Elon Musk’s feet are not popular with the people who likely spend the most time of anyone on the planet looking at and rating feet, outside of podiatry.
On Sunday, in the lead-up to his flight on the Virgin Galactic spaceplane VSS Unity, billionaire Virgin Group founder Richard Branson tweeted a photo of himself alongside his fellow billionaire, Tesla/SpaceX CEO and prospective space oligarch Elon Musk. In the photo, Branson is wearing shoes. Musk, for whatever reason, is not.
Big day ahead. Great to start the morning with a friend. Feeling good, feeling excited, feeling ready.
Watch #Unity22 launch and livestream TODAY at 7:30 am PT | 10:30 am ET | 3:30 pm BST.@virgingalactic @elonmusk https://t.co/1313b4RAKI pic.twitter.com/FRQqrQEbH8
— Richard Branson (@richardbranson) July 11, 2021
Most people would hardly notice. But as first reported by Business Insider, that is very much not true of the community at WikiFeet, “the collaborative celebrity feet website.” WikiFeet is like Wikipedia, but for people with a fetish for feet and who enjoy uploading and rating photos of the feet that belong to various celebrities (and in some cases, random people who often justifiably find the experience extremely unnerving). In the last two and a half months, according to BI, at least 14 different photos of Musk’s bare lower extremities have appeared on the site — including as of this week the Branson photo.
Musk’s score on WikiFeet is not very flattering. Out of a maximum score of 5, WikiFeet users have, as of Monday afternoon, rated Musk’s feet a dismal 2.65.
Here’s a sampling of the comments section on the page, some of which note that the 14 images on the page aren’t clear enough to work with:
- Bad pics.
- He doesn’t show his feet at all. Super rare
- One of the few places on the internet where he’s not critically acclaimed
- I‘d need better quality pictures to make my final decision.
- Come on, lemme see his feet!!
- Bruh
- I’d love to see more!
BI wrote that “it’s unlikely Musk minds all that much,” which seems to be assuming a lot of the world’s second-richest man. Yet of the other billionaires racing to get to space, Musk isn’t particularly far behind. Branson has a 3.33 rating, while Amazon/Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos comes in at a paltry 3.15.
Russian-Israeli billionaire Yuri Milner, who along with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has launched an interstellar probe project named Breakthrough Starshot, does not appear to have a WikiFeet page. Neither does Yusaku Maezawa, the Japanese billionaire who paid an undisclosed sum to book a flight for him and eight creatively minded people on SpaceX’s Starship rocket in 2023.
Other billionaires have won accolades on WikiFeet. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who has recently stumbled into a completely different sort of sexual controversy, has a 3.71 rating. We deeply regret to inform you that Zuckerberg has somewhat inexplicably scored a 4.28 rating, which just goes to show you what’s below the ankles might not be the best judge of character.