $66 today. The domestic rural market is largely saturated. Every new subscriber cohort comes from lower-income international markets paying thirty or forty dollars a month instead of a hundred. You have to keep doubling subscriber counts just to hold revenue flat. That's not a growth story. That's a treadmill with an excellent press release.

And then there's everything else. The sustained Great Replacement posting — not edgy flirtation but full throated endorsement, "100%," that white men will be slaughtered, that it is "simply a statement of fact." The AfD rallies. Grok replying publicly to women's posts with sexualized images of them while users typed "remove her school outfit" in the comment threads. Musk posted laughing emojis. The Epstein emails — his own emails, from 2012 and 2013, asking Epstein what night on the island would have the "wildest party" — released while he was loudly leading the fucking parade demanding the files come out. His name was in the files he demanded. You cannot make that up. And DOGE cutting the program monitoring flesh-eating parasites making their way north through Central America, after which the flesh-eating parasites arrived in Texas for the first time since 1966. Small screw-up in the grand scheme. But small things reveal character.

None of this is new. None of it is radicalization. The pattern was fully formed and publicly documented in a women's magazine in 2010. A woman told us who this man was in plain language, and the world decided the Roadster was too cool to care. That choice — to dismiss the evidence that complicates the hero story because the hero story is more fun — is how a man who called his grieving wife emotionally manipulative ends up the world's first trillionaire.

The Roadster was cool though. I'll give him that much.