When Elon Musk goes out in a blaze of rapid unscheduled disassembly, as his company SpaceX likes to quip, how will be remembered? A centibillionaire genius who brought humanity to the stars? Or a weird egomaniac who bought an entire social media site so he could blather racist conspiracy theories, salivate over AI waifus, and build a Hitler-praising chatbot that glazes him at all costs?
It’s the latter, less-than-illustrious track record that had X users believing that Musk may have been secretly puppetting the account of his mother, Maye Musk, all along.
As funny as it would be, though, we’re not convinced.
The gleeful conspiracy theories were fueled by a now-deleted tweet made by Maye Musk’s account which was responding to another tweet Elon made about his grandmother, who was “a housekeeper in England,” he claimed.
“Your mom told me she was cleaning toilets in a Liverpool boarding house as a child,” wrote Maye Musk, seemingly referring to Elon’s mother in the third person despite ostensibly being Elon’s mother. “When I met her in 1966, she was sewing linings for a furrier in a small windowless room behind the store.”
One confused replier asked what was on everyone’s mind.
“Aren’t you his mom,” the user wrote.
Many saw this as a sign that Elon was behind the post, with theories purporting that he intended to write while masquerading as his dad, Errol Musk.
While Musk probably doesn’t need any more defending than he already gets, that theory is probably bunk. As observers pointed out, it’s more likely that Maye meant to write something like “your grandmom” or “your father’s mom,” and not “your mom.” Errol’s mother was an Englishwoman from Liverpool, just as the original tweet describes. Maye is not; she was born in Canada and grew up in South Africa.
It’s probably a nonstory then, but if there has to be a takeaway, it’s that Musk has demonstrated himself to be so unscrupulous and vain a character that a lot of people were ready to believe he’d pretend to be his mom without a second thought.
But on what grounds? With a heavy sigh, here’s the part where we tell you that Musk secretly owned an alt account that he used to roleplay as his toddler son, X Æ A-12. Pretending to be his mom, in terms of weirdness, pales in comparison. Plus, he has a track record of manipulating the website to boost his own posts, and his AI chatbot Grok frequently lavishes a suspicious degree of praise on its creator, including insisting that he was as great a mind as Isaac Newton, and that it would be more ethical to kill one billion children if it meant saving him.
Technically, it’s still possible that Elon is pulling the strings of his mom’s account behind the scenes, and this is all some sort of 4D chess move. But as evidenced above, there’s no shortage of other, actually verifiable things to dunk on him for.
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