Elon Musk is a shapeshifter. One moment he speaks in gentle and almost disarmingly naive terms about the need to live with curiosity and compassion, and gets lost in the details of orbits and thrusters. In the next he stokes racist anger through inflammatory posts, recently branding a member of the UK government a “rape genocide apologist”. He is drawn to goth aesthetics (see the Elvish Fraktur typeface of his Maga hat) yet displays none of the capacity for introspection required to truly contemplate the void. Too hyperactive to mope, Musk’s attention skitters along the staccato of his social media feed. In the autumn he zigged towards Maga and Mar-a-Lago. In the winter, he zagged into the bramble of British and German politics. What happens when the world’s richest man becomes the world’s most high-profile troll?
“Only AfD can save Germany,” Musk wrote on X three days before Christmas, highlighting another user’s post about Germans “getting killed and raped by migrants”. Since New Year’s Eve he has blitzed his more than 200 million followers with dozens of images, clips and exhortations about the groomer gang scandal in northern England. A public tragedy and the subject of years-long inquiries, the topic has been of special focus for the far right because of the prominence of non-white men among the culprits. In 2019, the Christchurch shooter name-checked the central site of the abuse when he painted the words “for Rotherham” on one of the cartridges he used to kill 51 people in a New Zealand mosque.
Despite Keir Starmer’s personal involvement in prosecuting related crimes, Musk has taken special aim at the British Prime Minister. “Starmer must go,” he posted on 5 January. A few days later, the Financial Times revealed Musk is actively investigating ways for Starmer to be replaced before his term is over. A close adviser of the new US president scheming to remove the head of state of one of America’s closest allies feels like uncharted territory. When Donald Trump assumes office on 20 January, Musk and his nocturnal online impulses will come even closer to the levers of power. Trying to understand the kaleidoscopic rules of the game Musk is playing has therefore become something like a civic duty. If we squint through the shitposting and chaos, he seems driven by what we could see as five core propositions.
The first is that the state serves makers. Musk has no compunction about working with the government, having never been a doctrinaire libertarian. He sees government as a positive partner insofar as it coordinates its efforts to the solutions of engineers.
The second proposition is that all wicked problems have a technological fix. Nothing from climate change to social inequality requires mediation through public consultative processes. Everything has a design remedy. On these first two propositions, Musk is in the world of his Silicon Valley comrades and their embrace of what tech critic Evgeny Morozov dubbed “solutionism”.
He has followed in the footsteps of Peter Thiel, a fellow member of the “PayPal mafia” who together established much of the current tech landscape in the 2000s after working at the payments company. It was Thiel who first showed the value of the “Trump trade” by backing him in 2016 and advising on a transition team. Thiel then hired JD Vance at his venture capital firm Mithril in 2017, and spent $15m on the successful senatorial run that ultimately paved Vance’s path to the vice-presidency.
The rhetorical aversion of the many self-proclaimed libertarians in this cohort to reliance on state contracts has been either overcome or revealed as flimsy hypocrisy. Thiel’s Palantir has a half-billion-dollar contract with the US military. Anduril, founded by the Thiel protégé Palmer Luckey, signed a $250m contract with the Department of Defense just months ago. The venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who once had only harsh words for government as an obstacle in his “techno-optimist manifesto”, spent the Biden administration backing companies gunning for federal contracts under his “American Dynamism” initiative. Silicon Valley is playing a far more active role than during Trump’s first presidency, however. Trump has tapped David Sacks, another PayPal mafioso, as “AI and Crypto czar”, indicating the importance of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, whose value was $700 on election day in 2016 and has since soared to over $100,000.
Before the 2024 election, Trump compared crypto to the “steel industry of 100 years ago” and promised to construct “the crypto capital of the planet and bitcoin superpower of the world”. The centrality of Silicon Valley in Trump’s coalition lends not only the legitimacy of a continual rising stock market – resting disproportionately on a handful of very large tech companies – but also a world-view that points to an innovative future rather than backwards to an idealised past.
