Elon Musk picks a lot of fights. Here's why so few CEOs fire back — even if they want to.

• Elon Musk has become known for picking fights with business leaders and politicians.

• But business executives and other billionaires tend to tiptoe around the Tesla CEO.

• Here's why no one wants to badmouth the world's richest man.

Elon Musk rarely holds back.

He's called Joe Biden "a damp sock puppet in human form" and seemingly mocked Bill Gates' weight. He's tweeted crude digs at a senator and challenged Mark Zuckerberg to a cage fight.

But when it comes to returning the favor, the rich and powerful are much more hesitant.

Just consider November's DealBook Summit. Musk stole the show with his no-holds-barred interview, during which he told advertisers fleeing X to "go fuck yourself."

Hours before he took the stage, he was the topic of much more restrained conversation.

"We're going to have Elon Musk here this afternoon. What do you think of him?" host Andrew Ross Sorkin asked JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon.

"He's obviously a brilliant human being and making unbelievable contributions to mankind. But he, you know, comes with pluses and minuses," answered Dimon, who reportedly hasn't always gotten along with the Tesla CEO.

It wasn't just Dimon.

"I have a lot of respect for Elon and what he's accomplished," Disney CEO Bob Iger said, answering a question about Disney's decision to pull advertising from X. "We know Elon is larger than life in many respects and that his name is very much tied to the companies he either has founded, or he owns."

Then, a few weeks later, on an episode of Lex Fridman's podcast, Amazon's Jeff Bezos evaded a question about Musk.

"I don't really know Elon very well. I know his public persona, but I also know you can't know anyone by their public persona," Bezos said. "He must be a very capable leader. There's no way you could have Tesla and SpaceX without being a capable leader. It's impossible."

Even Zuckerberg, who initially played along and accepted Musk's invitation to a cage match over the summer with bravado, shied away from badmouthing the Tesla CEO in an interview shortly after the pair's online back-and-forth.

"He's definitely a change agent," the Meta CEO told The Verge in September, delicately side-stepping any overt criticisms of how Musk was running Twitter. "He's been pretty polarizing, so I think that the chance that it sort of reaches the full potential on the trajectory that it's on is … I don't know. I guess I'm probably less optimistic." (And, of course, Zuckerberg has rushed out Threads to compete with X.)

So why is Musk the very rich elephant in the room? Why are people being so restrained about someone so unrestrained? (In further evidence of the trend, none of the business titans above responded to requests for comment from BI for this story. Musk also didn't respond.)

In part, it comes down to an intimidation factor.