Do we like Elon Musk?
Our score: 2 out of 10. A run of his own posts and speeches that cut against women, minorities and the vulnerable, a jury loss in court, and only a little documented good alongside.
Musk is the bloke behind SpaceX, which he says has now shifted its focus from Mars to a city on the Moon, and the one who bought Twitter for $44 billion. He is as famous for his posting as for his rockets, and that is where our trouble starts. Everything below is about the public man, not the genius myth.
The courts have not been kind lately. In March a San Francisco jury found him liable to Twitter shareholders over two May 2022 tweets, including one saying the deal was “temporarily on hold”. It rejected the claim that he ran a wider scheme, his lawyers called it “a bump in the road”, and he plans to appeal. In July a judge approved a $1.5 million settlement of the SEC’s case over his late Twitter stake disclosure, but said she had significant misgivings. In May he lost his OpenAI suit as plaintiff, when a jury found he sued too late.
A 2022 Business Insider story reported that SpaceX paid a flight attendant $250,000 in 2018 after she alleged misconduct by Musk. He denied it, calling the story a “politically motivated hit piece”, and said it never happened. It is an allegation, not a finding, and the settlement is all the paper trail there is.
On the harm test, his own words are the problem. In February he told Anthropic its AI models were “misanthropic and evil” and wrote “Your AI hates Whites & Asians”. That came amid reporting that he had posted about race 850-plus times. At a 2025 AfD rally by video link he said “There is too much focus on past guilt”. He also called the AfD “the best hope for Germany”. On his earlier salute-like gesture, the ADL called it an “awkward gesture” and not a Nazi salute, and he mocked the criticism.
The latest one is Anne Hathaway. When her 2018 Human Rights Campaign speech backing gay and trans rights went viral again, Musk wrote “She’s just a marionette” and said no critical thinking was happening. Conservative commentators joined in, and PinkNews reported no reply from her. Mocking an ally for supporting LGBTQ+ people is not a good look for a bloke who wants our support.
There is real good, and we will say it. In 2022 Musk responded to a call for Starlink kits during the New South Wales floods. SpaceX has sent Starlink gear to other disasters, though the stories we found were about company kit, not his own money, and the record on his personal giving is thin. We could not verify more than that, and that is honestly the whole list.