Is Elon Musk Nuts?
POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Thursday, September 3, 2026 02:05
VIEWED: 37827
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When (and Why) Exactly Did Elon Musk Make His Hard Turn to the Right?
Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff on the Deciding Factors Behind the Tech Billionaire's Political Shift
Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff | April 20, 2026
https://lithub.com/when-and-why-exactly-did-elon-musk-make-his-hard-tu
rn-to-the-right/
“The coronavirus panic is dumb,” tweeted Elon Musk in early March 2020, his first public comment on COVID-19. (It was also his first tweet to earn more than one million likes.) To him, the true virus was informational. The cybernetic collective of social media functioned like a communal id, where posts spread not because of their truth but their “limbic resonance.” “You can’t talk people out of a good panic,” Musk told Joe Rogan, “They sure love it.” By late March, he had landed on a new phrase for the phenomenon: a “mind virus.”
It was an interesting choice of words. Social media virality had been Musk’s great asset, the mechanism through which he converted attention into value. But here, virality was being invoked in a negative sense: it wasn’t just about circulation but sickness. The phrase reached back to Richard Dawkins, whose 1993 article “Viruses of the Mind” argued that human consciousness was susceptible to infection by irrational ideas like religion and superstition the way malware infected a computer. For Musk, social media was now the superspreader of such contagions.
If Musk had formerly conceived of the cybernetic collective as a safeguard against an evil AI, he now saw it as a carrier for a mental plague that evil humans were using to sicken the minds of millions.
He elaborated further in a conversation with Joe Rogan on May 7, 2020. As the “memesphere” had become global, Musk said, it created the conditions for a “mind virus” that could infect the whole world. Rogan was confused. He thought Musk was talking about Neuralink—a virus that interfered with a brain-computer interface. No, Musk clarified: a mind virus referred to a “wrong-headed idea that goes viral.” To Musk, the political-economic struggles of the pandemic were not just being waged in factories or governments but in the immune systems of collective thought itself.
Twenty-one days later, a group of protesters burned down a police station in Minneapolis in retaliation for the killing of George Floyd, a Black man murdered by a white officer. Protests spread around the country and around the world. By the summer of 2020, between 15 million and 26 million Americans had participated in the demonstrations, making it the largest social movement in U.S. history. One consequence was the election of Joe Biden in November 2020: as multiple studies have shown, the protests contributed to Democratic electoral gains across the country.
Once in office, Biden would pursue the most progressive domestic agenda in decades. His administration oversaw an expansion of the social safety net, a regulatory push around antitrust and consumer protection, and the most pro-labor National Labor Relations Board since the 1940s. The sequence of events fits the classic pattern of a Twitter Revolution. The George Floyd protests seemed to fulfill the promise of social media as a catalyst of progressive change. The woke social network that spawned Occupy Wall Street and Me Too now brought tens of millions of Americans into the street and helped eject Donald Trump from the White House. The hashtag progressivism of the 2010s had been vindicated on a very large scale.
In retrospect, however, the victory was fleeting. The George Floyd protests provoked a major backlash. Right-wing forces mobilized on social media to counter narratives about police brutality and racial inequality, and to celebrate figures like Kyle Rittenhouse, the white teenager who shot three men with a semi-automatic rifle at a protest in Wisconsin in August 2020 and was subsequently acquitted of all charges after claiming he acted in self-defense. Conservatives increasingly appropriated the word “woke” for their own purposes, turning it into a catch-all for the kind of politics
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Everything you need to know about Elon Musk's OpenAI testimony
Musk didn't respond well to questioning in his lawsuit against ChatGPT's developer.
By Chris Taylor | April 30, 2026
https://mashable.com/article/musk-openai-trial-testimony
The Elon Musk-Sam Altman courtroom showdown already promised plenty of fireworks. And in its first week, dominated by the world's richest man taking the stand in a federal courthouse in Oakland, Calif., Musk v. Altman delivered more than a few whizz-bangs.
Musk's goals on the witness stand were to explain his OpenAI lawsuit under friendly questioning from his own lawyer, and to not look too arrogant or ignorant under questioning from counsel for the OpenAI executives he's suing.
