What the World's Richest Man Does All Day — Elon Musk Part 6
What the World's Richest Man Does Every Day
The present — 2024 to 2026.
We've followed this man from a boy in South Africa to the rockets, the marriages, and finally the family that came apart. Now we look at the present. Not the biography — the actual man, today. What he does. How he lives. What happens when the boy who survived everything becomes the richest person in recorded history, and still turns on his phone at 3am to check whether the numbers went up.
A Day in the Life
This schedule isn't new. It's the same one he kept at Zip2, sleeping on a beanbag and asking coworkers to kick him awake. The only thing that's changed is scale. The boy who had no safe place to rest became a man who never learned how.
The House That Wasn't Supposed to Exist
In 2020, Musk announced he was selling everything he owned and would own no house. He sold his California properties. He named his residence a small prefab home in Boca Chica, Texas — roughly 400 square feet, $50,000, rented from SpaceX, right beside the launch pad.
This became part of the Musk mythology: the richest man on earth, living in a tiny box.
In 2024, the New York Times reported that Musk had bought multiple properties in Austin, Texas, worth roughly $35 million — a 14,400-square-foot Tuscan-style villa, a six-bedroom mansion, and additional homes, arranged as a compound for his children and their mothers.
Musk denied buying a compound. The property records existed.
The story he tells about himself and the life he actually lives are two different documents. He wrote both. Only one is accurate. Nothing new about that — it started with the fake supercomputer back at Zip2.
The Pillbox
In May 2025, the New York Times published an investigation into Musk's drug use, citing more than a dozen people who knew or worked with him. According to the report, Musk carried a daily pillbox holding roughly 20 capsules — Adderall, ketamine (reportedly used nearly every day), and other substances. The use was described as severe enough that Musk had told others it was causing bladder problems.
At a press event after leaving DOGE, a reporter asked him about the report. Musk attacked the Times over unrelated coverage and moved on without answering.
I want to say something directly here.
I'm not interested in judging his drug use. People use substances for all kinds of reasons — pain, pressure, self-medicating something real and documented. What interests me is the pattern. A man who can't stop. Who pushes past every physical signal his body sends. Who medicates to keep going, instead of stopping to ask why stopping feels impossible.
That pattern started in Pretoria. It has never once stopped.
DOGE — The Chainsaw Period
From late 2024 through May 2025, Musk served as the public face of the Department of Government Efficiency under the Trump administration. He appeared at events carrying a chainsaw. He oversaw the firing of thousands of federal workers and the cancellation of numerous government contracts.
His stated goal was cutting $1 trillion from the federal budget. The administration's reported savings came to roughly $170 billion — a figure analysts themselves disputed.
In May 2025, Musk announced he was leaving. Around the same time, he publicly called a major piece of Trump's legislation "disappointing." An alliance that had looked unbreakable showed visible cracks within six months.
No alliance Musk has ever built has lasted. Not with Thiel. Not with the PayPal cofounders. Not with Tesla's original team. Not with Grimes. Not with Trump.
Every position is temporary. Every ally is useful until they aren't. Every board gets flipped the moment the rules stop favoring him. My read is, this isn't betrayal in the ordinary sense — it's the OS. "People make each other fail." Installed at eight. Still running at fifty-three.
The chainsaw was the performance. The exit was the OS. When the game stops being winnable on his terms, he leaves. He always leaves. The equity is the only thing he ever holds onto to the end.
What happened after is worth looking at too. Once he'd stepped back, he went a step further and set out to build an entirely new arena of his own — the same move that had always worked before, building his own door. This time was different. Within a few months, the attempt fizzled out, and he ended up back where he'd started.
My read is, this might be the first time in his life he actually lost a power game. A man who always walked into someone else's arena and made it his own — this time couldn't build one of his own, and had to fold instead.
But the full picture isn't quite that simple. In the unfamiliar arena of politics, he was pushed back. In the arena he actually controls — companies, contracts — he didn't budge. When threats came to cut government contracts entirely, most have held so far, largely because there's no real replacement for what he provides.
Same pattern, again. He gets pushed out of arenas he can't control. He retreats to the ones he can. And inside those, he still doesn't lose.
3am on X
Whatever else is happening — rockets launching, companies burning cash, a child being born — Musk is on X. Midnight. 2am. 3am. Posting. Replying. Arguing. Provoking strangers. Sharing things that help him and things that hurt him in equal measure.
He has over 200 million followers. He still checks the numbers. He responds to criticism from accounts with 47 followers. He gets pulled into arguments a man in his position has no rational reason to engage with.
The richest man in the world. Late at night. Alone with his phone. Needing to be seen.
$1.2 trillion. And still checking at 3am whether the world is paying attention. That's the $500 that's never been fully cashed. Still looking for someone to say: you were right. What you made matters. You matter.
A boy who wanted one person to say "you're right" built companies that made millions say it. He still checks X at 3am to see whether the number went up. That isn't the sound of triumph. That's the sound of a wound that never closed.
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