The Improbable Rise of MAGA-Musk

It was the most indelible image of the 2024 presidential campaign: Donald Trump on a stage in Butler, Pennsylvania, right fist raised in defiance over a scrum of Secret Service agents, blood streaming from a bullet wound to the ear, shouting, "Fight! Fight! Fight!"

One of the millions of people moved by that moment was the world's richest man, the industrialist and futurist Elon Musk. Musk—America's most famous immigrant—runs, among other companies, Tesla, which sells the majority of electric cars in the U.S.; SpaceX, developer of the first-ever reusable booster rocket and also the only reliable transport for astronauts to and from the International Space Station; and X (formerly known as Twitter), one of the globe's most-discussed and influential social media platforms.

In the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt, Musk publicized what until then had been more of a private affair: his enthusiastic support for a return to the White House of a man of whom he had previously been frequently intensely critical.

Thus the stage was set for a second indelible campaign image, one that may prove more telling about the practical import of the 2024 election. In October, Trump was back in Butler at the scene of the crime, paying respects to the slain rally attendee Corey Comperatore and urging his supporters to fight-fight-fight until Election Day.

Behind him, airborne, giddy, and goofy, bounced the world's most successful civilian, reducing himself to a dignity-free cheerleader for a politician he once dismissed as a "con man." It was the dance that launched a thousand derisive memes, but it also arguably purchased key White House access for an influential figure with a gigantic megaphone, who in his public life has nurtured, acted upon, and celebrated many contrarian political ideas, some of them libertarian.

Musk spent more than $132 million of his own money to help Republicans win in 2024, including around $75 million to a political action committee called America PAC that essentially took over whole chunks of Trump's ground game. He appeared at campaign rallies; he argued on X that a vote for Trump was the last, best hope for the American experiment; and then, after the election, he fused himself to the president-elect's side, wolfing down fast food, participating in phone calls with world leaders, and kibbitzing on staff decisions.

In mid-November came the prize: Musk, along with former presidential candidate and fellow tech-world booster Vivek Ramaswamy, would head a nongovernmental commission called—at Musk's cheeky suggestion—the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Resemblance to the surprisingly lucrative memecoin that Musk has long promoted was purely noncoincidental.

History is littered with government-reorganization task forces that go nowhere. But Musk does have Trump's ear (for the moment, anyway—the president is not known for his long, healthy working relationships), and he and Ramaswamy have been meeting with the state-slashing likes of Argentine President Javier Milei. They have also been serially reposting clips of Milton Friedman talking about eliminating swaths of the federal government. In a joint Wall Street Journal op-ed published November 20, the two laid out a legally plausible roadmap for significantly reducing the administrative state via executive orders. All Trump would need to do is sign. "The entrenched and ever-growing bureaucracy represents an existential threat to our republic," the duo wrote, "and politicians have abetted it for too long."

Musk's antipathy toward government spending and indebtedness—at least when that spending is not enriching one of Musk's companies—differs sharply from the track record of the 45th president, who jacked up both. The prospect of Friedmanites steering Trump down a different road the second time around may be the biggest reason libertarians have to believe at least something good might come from the new administration, otherwise burdened with Trump's obsessions with tariffs and migrants. At the same time, the combination of the president's mercurial nature and Musk's recent fondness for apocalyptic culture war trolling may divert his Washington energies into something a good deal less beneficial.

For years, Musk has been obsessed with Isaac Asimov's "zeroth" law of robotics, which stipulates that a robot must not through inaction allow humanity to come to harm. This insight has underpinned his many futurist endeavors: renewable energy to power a mighty civilization without befouling its own nest, rockets to ensure mankind has a future even beyond the life span of our planet of origin, brain-computer interfaces (through Neuralink) to transcend physical limitations. Many vehemently disagree, but Musk seems to sincerely believe that getting Trump elected was vital for the healthy future of the human race. Now he's working to turn that belief into reality.

The Road to Trump

Musk used to be publicly apolitical, outside his loud skirmishing with government regulators. (Since he has been a businessman in the payments, rockets, and car spaces, such clashes have been frequent.) "When I got into the company, there was a heavy, heavy focus on batteries," one former high-level Tesla employee recalls. "He never brought up politics in meetings except with regards for regulations."

Musk had a reputation, Kate Conger and Ryan Mac write in their new book Character Limit, as "a libertarian with liberal tendencies, a business scion who backed Obama." Especially with Tesla, he coded as environmentalist-progressive, positioning his company "to help expedite the move from a mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy toward a solar electric economy."

