Despite being busy managing many companies, Elon Musk still makes time daily to play with his pets, mainly dogs.
Last week, Musk revealed that he’s now taking care of a hedgehog. “Yes, her name is Shrub, a female hedgehog,” he replied to user Spy, who spotted him with a hedgehog in his car. Musk also mentioned that Shrub “loves running on a wheel.”
Musk’s announcement immediately caused a cryptocurrency called Shrub to surge nearly 34 times, from $0.0033 to $0.12.
Previously, Musk often shared stories about his pets alongside his responsibilities of raising children and managing multiple companies. In 2023, he mentioned a Yorkshire Terrier with a “habit” of biting people’s ankles.
“I had an amazing Yorkie for 15 years named Hobbes, because he was nasty, brutish, and short,” Musk said. According to Business Insider, the name seems inspired by a play based on Leviathan, a work by 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, which described human existence as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
“I’d warn people ‘watch out for the dog,’ then they’d see him and laugh. But after that, he’d bite their ankles,” Musk wrote.
In 2022, he also posted a video showing his son, X Æ A-12, playing with the family dogs. “X loves Doge,” he wrote. After this post, the cryptocurrency Dogecoin saw a significant increase.
A moment of X playing with Elon Musk’s family dogs.
However, Floki, Musk’s Shiba Inu, is his most famous pet. He first mentioned Floki in a tweet in 2021, which caused Dogecoin, whose mascot is the Shiba Inu dog, to spike tens of thousands of percent. In early 2023, when Musk posted a picture of Floki and labeled him the “new CEO of Twitter,” Dogecoin’s market cap quickly hit $10 billion.
Elon Musk’s dog, Floki
Musk has also shared about other pets. In 2018, he mentioned he has a big dog named Gatsby, a small dog named Marvin the Martian, and a cat named Schrödinger. In 2021, when someone asked if Marvin and Floki got along, Musk shared that “they’re still not friends.”
Musk has co-founded or managed close to 10 companies, primarily in the tech field with unique ventures like Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, The Boring Company, X, xAI, and more. He is also famously known for having a large family, with 11 children.