Whether he succeeded in either sense is open to question — in part because Musk himself did not seem very open to questions.
But Musk certainly succeeded in making more people aware of his ongoing romantic co-parent relationship with his former chief of staff, and making many of us scratch our heads about what, exactly, the popular online acronym "TL;DR" stands for.
So let's dive in to our own TL;DR: highlights from the Musk testimony we followed so you don't have to.
1. Musk says this is about 'looting every charity' . . .
2. OpenAI says this is about Musk's 'sour grapes' . . .
3. Musk reluctantly recognized a mother of his children
Under favorable questioning Tuesday, Musk identified Shivon Zillis — a key player in the early days of OpenAI — as his "chief of staff." Multiple laughs came from the public gallery, presumably from those who knew that Zilis also happens to be the mother of Musk's children, or at least four out of 14.
Asked again about Zilis by his lawyer on Wednesday, Musk came clean: "We live together and she’s the mother of four of my children."
4. What's the TL;DR, Elon?
Asked by his lawyer to explain the acronym TL;DR, which cropped up in a court document, Musk said it stands for "Too Long, Don't Read." As any dictionary will tell you, however, it's actually Too Long Didn't Read.
That may just have been a trivial mistake, but for the fact that Musk appears to have used his version to apply to court documents themselves. On Wednesday, Savitt hammered away at Musk for saying he'd only read the first paragraph of a key OpenAI document.
On Thursday, the OpenAI counsel played a segment of Musk's 2025 deposition in which he'd claimed to have read the whole thing. TL;DR: OpenAI is doing a fairly good job of establishing that Musk's statements about reading or not reading, at least, are untrustworthy.
5. Musk was testy on the stand, not aided by 'Law 101'
Echoing the judge's admonishment of his own lawyer, Musk repeatedly claimed Savitt was leading the witness. That is, however, something that only applies to friendly questioning, as Gonzalez Rogers pointed out.
"That’s not how it works," the judge told the world's richest man, before dropping the mic: "Let’s remind everyone in the courtroom that you're not a lawyer."
But Musk simply couldn't avoid having the last word, telling the jury that "I did take Law 101 in school."
As any Law 101 professor could tell Musk, however, he should be glad to be off the witness stand before he made his case any worse for himself.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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he thought he would be on Mars
its running late
NASA's Psyche asteroid probe flying within 3,000 miles of Mars
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/asteroid-comet-missions/nasas-
psyche-asteroid-probe-will-fly-within-3-000-miles-of-mars-on-may-15-heres-what-to-expect
and even Bezos is going ahead
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I rode Elon Musk's Vegas Loop, the worst transit system on Earth
Katie Dowd takes a trip on the least efficient form of transit on the Vegas Strip
June 2, 2026
https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/vegas-loop-22280647.php
In 1863, the world’s first underground railway opened in London. On its first day, nearly 40,000 thrilled Brits made the short, speedy journey between Paddington and Farringdon. The future of transportation had arrived.
One hundred and sixty-three years later, I was at my desk in San Francisco, clicking around the Vegas Loop map, trying to figure out where the world’s dumbest form of transportation could take me.
In 2016, billionaire Elon Musk decided he was sick of traffic. Because Musk believes every thought he’s ever had is the first of its kind, he decided to revolutionize transportation. His mission was to build underground highways, creating a tunnel system below surface streets that would zip people around in a way that congested, outdated freeways could not. Las Vegas, which has never seen a gimmick it didn’t love, signed on to become the first American city with a Loop.
The scale is ambitious to the point of stupidity. Once its 104 stations and 68 miles of tunnels are complete, the Vegas Loop site says it “will serve up to 90,000 passengers per hour.” About 642,000 people live in Las Vegas, plus an additional 110,000 tourists on any given day. That means every single resident and tourist need to ride the Loop multiple times per day to average 90,000 passengers an hour. For reference, the Tokyo Metro moves 6.5 million people a day around an area with 33 million residents. You do the math.
