By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Elon Musk 'MAGA' And QAnon

In the early hours of November 6, as the result of the US presidential election was called, Elon Musk posted a picture of himself walking into the Oval Office carrying a heavy porcelain basin. The image showed him standing on the iconic plush blue carpet with the presidential seal and gold curtains in the background. The chair behind the Resolute desk was conspicuously vacant. The post read: “Let that sink in.” A dad joke, haha, from a man who has had 12 children and accumulated the largest pile of fuck-you money on the planet.

To be clear, the picture was a Photoshopped screengrab from a video Musk had posted two years previously, in October 2022, when he bought Twitter and walked into the company’s HQ carrying the sink. In the spirit of bad puns, many said he would sink Twitter by sacking 80 percent of the workforce and reinstating legions of far-right conspiracy theorists. Whereby not too long ago Elon Musk tweeted an explicit encouragement to his 121 million followers to look into the QAnon conspiracy movement.

Musk became the object of mockery and scorn. They called him “Space Karen”, a buffoon with grandiose ideas about colonizing Mars, who had squandered $44bn on a social media vanity project that was hemorrhaging users, value, and advertising revenue.

They were wrong. Musk used his money and his social media platform (now renamed X) to help Donald Trump execute a spectacular political comeback. But when Trump moves back into the White House in January, will Musk be the real power behind the throne? And if so, how does he intend to wield that power?

On one level, the answer to this question is a simple four-letter word: Doge — the acronym for the proposed Department of Government Efficiency. Musk, who is to head the new department, has promised to cut $2tn worth of spending (a little under a third of the total federal budget

Even Musk’s many critics might agree with his contention that the federal government is sprawling, bloated, and riddled with inefficiency. But almost every president since Ronald Reagan has attempted to streamline the administrative state (including Trump 1.0 — remember “drain the swamp”?) with limited success. Doge — the planned government department whose acronym brings to mind a (Musk-endorsed) cryptocurrency — will not be a government department at all, but more of an advisory committee. Musk will face significant administrative and legislative hurdles. But the biggest obstacle to success might be maintaining his reformist zeal. The business of government is mind-numbingly dull compared to launching rockets, a not-insignificant consideration for a man who hates bureaucracy and has a famously short attention span.

Still, if anyone can do it, perhaps it’s Elon. In 2017, after a series of statewide power failures in South Australia, Musk swooped in saying his electric car company Tesla could solve the problem by building the world’s largest lithium-ion battery. If the job wasn’t done within 100 days, he pledged, Tesla would do the work for free. He comfortably beat his deadline, in 63 days.

Elon Musk is a legendary workaholic and control freak. His biographer, Walter Isaacson, recounts how he runs his companies with brutal drive and determination. He sends his employees emails telling them that “a maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle”. He now promises to bring that maniacal energy to bear on ensuring that “small-government revolutionaries join this administration!” The question is: is Musk’s vision for the US government more Twitter or more SpaceX? Is he going to slash and burn and fill the place with toxic trolls and conspiracy theorists? Or is he going to reduce costs by a factor of 10 and halve delivery times while producing a genuinely breathtaking breakthrough in engineering that many doubted could be achieved?

In the oceans of newsprint that have been splurged on Musk since he officially endorsed Trump, the narrative of how an entrepreneur who once backed the Democrats and worried about climate change morphed into a conspiracy-theorizing Trump supporter has coalesced into a single origin story. 

President-elect Donald Trump watches the launch of Musk’s SpaceX Starship rocket on November 19 in Texas.

In the summer of 2021, President Joe Biden hosted a summit at the White House for manufacturers of electric vehicles. Executives from Ford and General Motors were there, companies that sell only a tiny percentage of electric cars. Tesla, however, by far the biggest producer of EVs in the world, was conspicuously absent from the invite list. Elon had been snubbed.

The reason seemed to have less to do with any personal animus between the Biden administration and the Tesla chief executive, and more to do with the sensitivities of the United Auto Workers union, which was also invited to the White House ceremony and had been battling, unsuccessfully, to unionize workers at Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California. But Musk stewed on it. “Biden is a damp [sock-emoji] puppet in human form,” he tweeted in 2022. Two years later, at a rally in Pennsylvania, Musk was to be heard musing about the “crossover between the Epstein client list and Kamala’s puppet masters”.