During the 2016 presidential campaign, the entrepreneur lamented to MSNBC that the Republican nominee "doesn't seem to have the sort of character that reflects well on the United States." After Trump won, Musk did join with other tech executives at a meeting with the president-elect, and he later volunteered for a White House business council, even while continuing to say things like (per Walter Isaacson's 2023 biography Elon Musk) "Trump might be one of the best bullshitters ever" and "if you just think of Trump as…a con-man performance, then his behavior sort of makes sense."

Musk quit the White House business council in June 2017 to protest the president withdrawing from the Paris Agreement on global carbon reduction. In 2018, he told tech journalist Kara Swisher that it had been a mistake for tech execs to kiss Trump's ring before inauguration. Even as late as 2022, after he acquired Twitter, Musk complained to Isaacson that Trump (who had been banned from the platform after the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021) exploited "free speech to subvert democracy."

The steps to Musk's subsequent MAGA-ization have been reasonably well-documented, not only in the journalistic attention he inevitably attracts, but because for years, even before he owned it, Musk has used the platform formerly known as Twitter to reveal virtually every twist of his thought.

His first turn to the explicit right was precipitated by government COVID-19 policies, Conger and Mac believe. On a Tesla earnings call in April 2020, Musk condemned lockdowns and the coerced closings of businesses and churches as "fascist," saying: "This is not democratic. This is not freedom. Give people back their goddamn freedom." He asked to be the first person arrested when he reopened his Tesla factory in Fremont, California, in violation of local lockdown orders. (There were no arrests.) In May, he tweeted an exhortation to "take the red pill," memespeak (based on The Matrix) for being willing to discover that the perceived world around you is an elaborate hoax concocted by a malevolent, controlling elite.

Musk himself credits his radicalization to the gender transition of his daughter, Vivian Wilson, who has disowned him. "My son Xavier is dead, killed by the woke mind virus," he lamented to the popular psychologist and podcaster Jordan Peterson in July 2024. Since then, Musk continued, he has "vowed to destroy the woke mind virus…and I'm making some progress."

Precisely what constitutes the "woke mind virus" is open for interpretation, but Musk says that destroying it would help make America again the "meritocracy" he believes it once was, with no special consideration for race, gender, or any of the classifications and practices that fall under "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion"—frequently abbreviated as DEI, but Musk prefers "DIE," since he believes such policies are endangering humanity by placing unqualified people in life-and-death jobs.

Musk's voyage to the right was further accelerated by his ejection from the left. President Joe Biden, irritated by the manufacturer's stance against unionization, pointedly did not invite the market leader to an August 2021 White House summit honoring electric vehicle producers. "Given unprovoked attacks by leading Democrats against me & a very cold shoulder to Tesla & SpaceX," Musk announced in May 2022, he now intended to vote Republican. That November, Biden warned that "Musk's cooperation and, or, technical relationships with other countries is worthy of being looked at," a reference to the entrepreneur's globe-straddling business ties to states such as China, Saudi Arabia, and particularly Russia. "Elon Musk," warned the establishment-liberal website Slate in August 2024, "is a threat to international peace."

Neoreactionary Trolling

Since taking over Twitter, Musk has regularly boosted, echoed, and embraced thoughts and thinkers commonly classified (often by the practitioners themselves) under the ideological category "neoreaction," which roughly thinks a domineering, censurious machine of progressive thought control has ruined the West with dangerously wrong beliefs in things such as democracy, cosmopolitanism, and equality of the sexes or races.

Gleefully fixated on such topics as immigration, gender bending, and street crime, neoreactionaries don't just tiptoe up to the line of conventionally acceptable discourse; they stampede across it, at every step mocking what they see as liberal pieties. It is here, and not in his more libertarian beliefs about the government's role and efficiency, where Musk's X-age persona is routinely classified by the left as an insidious and possibly fascist public menace.

Musk over the past two years has characterized as an "interesting observation" the argument that "a Republic of high status males is best for decision making," has agreed with the notion that "Democracy is probably unworkable long term without limiting suffrage to parents," and has responded to Taylor Swift's endorsement of Kamala Harris by offering to impregnate the childless singer. He tweeted an exclamation point while reposting the false claim that "Blacks kill nearly 1,500 more whites each year than whites kill blacks" (the number is less than a third of that), and he responded positively to a tweet by the same account alleging that graduates from historically black colleges and universities have IQs "within 10 points of the threshold for what is considered 'borderline intellectual impairment.'" He described as "the actual truth" the claim that "Jewish [communities] have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them." He's become the sort of poster very concerned that nonwhite actors often get cast playing characters who are white in the original comics.