So far, the Vegas Loop has opened just nine stations, five of which connect the Las Vegas Convention Center. From a sixth station, Encore, travelers can go only to the convention center. Three more stations serve Westgate, Resorts World and Fontainebleau. As it turns out, the ground below cities is not a vast, empty space. It’s already full of infrastructure like sewer systems, electrical lines, gas pipelines, flood-control tunnels — there’s a reason you call 811 before you start digging around in your yard. Musk, who’s no fan of regulation, holds the stance that it’s better to pay for penalties than follow the rules. As a result, the Loop has been plagued by issues, including allegations of worker injuries, chemical burns and “ankle-deep” water in the tunnels.
To supplement this sad little system, the Loop added $12.50 rides to the airport. But because there’s no tunnel there yet, it’s just a regular route on regular surface streets. Oh sorry, were you imagining a train? Autonomous cars? Nope. The Loop is operated by human drivers in Teslas. Elon Musk is creating a race of mole people driving endless circles below Las Vegas.
I was in Vegas the last week of May, so I figured I’d give the Loop a try. On its site, you can prebook tickets; despite the fact Tesla has an app, the Loop does not. When I clicked on “ride the Loop,” I was informed that six of the stations were closed because there was nothing going on at the convention center that day. Westgate, Resorts World and Fontainebleau, however, were open from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m., a completely reasonable schedule given most Vegas tourists are tucked back in their beds by 8:30 p.m.
A quick glance at the map showed that there are no loops. There are lines that largely do not connect with one another. Unless you book an airport ride, the farthest south you can go is the Encore, which, if you know anything about the geography of the Strip, is not far. The only logical way to test the system was by booking a $4.50 one-way ticket from Resorts World — misspelled Resort World on the Loop map — to Westgate, a trip of about a mile. Adding insult to injury, I was warned that my “ride may be shared.” After paying with a credit card, I was texted a QR code with no further information on how to hail a car. “Enjoy the ride on the Vegas Loop!” the text said. But … how?
Because almost no lines, let alone loops, of the system exist yet,
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He Blew the Whistle on DOGE. Then His Brakes Were Cut
A federal IT staffer filed a complaint about DOGE, then went public. Shortly after Elon Musk boosted a post calling his claims false, his brake lines were cut. Now he’s suing for defamation.
Vittoria Elliott | Jun 2, 2026 3:16 PM
https://www.wired.com/story/he-blew-the-whistle-on-doge-then-his-brake
s-were-cut/
On April 14, 2025, Dan Berulis, an IT staffer at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), filed a Congressional whistleblower complaint with an extraordinary and urgent claim: The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had seemingly compromised the agency’s data and appeared to be exfiltrating it out of the NLRB entirely. Additionally, Berulis claimed that mere minutes after DOGE members had accessed the agency’s data, there appeared to be login attempts from an IP address in Russia.
At the time, DOGE teams, orchestrated by billionaire Elon Musk, were sweeping across government, firing federal workers and accessing sensitive data and technical systems with no oversight and little transparency.
The following day, Berulis went public in an NPR article with his name and claims. In it, he claimed that in the lead-up to his Congressional disclosure, a threatening note had been taped to his door, including photos of him walking his dog that appeared to have been taken by a drone. Berulis was already scared that speaking out had made him a target.
In a new defamation lawsuit, filed by Berulis in a DC court on April 17 and made public this week, Berulis alleges that Musk himself made him a target of further violence by falsely stating that Berulis’ whistleblower claim against DOGE was fake. The complaint was initially filed under seal because Berulis maintains a security clearance that requires prepublication review of anything related to his work with the government.
Five days after the NPR story went live, on Easter Sunday, April 20, 2025, Berulis got in his car to drive to Maryland to make a last-minute visit to his uncle, opting to take local roads instead of the major highway nearby. Within about five minutes of leaving his house, Berulis realized something was wrong. As he approached a stop sign at an intersection, his car wouldn’t slow down. He ran off the road and into the sign. When he examined his car, he found something that terrified him: His brake lines had been cut.