Musk’s third conviction is that online politics have killed old politics. X is more valuable than the New York Times; Tesla is worth all other car companies combined. In 2016, Trump staged a hostile takeover of the GOP. His candidacy was opposed by the entire Republican establishment. Yet he showed the power of breaking taboos and leveraging outrage, not least through the new immediacy of social media platforms. Musk did not orient himself right away to the new paradigm, opposing Trump in 2016. His political conversion to the right was accelerated by twin events in 2020: first, the measures to contain the spread of Covid-19 which slowed the operation of his car manufacturing plants, and second, the gender transition of his child, Vivian. Since 2020, Musk has become ever-more fixated on the “woke mind virus”, claiming at one point it had “killed” his (very much living) child.
In early 2022, Musk extended an offer to spend $44bn to buy what he saw as a primary conduit of the virus – Twitter. After what began as something close to an online stunt was enforced by Delaware courts, Musk took an increasingly active role in posting provocatively and plunged with new vigour into the culture wars. Snubbed by the Biden administration in its courtship of other electric vehicle companies, he publicly endorsed Republican candidates for the first time in the 2022 midterm elections. And he began to express an international interest in maverick right-wing candidates in 2023, posting sweaty memes about Argentine president Javier Milei and praising his austerity drives. In July 2024, he came out in support of Trump and the Maga movement and has not looked back.
Famously, Musk did not found Tesla nor did he have any hand in designing its core technology. What he did was discover a promising start-up and spearhead a hyper-successful capital-raising and marketing process. Similarly, Trump took over the Republican Party and rebranded it, making it his own. Events have brought these two disruptors together. And Musk is now on a global hunt for other upstart contenders to displace legacy brands. Hence his attraction to Milei’s La Libertad Avanza in Argentina, Nayib Bukele’s Nuevas Ideas in El Salvador, and, more recently, Reform UK, the Alternative for Germany and Brothers of Italy. These are the would-be Teslas of politics. Giorgia Meloni’s recent announcement of interest in Musk’s Starlink rather than the nascent EU project of Iris to serve Italy’s satellite needs hints at the material pay-off these alliances could yield.
One of Trump’s earlier advisers, Steve Bannon, led a similar effort to unite disparate parties in a global populist right in 2017. However, Bannon not only lacked the resources enjoyed by Musk but his focus was overwhelmingly cultural, focused on restoring civilisational values of the West and dwelling on gloomy tropes of the Hindu dark age of modernity, Kali Yuga, and decline. His economic imagination was defined (at least rhetorically) against the mainstream logic of neoliberalism and the imperatives of austerity, efficiency and the international division of labour.
The problem here was a simple one: the most successful insurgent parties of the global right are not the enemies of neoliberalism. They are the bastard offspring of neoliberalism itself. The parties beloved by Musk share the focus on cost-cutting and efficiency he developed in his companies where process innovation and staff reduction were key. Milei has taken a chainsaw to education and cultural budgets. Bukele has done the same while carrying the costs of imprisoning a global high of 2 per cent of El Salvador’s adult population.
The AfD, target of Musk’s most recent lovebombing, has neo-Nazis in its ranks. But it is not inaccurately described by its current co-leader Alice Weidel as a “conservative libertarian” party, matching nativist promises of hard borders with low taxes, slashed regulations and carbon-driven growth. When Musk spoke with Weidel to an audience of several hundred thousand on Twitter on 9 January, she said that the AfD was trying to “free people of the state”. “We want freedom of speech,” she said, and “freedom of wealth”. The targets were familiar from the Thatcher and Reagan years: the bureaucrats, the welfare recipients and the regulators.
Musk’s fifth proposal is perhaps the strangest: the idea that the deep future guides present action. As fanciful as it might sound, his discussion of the need for humans to be “a multi-planetary civilisation” offers some explanation for why he is willing to put himself in the centre of the story.
We are in a different realm than the traditional model of billionaires enriching themselves through alliances with politicians just to secure federal contracts or fight for tax breaks, operating in the shadows through Pacs (political action committees) and funding ecosystems of opinion-creation in the style of the ultra-libertarian carbon baron, Charles Koch. Granting some truth to Musk’s continual vilification of George Soros and Bill Gates, this is also how they have operated: funding civil society in the form of research, advocacy and journalism.