Musk warned just prior to the election that if Harris won, she (or the "puppet regime" controlling her) would shut X down and throw him in prison. "There isn't just any one puppet master," Musk posited in an October stump speech. "It's more like there's a thousand….It's just obvious that Biden is not in charge. It's obvious that Kamala is not in charge. I mean, they just replaced the Biden puppet with the Kamala puppet….It'd be interesting to see the crossover between the [Jeffrey] Epstein client list and Kamala's puppet masters."

Such conspiratorial insult comedy has triggered thunderous condemnation from people inside what neoreactionaries call "the Cathedral"—that monolithic (in their view) force in media, academia, and government that enforces leftist ideologies, cultural preferences, and managerial perquisites through conformist peer pressure. "Musk is uniquely dangerous," MSNBC host Chris Hayes charged in October, in part because "he made [X] an absolute vector for misinformation and neo-Nazi bigotry."

In the pre-X days, "There was nothing political about him ever," a "close associate" of Musk's told Ronan Farrow for a 2023 New Yorker story. "I've been around him for a long time, and had lots of deep conversations with the man, at all hours of the day—never heard a fucking word about this."

Partly because Musk upended the cocky view that everyone significant or accomplished should fully embrace progressive or at the very least mainstream Democratic politics—and partly because he runs a platform that allows the spread of ideas, stories, and perspectives outside progressive control—it has become au courant for those sorts to slam him as being just stone dumb. When The New Republic dubbed Musk 2023's "scoundrel of the year," it declared him "not just evil, but deeply stupid, too."

This is patent nonsense: Musk has a clear ability to grasp several complicated worlds. His ongoing success in running difficult and against-the-odds businesses—companies that make one technological breakthrough after another—speaks for itself, and numerous colleagues have averred to journalists that he is generally an active and helpful participant in decision making, not merely a guy who made smart or lucky hires.

But when he enters political discourse, Musk's bullshit meter is poorly calibrated. He is credulous on a daily basis when coming across information, regardless of source, that marks his political enemies as absurd or sinister. He posted, and later deleted, an assertion that the Pizzagate conspiracy theory about an elite pedophile ring being conducted out of the basement of a D.C. restaurant "is real." He posted, and later deleted, a link to an article alleging baselessly that Nancy Pelosi's husband Paul had been assaulted in his home by a gay lover. He cast aspersions at campaign rallies on the 2020 election performance of Dominion voting machines, a line of argument that cost Fox News $787.5 million in settlement money. The Washington Post has reported that "50 of Musk's false or misleading claims about the U.S. election between Jan. 1 and July 31 were debunked by independent fact-checkers." To a certain strain in the red-pilled right, true perspicaciousness comes from merely understanding that Democratic or progressive political and cultural elites are just the types to do any baroquely sinister thing you can imagine; the specifics of the rigorously proven facts about any given accusation are far less important.

The anti-Musk ranks in journalism and academia routinely engage in conspiratorial nonsense of their own. "Musk's Starlink uploaded votes in swing states," the political commentator (and former adjunct professor at George Washington University's graduate school of political management) Cheri Jacobus posted on Threads after the election. "Swing state voters went Dem downballot but Trump at the top? [Unlikely]." An October Wall Street Journal article on Musk's "secret conversations with Vladimir Putin" triggered a fusillade of speculation about him "taking orders" from the Kremlin, with former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann posting on Musk's X that "We need to arrest and detain @elonmusk immediately. He is operating on behalf of Russia. Cancel all contracts, seize his facilities, lock him away in a military facility." With great megaphones, and wild aim, comes great controversy.

How Free Can Speech Be?

Throughout the presidential campaign, Musk portrayed the election as a final stand against the relentless drive toward Democratic thought control. "This is a must-win situation," he said in Butler. "This is no ordinary election. The other side wants to take away your freedom of speech. They want to take away your right to bear arms. They want to take away your right to vote."

Yet his own actions before and after November 5 demonstrate that Musk's commitment to untrammeled free speech is not as strong as he likes to pretend.

Months after purchasing Twitter, Musk gave a few reporters access to his new acquisition's voluminous correspondence with the federal government. The ensuing Twitter Files, reported by Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Michael Shellenberger, and others, revealed a pervasive pressure campaign on social media platforms to censor COVID-related content. (He was also, rightly, angry at the previous owners going along with throttling access to stories about Hunter Biden's laptop revelations.) But even as he denounced Twitter's past owners, Musk proved that no business that wants to stay legal around the globe and to woo advertisers can function as a zone of total free speech.