Unbeknownst to Berulis at the time, the night before, on April 19, at 8:06 pm, Musk had reshared an X post from right-wing influencer Mario Nawfal, claiming that DOGE had been “cleared” and that people were asking the Department of Justice to investigate Berulis. Musk shared Nawfal’s post, writing, “Filing a deliberately false whistleblower claim is a serious crime.” The story had originally been circulated by @amuse, an account that has regularly shared misleading claims and misinformation and is followed by influential people like Musk and Department of Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The @amuse post included Berulis’ name and photograph.
According to a police report viewed by WIRED, when a police officer from Prince William County arrived at the scene, Berulis’ lawyer from Whistleblower Aid, Andrew Bakaj, who had helped Berulis file his Congressional complaint about DOGE, was also on the scene.
Berulis, who found out about Musk’s tweet after the accident, thought back to the threatening note that had been posted on his door earlier that month.
According to the suit, Musk’s “readers drew the implication” that Berulis had committed a serious crime, “as reflected in replies demanding prosecution, jail, harm, or arrest,” and this put him at “increased risk of physical harm.” In the replies to the post, which remains online, several users called for Berulis to be prosecuted. One user wrote, “Snitches get stitches.”
“The correlation was obvious to me, with the timing,” he says. Berulis also began to worry about how exactly whoever had been threatening him knew where he lived.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, wh
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For a Communist, you really seem to hone in on only one Billionaire specifically dude.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:Trump has a deviant sex life involving raping both children and old ladies in the changing room at Bergdorf Goodman department store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-dis-crt-sd-new-yor/114642632.html
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
For a Communist, you really seem to hone in on only one Billionaire specifically dude.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
But Elon Musk's sex life is even more deviant than Trump's. I would surmise that with too much money, Trump and Elon have lost control of themselves from the waist down:
I knew Elon was nuts, but not this nuts, where he is unable to have sex except with a Pyrex glass test tube:
At least nine of Elon Musk's children were conceived using IVF. This includes his five children with his first wife, Justine Musk (twins and triplets) and two of his children with Neuralink executive Shivon Zilis. Additionally, some of his surrogate-born children involved IVF, though precise numbers vary due to privacy.
https://www.vanityfair.com/style/story/all-elon-musk-children-and-moth
ers
https://people.com/all-about-elon-musk-children-11678749
Elon Musk has welcomed 14 children over 20 years.
The Tesla founder first became a father in 2002 when his ex-wife, Canadian author Justine Wilson, welcomed their son Nevada Alexander, who tragically died at 10 weeks old. The two went on to have five more children: twins Vivian and Griffin and triplets Kai, Saxon and Damian.
After divorcing Wilson in 2008 following seven years of marriage, Musk married and divorced actress Talulah Riley twice, though they never had children together. In 2020, two years after Musk and singer Grimes were first linked, the two announced they welcomed their first child, X Æ A-12, together.
The former couple share two more children, a girl, Exa Dark Sideræl, and a boy, Techno Mechanicus. A few weeks prior to the arrival of their second child, the tech CEO also secretly fathered twins, Strider and Azure, with Shivon Zilis, an executive at one of his companies, Neuralink, in November 2021, according to court documents published by Insider.
The pair then welcomed daughter Arcadia in February 2024. Later that year, a source told PEOPLE that Musk and Grimes were looking for a home in Bel Air where they could live with all of his children and their mothers.
In February 2025, author Ashley St. Clair revealed that she and Musk had welcomed a child, whose name was later revealed to be Romulus. Zilis then announced that she and Musk had secretly welcomed baby No. 4, son Seldon Lycurgus, though it's unclear when.
Another update came in May, when St. Clair told The New York Times that Musk told her that he had also fathered a child with a Japanese pop star, though this claim has not been confirmed.
Here's everything to know about Elon Musk's 14 children: Nevada, Vivian, Griffin, Kai, Saxon, Damian, X Æ A-12, Exa, Strider, Azure, Techno, Arcadia, Seldon Lycurgus and Romulus.
More at https://people.com/all-about-elon-musk-children-11678749
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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For a Communist, you really seem to hone in on only one Billionaire specifically dude.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:Were you aware that Elon Musk fears a prophecy?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
For a Communist, you really seem to hone in on only one Billionaire specifically dude.
