Grok Thinks Trump’s Story of a Businessman Who Got the ‘Fat Shot’ Is about Elon Musk

On Monday, as Trump signed what appears to be a do-nothing executive order asking pharmaceutical companies to lower the price of drugs for Americans, he went on one of his trademark tangents to explain what led him to pursue the policy-less policy, telling the crowd about an unnamed, overweight titan of industry who apparently has a direct line to the President.

“I’ll tell you a story. A friend of mine—he’s a businessman, very, very, very top guy. Most of you would’ve heard of him. Highly neurotic, brilliant businessman, seriously overweight, and he takes the fat shot drug,” Trump started before explaining that this unidentified executive called him one day and said, ‘I’m in London. And I just paid for this damn fat drug I take.’ I said, ‘It’s not working.’ He said, ‘I just paid $88. And in New York, I pay $1,300. What the hell is going on?’”

First of all, it brings me no joy to report that Trump can still muster up a fastball every now and then. But secondly, his story got a lot of people wondering who he was talking about, because he really drops a decent number of descriptors to work with. X users decided to prompt the AI chatbot Grok to see if it could come up with its best guess at who Trump was describing.

Grok guessed Elon Musk. Seems like there is going to be an engineer working overnight to fix that one.

It’s likely that Trump was referring to Elon Musk in the quoted tweet. Musk has publicly admitted to using weight-loss drugs like Ozempic and fits the description of a well-known, brilliant businessman. His international travel supports the price complaint scenario. However, the…

— Grok (@grok) May 12, 2025

“It’s likely that Trump was referring to Elon Musk in the quoted tweet,” Grok responded when prompted. “Musk has publicly admitted to using weight-loss drugs like Ozempic and fits the description of a well-known, brilliant businessman. His international travel supports the price complaint scenario.” Musk is quite a whiner, too, though Grok didn’t offer that reasoning specifically.

The AI chatbot did a little bit of pushback on one part of Trump’s story: “The ‘seriously overweight’ label doesn’t perfectly match Musk’s public image, and Trump’s storytelling can be exaggerated, leaving some uncertainty.”

Musk has, in fact, revealed that he has been using an Ozempic competitor, Mounjaro, for weight loss. Mounjaro, much like Ozempic, is a GLP-1 inhibitor, initially marketed to manage type 2 diabetes before becoming a popular tool for people looking to lose weight.

Regardless of who Trump was talking about (though let’s run with Musk, just for the fun of it), there is a major price difference for weight loss drugs like Ozempic in the US compared to Europe and other markets. Last year, Senator Bernie Sanders dragged Doug Langa, president of Ozempic manufacturer Novo Nordisk, in front of Congress to explain why the drug costs $92 per month in the UK and $1,349 a month in the US.

During the hearing, Sanders took the drug makers to task for corporate greed, calling the price markups a “profound moral issue,” and revealing that other drug manufacturers could create a generic version of the popular drugs to sell for less than $100 per month. Sander got Novo Nordisk’s CEO to pledge to work with pharmacy benefit managers to lower the price of the drugs for Americans, which appears to be a more concrete achievement than Trump accomplished with his executive order on Monday.