Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk began peddling a cologne called “Burnt Hair” and sold 10,000 bottles within a few hours.
The product, sold through tunneling and infrastructure startup The Boring Company, is marketed as “The Essence of Repugnant Desire” and sold for $100. The cologne vows to make buyers smell “just like leaning over a candle at the dinner table, but without all the hard work” and help users “get noticed as you walk through the airport.”
“With a name like mine, getting into the fragrance business was inevitable — why did I even fight it for so long!?” Musk said on social media, proclaiming that the cologne is “an omnigender product” and changing his bio to “Perfume Salesman.”
The finest fragrance on Earth!https://t.co/ohjWxNX5ZC pic.twitter.com/0J1lmREOBS
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 11, 2022
Musk announced on Tuesday that the company had already sold 10,000 bottles, therefore earning $1 million. He also appeared to mock media outlets that were sure to jump on the story. The Daily Wire is guilty as charged.
The Boring Company also served as the platform for selling “Not A Flamethrower” — a handheld device that shoots a jet of fire, but for legal purposes is not classified as the weapon mentioned in its title. The firm manufactured exactly 1,000 flamethrowers and initially sold each for $500. The terms and conditions for the product read: “I will not use this in a house, I will not point this at my spouse, I will not use this in an unsafe way, the best use is creme brulee.”
The finest fragrance on Earth!https://t.co/ohjWxNX5ZC pic.twitter.com/0J1lmREOBS
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 11, 2022
“The rumor that I’m secretly creating a zombie apocalypse to generate demand for flamethrowers is completely false,” Musk promised on social media in 2018. “You’d need millions of zombies for a so-called ‘apocalypse’ anyway. Where would I even get a factory big enough to make so many!?”
The sudden pivot to cologne sales from the world’s richest man comes on the heels of his renewed offer to purchase Twitter for $44 billion. The social media company had been fighting Musk in court over his attempt to cancel a previous offer to buy the social media platform — a move he said was based upon worries that the actual share of fake accounts on Twitter could range as high as 33% rather than the company’s reported 5%, with a lower number of monetizable daily active users justifying a lower valuation.
Several business leaders have since voiced support for Musk’s proposed reforms of the platform, which involve the removal of fake accounts and a revived emphasis on free expression.
“I hope Musk cleans up Twitter… Why can’t Twitter know who you are when you come on board, so they can eliminate all those people in the public square who are robots and emails and stuff like that?” JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, a rival of Musk, said during an interview this week. “Why can’t they give you a choice of algorithms, as opposed to one that just jazzes you up?”
After initially indicating support for the deal, Twitter appeared to reject Musk’s revived offer. “Twitter will not take yes for an answer,” Musk attorney Edward Micheletti said in a legal filing. “Astonishingly, they have insisted on proceeding with this litigation, recklessly putting the deal at risk and gambling with their stockholders’ interests.”