I write a newsletter called On the Right, which covers the often complex and compelling political ideas that drive the modern conservative movement. This week, I thought it would be important to cover Elon Musk – a man who Much of Trump’s ground game is bankrolling the single. What are the ideas that drive an engineering titan to take such a sharp turn in politics?
But reporting on Musk’s worldview has led me to a perhaps surprising conclusion: His politics are boring.
His social politics are taken directly from the X answers he often says – a certain kind of Edgelord bigotry that frequently veers into conspiracy theories. His economic outlook is even less interesting — the same tiresome hostility to taxes and regulation you hear from most people at his economic level. For someone who did such innovative work on cars and rocket ships, his politics could hardly be more conventional.
Yet for all their annoyance, I realized that Musk’s ideas were worth writing about anyway.
This is true, in part, because of its sheer financial investment—it’s a Trump himself estimated the total at approximately $500 million. The eye-popping sums coupled with stunts like the possibly illegal million-dollar-a-day raffle for registered swing state voters demand some investigation into the man behind it all. While Musk may not have successfully bought the election, he has succeeded in buying our collective attention.
Perhaps more importantly, the irrationality of Musk’s politics is revealing itself. In Musk, we see Trumpism for what it really is: not a war between populists and small-government types, but a marriage between them.
In the prevailing image of the modern GOP, Trumpian culture warriors are described as “populists” who are comfortable with big government held back by their ultra-wealthy allies. Alternately, the super-rich are described as cultural libertarians who tolerate race-baiting and xenophobia in order to lower their taxes.
Yet this image is misleading, capturing only part of the dynamic. And no one shows why more clearly than Elon Musk.
He is a conspiracy theorist chummy with white nationalists, the truth; But he’s a plutocrat who believes the greatest form of freedom is letting big corporations do whatever they want.
In it, he exposes the flaw in the popular analysis that the new GOP is beset by a fundamental conflict between populists and elites when, in fact, the priorities of culture warriors and the wealthy are often one and the same.
Elon Musk, conventional thinker
Elon Musk’s Pittsburgh’s town hall this Sunday — which began with about 30 minutes of free-flowing Musk on politics, followed by an hour and a half of questions — offered the most inexplicable look yet into his political worldview. In front of a friendly audience, with all the time in the world, Kasturi was free to say whatever he wanted.
He sounded like the one in X.
While warning of the dangers of a Harris presidency, for example, Musk dismissed the vice president as an irrelevance. “There’s almost no point in attacking Kamala personally because she’s just a puppet of the damn machine,” he says.
Many of his fears about this machine’s agenda — such as “expansive borders” and “taking away free speech” — are classic Trump-Right themes. But his crowning fear, which he says has pushed him to invest so much in the Trump campaign, is that Democrats are importing “illegals” to replace native-born American voters.
“The number of illegals in swing states has increased dramatically,” Musk said. “Then the goal would be, over the next four years, to legalize all those illegals. … Each swing state will be blue. America will forever be a one-party state, just like California. And it would be a nightmare – democracy gone. I think that will be the case with the Kamala Presidency.
This, as my colleague Li Zhou explains, is top-to-bottom nonsense.
Musk’s claim that the undocumented population is growing in swing states, sourced from unspecified “government data,” appears to be false: data from bothHomeland SecurityAndPew Research CenterBiden refutes Musk’s claim to swing the state’s era of undocumented immigrants. (In some swing states, undocumented populations have shrunk, in others, they’ve grown slightly or stagnated.) Immigrants aren’t “settling” in those states, let alone Democrats; That’s not how undocumented migration works. Nor does Harris have a viable plan to enfranchise them all within four years or evidence that once enfranchised they will all vote for Democrats forever.
Really, what Musk is doing is an old white nationalist trope – the “great replacement”. Mainstream By Tucker Carlson, X’s most prominent talk show host — and back it up with questionable swing-state demographic data. Pretty much what you’d expect from the guy who once told an X user about Jews that “You spoke the real truth“
Musk had another big policy theme throughout the town hall: deregulation. Again and again, he returns to his fervent desire to shrink government so that private industry can work its alleged magic—employing tired anti-government rhetoric that could be cribbed from any national Republican campaign since Ronald Reagan.
“The bigger government gets, the less personal freedom you have,” Musk said. “They are currently creating new agencies at the rate of two per year and every single one of them is chipping away at your independence. It is imperative for us to free this process and reclaim your personal freedom – and with it come great prosperity and personal happiness.”
A person whose company may note the irony Profits greatly from subsidies and government contracts Offer to starve the animal. But Musk, for his part, seems concerned.
Perfect Trumpist
“Rich people support Republicans to eliminate regulation and increase profits” is a story as old as time. But what’s interesting about Musk is that he associates it with an almost naïve belief in the rankest culture war conspiracy: the sort of thing the super-rich shouldn’t believe.
In theory, the Republican Party is torn between its “popular” and “establishment” wings. Populists are culture warriors who take a government-friendly line on the economy; The establishment is elite cultural squish and free market fundamentalist.
Yet this stylized description never really captures reality. Trump, the populist-in-chief, is a billionaire whose only first-term legislation was tax cuts for the wealthy. And many of the party’s big-money elites — including Musk, Rebecca MercerAnd Bill Ackman — All-out in the culture war.
In emerging as Trump’s leading surrogate, Elon helps bring this reality to the fore. His unoriginality, drawn equally from X trolls and anti-government clichés, shows us what the real priorities of a second Trump term might be. Not the pseudo-populism of JD Vance and Macdonald’s change, but the co-equal priority of culture and class warfare – both directed in favor of the wealthy.
This story was adapted from the On the Right newsletter. New versions drop every Wednesday. Sign up here.
