Elon Musk is one of those guys who only has one towel, according to his mother.
In an X post on Tuesday, Maye Musk described her son’s living space in Boca Chica, southern Texas, near SpaceX’s Starbase launch site.
“There is no food in the fridge,” the billionaire’s mother, 77, said. “The garage where I slept is on the right.”
She added, “The shower only has one towel so I left it for Elon. That was okay with me.”
There is no food in the fridge. The garage where I slept is on the right. The shower only has one towel so I left it for Elon. That was okay with me. When I was a child, I’d spend three weeks in the Kalahari Desert without showering. Many times. There was no water. I think my… https://t.co/8XT04q5DQg
Maye Musk wrote that she had been primed to live like this since childhood, saying that she had spent many weeks in the Kalahari Desert as a child without showering because there was no water.
“I think my parents prepared me for this luxury,” she said, adding a laughing emoji to the end of her X post.
Musk’s Boca Chica house is a 3-bedroom home worth $45,000, he said in a 2022 podcast interview.
This is not the first time Maye Musk has ratted on her son’s living conditions.
In 2023, she responded to Musk’s tweet, in which he said he slept on a friend’s couch the weekend prior. She said she has “many memories of sleeping on mattresses or blankets on the floor, on couches, or a bed in the garage,” when she visited him in Texas.
In that tweet, she said it was “still better than on the ground in the Kalahari Desert with lions or hyenas nearby.”
Musk has made headlines several times for his austere and modest lifestyle. The Tesla, SpaceX, and X CEO, who is currently worth about $664 billion and is the richest man alive, is known for sleeping on the floor in his offices and going to bed at 3 a.m.
“Back to spending 24/7 at work and sleeping in conference/server/factory rooms,” he said in a May X post after quitting his role in the Department of Government Efficiency to focus on his companies.
Despite Musk’s slim inventory of towels, he’s previously said the habit that had the biggest positive impact on his life was showering.
Representatives for Musk did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
In 2021, the Barclays Center arena — home to the Brooklyn Nets and concerts ranging from Disney on Ice to Bad Bunny — decided to switch from Ticketmaster to another ticketing company, SeatGeek.
The switch didn’t go well.
Ticketmaster retaliated hard, a federal jury in Manhattan heard on Wednesday, as testimony began in a high-stakes government effort to split the ticketing giant from parent company Live Nation.
“Ticketmaster pulled up the drawbridge behind them,” refusing to help with the transition to SeatGeek, testified John Abbamondi, Barclay’s then CEO.
And soon, Live Nation retaliated as well, Abbamondi testified, supporting the federal antitrust allegation that any venue that refused to use Ticketmaster would be threatened or punished.
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After booting Ticketmaster in October 2021, the 18,000-seat arena saw a dramatic drop in Live Nation-promoted concerts, Abbamondi told the jury — from more than 20 a year to fewer than eight.
Abbamondi cited a Billie Eilish concert as one example of what he called “smoking gun” evidence: that Barclays was punished for quitting Ticketmaster.
Word got back to Abbamondi, he testified, that Live Nation pulled a planned Barclays concert featuring the Grammy-winning artist. A concert date for Eilish, who was promoted by Live Nation, was switched from Barclays to the USB Arena near JFK Airport in Queens, Abbamondi said.
“It was Live Nation’s decision,” Abbamondi said an Eilish manager told one of his executives of the Barclays snub.
John Abbamondi in 2019.
Dave Reginek/NHLI via Getty Images
Live Nation’s retaliation campaign did not come without warning, Abbamondi told jurors.
The ex-Barclays CEO said that six months before the switch to SeatGeek, he received a cautionary text from his friend, Patti Kim, a Live Nation vice president.
In the text, Kim warned that he “should think about the bigger relationship with Live Nation” before going with SeatGeek, according to a copy of the exchange shared with jurors.
Kim’s email was signed with “a winky face emoji,” Abbamondi noted.
“I took this as a friendly warning to me that I was about to make a big mistake,” he told jurors.
When Abbamondi called two Live Nation executives weeks later to break the news that Barclays still planned to switch ticketers, the profanities flew, he said.
Joe Berchtold, Live Nation’s Chief Financial Officer, “dropped an F-bomb on me,” Abbamondi said, when a government lawyer asked how he knew the CFO was angry.
“He told me it was going to be difficult to put concerts in Barclays Center,” Abbamondi told jurors.
Asked to elaborate on his retaliation concerns, Abbamondi said “I would describe it as a widely-shared concern in the industry.”