Musk’s willingness to make himself the main character suggests that he realises the power of himself as a brand. In the same way that Trump has become synonymous with the GOP, Musk’s cult of personality is inseparable from the valuation of his companies. Any need for validation would be confirmed by looking at the vertical rise in stock prices of the companies that he helped found or direct over the last few years.
Musk’s goal is not to operate behind the scenes. Even after the inevitable falling out between himself and Trump, he will be a gadfly with half a trillion reasons to keep his name in the headlines. Nor (citizenship requirement notwithstanding) does he aim to become president himself one day. Why tolerate such a minor role? From buying Twitter to fathering a dozen children to getting Trump elected, he routinely explains his decisions as made for the “future of civilisation”.
Rather than a new Koch or Soros, his aspiration is to be more like the Hari Seldon character from Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, which is among Musk’s “all-time best” novels. In Asimov’s story, the mathematician Seldon predicts humanity’s future and intervenes as an enlightened avatar. He is the saviour of not just the party or the society, but civilisation itself. This level of validation is perhaps the only thing that will satisfy Musk’s ego after having achieved all other man-made goals.
We have to entertain the idea that, for Musk, state capture is not an end in itself, but only a prelude to state exit – starting a new polity either on Earth (trialled by the incorporation of a new company town in Starbase, Texas) or on Mars. But how seriously should we take this long-termism? Would it not be more accurate to see Musk as the consummate short-termist? A good historian finds the personality of their subject not in the motivation of a single ego, however powerful, but in the context out of which they rose. What if we asked not what worlds Musk is making but what worlds made Musk?
Both he and his wealth were made in the froth of the stock market, first in the dot-com bubble when he cofounded PayPal and, since the global financial crisis, in the era of infinite quantitative easing when liquidity flooded into speculative assets, irrigated capital-intensive research and development and drove up valuations to unheard-of heights. Mastering the hype cycle is an essential part of boosting a stock, knowing when to buy and when to sell it. The “pump-and-dump” scheme Musk has been accused of engaging in through his “meme coin” cryptocurrencies are only the most obvious example of this. That the new department of government efficiency takes its acronym (Doge) from Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency promoted by Musk, raises further questions about the relationship between principles of accountability and speculative investment.
The willingness to engage in high-risk, short-term manoeuvres may be captured even better in Musk’s fixation on video games, especially those of the “dungeon-crawling” variety involving navigating labyrinths and slaying enemies to complete tasks in record time. Musk posts repeatedly about his progress up the leaderboard of his current favourites, Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred and Path of Exile 2. In the former he wears armour that leaves him looking not unlike the QAnon shaman from the 6 January insurrection of 2021. Path of Exile’s goal is to defeat a villain who has grown a Beast from a “seed of corruption” and fed it with excavated corpses.
Musk praises the “life lessons” learned by speedrunning games as a way to “see the matrix, rather than simply exist in the matrix”. Maybe he’s saying that mastering them may not make you live forever – death is constant in gaming – but you could be the top player. Find the most powerful opponent, Musk advises in an online stream of his Diablo IV gameplay, and run straight at them. He has met something close to a peer in Trump, who has so far been able to get what he needs from his centibillionaire backer without being accused of surrendering control. Even a dust-up over temporary visas that pitted Silicon Valley Maga against hard-line nativists left Trump without a stain on his gabardine.
With his hooks deep in the new administration, Musk is taking aim at some of the world’s other leaders, from Justin Trudeau to Olaf Scholz. It’s nihilistic, reckless and – perfect for a gamer used to satisfying short-term impulses – delivers endorphin rushes without regard to real-world effects. Safe from his provocations so far are the countries closest to his own interests, namely China, where he may still play a moderating influence on the Trump administration. The rest of the world remains what developers call a sandbox game, open for free play and exploration.
Perhaps this is closer to who Musk is in reality: not Hari Seldon the “psychohistorian” able to read the future from his library, but the teenage boy in the dorm room talking about aliens and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, pumping his fist when he kills another pixelated demon. The world continues to reward him. Why would he stop?
[See also: Elon Musk’s secret weapon]
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This article appears in the 15 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Disruptors