According to the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, in the first half-year of Musk's ownership, Twitter acceded at least in part to more than 98 percent of the approximately 1,000 censorship requests by various governments (with Turkey, Germany, and India leading the way). The restrictions on users and their speech weren't just overseas: "In the first six months of this year," Fortune reported in September 2024 based on one of X's own transparency reports, "the social network has suspended 5.3 million accounts, compared to 1.6 million in the first half of 2022." (X reported that 2.7 million of those suspensions were for "child safety" reasons, and those numbers did not include spambots, 464 million of which Fortune reports were nuked in that period.)

Musk has used what Trumpists in other contexts like to call "lawfare" to punish the speech and actions of those trying to dissuade advertisers from spending money on X. He has filed suits against the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), Media Matters for America, and the World Federation of Advertisers for allegedly damaging X's bottom line through pressure campaigns. U.S. District Court Judge Charles Breyer dismissed the CCDH suit in March 2024, writing in his order that the effort was "unabashedly and vociferously about one thing": punishing the nonprofit for its speech. No matter: Two days after the election, Musk, now with much more pull in Washington, tweeted that the group "should be prosecuted for interference in US elections by a foreign entity, among their many crimes."

Fellow Trump contributor, tech thought leader, and erstwhile free-speech supporter Marc Andreessen agreed, tweeting that the "orchestrated advertiser boycott against X and popular podcasts must end immediately. Conspiracy in restraint of trade is a prosecutable crime."

Musk's deregulatory rhetoric at DOGE is in direct conflict not only with his selective punitiveness toward people who use speech in ways he dislikes, but with Trump's many threats (some backed by personal lawsuits) against journalism companies and broadcast licensees who produce content he disfavors. Milton Friedman once said that "One of the worst things we have is the control by FCC [the Federal Communications Commission] of radio and television." Now, as his acolytes talk about slashing government, Trump is nominating as FCC chair Brendan Carr, a man who warned after the election that "media companies are required by law to operate in the public interest. If they don't, they are going to be held accountable."

Musk vs. Government

Musk's more libertarian side, which sees government as doing things poorly that it ought not do at all, is easily understood through his own experience with regulators.

Stories abound of his goals—his civilization-saving goals, as he sees it—made more difficult and costly than necessary. He launched a rocket in 2020 against the will of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which had warned that wind patterns created a risk that the rocket could shatter some house windows if it exploded. Rather than fining him (since Musk "could pull that out of his pocket," the FAA's Wayne Monteith told The New Yorker), the agency grounded SpaceX from launching for two months. (In the event, no harm came from the unauthorized takeoff, even though the rocket indeed exploded.)

"The FAA space division has a fundamentally broken regulatory structure," Musk has concluded. "Under those rules, humanity will never get to Mars."

In September 2024, SpaceX posted on its website a detailed critique of how it is misregulated, insisting that "the licensing process has been repeatedly derailed by issues ranging from the frivolous to the patently absurd." At times, the company complained, "these roadblocks have been driven by false and misleading reporting, built on bad-faith hysterics from online detractors or special interest groups who have presented poorly constructed science as fact," often involving "superfluous environmental analysis" on matters such as water runoff quality, and 60-day delays over what marine life might be harmed by rockets upon splashdown.

Musk's other businesses are also in constant conflict with government. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is still enforcing a consent decree it imposed on X's previous owners over the platform's allegedly insufficient protection of customer personal information. Tesla's ability to sell cars is bedeviled across the country by laws restricting direct-to-consumer sales to licensed car dealers. A Delaware court in 2024 denied Musk the compensation package that Tesla's board had agreed to give him back in 2018, even after an initial judicial injunction prompted shareholders to reapprove the package. (One of the goals Musk met to earn his $48 billion was getting Tesla's market value to grow more than 10 times since 2018, to $650 billion.) The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) leaned on him when he fired SpaceX employees for what they claimed was speaking out about bad behavior on Musk's part. (SpaceX is itself suing the NLRB, claiming that its administrative structure unconstitutionally denies the president sufficient power to discipline its internal judges.)

The Securities and Exchange Commission famously fined Musk in 2018 when he made jokey tweets about taking Tesla private at a cost of $420 per share (a coded reference to pot), which cost the man and the company $20 million apiece. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has sued Tesla for alleged racial harassment at its Fremont plant. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is looking into Tesla's "full self-driving" safety data.