The puppets/Epstein narrative is a variation of the QAnon conspiracy theory and helped drive the mob into the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Adherents believed Hillary Clinton was the leader of a cabal of satanic pedophiles who secretly controlled the US government. Since endorsing Trump, Musk has also repeatedly suggested that the situation on America’s southern border, which saw record numbers of illegal crossings under the Biden administration, was a plot on the part of the Democrats, who had “imported massive numbers of illegals to swing states”. These immigrants would, Musk said, reliably vote Democrat, and “America would then become a one-party, deep blue socialist state”.

Leaving aside the fact that immigrants aren’t automatons who are programmed to vote blue (as Kamala Harris found to her detriment), this narrative about importing voters to wipe out a certain political party bears an uncanny resemblance to a well-worn far-right conspiracy theory known as the “great replacement”. The phrase was coined by the French writer, Renaud Camus (no relation to Albert), whose 2011 book, Le Grand Replacement spoke of an elite plot to replace France’s white, Christian population with non-white immigrants, especially from the Muslim world. The theory has since gained traction in other countries, especially among white nationalists in America. Marchers at the infamous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017 chanted “You will not replace us”, a direct reference to Camus.

Whether or not such echoes are conscious on Musk’s part, the highly online rightwing movement that was energized by Trump is now being energized by Musk too.

Elon Musk was born in South Africa in 1971. The son of an overbearing father, he was mercilessly bullied at school. Little Elon took refuge in Dungeons & Dragons, in computers and video games, and in books. In an interview in 2013, he talked about how, as a teenager in the grip of an existential crisis, he discovered Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, “which you should not read at age 14. It is bad, it’s negative.”

Burnt by German philosophy, he buried himself in science fiction: Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series books were formative texts, a sprawling epic about a Galactic Empire on the verge of collapse, and a hero, Hari Seldon, who leads his followers to a hidden location at the edge of the galaxy in a battle to preserve the sum of human knowledge from annihilation.

But the book that Musk keeps returning to is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In Douglas Adams’ cult classic, a supercomputer takes 7.5mn years to calculate the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything”, which turns out to be 42. The point of this meaningless response, Musk told the same interviewer in 2013, is that “a lot of times the question is harder than the answer. And if you can properly phrase the question, then the answer is the easy part.” The question that The Hitchhiker’s Guide prompted Musk to ask is: how to “expand the scope and scale of consciousness and knowledge”.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk standing beside a rocket in 2004

And Musk’s answer? Become a “multi-planetary species”. During the past few years, Elon has placed less emphasis on the need to combat climate change and more on the idea that the planet we inhabit is doomed. “One of these days, a large comet will hit Earth and destroy almost all life, as has happened many times in the past,” he posted this year, before summing up humanity’s options: “Either become a spacefaring civilization or die.” To that end, Musk says SpaceX will carry the first crewed missions to Mars by 2028, and build a self-sustaining colony on the planet in “about 20 years”.

The Harvard historian, Jill Lepore, herself a connoisseur of science fiction, suggests that Musk has fundamentally misunderstood the message of The Hitchhiker’s Guide. It is, she writes, a “razor-sharp satiric indictment of imperialism”, pointing out that the wealthy interplanetary characters of Adams’ imagination are not bold visionaries saving humanity from extinction but rather restless wanderers in search of a home that can never quite satisfy them. “Either the climate wasn’t quite right in the later part of the afternoon,” she quotes from The Hitchhiker’s Guide, “or the day was half an hour too long or the sea was just the wrong shade of pink. And thus were created the conditions for a staggering new form of industry: custom-made, luxury planet building.”

A bust of Elon Musk near SpaceX’s launch pad.

In conclusion, we can say that indeed, X owner Elon Musk spends a lot of time posting extreme right-wing talking points and misinformation on his social media platform. But on the eve of Election Day, shortly before NBC News projected Donald Trump's re-election, Musk posted a pro-Trump video arguably more concerning than pretty much anything he’s shared before. The video features messaging tied to QAnon, one of the most noxious, brain-corroding conspiracy theories circulating among the MAGA faithful. And, once again, one has to wonder how we’ve ended up in a situation where a man with so much power believes such backward things.

But let’s see what happens. Two men with massive egos but otherwise really quite divergent world views sharing an Oval Office? What could go wrong?

 

 

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