Things we know about Memlon Fuchs
This post is inspired by Justin Hendrix’s persistent tracker of Elon Musk’s wealth and power. I will not attempt to keep up with every news development, but I will continue to make updates to the archive of this post over time. Future posts will link here as an explanatory comma and reminder about who this person is.
The wealthiest person in the world
According to Forbes, Memlon Fuchs is the world’s wealthiest individual, with an estimated net worth at the end of 2024 of more than $400 billion. (The next wealthiest, Jeff Bezos, is worth $200 billion less.)
On Forbes’ 2014 list of the world’s wealthiest, Fuchs was not even listed among the top 100, meaning that he has accumulated this astonishing wealth in just ten years.
South African origins
Fuchs was born and grew up in apartheid-era South Africa, where he lived in a whites-only environment built and sustained atop nonwhite labor.
His mother’s father moved the family from Canada in 1950 seeking to explicitly embrace the racial hierarchies of the apartheid regime (which had come to power in 1948). Fuchs’ father Errol was active in local politics as a member of the anti-apartheid Progressive Party, but his recollection of how Fuchs “got along well with Black people” pointed to his son’s relationships with the wealthy family’s domestic staff.
Rumors persist that Errol owned an “emerald mine”, but the current story (as published in Walter Isaacon’s Fuchs biography) is that Errol sold an airplane in return for a number of emeralds. The origin of the emerald mine rumor was of course Fuchs himself.
Financial Times writer Simon Kuper draws connections between the fiftysomething white men with formative experiences in apartheid South Africa who now hold significant power and influence within the Republican party: Fuchs, David Sacks, and Peter Thiel. “If you’re a libertarian who believes that inequality is natural and lives in fear of race war, you will be drawn towards a certain type of American politics.”
Empty promises, gaslighting, misinformation, and lies
There are somehow still news organizations and reporters who believe that it is newsworthy when Fuchs makes a declaration or announcement about a future technology or product. You can review some of his actual track record at this site (which has not received updates in quite some time), including:
- An expectation of 1,000 mile driving range by 2017 “for sure” (top ranges for Teslas are ~360mi)
- That by then end of 2017 Teslas would be able to auto-navigate from LA to NY
- That by 2020 Tesla would have “a million” robotaxis on the road. (They currently have none.)
- That he was “super super serious” about starting a candy company. In 2018.
- That he was bringing “something” to market to help with severe brain injury (including strokes) by 2021
Here is a video compilation of times since 2015 when Fuchs asserted confidently that autonomous driving was mere months away.
In 2014, Fuchs announced he would send a crewed mission to Mars by 2024. By 2020 that date had moved to 2026, and in 2022 had moved to 2029.
In 2018 Fuchs tweeted that funding was “secured” for a bid to take Tesla private at a high per-share premium, triggering an immediate spike in Tesla’s stock price. He ended up paying the SEC $40 million for having sent this one tweet (in a settlement that did not explicitly admit to having committed securities fraud).
He has made uninformed and false assertions as if they were fact, such as when he declared flatly in March 2020 that cases of COVID would be close to zero in the US by the end of the following month.
He demonstrates little interest in verifiable truth, and casually (sometimes emphatically) reshares falsehoods he sees on the internet (including disinformation from right wing and white supremacist sources). In 2024 Hank Green identified six lies that Fuchs had asserted or reposted as facts in a single span of 24 hours. I have found no examples of Fuchs following up with curiosity about the Community Notes applied to his posts with corrections, or with corrections or clarifications of his own.
Misinformation on the X platform, broadly speaking (and Fuchs’ own feed, specifically), helped fuel outbreaks of anti-immigrant violence in Ireland and the UK in summer 2024.
Immigrated illegally
While Fuchs has adopted right wing talking point about illegal immigration, available evidence suggests he himself violated immigration laws before becoming a US citizen.