The prophecy: You will have a daughter, and she will bring your downfall.
Elon Musk: Then I will reproduce using only In vitro fertilization, coupled with Pre-implantation Genetic Testing, thus ensuring that I only have sons.
Who is Elon’s “daughter”? The one Elon fears? She is Vivian Jenna Wilson: Born as Xavier Musk, she is one of Musk's twins from his first marriage to author Justine Wilson. She came out as transgender in 2020 and legally changed her name and gender in 2022. Vivian and her father have been estranged for years, and she has pursued a modeling and advocacy career independently.
https://imgur.com/gallery/prophecy-Y7kQl0R
Yes, Elon Musk has confirmed that his transgender daughter's transition was a primary motivator for his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter.
Musk has frequently characterized the cultural and political atmosphere on Twitter as being infected by a "woke mind virus" that affected his daughter. Reports from his biographer, Walter Isaacson, indicated that his anti-woke sentiments were largely triggered by her gender transition.
https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/elon-musk-confirms-he-bought-twitte
r
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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How Elon Musk Killed Hundreds of Thousands of People
Former USAID global health official Nicholas Enrich explains the catastrophic human toll of DOGE's cuts to the agency.
30 May 2026
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/how-elon-musk-killed-hundreds-of-t
housands-of-people
For more than 12 years, Nicholas Enrich worked at USAID, the United States Agency for International Development, rising to become one of the agency's top global health officials. Then, in a matter of weeks, he watched as the Trump administration and Elon Musk's "Department of Government Efficiency" (DOGE) dismantled the six-decade-old agency responsible for delivering American foreign aid around the world.
Enrich documented the experience in his book Into the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower's Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID. He joined Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson to discuss what happened behind the scenes, and its devastating consequences. Download the book for free from https://z-lib.sk/s/Into%20the%20Wood%20Chipper
NATHAN Robinson
Let's start with the book's title, Into the Wood Chipper. If people don't remember the "wood chipper" and how your agency was fed into it, who's it a quote from?
Nicholas Enrich
It's Elon Musk. So, yeah, about two weeks into the Trump administration, Musk tweeted that he just spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper, and I was the top global health official at USAID at the time. So, I unfortunately had a front row seat to the destruction that that was happening to the agency at that point, and I wrote this book to hopefully give readers a look of what it actually felt like inside of that wood chipper.
Robinson
Okay, so how it felt inside the wood chipper, but first, before we get to the dismantlement, let's have you lay out your personal background here. I mean, how did you get involved with USAID? How, what's what brought you to this agency, and what did you do for it?
Enrich
Coming into the second Trump administration, I was the Director of Policy, Programs, and Planning for Global Health, which basically meant that my job was to ensure that we were using taxpayer dollars effectively to achieve our objectives of increasing global life expectancy and creating access to affordable and high-quality healthcare around the world, and keeping Americans safe from infectious diseases overseas.
My background is actually in law, which is unusual for the Global Health Bureau at USAID, where a large portion of the staff were experts in global health, specifically—so doctors, epidemiologists, public health specialists, etc. But, you know, it's an agency that moves an incredible amount of money using complex financial instruments, and so that's that was kind of where I fit in: trying to find very efficient and effective ways to do the things that the doctors and epidemiologists were trying to do, using our funding.
Robinson
I feel like one of the tragedies of this story is that so many Americans had no idea what they lost when they lost this agency. I mean, you point out that before the Trump administration had USAID in its sights, you used to have to explain to people where you worked, and they didn't even know this agency existed.
And yet, for all of the horrors that come out of US action abroad on the military side, there's a lot of goodness that has come out of what this agency has done over the years. So tell us a little bit about about what this agency managed to accomplish.
Enrich
So, USAID was the federal government's branch to deliver foreign aid and international development assistance around the world to over 100 countries, and it succeeded in spades, using less than one percent of the budget. For example, we saved over 92 million lives within just the last 20 years alone. It was kind of the embodiment of American generosity overseas. We operated under a flag of people shaking hands that said "from the American people", bu
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