Musk has good reason to suspect that government and media forces are out to get him. In January 2024, a European Union commissioner speaking at the World Economic Forum threatened him with "sanctions" for not censoring X posts to her satisfaction. Brazil shut down X in 2024 for more than a month over its demands that he take certain posts down. Britain's justice minister declared it "unacceptable" for Musk to post, following some immigrant-related rioting, that he thought civil war in the U.K. was inevitable.

As much as he has butted heads with government, and now seeks to slash the regulatory state by a third, Musk has also benefited from the state, as his enemies relentlessly point out. The government, primarily the military, was the first and biggest client to pay for SpaceX's services; the company received its first billion-dollar contract from NASA in 2008 to ferry astronauts and equipment to the International Space Station. Tesla has enjoyed Department of Energy loan guarantees, subsidies for customer purchases, state-level subsidies and tax incentives for placing factories, and government-created markets in zero-emission credits.

As The New York Times reported in October 2024, Musk's companies in 2023 were promised $3 billion in government money over nearly 100 contracts with 17 federal agencies. Politico estimated that same month that over their histories, SpaceX and Tesla combined have received over $14 billion in federal contracts.

Will MAGA-Musk Destroy the Old Musk?

Many fans of Musk the cool, visionary industrialist/futurist have despaired over how going full MAGA will ruin his reputation. One ex-Tesla employee, who says he was was "high-level" (but has no reason to think Musk would remember him personally), quit over not wanting to be associated with what Musk now stands for politically. Still, even he isn't sure it will matter that much in the long run for Musk's reputation and impact on humanity.

"Sure, he's guilty of a bunch of logical fallacies and acting like a 13-year-old 4chan idiot," says this former employee. "I think it's unfortunate that he has become this. But I don't think it's going to destroy the good that he has done or could do for the causes of battery tech and electric cars and a green future and getting off Earth and all that. I hope not."

Musk still shows, at any rate, some signs of independence from a complete Trumpist agenda. In August, he talked with Trump on X for more than two hours, along the way saying many things that sounded far more libertarian than MAGA. Cutting government overspending, he insisted, was the key to beating back inflation. Consumers would benefit from faster drug approval by the Food and Drug Administration, rather than the pharma-distrusting gear grinding preferred by the likes of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Appearing on Joe Rogan's podcast the day before the election, Musk made a proactive case for global free trade, arguing that any Trumpian tariff increases needed to be slow so as not to disrupt existing business plans and supply chains, and gently educating Rogan on the economic truths of comparative advantage when America's most popular podcaster expressed the belief that surely it's best if we make everything we need at home. Yet after Trump announced on November 25 that he would impose a 25 percent tariff on Canada and Mexico until no more drugs and illegal immigrants crossed America's borders, Musk predicted the policy "will be highly effective." (Many who don't actually want the economic effects of tariffs nonetheless toe a Trump line that threatening them will get desired policy outcomes.)

Contradictions and all, Musk may be the brightest spot for libertarians in the second Trump administration. His instinct to cut regulations that prevent good things from happening at a reasonable price and pace is good, as is his urge to prioritize huge spending cuts. Given Trump's track record and campaign emphases, Musk's influence may be the only hope for serious spending cuts over the next four years.

DOGE will have no specific policy powers. Still, Musk has very grand goals: A "Department of Government Efficiency is the only path to extending life beyond Earth," he wrote on X in September. He believes he can cut a couple of trillion dollars from the federal government, which would bring spending back to the level of only five or so years ago. Mercatus Center analyst and Reason columnist Veronique de Rugy thinks block grants to states and subsidies to private businesses would be the richest veins for pure government-shrinking gold, and the DOGE project opens up possibilities for seriously rethinking what the federal government ought to be doing at all.

Musk has a grandiose sense of himself and his companies as indispensable nodes in humanity's progress. His history as an industrialist is full of stories about pushing the limits, doing more with less. He did manage to eliminate more than half of old Twitter's staff, and the rebranded site still functions reasonably well, even if at least hundreds of thousands of users unhappy with Musk have left.

Musk is also famous for overpromising, and for being far too optimistic about timetables. Even if he makes a concerted attempt to cut federal spending by a third, it's unlikely that target will be met within the length of Trump's second term.

But the key to his possible success may be his very status as an outside disruptor. As he told a reporter profiling him for Salon back in 1999, years before SpaceX and Tesla, "I've found that being an outsider helps you to think creatively about improving the way things are done. When people have been doing things the same way for years, they stop questioning their methods even if they defy common sense."

Musk might be the only government-cutting voice Trump trusts. He and Ramaswamy now have until a self-imposed deadline of July 4, 2026—America's 250th anniversary—to make deregulation and spending cuts great again.