The banality of Elon

I write a newsletter called On the Right, which covers the often-complicated and compelling political ideas driving the modern conservative movement. This week, I thought it’d be important to cover Elon Musk, a man who is single-handedly bankrolling much of Donald Trump’s ground game. What are the ideas that drive an engineering titan to make such a sharp turn into politics? But reporting on Musk’s worldview led me to a perhaps surprising conclusion: His politics are boring. His social politics are taken straight from the X replies he frequents — a specific type of edgelord bigotry that drifts frequently into debunked conspiracy theories. His economic views are even less interesting — the same tired hostility toward taxation and regulation that you hear from most people of his economic strata. For someone who has done such innovative work on cars and rocket ships, his politics could scarcely be more conventional. Yet for all their boringness, I realized Musk’s ideas were worth writing about anyway. This is true, in part, because of his sheer financial investment — one that Trump himself estimates at roughly $500 million in total. The eye-popping sum together with stunts like the possibly illegal million-dollar-a-day raffle for registered swing state voters demand some scrutiny of the man behind it all. While Musk may not successfully buy the election, he has succeeded in purchasing our collective attention. Perhaps more importantly, the unoriginality of Musk’s politics is revealing in itself. In Musk, we see Trumpism as it truly is: not a war between populists and small-government types, but a marriage of them. In the conventional picture of the modern GOP, the Trumpian culture warriors are described as “populists” comfortable with big government who are being held back by their super-rich allies. The super-rich, in turn, are described as cultural libertines who put up with the race-baiting and xenophobia to get their tax cuts. Yet this picture is misleading, capturing only part of the dynamic. And no one shows why more clearly than Elon Musk. He is a gullible conspiracy theorist chummy with white nationalists, true — but he is also a plutocrat who believes that the greatest kind of freedom is letting big corporations do whatever they want. In this, he exposes the flaw in the popular analysis the new GOP is beset by a fundamental contradiction between populists and elites when, in fact, the priorities of the culture warriors and the wealthy are often one and the same. Elon Musk, conventional thinker Musk’s town hall in Pittsburgh on Sunday — which began with about 30 minutes of Musk free-associating on politics followed by an hour and a half of questions — provided one of the most unvarnished looks yet into his political worldview. In front of a friendly audience, with all the time in the world, Musk was free to say whatever he wanted. He sounded exactly like the person he is on X. When warning about the risks of a Kamala Harris presidency, for example, Musk dismisses the vice president as an irrelevancy. “There’s almost no point in attacking Kamala personally because she’s just a puppet of the Dem machine,” he says. Many of his fears about this machine’s agenda — like “wide-open borders” and “freedom of speech taken away” — are classic Trump-right themes. But his crowning fear, the one that he says pushed him into investing so heavily in the Trump campaign, is that the Democrats are importing “illegals” to replace native-born American voters. “There’s a massive increase in the number of illegals being put in swing states,” Musk said. “The goal will then be, over the next four years, to legalize all of those illegals. … Every swing state will be blue. America will be a one-party state forever, just like California. And that will be a nightmare — democracy gone. That’s what I think will happen with a Kamala presidency.” This, as my colleague Li Zhou explains, is top-to-bottom nonsense. Musk’s claim that the undocumented population in swing states is surging, sourced to unspecified “government data,” appears false: Data from both Homeland Security and Pew Research Center debunks Musk’s claim of a Biden-era surge in undocumented immigrants to swing states. (In a few swing states, undocumented populations have shrunk, whereas in others, they’ve increased slightly or been stagnant.) Migrants aren’t being “put” in those states by anyone, let alone Democrats — that’s not how undocumented migration works. Nor is there any evidence Harris has a viable plan to grant them all citizenship in four years or proof they’d all vote for Democrats forever once given the franchise. Really, what Musk is doing is taking a hoary old white nationalist trope — the “Great Replacement” mainstreamed by X’s most prominent talk show host, Tucker Carlson — and reiterating it with dubious swing-state demographic data. More or less what you’d expect from the guy who once told an X user ranting about Jews that “you have said the actual truth.” Musk had one other big policy theme throughout the town hall: deregulation. Again and again, he returned to his fervent desire to shrink government so that private industry can work its alleged magic — employing tired anti-government rhetoric that could have been cribbed from any national Republican campaign since Ronald Reagan. “The larger government gets, the less individual freedom you have,” Musk said. “They’re currently making new agencies at a rate of two per year, and every one of them is chipping away at your freedom. It’s essential for us to unwind that process and restore your personal freedom — and with that will come great prosperity and personal happiness.” One might note the irony of a man whose companies benefit immensely from subsidies and government contracts proposing to starve the beast. But Musk, for his part, seems unconcerned. The perfect Trumpist “Rich guy supports Republicans to eliminate regulations and increase profits” is a tale as old as time. But what’s interesting about Musk is that he pairs it with an almost naive faith in the rankest culture war conspiracies: the sorts of thing the ultra-wealthy aren’t supposed to believe. Theoretically, the Republican Party is torn between its “populist” and “establishment” wings. The populists are culture warriors who take a more government-friendly line on the economy; the establishment are elite cultural squishes and free market dogmatists. Yet this stylized description has never really captured the reality on the ground. Trump, the populist-in-chief, is a billionaire whose sole first-term legislative accomplishment was a tax cut for the wealthy. And many of the party’s big-money elite — including Musk, Rebekah Mercer, and Bill Ackman — are all-in on the culture war. In emerging as Trump’s leading surrogate, Musk helps bring this reality to the fore. His unoriginality, cribbing equally from X trolls and hoary anti-government cliches, shows us what the true priorities of a second Trump term might be. Not the faux populism of JD Vance and staged McDonald’s shifts, but the co-equal prioritization of culture and class war — both waged on the wealthy’s behalf. This story was adapted from the On the Right newsletter. New editions drop every Wednesday. Sign up here.