Grimes and Elon Musk are an unlikely pair. Their new relationship is shocking at worst and bizarre meme fuel at best. Nothing’s wrong…it’s just weird! Right?
Sadly, Elon Musk is a career abuser — and he’s kept it under wraps
There aren’t articles about Elon Musk’s abusive tactics because Elon Musk can take them down.
The search results for “Elon Musk wife” or “Elon Musk girlfriend” do not reveal his horrific marriage to Justine. Elon Musk’s romantic privacy is not the result of personal preference, but strategic concealment.
Once you realize that Elon Musk removed an unflattering article about his first marriage from the Huffington Post, you wonder if he regularly keeps his interpersonal abuse tactics underground.
Was that the last time he ever curated media coverage to conceal his abuse tactics? I have no way of knowing.
Is this evidence that Elon Musk censors media coverage of him? Or is it just a joke?
Most people, upon hearing “don’t do this or I will put you in jail” would be scared into what was asked of them.
However, if someone asks Elon whether he seriously threatened a reporter with jail time, he could easily use discounting and the joke disguise to get himself out of trouble.
Discounting
Discounting is an attempt to deny that the victim of the abuse has any right to his or her thoughts or feelings. The abuser thereby denies the victim’s inner reality, indirectly telling a partner that how they feel and what they experience are wrong.
Verbal abuse disguised as jokes.
The abuser may say something very upsetting to the victim of the abuse and, after seeing her reaction add, “It was just a joke!” Abuse is not OK in any form; jokes that hurt are abusive.
What if this is really just a joke? Perhaps Elon was joking here, but in his marriage with Justine he was undeniably abusive.
What Is Psychological Abuse?
Abusive power (also controlling behaviour) is the way that an abusive person gains and maintains power and control over another person…in order to subject that person to psychological or financial abuse.
The goal of the abuser is to control and intimidate the victim or to influence them to feel that they do not have an equal voice in the relationship.[2]
If Elon Musk were described in one word, it would be controlling. At his and Justine’s wedding reception, he told Justine that he would be the “alpha” in their relationship. Immediately he wanted to intimidate Justine and make her feel that she did not have an equal voice in the relationship.
The abuser can get control through economic abuse thus limiting the victim’s actions as they may then lack the necessary resources to resist the abuse.[1]
Justine Musk has talked at length about how Elon Musk used Justine’s lack of financial knowledge to make her financially dependent on him.
Justine wrote extensively about about how the legal documents Elon gave her to sign ended up destroying her financial security. She talks about his financial abuse even more than things that, in my mind, are more shocking.
I worry for his kids. It’s sad that they are taken care of exclusively by a nanny when he has custody, but I am a little scared of what he would do to them if he spent more time with them.
Elon Musk has a son who died. You didn’t know that?
That’s because Elon pretends that he never existed.
There’s something to be said for coping with grief in ways that happen to be hurtful to others. Maybe in the beginning, Elon could be said to be grieving in a way that was damaging to others, but grieving nonetheless.
However. Elon bullied Justine for mentioning their dead son. He even used emotional blackmail when Justine tried to have a single conversation about their dead child.
Elon Musk told Justine that she was being manipulative for mentioning their dead child, which was Elon’s transparent attempt at ensuring Justine would never mention Nevada again. Justine would think, “I’m being manipulative if I mention Nevada,” and then felt compelled not to talk about him.
He was very invested in the idea of him being the breadwinner, who has the power, and his wife as an entity which he has complete control over.
Elon Musk does not let his children have stuffed animals
He sees it as “annoying”. No, he did not even try to rationalize it. He does not care what the stuffed animals mean to his kids. It is not something he thought deeply about. The toys just annoyed him.
Let’s compare Justine’s description of Elon’s controlling tactics with the the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project’s diagram of the most common manipulation tactics.
USING EMOTIONAL ABUSE — Putting her down, making her bad about herself
USING CHILDREN — Making her feel guilty about the children
USING INTIMIDATION — Making her afraid by using looks, actions gestures
It is almost as if Elon Musk consulted the “How To Recognize Abuse” Power and Control wheel before every time he talked to Justine.
If this is old news to you, I’m glad! Most people I talk to only know Elon Musk as car-rocket-space guy but I would be glad to know that there are others aware of him as a career abuser.
I don’t consider this information easy to discover — even when I had a Google Alert for Elon Musk from 2013 to early 2016, there’s always been a ratio of 1 article written about him as a person for every 40,000 articles about Tesla production problems. 1:40,000 ratio for person vs. production articles.
What should you do?
If you hear the phrase “emotional abuse” or “psychological abuse,” fight the urge to think “at least it’s not sexual or physical abuse”.
Devastating abuse does not require physical contact. Whiplash is an example.
Always remember that psychological abuse is serious, real, and traumatizing as other any other type of abuse.
