Elon Musk Eyes a Shadow Presidency
The world’s richest man is expecting a major return on investment for his lavish support of Trump’s campaign.
We’ve never seen the American plutocracy operate quite like this. Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, spent the homestretch of the 2024 presidential campaign providing a degree of public and financial support to a candidate that’s all but unprecedented in the annals of pay-to-play American electioneering. Not since Howard Hughes secretly funneled cash to Hubert Humphrey, Robert F. Kennedy, and Richard Nixon in 1968 has an unstable, flamboyant billionaire industrialist exerted such influence on a presidential race.
According to the latest Federal Election Commission filings, in the last quarter, Musk gave $74,950,000 to America PAC, the pro-Trump organization he cofounded with like-minded tech billionaires. He also gave $289,100 to the National Republican Congressional Committee.
Other right-wing billionaires have contributed tens of millions of dollars to Donald Trump–supporting PACs. But Musk was doing more than dipping into his highly leveraged fortune to prop up the Trump campaign and its associated PACs. Although Musk and Trump had shit-talked each other in public and private, the two men mothballed the snippy hostility as they pursued an awkward alliance, gassing each other up at Trump rallies, on social media, and in TV interviews.
Trump has embraced Musk’s cultish, and cultivated, image as a technical visionary and genius businessman with ambitions that reach beyond the stars. The flattery is mutual: Musk, who speaks in the doomer register favored by reactionary venture capitalists and Trump himself, routinely described the Republican nominee as the only person who can save America from civilizational collapse.
True to his word, Musk did all he could to promote Trump’s candidacy on X. Through a series of feature changes, including the site-wide promotion of right-wing accounts—most especially his own—Musk turned X into 4chan lite. The platform became a sewer of bad information, 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 using them to juice his worshipful followers’ political hysteria.
It’s unclear whether the debauched X platform can still wield the immense influence it once held over a mainstream media that has started to tire of Musk. But he still gets clicks, even if he’s now the villain. In his ability to shape the news cycle—or, more accurately, to troll it—Musk is rivaled only by Trump. And Trump, who rarely posts on X, has arguably been eclipsed there by his ketamine-touting backer.
Musk adopted an all-hands approach to the election. He has relocated much of his business empire to Pennsylvania and assembled a war room of advisers and political consultants to strategize how to win that crucial state. His America PAC emphasized collecting voter data in swing states and employed dissembling tactics that quickly drew investigations. Musk joked about personally canvassing neighborhoods in Pennsylvania. Instead, he did the rich man’s version, unleashing his PACs to hire canvassers on the ground in swing states.
The motive behind Musk’s MAGA makeover was, as he described it, a simple question of self-interest. In the event of Trump’s defeat, he told Tucker Carlson, “I’m fucked.” In an attempt at humor, he wondered how long his prison sentence might be and if he’d be allowed to see his kids. Even if they were mostly unmoored from reality, Musk’s dark, typically unfunny jokes reflected a truth: He saw the stakes as incredibly high. And so should we.
Trump had touted Musk as the future “secretary of cost-cutting”—an informal executive gig that would give the erratic billionaire carte blanche to ax federal programs, close departments, and remake the administrative state according to the persecution fantasies he harbors about “the woke mind virus.” Such a post would grant Musk unprecedented authority to dismantle agencies he doesn’t like—which, in practice, means booting masses of middle-class government workers out of their jobs and slashing regulations that attempt to check corporate power. To consider just one possibility, Musk, Trump, and the GOP could find common cause in ending protections for trans youth and the healthcare programs that serve them. Musk’s ability to disrupt Americans’ lives—not just in the rhetorical sense favored by his fellow Silicon Valley moguls—would be vast.
The outcome of the 2024 election was still unknown as this piece went to press. But it bears stressing that the broader oligarchic logic behind the Musk-Trump alliance won’t be going away anytime soon. The next phase of the MAGA movement is poised to bestow untold new influence on the menagerie of crypto con men, bootlicking fascists, and billionaire ghouls who have long surrounded Trump. Just consider Trump’s heir apparent, JD Vance. Like Musk, he came up through Silicon Valley as a devoted venture capitalist understudy to Peter Thiel. Vance is a chameleon and a sycophant of power—and no one, in this decadent phase of the American imperium, has power like Elon Musk.
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Onward,
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editorial Director and Publisher, The Nation
