“Elon believes he should be emperor of the world, and this is his way of showing people what he’s capable of as emperor,” — a close associate of Musk’s
I'm not sure it matters if it's attributed or not. Very few people are capable of setting their biases aside, so even intimate hearsay is mostly just going to be driven by subjective opinions about the person in question.
I mean I think we've most all seen literally the exact same thing at any reasonably large institution.