The Improbable Rise of MAGA-Musk
It was the most indelible image of the 2024 presidential campaign: Donald Trump on a stage in Butler, Pennsylvania, right fist raised in defiance over a scrum of Secret Service agents, blood streaming from a bullet wound to the ear, shouting, “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
One of the millions of people moved by that moment was the world’s richest man, the industrialist and futurist Elon Musk. Musk—America’s most famous immigrant—runs, among other companies, Tesla, which sells the majority of electric cars in the U.S.; SpaceX, developer of the first-ever reusable booster rocket and also the only reliable transport for astronauts to and from the International Space Station; and X (formerly known as Twitter), one of the globe’s most-discussed and influential social media platforms.
In the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt, Musk publicized what until then had been a more of a private affair: his enthusiastic support for a return to the White House of a man of whom he had previously been frequently intensely critical.
Thus the stage was set for a second indelible campaign image, one that may prove more telling about the practical import of the 2024 election. In October, Trump was back in Butler at the scene of the crime, paying respects to the slain rally attendee Corey Comperatore and urging his supporters to fight-fight-fight until Election Day.
Behind him, airborne, giddy, and goofy, bounced the world’s most successful civilian, reducing himself to a dignity-free cheerleader for a politician he once dismissed as a “con man.” It was the dance that launched a thousand derisive memes, but it also arguably purchased key White House access for an influential figure with a gigantic megaphone, who in his public life has nurtured, acted upon, and celebrated many contrarian political ideas, some of them libertarian.
Musk spent more than $132 million of his own money to help Republicans win in 2024, including around $75 million to a political action committee called America PAC that essentially took over whole chunks of Trump’s ground game. He appeared at campaign rallies; he argued on X that a vote for Trump was the last, best hope for the American experiment; and then, after the election, he fused himself to the president-elect’s side, wolfing down fast food, participating in phone calls with world leaders, and kibbitzing on staff decisions.
In mid-November came the prize: Musk, along with former presidential candidate and fellow tech-world booster Vivek Ramaswamy, would head a nongovernmental commission called—at Musk’s cheeky suggestion—the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Resemblance to the surprisingly lucrative memecoin that Musk has long promoted was purely noncoincidental.
History is littered with government-reorganization task forces that go nowhere. But Musk does have Trump’s ear (for the moment, anyway—the president is not known for his long, healthy working relationships), and he and Ramaswamy have been meeting with the state-slashing likes of Argentine President Javier Milei. They have also been serially reposting clips of Milton Friedman talking about eliminating swaths of the federal government. In a joint Wall Street Journal op-ed published November 20, the two laid out a legally plausible roadmap for significantly reducing the administrative state via executive orders. All Trump would need to do is sign. “The entrenched and ever-growing bureaucracy represents an existential threat to our republic,” the duo wrote, “and politicians have abetted it for too long.”
Musk’s antipathy toward government spending and indebtedness—at least when that spending is not enriching one of Musk’s companies—differs sharply from the track record of the 45th president, who jacked up both. The prospect of Friedmanites steering Trump down a different road the second time around may be the biggest reason libertarians have to believe at least something good might come from the new administration, otherwise burdened with Trump’s obsessions with tariffs and migrants. At the same time, the combination of the president’s mercurial nature and Musk’s recent fondness for apocalyptic culture war trolling may divert his Washington energies into something a good deal less beneficial.
For years, Musk has been obsessed with Isaac Asimov’s “zeroth” law of robotics, which stipulates that a robot must not through inaction allow humanity to come to harm. This insight has underpinned his many futurist endeavors: renewable energy to power a mighty civilization without befouling its own nest, rockets to ensure mankind has a future even beyond the life span of our planet of origin, brain-computer interfaces (through Neuralink) to transcend physical limitations. Many vehemently disagree, but Musk seems to sincerely believe that getting Trump elected was vital for the healthy future of the human race. Now he’s working to turn that belief into reality.
The Road to Trump
Musk used to be publicly apolitical, outside his loud skirmishing with government regulators. (Since he has been a businessman in the payments, rockets, and car spaces, such clashes have been frequent.) “When I got into the company, there was a heavy, heavy focus on batteries,” one former high-level Tesla employee recalls. “He never brought up politics in meetings except with regards for regulations.”
Musk had a reputation, Kate Conger and Ryan Mac write in their new book Character Limit, as “a libertarian with liberal tendencies, a business scion who backed Obama.” Especially with Tesla, he coded as environmentalist-progressive, positioning his company “to help expedite the move from a mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy toward a solar electric economy.”
During the 2016 presidential campaign, the entrepreneur lamented to MSNBC that the Republican nominee “doesn’t seem to have the sort of character that reflects well on the United States.” After Trump won, Musk did join with other tech executives at a meeting with the president-elect, and he later volunteered for a White House business council, even while continuing to say things like (per Walter Isaacson’s 2023 biography Elon Musk) “Trump might be one of the best bullshitters ever” and “if you just think of Trump as…a con-man performance, then his behavior sort of makes sense.”
Musk quit the White House business council in June 2017 to protest the president withdrawing from the Paris Agreement on global carbon reduction. In 2018, he told tech journalist Kara Swisher that it had been a mistake for tech execs to kiss Trump’s ring before inauguration. Even as late as 2022, after he acquired Twitter, Musk complained to Isaacson that Trump (who had been banned from the platform after the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021) exploited “free speech to subvert democracy.”
The steps to Musk’s subsequent MAGA-ization have been reasonably well-documented, not only in the journalistic attention he inevitably attracts, but because for years, even before he owned it, Musk has used the platform formerly known as Twitter to reveal virtually every twist of his thought.
His first turn to the explicit right was precipitated by government COVID-19 policies, Conger and Mac believe. On a Tesla earnings call in April 2020, Musk condemned lockdowns and the coerced closings of businesses and churches as “fascist,” saying: “This is not democratic. This is not freedom. Give people back their goddamn freedom.” He asked to be the first person arrested when he reopened his Tesla factory in Fremont, California, in violation of local lockdown orders. (There were no arrests.) In May, he tweeted an exhortation to “take the red pill,” memespeak (based on The Matrix) for being willing to discover that the perceived world around you is an elaborate hoax concocted by a malevolent, controlling elite.
Musk himself credits his radicalization to the gender transition of his daughter, Vivian Wilson, who has disowned him. “My son Xavier is dead, killed by the woke mind virus,” he lamented to the popular psychologist and podcaster Jordan Peterson in July 2024. Since then, Musk continued, he has “vowed to destroy the woke mind virus…and I’m making some progress.”
Precisely what constitutes the “woke mind virus” is open for interpretation, but Musk says that destroying it would help make America again the “meritocracy” he believes it once was, with no special consideration for race, gender, or any of the classifications and practices that fall under “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”—frequently abbreviated as DEI, but Musk prefers “DIE,” since he believes such policies are endangering humanity by placing unqualified people in life-and-death jobs.
Musk’s voyage to the right was further accelerated by his ejection from the left. President Joe Biden, irritated by the manufacturer’s stance against unionization, pointedly did not invite the market leader to an August 2021 White House summit honoring electric vehicle producers. “Given unprovoked attacks by leading Democrats against me & a very cold shoulder to Tesla & SpaceX,” Musk announced in May 2022, henow intended to vote Republican. That November, Biden warned that “Musk’s cooperation and, or, technical relationships with other countries is worthy of being looked at,” a reference to the entrepreneur’s globe-straddling business ties to states such as China, Saudi Arabia, and particularly Russia. “Elon Musk,” warned the establishment-libe
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