Elon Musk is a billionaire again. It also reaches new heights of self-debasement

How is it possible to be the richest person in history and still be as pitiful as Brundlefly in that scene from David Cronenberg’s film? The fly (Major spoiler alert btw).

Over the past summer, it’s been difficult to summarize Elon Musk’s net worth. He was supposed to “become a billionaire” at the beginning of June. Then he succeeded, becoming “the world’s first billionaire” shortly after SpaceX’s IPO. But then he became an “ex-billionaire” or “former trillionaire” when SpaceX’s stock price fell.

Should we all just agree on the term “recurring billionaire”? In any case, here we go again. If you haven’t refreshed your browser tab with the Forbes.com Real Time Billionaires page today, you may not have seen the news, but Musk has collected his 13th digit. Congratulations once again to our Big Net Worth Boy on all his net worth.

How did this miraculous resurrection happen? New analysis from Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas called SpaceX shares “cheap and getting cheaper” on Sunday, and then on Monday, shares soared more than 7%, returning the stock price to June levels.

And this stock market rise fixed Musk’s net worth, so that it once again became an absolutely incomprehensible number. But if you take your gaze away from his personal ledger and focus on how he’s spending his time lately, any lingering craving you might have for all that money will quickly and disgustingly dissolve like one of Brundlefly’s meals before he eats it.

Last week, Musk apparently orchestrated a public, ugly breakup with the mother of four of his children, which appears to have been carried out in the style of a firing (she’s his employee), and all of this is happening as Musk’s reputation for his treatment of women is under the microscope due to an upcoming documentary.

And there’s been plenty of famous nastiness from Musk since his turn toward Trump-flavored racist policies. But in all my years of watching this guy Musking it up, I’ve never seen him play the role of an obsequious worm as much as he has in recent days, and that adds a new, stomach-churning subplot to Musk’s story.

Last week, Donald Trump issued an executive order that agencies he controls must use the term “Super Intelligence” instead of “artificial intelligence.” Yesterday, Musk said he also preferred Trump’s term in office and included the president’s preferred title style, two words. He says he will even rename SpaceXAI “SpaceXSI”.

Aside from being a tedious attempt to introduce proper Newspeak into the vernacular, adopting the new name Super Intelligence muddles the meaning of whatever the speaker is saying, and Musk clearly knows enough about AI to understand it. “Superintelligence” – intelligence beyond that of humanity – remains an elusive and futuristic goal for some AI labs like Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence and Meta, which have a division called the Superintelligence Lab. If “superintelligence” now refers to AI in general, then what is “superintelligence”?

So is Musk sincerely committed to using the term, or — if you’ll forgive me for sounding a little paranoid — is he perhaps just nodding in agreement with the 80-year-old president’s ramblings because, as he already learned once, things go easier when Trump likes it? 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 richest country. Musk is the richest person in the world and he needs these federal contracts to keep his empire afloat.

But in theory, Musk loves the term Trump used and thinks we should all say it. Meanwhile, Musk’s courtiers I love it and I completely agree. And while it’s doubtful Musk likes his sycophants, he appreciates the free content they generate so he can repost it to his 241.7 million followers, which encourages the creation of, uh, anything:

Grok Imagine https://t.co/YrlzAhZltk

– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 5, 2026

At least this video from @VOLDEMORT2X is useful because you can cite it as an example of “superintelligence” that cannot be confused with “superintelligence”. It’s a music video set to an unlistenable dance-pop song by IA about how the term “AI” is being downgraded. The clips fit a familiar AI trope: memories of the AI’s teleprompter memories of movie and video game scenes that were probably sick as hell in their original forms, but the context-free AI versions are just all mixed together in one big salad with no emotion or negative vibes. @VOLDEMORT2X even calls this style in the lyrics: “SI slopcore”.

At least I think they mean “SI slopcore” because in the actual audio track, “SI” appears to appear as “Sí” – like, Spanish for “yes” – probably because @VOLDEMORT2X didn’t put clarification points in the term “SI” during the lyric generator prompt, in order to help the apparently “super smart” AI model know which words to sing.

This is difficult content to consume. I bet you can’t watch the entire video, and maybe Musk himself didn’t either. But embedding video was probably useful if he wanted to go through the mental contortions necessary to associate the phrase Super Intelligence with 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 has a difficult task ahead, preparing to say “Super Intelligence” in person and on camera and, if possible, convincing himself that he really means it when he says he likes it. For all the money in the world, would you do this to yourself in front of the whole world? Personally, I would not accept this offer.