Elon Musk Eyes a Shadow Presidency

We’ve by no means seen the American plutocracy function fairly like this. Elon Musk, the richest particular person on this planet, spent the homestretch of the 2024 presidential marketing campaign offering a level of public and monetary assist to a candidate that’s all however unprecedented within the annals of pay-to-play American electioneering. Not since Howard Hughes secretly funneled money to Hubert Humphrey, Robert F. Kennedy, and Richard Nixon in 1968 has an unstable, flamboyant billionaire industrialist exerted such affect on a presidential race.

In line with the most recent Federal Election Fee filings, within the final quarter, Musk gave $74,950,000 to America PAC, the pro-Trump group he cofounded with like-minded tech billionaires. He additionally gave $289,100 to the Nationwide Republican Congressional Committee.

Different right-wing billionaires have contributed tens of thousands and thousands of {dollars} to Donald Trump–supporting PACs. However Musk was doing greater than dipping into his extremely leveraged fortune to prop up the Trump marketing campaign and its related PACs. Though Musk and Trump had shit-talked one another in private and non-private, the 2 males mothballed the snippy hostility as they pursued a clumsy alliance, gassing one another up at Trump rallies, on social media, and in TV interviews.

Trump has embraced Musk’s cultish, and cultivated, picture as a technical visionary and genius businessman with ambitions that attain past the celebrities. The flattery is mutual: Musk, who speaks within the doomer register favored by reactionary enterprise capitalists and Trump himself, routinely described the Republican nominee as the one one who can save America from civilizational collapse.

True to his phrase, Musk did all he might to advertise Trump’s candidacy on X. By way of a sequence of function modifications, together with the site-wide promotion of right-wing accounts—most particularly his personal—Musk turned X into 4chan lite. The platform grew to become a sewer of unhealthy data, bigotry, and Nazis stumping for Trump. Musk is the goblin king of this dank fiefdom, plucking inane, racist, wholly fictional posts from the rivers of shit and utilizing them to juice his worshipful followers’ political hysteria.

It’s unclear whether or not the debauched X platform can nonetheless wield the immense affect it as soon as held over a mainstream media that has began to tire of Musk. However he nonetheless will get clicks, even when he’s now the villain. In his capacity to form the information cycle—or, extra precisely, to troll it—Musk is rivaled solely by Trump. And Trump, who hardly ever posts on X, has arguably been eclipsed there by his ketamine-touting backer.

Musk adopted an all-hands strategy to the election. He has relocated a lot of his enterprise empire to Pennsylvania and assembled a battle room of advisers and political consultants to strategize easy methods to win that essential state. His America PAC emphasised accumulating voter information in swing states and employed dissembling ways that shortly drew investigations. Musk joked about personally canvassing neighborhoods in Pennsylvania. As an alternative, he did the wealthy man’s model, unleashing his PACs to rent canvassers on the bottom in swing states.

The motive behind Musk’s MAGA makeover was, as he described it, a easy query of self-interest. Within the occasion of Trump’s defeat, he advised Tucker Carlson, “I’m fucked.” In an try at humor, he questioned how lengthy his jail sentence is likely to be and if he’d be allowed to see his youngsters. Even when they had been largely unmoored from actuality, Musk’s darkish, sometimes unfunny jokes mirrored a fact: He noticed the stakes as extremely excessive. And so ought to we.

Trump had touted Musk as the long run “secretary of cost-cutting”—a casual govt gig that may give the erratic billionaire carte blanche to ax federal applications, shut departments, and remake the executive state in line with the persecution fantasies he harbors about “the woke thoughts virus.” Such a put up would grant Musk unprecedented authority to dismantle businesses he doesn’t like—which, in apply, means booting lots of middle-class authorities staff out of their jobs and slashing laws that try and test company energy. To contemplate only one chance, Musk, Trump, and the GOP might discover widespread trigger in ending protections for trans youth and the healthcare applications that serve them. Musk’s capacity to disrupt Individuals’ lives—not simply within the rhetorical sense favored by his fellow Silicon Valley moguls—could be huge.

The end result of the 2024 election was nonetheless unknown as this piece went to press. But it surely bears stressing that the broader oligarchic logic behind the Musk-Trump alliance gained’t be going away anytime quickly. The following part of the MAGA motion is poised to bestow untold new affect on the menagerie of crypto con males, bootlicking fascists, and billionaire ghouls who’ve lengthy surrounded Trump. Simply contemplate Trump’s inheritor obvious, JD Vance. Like Musk, he got here up by way of Silicon Valley as a loyal enterprise capitalist understudy to Peter Thiel. Vance is a chameleon and a sycophant of energy—and nobody, on this decadent part of the American imperium, has energy like Elon Musk.