Elon Musk Goes Full Conspiracist
But why?
As election season crawls towards its long-awaited finale, it’s easier than ever to become desensitized to people saying insane stuff: the kind of stuff that 10 years ago would have made instant headlines. In this regard, nobody has lurched further into conspiracism than Elon Musk, who over the past two years has transformed from a tech billionaire who sometimes courted controversy—and who supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020—into a full-throated propagandist for Donald Trump.
We can chart the evolution with some precision. Shortly after buying Twitter in 2022, Musk announced that he was no longer supporting the Democratic Party. Later that year, he endorsed Florida governor Ron DeSantis for president, and then proceeded to conduct a live event with him on the platform. This accorded with his growing anti-woke preoccupations, as DeSantis at the time was widely viewed as a more consistent (and certainly more sophisticated) anti-woke politician. It wasn’t until the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt on Trump in July this year—by which point he was already confirmed as the Republican nominee—that Musk fully endorsed Trump and became entirely one-sided in his political activities. Since then he has plowed $75 million into the Trump-supporting “America PAC,” appeared at numerous Trump rallies, and offered $1 million a day to Pennsylvania residents who sign a Trump-aligned petition—but only if they are registered to vote.
It’s not unusual for the rich and powerful to involve themselves in U.S. politics. Some people still insist that the Musk phenomenon is just par for the course, perhaps even a necessary correction to the left-leaning bias exhibited by many other rich and powerful individuals in recent years. But there is something particularly egregious and unprecedented about Musk’s foray into politics this election cycle.
His favored form of activism involves spouting outright conspiracy theories and pushing a hysterical narrative about his political opponents of a sort unparallelled in recent American history. Since the summer he has explicitly—and repeatedly—endorsed the idea that the Democrats are engaged in a wide-ranging plan to actively import millions of immigrants into the United States for their own electoral benefit; that the left is engaging in widespread voter fraud; that Democrats are attempting to impose “permanent one-party rule” in the United States; and that, if Harris wins, this may well be “the last real election.” That’s not to mention the various other conspiracy theories du jour that Musk has supported over the course of the election cycle, such as the widely-debunked claim that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are eating household pets.
Conspiracy theories are dangerous at the best of times. When they are peddled by a rich and powerful individual they have an outsized influence and act as a force multiplier that further degrades the discourse from which they originally sprang, with the potential to cause real-world violence. (If you doubt this, just look at the anti-immigrant riots that recently broke out in the UK, which originated from false claims online.) And when, to cap it all off, conspiracy theories are peddled by a rich and powerful individual who, just last year, was touting his intention to build a “digital public square” in order to improve the health of political discourse, and who now controls a system of algorithms that determine what content the rest of us see, it can only fuel widespread despair about the country’s ability to have a sensible conversation about, well, anything. If this is America’s champion of free speech and architect of the new “public square,” then God help it.
One question is often asked about this latest iteration of Elon Musk: Does he actually believe what he says? Could he not be engaging in purely transactional politics, attempting to get Donald Trump elected in order to reap tangible rewards beyond those he could have expected from Clinton or Biden?
It’s certainly likely that Musk is expecting something concrete to reward his newfound affinity for the Republican candidate. Trump has stated that he intends to appoint Musk to lead a new government commission on cost-cutting and efficiency if he wins the election. (This role would likely lead to Musk being eligible for a huge tax break due to a little-known law that forces government appointees to divest from certain stocks and allows them to defer paying capital gains taxes on the proceeds of such sales.) Then there’s the fact that Musk’s company SpaceX holds billions of dollars worth of government contracts. Given that during his first term Trump was the most pro-space president in decades and a keen advocate of sending American astronauts back to the Moon, there’s clearly an alignment of interest here if, as seems likely, those plans accelerate during a second Trump term.
Still, it would be wrong to conclude that it’s all about the money for Musk; he also gives every sign of having become a true convert to the Trump cause. There are several likely reasons for this. Many tech moguls have drifted away from the liberal end of the political spectrum in recent years as politicians and the media adopted an increasingly hostile attitude towards Silicon Valley—from calls to ban misinformation to attempts to curtail artificial intelligence. To a sector of society once lauded as visionary and thrilling, and now being maligned—often unfairly, but sometimes not—as a threat to democracy, this unsurprisingly felt like a serious betrayal. Musk wouldn’t be the first public figure to overcorrect and descend down a reactionary rabbit-hole.
