‘He Did This While Kids Are Dying in Trenches’ – Musk Slams Zelensky Alleging Graft, Vanity, Despotism

US leader Donald Trump’s adviser and the world’s wealthiest man, Elon Musk, took to his social media network on Thursday to trash President Volodymyr Zelensky, accusing him of corruption, narcissism, and acting as a dictator during martial law in Ukraine.

Musk started his loyalist rant on Thursday by claiming Ukrainians “despised” Zelensky and that Trump was right to leave him out of talks with Russia aimed at ending the Ukraine war.

The South African-born tech mogul has been Trump’s axe man during his dismantling of government agencies, leading to the layoffs of hundreds of thousands of military veterans, career civil servants, and other federal workers.

But the unelected provocateur has also played a role in diplomacy, meeting with foreign leaders and, most recently, leaning in on the peace negotiations between the US, Ukraine, and Russia.

After Zelensky turned down an initial US offer that would usurp the value of about half of Ukraine’s rare mineral deposits, Trump laid into Zelensky, calling him a dictator, to which Zelensky replied that Trump lived in a world of misinformation.

The White House then warned Zelensky to stop the “insults” against Trump and just sign the deal.

The SpaceX and Tesla tycoon then took to the X social network that he controls, accusing him without evidence of running a “massive graft machine feeding off the dead bodies of Ukrainian soldiers.”

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Next up on his agenda was a photo shoot for Vogue that Zelensky and his wife, Olena, posed for in 2022, taken by renowned photographer Annie Leibovitz, and titled “Portrait of Bravery: Ukraine’s First Lady Olena Zelenska.” The theme of the story was the bravery of the Ukrainian people faced with the newly launched Russian invasion of their country.

Musk lampooned the two-year-old photo shoot, quipping that “He did this while kids are dying in trenches on the war front.”

Following the lead of Trump, who has quoted fabricated numbers in the past about Zelensky’s approval ratings and insinuating that he is a dictator afraid to hold elections (echoing Kremlin talking points on the topic), Musk piled on by saying the Ukrainian president is actually “despised.”

Zelensky was elected to a five-year term in 2019, but elections have been postponed since 2024 while the country is under martial law during Russia’s full-scale invasion, with millions of its citizens remaining abroad as war refugees, internally displaced, or in territory occupied and administered by Kremlin invaders.

“He knows he would lose in a landslide, despite having seized control of ALL Ukrainian media, so he canceled the election. In reality, he is despised by the people of Ukraine,” Musk wrote.

(Ironically, on that same day at a White House press briefing, the newly created front-row seat for new media was christened by the leading news editor for Musk’s social media platform.)

Musk struck a calmer tone at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) later Thursday, saying that Trump was “so pragmatic” about the Ukraine war.

“The president has a lot of empathy. He really cares,” said Musk.