He has described his relationship with food as “chaos.”
The richest human being on Earth — the man whose rockets fly themselves back to their launch pads and whose cars outnumber Tesla chargers — will tell you, in the same interview, that he eats breakfast like a paleo-obsessed rancher and survives crunch weeks on one meal a day.
The breakfast is documented on his own social network: steak. Eggs. Coffee. Three items, posted with the kind of enthusiasm other people reserve for movie trailers. On a podcast in early 2026 he went further — a carnivore-style morning, animal products, nothing else — before casually declaring the one food he could eat “for the rest of time”: cheeseburgers and fries. “That’s my food group,” he joked, and nobody entirely believed it was a joke.
Because there’s also the donut he’s said he eats most mornings — sprinkles, the old one with holes. The “Dynamite” tweet: the candy bar he ate for the pain, to stay sharp. The deep-fried Snickers he nominated, on the BBC, as his last meal. The repeated, almost-throwaway admissions, across interviews from Rogan to Walter Isaacson’s biography, that during rocket-launch weeks he simply does not eat: “Food is an expensive way to make urine,” he once deadpanned, quoting someone else’s joke about his own lifestyle, and the line stuck because it was funny and partly true.
Alcohol he quit on his own: he’d explain to crowds that a beer makes him grumpy, that he’s figured out he “doesn’t like how alcohol makes me feel,” and so the party of SpaceX is Diet Coke.
Exercise is episodic, brutal, then gone for months. In his twenties he lifted hard — “the best way to feel good after a terrible day,” he’s said — then fell out of it, and now does whatever fits between board meetings, sometimes weights, sometimes running his kids’ footsteps off, sometimes nothing at all. When asked about longevity he has given an answer that would horrify a prevention-medicine conference: he works 100-hour quarters because the work is the life. In his official biography, Isaacson records the phrase he’s come back to: he “leans into pain,” deliberately — stress as training load.
Whether any of this adds years or simply spends them at extreme volume is the open question his body will answer in public. He’s 55 and looks every hour of 20 years he’s spent at the frontier of the impossible.
His name is Elon Musk. He is 55 years old, the world’s richest person at roughly $870 billion, and his diet is the closest thing in the billionaire cohort to a controlled — or uncontrolled — experiment in pure work.
Sources & citations
- Katie Miller podcast (Mar 2026, via Unilad) — carnivore-style breakfast, “for the rest of time” cheeseburger — unilad.com
- X posts, Musk (2024) — steak, eggs, coffee breakfast — x.com/elonmusk
- Alix Earle podcast (2025) — “cheeseburgers and fries are the food group” — widely reported
- BBC interview (2023) — deep-fried Snickers last meal
- Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk (2023) — “leans into pain,” donut, work quarters
- Mashed / Health Digest diet profiles (2025) — compiled X history
Part 3 of the series “What Billionaires Actually Eat.”