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Elon Musk is a billionaire (sometimes trillionaire) specifically because he's such a big brained genius. Everyone knows this. So Musk posting sensitive personal information on the social media site he owns to his 241.7 million followers couldn't possibly be described as dumb. No, nothing Musk does could possibly qualify as dumb, right?
Musk recently lost his trillionaire status again, but not because he posted his email address, ordering information for a LEGO purchase, and last four digits of his credit card on X, The Everything App. He squeaked back into mere billionaire status after SpaceX took a $28 billion nosedive in the stock market this week, according to Forbes. Poor guy.
What on Earth would posses Musk to post such sensitive information online? Like all good screw ups these days, this tale involves oligarchs pushing AI slop into every crevice of American life.
There's a lot of weirdos on the internet
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The slip up happened Sunday, though I didn't notice it until Wired posted a story about the massive misstep, mostly because I'm too grass-touchy to even have a X account. Musk was promoting to his followers the idea of uploading a picture of your credit card to Grok, telling the AI what parameters you're looking for in a product and giving the AI permission to purchase said product when located. Which, wow, what a terrible, awful idea. Musk is pumping a lot of money into Grok, and he's hoping you will trust it with your financial life. As an example, he asked Grok to find the most entertaining Star Wars LEGO sets for young kids (since last year he allegedly spent 17 hours playing Diablo on December 25, maybe he's hoping to get the Christmas shopping finished early this year).
When he posted about the order, he left a lot of important info in there. So important, a user was able to cancel Musk's order. The X user even gave fellow Musk followers some important advice.
Just canceled your order, don't share your info online guys 👍 https://t.co/n4GLXBPWWP pic.twitter.com/GoE8he0PCT
— Enderman (@Enderman) October 11, 2026
Musk later posted that, nuh-uh you guys, his order had not been canceled, but come on, users were still dunking on him for forgetting this basic internet financial hygiene. If it's a bad idea to post even these barebones details about yourself, you can bet dollars to data centers that you shouldn't be uploading your entire credit card information to something even more notoriously unreliable than social media.
As Wired pointed out, Visa has suggested to its customers that, oh god, please don't let AI make purchases for you. "Once the AI agent completes the purchase ... the malicious merchant can harvest payment data and instantly use it for unauthorized transactions," Visa posted in a blog. Even if you don't listen to any other piece of advice, I'd go ahead and trust Visa on this one.