Elon Musk Is a Trillionaire Again. He’s Also Reaching New Heights of Self-Debasement
How is it possible to be the richest person in history while also somehow being as pitiful as the Brundlefly in that one scene in David Cronenberg’s The Fly (Major spoiler alert by the way).
Over this past summer, it was tricky to sum up Elon Musk’s net worth. He was “expected to become a trillionaire” in early June. Then he succeeded, becoming “the world’s first trillionaire” shortly after the SpaceX IPO. But then he became an “ex-trillionaire” or an “erstwhile trillionaire” when the SpaceX stock price dipped.
Should we all just agree on the term “on-again-off-again trillionaire”? In any case, it’s on again. If you haven’t hit refresh on your browser tab with the Forbes.com Real Time Billionaires page today you might not have seen the news, but Musk got his 13th digit back. Congrats once again to our Big Net Worth Boy for all his net worth.
How did this miraculous resurrection happen? Some fresh analysis from Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas referred to SpaceX stock as “cheap and getting cheaper” on Sunday, and then on Monday, shares climbed over 7%, bringing the stock price back to June levels.
And that stock spike fixed Musk’s net worth so that it’s back to being an absolutely incomprehensible number. But if you shift your gaze from his personal ledger to how he’s been spending his time lately, any lingering envy you might have for all that money will quickly and disgustingly dissolve like one of the Brundlefly’s meals before he eats it.
Last week, Musk apparently orchestrated an ugly, public breakup with the mother of four of his children that seems to have been conducted in the style an employee layoff (she is his employee), and all this is happening as Musk’s reputation around his treatment of women is under a microscope due to an upcoming documentary.
And there’s been plenty of famous nastiness from Musk ever since his turn toward Trump-flavored, race-baiting politics. But in all my years of watching this guy Musking it up, I’ve never seen him play the role of obsequious worm to quite the degree he has in the past few days, and it’s adding a new, stomach-churning subplot to the Musk story.
Last week, Donald Trump decreed by executive order that the agencies he controls must use the term “Super Intelligence” in place of “artificial intelligence.” Yesterday, Musk declared that he also prefers Trump’s term, and included the president’s preferred, two-word, title case styling. He says he will even rename SpaceXAI, “SpaceXSI.”
Aside from being a sweaty attempt to shoehorn cringeworthy newspeak into the vernacular, embracing the Super Intelligence rebrand muddles the meaning of whatever the speaker is saying, and Musk clearly knows enough about AI to understand that. “Superintelligence”—intelligence exceeding humanity’s—is still a fuzzy, futuristic goal for certain AI labs like Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence and Meta, which has a division called Superintelligence Lab. If “Super Intelligence” means AI generally now, then what’s “superintelligence”?
So is Musk earnestly committed to using this term, or—if you’ll forgive me for sounding a little paranoid—is he just, perhaps, nodding along with the 80-year-old President’s ramblings because, as he already learned once, things go more smoothly when Trump likes him? As my colleague Matt Novak wrote in November:
Trump has built a powerful political machine and he holds the keys to federal contracts in the world’s wealthiest country. Musk is the world’s wealthiest person and he needs those federal contracts to keep his empire afloat.
But in theory, Musk just loves Trump’s term and thinks we should all say it. Meanwhile, Musk’s sycophants love him and loudly agree. And while it’s doubtful Musk loves his sycophants, he does value the free content they generate for him to repost to his 241.7 million followers, which incentivizes the creation of, uh, whatever the hell this is:
Grok Imagine https://t.co/YrlzAhZltk
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 5, 2026
If nothing else, this video from @VOLDEMORT2X is helpful because you can point to it as an example of “Super Intelligence” that can’t possibly be mistaken for “superintelligence.” It’s a music video set to an unlistenable AI dance-pop song about how the term “AI” is déclassé. The clips fit a familiar AI trope: recollections of the AI prompter’s memories of scenes from movies and video games that were probably sick as hell in their original forms, but the contextless AI versions are just all mushed together into a big salad with zero emotion and negative vibes. @VOLDEMORT2X even names this style in the lyrics: “SI slopcore.”
At least I think they mean “SI slopcore” because in the actual audio track, “SI” appears to come through as “Sí”—like, Spanish for “yes”—most likely because @VOLDEMORT2X didn’t put clarifying periods in the term “SI” when prompting the lyrics generator, in order to help the ostensibly “Super Intelligent” AI model know what words to sing.
This is difficult content to consume. I bet you can’t watch the whole video, and perhaps Musk himself didn’t either. But embedding the video was probably useful if he’s going to subject himself to the mental contortions necessary to tie the phrase Super Intelligence to his products—in this case Grok Imagine. And reposting it was a way of signaling that he’s still on the same page as Trump.
It looks like he’s got a hard task ahead, psyching himself up to actually say “Super Intelligence” in person and on camera, and, if possible, to convince himself that he actually means it when he says he likes it. For all the money in the world, would you do this to yourself in full view of the world? Personally, I wouldn’t take that deal.
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