Elon Musk Tries Desperately to Prove He’s a Real Human Being

Elon Musk is the wealthiest man in the world. But based on his posts on X, the billionaire has never appeared more detached from humanity. And after one high-profile author pointed out that fact over the weekend, Musk now seems determined to prove that he’s a real human person with real human interests.

It all started in the early morning hours of Saturday when, at 3:20 a.m. Central Time, Musk shared a video with his followers on X. “Grok Imagine prompt: She smiles and says ‘I will always love you,’†Musk wrote, sharing the resulting AI video.

Grok Imagine prompt:

She smiles and says “I will always love you†pic.twitter.com/cjDu3MuDCZ

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 8, 2025

The video is eerie, to say the least. It starts with an AI-generated woman giving a rather concerned expression before smiling in that fake way real humans sometimes do without using their eyes. Smiling without your eyes is famously a hallmark of a fake smile. The audio is also not very well synced to the video, as you can see above.

But whatever the technical limitations of Musk’s Grok, the real story here is just how much the wealthiest person in the world seems to be struggling with a lack of human connection. Musk’s desire for love and companionship is understandable, if that’s what’s going on. It’s what all of us want in our lives. It’s only human. However, it’s easy to see why that might be hard for Musk, especially when it comes to a romantic partner, given his attitudes on women and their role in society.

Back in July, Musk pushed the idea that women were “anti-white†because they’re physically weak. He’s described empathy as a weakness, and has been blamed for contributing to the deaths of an estimated 600,000 people through his role in destroying USAID while the head of DOGE, according to the New Yorker.

Musk is disconnected from humanity and insulated by his wealth, but he also seems to be suffering from a self-imposed exile into a fantasy world of his own creation. The Tesla CEO purchased Twitter in late 2022 and promptly set about changing the platform’s algorithm to make sure he saw more praise from his fans. He allowed anyone with $8 to buy a worthless blue “verification†checkmark and tweaked the way Twitter (now X) works to make sure those replies are at the top of all posts. Effectively, Musk made it so that the people willing to pay him money are the people whose replies will be the most visible.

The billionaire’s AI endeavors, with Grok and his company xAI, seem to serve that same goal of creating a fantasy universe for one man. Musk told Joe Rogan during a recent podcast that he predicts pretty much everything people consume will eventually be AI-generated. And it suggests that’s the world he wants to live in.

“Most of what people consume in five or six years, maybe sooner than that, will be just AI-generated content. So music, videos…†Musk told Rogan.

The podcaster replied that he loved AI-generated music, seeming to confirm Musk’s thesis among the demographic of extremely rich, 50-something men.

It was against this backdrop that Joyce Carol Oates entered the conversation on Saturday. Oates, the 87-year-old author, tweeted a rather devastating observation about Musk’s own social media habits.

“So curious that such a wealthy man never posts anything that indicates that he enjoys or is even aware of what virtually everyone appreciates— scenes from nature, pet dog or cat, praise for a movie, music, a book (but doubt that he reads); pride in a friend’s or relative’s accomplishment; condolences for someone who has died; pleasure in sports, acclaim for a favorite team; references to history,†Oates wrote.

“In fact he seems totally uneducated, uncultured. The poorest persons on Twitter may have access to more beauty & meaning in life than the ‘most wealthy person in the world,’†Oates concluded.

It’s true. Musk spends his days on X largely whining about trans people, palling around with far-right extremists, and retweeting quotes highlighting his brilliance. Musk’s own tweets are largely focused on his own petty grievances, but it’s his retweets that really give some insight into how disconnected he is from humanity. Scroll his feed at any given point, and the retweets aren’t about news he finds interesting or stories that he wants to elevate for unselfish reasons. It’s almost always about Musk, his companies, and his products.

Oates clearly got under Musk’s skin. He sent out a series of angry tweets, saying her tweet was “demonstrably false,†calling her an “angry liar,†and writing things like, “Oates is a liar and delights in being mean. Not a good human.â€

Musk then proceeded to make an effort to prove he was interested in things like movies. And it was pretty sad to watch. The billionaire started replying to random tweets from the X account @cinesthetic, which posts about films. “Man on Fire is great!†Musk wrote in reply to a tweet about the 2003 movie. “Great movie,†Musk wrote in reply to another tweet about the 2014 movie Edge of Tomorrow.

“Fifth Element has great style,†Musk replied in another. It should probably be noted that the video he was replying to opens with a shot of Gary Oldman’s character in the 1997 film, who happens to have the haircut Musk was sporting in 2021. And none of Musk’s very short tweets engaged with anything deeper. It was pathetically performative after getting pantsed by Oates.

Bluesky users ridiculed Musk’s attempt at appearing to like normal human things, as that social media platform’s left-leaning user base tends to do.

In fairness, Musk does post about books and movies sometimes. He’s recommended people listen to The Iliad on audiobook at least half a dozen times in recent years. But he seems to often get confused about much of the media he talks about, including things like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.

“I took from the book that we need to extend the scope of consciousness so that we are better able to ask the questions about the answer, which is the universe,†Musk is quoted as saying in Walter Isaacson’s biography.

The New Yorker marveled at Musk’s characterization in 2023, even questioning whether he’d actually read the book. The magazine explained that he fundamentally misunderstands the book’s message, which is actually an indictment of imperialism, not a celebrating of seeing how far you can reach.

But that’s arguably less embarrassing than Musk’s thoughts on the 1982 sci-fi film Blade Runner. The CEO was describing his new Tesla Cybertruck vehicle and why it was futuristic: “It’s an armored personnel carrier from the future – what Bladerunner would have driven.†There is no character named Bladerunner in the film Blade Runner.

Elon Musk may be the richest man in the world, but money can’t buy the ability to care about your fellow humans. Nor can it give you the cultural knowledge to properly claim the title of Nerd King—something he desperately aspires to achieve with his awkward tweets.

Musk has built an artificial world where he can make robot girlfriends profess their love, without the messiness of attending to an actual human’s needs or desires. Other X users have even made fun of his desire to make AI girlfriends in the past, with even some of his biggest fans recognizing it as weird. He’s put up guardrails on X so that most of the messages he sees on a daily basis are fawning adulation, something that fewer people on the platform seem to notice. But every once in a while, a person like Oates will absolutely eviscerate him. And he simply doesn’t know how to handle it.

Without the ability to self-reflect, Musk seems doomed to repeat this cycle of embarrassment for the rest of his life. While Tesla shareholders voted just last week to give him a nearly $1 trillion pay package that could be paid out over the next decade, there are days when it seems like Elon Musk is the most impoverished man in the country.