Elon Musk is not telling the truth

Elon Musk is the richest person on Earth, and it isn’t close. His net worth, largely based upon his ownership of Tesla and SpaceX stock, is close to $400 billion. In second place is fellow tech giant Mark Zuckerberg, who is worth about $140 billion less than Musk.

Just the difference between Musk and Zuckerberg is larger than the combined gross domestic product of Kenya.

It feels wrong for all that wealth to sit in a single person’s hands, especially when more than half the planet lives on less than $5 per day. On some level, Musk must understand this. Perhaps that’s why he spends so much time trying to justify his opulence.

One way he does so is by mythologizing his own work ethic. A common theme in Musk’s rhetoric is that he earned every penny of his nearly $400 billion. In his public self-conception, Musk is no trust-fund baby. Au contraire — Musk is a rugged industrialist, an entrepreneur who earned his wealth through hard work and persistence.

In that vein, Musk recently claimed that he works 120 hours per week. And he called on his employees at the Department of Government Efficiency to do the same.

Even if Musk is being honest and does truly work that much, it is still a nonsense proposal.

You shouldn’t run employees into the ground. Such methods probably won’t even boost productivity in the long run, as workers would quickly become exhausted and likely depressed. In short order, they would be unable to bring their best selves to work each day, spelling doom for any office, whether in the public or private sector.

It’s also telling that Musk advocated literally tripling the standard workweek without raising pay. This shows how billionaires don’t care about employees and will happily trample labor rights in pursuing their own ends. For Musk, workers are mere cogs in his machine — not human beings with families they’d like to occasionally see. Working 120 hours a week doesn’t allow for that. It only (barely) leaves room for sleep.

All of that would be bad enough. But Musk is also a hypocrite, demanding government employees do something he does not. Despite what he claims, there is absolutely no way Musk works 120 hours a week. His own words prove it.

While appearing on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Musk said he sleeps six hours nightly. That’s 42 hours per week. As there are 168 hours in a week, this leaves just 126 for all waking activities — a mere six hours per week either not working or sleeping.

Musk also claims to be one of the 20 best players of the video game “Diablo” on Earth. The game is quite popular, with millions of active monthly players. Given such stiff competition, Musk must have had to put in considerable time to earn that elite ranking.

Such a commitment is nearly impossible if Musk works 120 hours per week. He would have no more than roughly 51 minutes available daily for playing the game, which is a generous estimate. It doesn’t account for the time he spends eating, on the toilet or trying to produce more offspring.

That simply would not be enough to earn such a rank. Many gamers have questioned Musk’s claims and accused him of enlisting other people to play on his behalf. If true, that only underscores Musk’s affinity for profiting off of other people’s labor.

But there’s more. Musk is addicted to X, the social media app he owns. He often tweets more than 100 times a day (not including retweets). That is a serious time commitment and casts further doubt on Musk’s supposedly Herculean work schedule. He simply cannot be telling the truth.

Musk’s apparent lies demonstrate how the ultra-rich will go to great lengths to justify their unjustifiable wealth. Musk and company will tell you they’re that rich because they worked harder. Nonsense. Just like people stuck in a poverty trap, billionaires are overwhelmingly products of circumstance.

Sweat from the brow isn’t what inflated their bank accounts past the size of national economies. Capitalism is — and the brute luck it so handsomely, but arbitrarily, rewards.

Elias Khoury is a law student at the University of Michigan who has written for Newsweek, Al Jazeera and others. He holds a graduate degree in public policy from the London School of Economics.