The answer was stricken from the record as unsupported hearsay, as was Abbamoni’s reference to a Eilish manager saying Live Nation had pulled her concert from Barclays.
Abbamondi’s testimony also supported the government’s contention that Ticketmaster’s technology is “held together by duct tape,” as a government attorney had told the ten-woman, two-man jury on Tuesday.
In his opening statements, Assistant US Attorney David Dahlquist pointed to Ticketmaster’s Taylor Swift Eras Tour crash in 2022 as evidence that a lack of competition let Live Nation get away with foisting an inferior product on fans, artists, and concert venues.
In his own opening remarks, Live Nation attorney David R. Marriott called Ticketmaster “the highest quality product that there is on this planet in terms of delivering quality ticketing services.”
But in his testimony Wednesday, Abbamondi told jurors that the decision to switch was clinched by SeatGeek’s superior technology. At one point, Abbamondi likened SeatGeek’s tech to “the Mac OS,” while Ticketmaster was more like “Windows 95.”
Abbamondi joked from the witness stand that the blinking green cursor he would see when running the Ticketmaster venue interface was “like something out of the 1980s.”
The Department of Justice has joined with a consortium of attorneys general from 39 states and the District of Columbia in pressing for the Ticketmaster-Live Nation split.
The feds say Live Nation holds a monopoly in the live music industry, which it uses to compete unfairly with its much-smaller competitors— and that Barclays’ experience is a case in point.
“They lost concerts, they lost profits, they lost revenue as a result of the move” to SeatGeek, Dahlquist told jurors in opening statements.
“And of course, because the Barclays Center wants to succeed, to be successful, they’re forced to go back,” to Ticketmaster, he said. “So today, they are a Ticketmaster entity.”
Marriott countered in his own opening statement that Barclays’ return to Ticketmaster, two years after the switch to SeatGeek, was based not on retaliation, but on Live Nation’s superior product.
“They came back to Ticketmaster not because of any threats, but because SeatGeek fell down on the job,” Marriott said.
Lawyers for Live Nation say that yes, they compete aggressively — but they do so fairly. Artists remain free to choose promoters, and arenas and venues remain free to choose who does their ticketing, they argued.
The civil antitrust trial, the culmination of a May 2024 federal and state lawsuit, is expected to last six weeks.
Two Alexander brothers had sex with a protesting woman in the backyard of a Hamptons rental as other partygoers joined in or watched, according to testimony in the third week of the siblings’ Manhattan sex trafficking trial.
“She was over and over and over asking them to stop,” a witness told the jury of an unnamed woman she described as intoxicated and “screaming” for help in a hot tub.
It was Saturday night on Memorial Day weekend in 2009. Tal Alexander and “one of the twins” — the witness couldn’t say if it was Alon or Oren Alexander — were among those sexually assaulting the woman, according to the testimony.
“It seemed nobody was taking action,” said the witness, Avishan Bodjnoud, an information management executive at the United Nations.
Bodjnoud said she asked the people around her to do something, but no one would. In the midst of a party, “there were no allies there to help,” Bodjnoud said.
She felt too fearful and too alone in her outrage to contact the police, Bodjnoud told the jury.
Instead, she fled the party in a taxi, but not before scrawling “Rapists” and “You need to apologize” in eyeliner on the front door and wall of the Southampton rental, Bodjnoud testified.
Photographs of the graffiti, recovered from Tal Alexander’s hard drive, were shown in court. “I hoped that someday this could be used as evidence,” Bodjnoud said, seeing the photographs and tearing up on the witness stand.
The disturbing testimony capped the third week of the trial of former luxury real estate brokers Tal and Oren Alexander and their brother, Alon.
So far — roughly halfway through the federal trial — nine accusers have taken the stand. In sometimes tearful testimony, they have described being sexually assaulted behind closed doors by one or more of the brothers, including on a cruise ship, at two Hamptons rentals, and at an Aspen ski resort.
The hot tub incident stands out as the only alleged assault totake placein public view, with a pool party in full swing. It is not clear whether prosecutors will call the woman herself to the stand or whether she was ever identified.
Lawyers for the brothers say that any sex was consensual and not trafficking. In their cross-examinations of witnesses, the lawyers have repeatedly pointed out that none of the women called the police or took a drug test that could substantiate their claims of being drugged.
During cross-examination, a defense lawyer for Tal Alexander challenged Bodjnoud’s testimony that she remained silent out of fear for the brothers’ power and influence.