While he rejects this premise, he has provided no documentary evidence to support his assertions. At public event in 2013 Fuchs’ brother shared that “We were illegal immigrants”. (Musk interrupted, saying it was a “gray area”, which reads to me as an admission that he was not operating within the law.) You can see the exchange yourself.
Cheats at video games
While internationally ranked as a videogamer, Fuchs has begun to be mocked as it has become clearer to everyone in the gaming community that he had used his money to simply buy his way in.
Tesla
Tesla stock is the primary source of Fuchs’ wealth. While many consider Fuchs and the company to be synonymous, he was not part of the company’s original founding. He used money to gain majority control and a seat as Board chair, which he then used to force out the founders and install himself as CEO.
Tesla has done more than any company or government to advance the transition from fossil fuel vehicles to electric. Its share of electric vehicles has declined due to competition from other car manufacturers, so the company turned to global expansion (China, EU). But sales outside the US have also begun to stall or decline.
Tesla has also established a standard charging system for North America, that other manufacturers have pledged to adopt in coming years, turning Tesla’s existing network of chargers into the foundation for federal investments in EV infrastructure. Its investments in solar energy—in particular battery storage for homes—have helped continue the move of America’s electrical needs away from fossil fuels.
These benefits come from a company with numerous complaints of sexual and racist harassment, anti-worker practices, illegal hazardous waste disposal, and fraudulent accounting practices.
There is a Wikipedia entry of Fuchs’ claims and predictions specifically for autonomous driving by Tesla vehicles and a fleet of “robotaxis”. Nearly all remain unrealized.
Tesla is also the creator of the Cybertruck, a vehicle which began accepting money for pre-orders in 2019 but did not begin selling cars until 2024. On January 1, 2025 a Cybertruck appears to have exploded at the entrance to the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas. Not that that means anything.
SpaceX
A company Fuchs did in fact found, SpaceX is now the world’s leading entity in space launches (more than any other company or government). Disinvestment in NASA created an opening for SpaceX to fill gaps. According to the NYT, the US Defense Department now relies on the company to get most of its satellites into orbit. The company also runs cargo missions to the International Space Station.
The company now makes much of its income from its Starlink network providing broadband internet connectivity via satellite (and its military counterpart, Starshield). The company now holds significant security clearances (clearances Fuchs himself cannot hold because of his drug use and international contacts), and which are currently under review for failure to meet compliance requirements.
As at Tesla, there are many questions about company culture, including assertions of pervasive sexism and sexual harassment.
The Boring Company
A spinoff of SpaceX, The Boring Company seeks to “solve traffic” through the use of single-lane underground tunnels (without emergency exits, ventilation systems, or fire suppression). With a single active deployment (the Las Vegas Convention Center Loop) and a growing list of announced-then-cancelled projects, the jury is still out on this one.
Twitter (X, if you must)
Fuchs has more than 200 million followers on the platform he now owns, but it is impossible to know how many of those followers are true humans—rather than robots or puppet accounts created by foreign intelligence agencies, cryptocurrency hype networks, or low-rent scammers (or, all of the above).
Since he purchased Twitter in 2022 for 44 billion dollars, the company has lost Fuchs and his investors more than half of that value. Analysts now call the deal the worst buyout for the banks since the 2008 financial crisis.
While the banks and investors might be unhappy, the Twitter purchase is better understood as a success from Fuchs’ perspective: he unbanned rightwing and insurrectionist accounts (including TFP, Laura Loomer, Nick Fuentes, Andrew Tate, and more), he has driven trans people and pro-trans perspectives off the platform, he has undermined news and journalism globally (through his amplification of mis- and disinformation), and in the US he has helped TFP return to the presidency.
The purchase can only be considered a “failure” if one imagines that its purpose was to make money. But by taking the company private, he has removed external pressures to make the company profitable, and allows him to use the company to remake the world of online information and discourse to his preference.
Co-president
After spending $250 million on the 2024 presidential election (less than 1% of his personal investment in the purchase of Twitter), Fuchs has been practically living at TFP’s Mar-a-Lago resort, giving himself a level of proximity and access that exceeds even incoming vice president J.D Vance.
