Elon Musk is having a bad year

Elon Musk is having a bad time.

First, some perspective: The Tesla boss is a white, privileged, Silicon Valley tech billionaire, so he’s probably having a better year than most people on the planet. But toxic masculinity and the pressure of being successful has come knocking at his door.

In an emotional interview with the New York Times, Elon Musk has said the past year of his professional life has been ‘excruciating’ and that stress has caused his health to deteriorate enormously.

The pressures of work had even caused him to spend his birthday’ stuck’ in the Tesla factory and almost miss his brother’s wedding. ‘This past year has been the most difficult and painful year of my career,’ he said in the interview.

Tesla announced a record $709.6m net loss in the first quarter of this year as the company struggles to manufacture large numbers of its Model 3 mass-market electric car.

According to Musk, he has been working up to 120 hours a week which has resulted in ill health and his friends have been worried about him. Apparently, he didn’t leave the factory for three or four days at a time.

Although Musk largely cited his professional career as the reason for such intense stress, it has no doubt been compounded by Musk’s fall from tech bro pedestal to gaff-ridden and highly questionable billionaire.

A string of strange public appearances and social media rants have got everyone asking: ‘You ok, hun?’ Here are some other reasons the Tesla CEO is probably feeling the strain in day-to-day life under scrutiny:

He called a diver who rescued 12 boys trapped in a Thai cave a ‘pedo’

‘Pedo’ means pedophile, FYI. In a Twitter spat over his suggestion to use a Tesla submarine to rescue the 12 Thai boys and their coach trapped in a cave, Musk hit out at volunteer diver Vernon Unsworth and suggested that he was attracted to children. ‘British expat guy who lives in Thailand,” Musk tweeted. ‘I challenge this dude to show final rescue video. You know what, don’t bother showing the video,’ he wrote in one tweet before replying to himself. ‘Sorry pedo guy, you really did ask for it.’ Naturally, Unsworth is now threatening to sue Musk.

That strange red carpet appearance with Grimes

If you are familiar with Grimes, she was formerly a grunge/gothic music artist that attracted a cult following. But after stepping onto the red carpet with Musk at the Met Gala, her cool allure was smashed to pieces in a mere second. With mouths gaping open, people had one question on their mind: ‘Is she really with him?’ Yes, she is, by the way. They still appear to be going strong.

Azealia Banks has beef with Musk and Grimes

Last weekend, Azealia Banks, Musk and Grimes had a very strange weekend. Azealia Banks said on Instagram that she had been in Elon Musk’s house alone for days, and that she wasn’t going to leave until Grimes arrived and finished a song for her new album, Fantasea II: The Second Wave. Banks said she had been wondering the hallowed halls of the Tesla CEO's home in LA, waiting for Grimes to come and complete the recording. Banks claims Grimes ‘ghosted’ her, writing on her Instagram stories: ‘I waited all weekend while grimes coddled her boyfriend for being too stupid to know not to go on Twitter while on acid.’ Banks then said Musk should have hired an escort instead of taking Grimes to the Met Gala to ‘hide his shrinking dick from Amber Heard’, that he takes steroids and got hair plugs to convince himself that he is alpha, and this his family are white colonialists.

He tried to say being a billionaire is a slur - and it massively backfired

‘The “billionaire” label, when used by media, is almost always meant to devalue and denigrate the subject,’ Musk tweeted. ‘I wasn’t called that until my companies got to a certain size, but reality is that I still do the same science and engineering as before. Just the scale has changed.’ I can confirm that absolutely no one felt sorry for him, apart from, possibly, other billionaires.

He might have broken the law by saying Tesla is going private

Musk tweeted that he wants to take his publicly-traded company private, with the assurance: ‘Funding secured’. However, Lawyers have warned that his tweet may have broken 14e-8 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, which prohibits publicly traded companies from announcing plans to buy or sell securities if executives don’t intend to complete, don’t have the means to complete, or are trying to manipulate the stock price, according to The Guardian. Last week, Musk was sued by investors, and the US’s top financial watchdog has reportedly launched an investigation into Musk.

He donates to the Republican Party

Musk was a major donor to a Republican political action committee, however he (once again) took to Twitter to explain that he only donated $40,000 to Protect the House to ‘maintain dialogue’ and that he is definitely ‘not a conservative’. However his connections to Donald Trump run deep. He previously served as an economic adviser to Trump last year, before quitting because they disagreed on climate change.