No one has burned their image in service of Donald Trump like Elon Musk has.
Sure, Musk began to dismantle his altruistic billionaire Tony Stark image when he bought Twitter and turned it into an alt-right Mojo Dojo Casa House. But after his smarmy chat with Trump on Monday, the unmasking was complete. The man who claimed his primary goals were to save humanity, defend free speech, and lead the world to a better future came across as just another lapdog, clumsily debasing himself in the political arena to serve his wealth.
Many other people have been run over by Trump. And like Musk’s $45 million-a-month pledge, other billionaires have raised and donated staggering sums for Trump. The difference is that they don’t all allow Trump to publicly disparage them. That kind of shaming is reserved for people who publicly try to control him or join his administration. It’s only once power brokers enter Trump’s domain that they start to look clumsy and ineffective. Musk decided to take a leap. After watching Trump’s ego steamroller everyone in its path, no one within a thousand miles of Mar-a-Lago thinks they can drive the Trump bus anymore. But apparently Musk has been to Mars (politically).
When he introduced Trump at X, the Tesla CEO said he wanted to give Americans a chance to get to know Trump — as if Trump hadn’t already been in office or campaigning for a decade. As if Musk’s attention had the power to cast Trump in a new light. Musk also said he wanted to give Trump a safe space to speak — as if Trump weren’t making fluid two-hour appearances at his rallies once a week. It was perhaps understandable that people would be curious about Trump’s values in 2015. Nine years later, it’s probably safe to say that everyone knows what he stands for. Even other wealthy Trump donors have questioned to the media why they’re donating to a candidate who’s already so “well-defined.” Meet Musk, who approached politics with the same energy as the people who pioneered crypto, who sought to reinvent finance, either unaware that everything they were doing had already been done better, or cynical enough to think no one would notice.
It’s only after power brokers enter Trump’s domain that they start to look clumsy and ineffective. Musk decided to pounce.
In practice, Musk’s amateurish event resulted in 45 minutes of technical glitches before his conversation with Trump even began. And that’s when the real reputational destruction began. Time and again, Trump trampled on the values that have defined Musk’s brand throughout the two-hour, seven-minute conversation (rightly or wrongly). When Trump argued that the greatest threat to humanity wasn’t the climate crisis — in part because it would give people more oceanfront property — Musk lamely mumbled an “OK.” You’d think the man who urged citizens to “rise up” against the fossil fuel industry and criticized government subsidies in 2016 would have more to say on the matter. Instead, he asked listeners not to demonize the oil and gas industry and insisted that the climate could wait. Only after about 1 ½ hours of Trump drilling Musk with his now stale, out-of-control xenophobic ramblings did Musk offer a feeble defense of the reality of the climate emergency.
The Tesla/SpaceX/X CEO was roughed up on a core point, and then Trump led Musk down a rabbit hole of his own weirder opinions. He praised Trump for not silencing the media during his administration — as if a free press is something a president can grant to American citizens at will. If you didn’t know last week that the engineer who wants to send humans to Mars also wants to get rid of the Department of Education , you do now. Even his defense of renewable energy sounded detached from reality.
“Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed, but now they’re full cities again,” Musk said, while pitching the benefits of nuclear power to Trump. “That’s great,” Trump said, sounding bored.
Ostensibly, the point of the conversation and Musk’s support for Trump was to get the former president to sign off on Elon’s agenda — mainly deregulation in ways that allow Musk’s companies to do whatever they want while receiving huge government subsidies for his projects. The stalwart libertarian clearly needs something from Washington, or he wouldn’t be asking for it. He’s said publicly that he wants to scrap U.S. climate regulations to discourage big automakers from making electric vehicles and maintain Tesla’s dominance in the market. But every time Musk tried to get Trump to support this “help me but not you” ethos during Monday’s chat, he was ignored. It turns out that Musk is not only willing to spend a lot of money to get his way in Washington, but also to berate himself for it.
It wasn’t exactly the kind of performance you’d want to hear from someone whose (stated) goal is to save humanity. Musk’s callous, phony intellectualism used to be something only the online-savvy among us experienced; now his involvement with Trump has brought it through the giant megaphone of a major presidential campaign. It turns out that his values crystallized into policy mean voting for a candidate who hates the free press and wants to “drill, baby, drill.” Musk used to make a lot of noise about the urgency of the planet’s climate crisis, attracting billions of dollars in investment for his projects in the private and public markets. Now it seems that none of that was very serious — at least not if he takes Trump seriously. Many rich and powerful people, like billionaire oil magnate Harold Hamm, clearly know why they support Trump. He’s for them, so they’re for him. Now we know that Musk is no different. Maybe he never was.
Stupid Soros
Musk’s attempts to manipulate Trump for his own gain aren’t the only ways he’s jumping into electoral politics. Based on the early results of these other efforts, he appears to be no more successful at influencing the micro-scale of politics than he is at working in the hallowed halls of power.
Musk’s attempt to launch a super PAC — a slush fund for political activism — has been a flop, according to recent reporting by The Wall Street Journal. The PAC’s stated goal is to register some 800,000 new voters, who would theoretically support Trump. Musk enlisted fellow Silicon Valley entrepreneur Joe Lonsdale in April to help raise money. Lonsdale’s pitch to potential donors was that if they stumped up some cash to get things started, an anonymous wealthy benefactor (Musk) would handle the PAC’s financing and ensure its success once it launched. Musk then hired Denis Calabrese, a GOP consultant who was once sentenced to 18 months in prison for tax evasion and who faced a lawsuit while serving on another political action committee over allegations he took bribes from vendors. The case was settled out of court. After Calabrese’s efforts on Musk’s behalf failed to bear fruit—aside from investigations from two state legislatures—he was fired in July and replaced by men working for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. So far, the PAC appears to have done little beyond creating a flawed web page and collecting some data from confused potential voters. The Journal reported that the PAC had yet to even mail out voter registration forms.
Real political influence, which requires focus, dedication and organization, eludes him.
If you’ve been keeping a close eye on the Muskiverse, this incompetence won’t surprise you. The billionaire was scammed out of $50,000 in 2019 after hiring a criminal to dig up dirt on Vernon Unsworth, a diver who rescued a group of children from a cave in Thailand and later sued Musk for defamation. It’s the kind of embarrassing incompetence that a powerful billionaire would never want to display. But now that it’s applied to big-money politics, it’s fodder for a much wider audience.
In recent weeks, Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, the violent strongman who is barely clinging to power, has portrayed Musk as the capitalist boogeyman — a right-wing George Soros manipulating Venezuela via X. Musk responded by saying he would take Maduro to Guantanamo Bay himself, riding a donkey. Hardy har.
High-school jokes and authoritarian propaganda aside, Maduro has so far given Musk far too much credit. Musk’s conversation with Trump drew an estimated 1.1 million concurrent listeners at its peak, about a third of Fox News’ prime-time audience. To his frustration, the more Musk tweets (if you can even call them that), the fewer people want to read his messages. Real political influence—which requires focus, dedication, and organization—eludes him. Musk has demonstrated to the world every day for the past two years that, regardless of the enormity of his wealth, his power is focused on tasks like egging on online trolls and annoying politicians around the world. He is no Avenger.
is a senior correspondent at Business Insider.
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