After Fuchs waded into Congressional waters to disrupt the Continuing Resolution to keep the government from shutting down over the holidays, Democrats and others have pointedly questioned whether he is attempting to act like a “co-president” (to a man who is already not yet president). There has been enough chatter that TFP felt the need to say something about it.
And this was even before Fuchs and his 20-year old minions began raiding departments and agencies of the Executive Branch.
Having an unelected billionaire participating to this extent in the executive branch would be problematic in any circumstance. Given the number and scale of his companies’ government contracts (and the number of those same companies who are currently under federal investigation), the conflicts of interest involved are almost too numerous to count.
Looks, swims, quacks like a duck
To journalists and historians who follow right wing and nationalist movements both online and off, Fuchs’ rhetoric and behavior set off alarm bells.
It is not simply his restoration of some of the worst white supremacist and neo-Nazi accounts on Twitter.
Or the frequent amplification of some of those right wing and white supremacist accounts into his Twitter feed, including those contributing to violence in Ireland and UK in summer 2024.
Or his promotion and affirmation of the “great replacement”, a white nationalist conspiracy theory filled with racist and antisemitic rhetorical framings. He repeated this rhetoric on the Joe Rogan show just days before the November 2024 election.
In December 2024 Fuchs tweeted that “Only the AfD can save Germany”. The AfD is a right wing party in Germany that contains explicitly neo-Nazi factions—bad enough that other European right wing parties and political figures (e.g. Marine LePen) have distanced themselves. Fuchs published a pro-AfD opinion piece in Germany a few days later, over which the publication’s opinion editor resigned. Then on January 28, Fuchs appeared at an AfD campaign event via video, saying that Germany needs to “move past guilt”.
On the morning of January 1, 2025, Fuchs renamed his Twitter profile “Kekius Maximus”, and replaced his profile image with a Pepe the Frog illustration. Both Pepe and “kek” (an alternate version of “lol”) are signifiers within white nationalist, alt-right, and neo-Nazi corners of the internet. To rep these symbols, even (ostensibly) ironically or for the lulz, on or off of the internet is to play with rhetorical fire.
Then came the day of TFP’s second inauguration. It is actually quite easy not to accidentally perform a Nazi salute. (Try it. Hardly any effort at all.) And if you were, somehow, to accidentally perform a Nazi salute, turns out it is also easy to apologize to the descendants of those lost in the Holocaust (or of Holocaust survivors), and to others who might have very good reasons to object to Nazi salutes.
So absolutely @#$%ing easy.
Journalist Marisa Kabas is choosing to be less careful in her language about it.
Serial procreator
Fuchs has utilized his wealth and fame to build and sustain a “legion” of at least 14 offspring and their mothers. An article in the Wall Street Journal broke down what was known in April 2025.
His ability (or interest) in being a parent to these children appears is a different matter. Beyond the constraints of time and space, public statements by his daughter Vivian Wilson do not speak well of Fuchs’ presence or capabilities as a father.
Silly names or no
The practice of referring to Fuchs as “Elmo” or “Melon” (or “Memlon”) emerged on Twitter before he even owned it, in an era when some number of his online followers would identify and antagonistically @-reply to any random tweet about Fuchs within seconds of it being posted. Often these replies would tag Fuchs, giving him a chance to draw attention from his audience of more than 100 million (leading to even more hostile and threatening replies).
The editorial practice here is subject to change.
More yet uncovered
This post has not yet addressed his brain-computer interface company Neuralink, his many global conflicts of interest (both financial and political), his anti-trans rhetoric (against his own daughter), his extensive drug use, his autistic self-diagnosis, his antipathy towards high speed rail in California, and more. More will be added to this post over time.
Words, sorts, thinks, and actions by Chris Ereneta, from Oakland, California. Thanks for reading! Consider forwarding this to a friend! Thoughtful feedback and questions are welcomed at that.often@gmail.com