“Were you aware that in 2009, Tal Alexander was a 21-year-old copy machine salesman?” asked the lawyer, Milton Williams.
A second witness to the alleged hot tub assault testified on Thursday and Friday under the pseudonym “Isa Brooks.”
Brooks told jurors she saw “a girl, I believe, in a green bikini with a bunch of guys on top of her.”
She said she heard another woman — who, like her, was indoors looking out into the yard — cry out, “I work for the UN and I know what you’re doing!”
Oren Alexander, who was outside, slammed the door in that woman’s face, Brooks testified.
Brooks was called to testify to her own alleged assault, which she said took place earlier in the day on that same Saturday. She was days away from her 17th birthday.
She described struggling and falling in and out of consciousness as Tal Alexander and Alon Alexander, whom she described as the “quieter twin,” joined with two other men in violently assaulting her on a bed.
The four men were saying “degrading words” during the attack, Brooks told the jury.
“I was wondering why they hated me,” she recalled thinking.
On cross-examination, Brooks was questioned by the defense about photographs showing her celebrating her 17th birthday with school pals days after the incident, and was asked why, days after that, she and a girlfriend stayed overnight at another Hamptons home where Tal Alexander was also present.
“I was scared to rock the boat,” she responded of her reluctance to speak out or call the authorities. “I was scared that I would get in trouble.”
The brothers face up to life in prison if convicted of a top count of sex trafficking conspiracy.
About 24 hours before a Manhattan jury made Donald Trump the first-ever former president to become a convicted felon — a person going by the name “Michael Anderson” made a little-noticed Facebook comment.
“Thank you for all your hard against the MAGA crazies!” he wrote in a comment on an unrelated post on the official page of theNew York State Unified Court System.
“My cousin is a juror on Trumps criminal case and they’re going to convict him tomorrow according to her. Thank you 🙏 New York courts!!!! ❤️”
In a Friday afternoon letter, New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, who presided over the trial, alerted prosecutors and Trump’s defense lawyers about the comment.
“Today, the Court became aware of a comment that was posted on the Unified Court System’s public Facebook page and which I now bring to your attention,” Merchan wrote.
A portion of the Friday filing from New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan.
New York courts
But it’s far from clear that the comment is genuine.
Anderson — if that is his real name — claims to be a troll.
Business Insider located the Facebook comment, which was timestamped 4:39 p.m. on May 29, a day before the jury verdict. It was made in response to an unrelated Facebook post about a program from the New York state court system to promote diversity.
“Now we are married ❤️ 😁,” he posted in response to another Facebook comment, which criticized his purported cousin.
A screenshot of Michael Anderson’s Facebook comment.
Facebook
On his Facebook page, Anderson describes himself as “Transabled & a professional shit poster.” His profile picture is an image claiming his account is restricted. His cover photo broadcasts the slogan: “Facebook: Wasting peoples lives since 2004.”
Few posts are publicly visible on Anderson’s page. Visible ones appear to be food videos and comedic Reels, a product from Facebook owner Meta that seeks to emulate TikTok videos.
Michael Anderson’s Facebook page describes him as a “professional shitposter.”
Facebook
“As appropriate, the Court informed the parties once it learned of this online content,” Al Baker, a spokesperson for the New York State Unified Court System, told Business Insider, declining to comment further on the incident.
Trump lawyers Todd Blanche and Susan Necheles, as well as representatives for the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.
Anderson did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BI sent through Facebook, but in a public post added to his profile shortly after BI reached out, he wrote, “Take it easy, I’m a professional shitposter,” along with a laughing emoji and the Wikipedia definition of shitposting.
While it remains unclear how significant the Facebook post will become during the proceedings leading up to Trump’s sentencing, it could complicate things.
Neama Rahmani, a former federal prosecutor, told BI that the social post, though apparently trolling, could raise questions about whether outside influences managed to find their way into the jury deliberation room, which is one of the few times the defense could use jury deliberations as grounds to appeal for a new trial.
However, he said, the burden for a new trial is high and would require the defense to show an outside influence prejudiced the jury enough that the outcome may have been different without exposure to it.
“A stray comment on social media is not enough for a new trial,” Rahmani said. “But if the defense can get a declaration from a juror that they discussed the case with family members, then Judge Merchan would hold an evidentiary hearing to examine the juror to determine whether the improper influence and prejudice took place. I don’t think a statement from the family member is enough if it’s not supported by a juror affidavit.”