Another reason for Musk’s ideological transformation is more personal: earlier this year, he said in an interview with Jordan Peterson that he was pushed over the edge by his child coming out as transgender, her subsequent medical transition, and their estrangement from each other. He claims he “vowed to destroy the woke mind virus after that.” Many of Musk’s statements—such as that his child is essentially “dead”—suggest that he does not merely share real concerns about the way that transgender medicine for some young people is administered in the United States (in contrast to the more cautious and evidence-based approach of many European countries); Musk fundamentally doesn’t seem to believe that being transgender is a legitimate identity at all. This is a change from his stated position in 2020 when he complained about people putting their pronouns in their bios but also stated that “I absolutely support trans.”
Ideologically, Musk may be the archetypical example of where the activist right currently is. Influential people in this space (think the Peter Thiels or Curtis Yarvins) share many of the same characteristics: they are often interested in technology and progress, resentful of arbitrary constraints on innovation, and hate the constellation of ideas and opinions variously described as “woke.” As in, really hate them. All that matters to them is defeating “woke” forever. They don’t consider their political opponents to be merely, well, political opponents, but rather an all-powerful hegemonic force that wants to impose single-party totalitarian rule on the poor suckers who oppose their regime. It’s the kind of neurotic systems-thinking—a quintessential victim mentality, seeing oppressive dark forces everywhere you turn, casting yourself as the plucky resistance in the face of overwhelming tyranny—familiar from the most outrageous elements of, weirdly enough, left-wing counterculture. Except these days it is the most potent and certainly the most visible form of right-wing activism.
There’s another element to Musk’s brand of activism. One of the cardinal rules of politics is that people don’t just state what they “believe”; political speech has other functions like signaling to a base, “sticking it” to the other side, baiting one’s opponents into a reaction, or simply assassinating their character and spreading chaos. In this sense, what’s uncertain is whether Musk necessarily believes everything he says—whether he sincerely believes all the conspiracy theories he reposts, whether he actually takes at face value all the memes and doctored headlines he amplifies, which at even the most surface level are often blatantly implausible or histrionic.
People who inhabit the extreme reactionary corner of the political spectrum tend to be driven as much by a need to rebel as by any real ideology. Saying shocking things is the point. When in 2018 Steve Bannon issued a call for Trump supporters to “flood the zone with shit,” he set the tone for what was to follow. From his avalanche of shitposting we know that Musk is deeply immersed in meme culture; when he took to the stage at a recent Trump rally, he began by declaring “I’m not just MAGA, I’m Dark MAGA”—something that just doesn’t make sense to anyone who isn’t terminally online. In this world of edgelords, does every conspiracy theory—of a “great replacement” of America’s white population, of the Democrats’ plans for totalitarian one-party rule—need to be literally true? No. But politics isn’t only about “facts.” It’s about signaling, about making people think new and dangerous thoughts, about pushing the discourse in one direction or the other, and, just as often, about burning things down.
The tragedy here is that everybody already knows what Musk is like. News articles and pearl clutching about his latest exploits are, by this point, boring: everyone’s already made up their minds whether to support his latest conspiratorial crusade, whether to ignore it, or whether to advertise their opposition to it. But in ten or 20 years, when the dust has settled, we will surely look back at the whole sorry misadventure of online right-wing culture in the 2020s and wonder how and why people at the very top of society—some of America’s richest, most powerful, and most accomplished individuals—transformed themselves into vituperative culture warriors flooding our feeds with content fundamentally divorced from reality.
Luke Hallam is senior editor at Persuasion.
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Missing from this analysis is acknowledgement of the outright hostility shown Elon by the Dems and current administration: having an EV "summit" and not inviting the pioneering biggest EV producer (Tesla), claiming that SpaceX was not eligible for an $800 mm rural coms contract when it was the only viable competitor, throwing all kinds of regulatory BS at SpaceX (would a rocket fall on a shark?). Trying to force X to heel with many varieties of economic pressure etc etc. For Trump this is not just about opportunities in a Trump admin, it's literally about a threat to survival under a Harris admin.
"Since the summer he has explicitly—and repeatedly—endorsed the idea that the Democrats are engaged in a wide-ranging plan to actively import millions of immigrants into the United States for their own electoral benefit...."
Biden revoked executive orders limiting illegal immigration on his very first day in office, spurring an unprecedented flow of illegals, with massive caravans launched that very day. Then, he used CBP to expedite the flow of illegals rather than stem it, putting call buttons at the border so that illegals could call CPB and be ushered into the country.
Nobody even knows who they are or how many have crossed: 10 Million? 20 Million? We do know they're mostly young men.
We also know that the Biden administration could have stemmed the flow at any time, because they finally did it when it became a political liability before this election.
This was such a massive betrayal of our country, that it virtually defies explanation -- or it requires a really wild explanation (i.e. "conspiracy theory"). I'd say the administration and its enablers were either spectacularly stupid or malevolently self-seeking. Those are the only possibilities. Neither is a conspiracy theory.