Elon Musk’s 7 Wildest Music Adventures: From Wacky EDM Tracks, to Azealia Banks Beef and $250M NMPA Twitter Lawsuit

Elon Musk dances to the beat of his own drummer. The Twitter/Tesla boss hardly ever does what you expect and almost always goes for the boldest, most outrageous move, whether in technology or when dipping his toe into the music biz. So far he’s kept his billions firmly focused on land (Tesla, Boring Co.), air (SpaceX, Starlink), inner space (Neuralink) and social media (Twitter).

But the once richest man in the world has long had a fascination with music, from his energetically goofy dances at company events to a ill-considered EDM track, a vigorous beef with rapper Azealia Banks, a brief relationship with musician Grimes (with whom he has two children) and his most recent hit: a $250 million lawsuit launched this week by a coalition of music publishers who sued Twitter for what they alleged is “massive copyright infringement” involving the catalogs of 17 music publishers. Musk’s X Corp, Twitter’s owner, is the only defendant in the case.

The legal action on behalf of the rights holders for artists including Drake, Adele, Taylor Swift, Michael Jackson and Rage Against the Machine, among hundreds of others, claims that, “Twitter stands alone as the largest social media platform that has completely refused to license the millions of songs on its service,” according to a statement from David Israelite, chief executive of the National Music Publishers’ Assn. “Twitter knows full well that music is leaked, launched, and streamed by billions of people every day on its platform. No longer can it hide behind the [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] and refuse to pay songwriters and music publishers.”

Check out a list of Musk’s musical forays below.