The Rotten World Elon Musk Is Trying To Force On Us

Beating Donald Trump and Elon Musk won't just feel good—it's critical to thwarting a bleak vision of the near- and long-term future.

(Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Tribal politics can be incredibly galvanizing depending on who the us and them are, and why they stand opposed.

You can see that in the persistence of MAGA, which shambles on despite losing election after election because Republicans trained their voters to hate their political opponents.

The headline on my Tuesday essay about Elon Musk, “Don’t Let This Guy Have The Last Laugh,” admittedly targets the same part of the lizard brain.

It works because Musk has made himself a controversial, polarizing, widely disliked figure, much like Donald Trump. I want to see Trump defeated in humiliating fashion. I want to see Elon Musk humiliated almost as much, and for similar reasons. After all, Musk seeks to thrust Trump on the country, so that the two of them can remake the world together.

It feels good to watch bad people fail.

But taking these guys down a peg would be a sugar high. It’s far more important that we not have to live in the society they want to build, and that we thus discredit their shared vision, so it doesn’t bounce back quickly under someone else’s mantle.

Through a combination of marketing savvy, passable technical chops, and good fortune, Musk has been able to pass himself off to millions as a revolutionary genius. At first, he did so in a way that fostered collective hope in human ingenuity as an engine of betterment. Set aside both incredulity and everything we’ve come to know about Musk: It’s just true that a world where cars don’t pollute is better than one where they must. Think more sensationally and you’ll admit that humans would be better off colonizing extrasolar planets by way of Mars than we would be destroying ourselves on Earth, or blinking out of existence when the sun boils away the oceans.

I don’t know how important those goals truly are to Musk—whether his foray into politics grew out of this great-savior megalomania, or his bigoted indulgences.

But even in the most generous interpretation, Musk’s fantastical vision entails forcing humans alive today to live in an uglier and more uncertain world. Not in a world progressing more slowly; not in a world that seeks shared sacrifices for the good of future generations. A world that’s just shittier than the one we live in, for no good reason. In a great irony of our time, this man who was once seen as the embodiment of enlightened thinking stands poised to plunge the world into a new medievalism.

SLOBBER BARON

There’s an irresolvable debate underway in liberal circles over whether Musk is a genuinely red-pilled, simple-minded weirdo or a calculating plutocrat craftily chasing greater wealth.

Cards on the table: I think he exhibits a mix of those tendencies. Musk clearly wants lower taxes, less regulation, a ban on collective bargaining, and to punish Democrats over a handful of perceived slights, and the fact that these goals aren’t usually the point of his frenetic political commentary suggests some level of cunning. On the other hand, his antics make little sense as ruthless, goal-driven influence peddling. Promoting and applauding social media’s most prominent Nazis and eugenists isn’t good for business or politics.

We can square these conflicting interpretations pretty easily: Musk is a narcissist who fancies himself both a titan of industry and a modern-day Machiavelli. He’s a man of petty obsessions whose ego that tells him he can exploit wealth and celebrity to commandeer the United States government.

That’s how I size him up.

But you can have the highest possible opinion of Musk, and still see the value in thwarting his political power plays.

Most proximately—Musk’s partnership with Trump reveals a deeply corrupted character. Whether his long-term objectives are benevolent, malevolent, or a combination thereof, he seeks to impose them on us without legitimacy. He’s the richest man alive and a powerful defense contractor who’s now spending hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidized earnings to elect someone who’s promised him immense official power. His professed aim in that role is to attack the “social safety net” (again, his political commentary isn’t what you’d expect of a disciplined operator), but he can’t play any role steering the federal budget without embracing vast conflicts of interest. His wealth is dependent on the federal budget, the government’s regulatory bent, and national security policy. On a transactional level, he will have burned billions of dollars to help Trump win the White House and Trump will be in the mood to make him whole.

This on its own should all be unacceptable in a democracy. But in the medium term, the proposition on offer is much worse.

GRASPING IN THE DARK AGES

Musk has legions of admirers and sycophants. He’s cashed out much of his brand equity as a tech-utopian environmentalist, but there are still plenty of people who imagine he’d be a moderating, stabilizing force in a second Trump term. It’s the other way around, though: If Trump wins the election, Musk would encourage and validate Trump’s most unenlightened instincts.

Musk may have genuinely deluded himself into thinking the shortest path between here and Mars runs through electing a fascist blowhard who will give him a long leash. That’s at least consistent with generalized megalomania. But even if he’s sincere—indeed, even if he’s right—think about what that means for people alive today:

• It means Donald Trump returns to power with all the risk that entails. Just this week we learned, via Bob Woodward, that Trump’s first defense secretary, Jim Mattis, slept in gym clothes in case he had to race to the White House in the middle of the night to deter nuclear war.

• It means the triumph of troglodyte values over empiricism and reason and self-government.

In a world where Musk gets his way, this supposed future-oriented industrialist will have reinvigorated a war against vaccines. Diseases most of us never have to think about anymore, like measles, will be poised for comebacks, to say nothing of what will happen if another pandemic reaches U.S. shores.

Musk will have helped establish a conspiratocracy, where instead of trying to mitigate and prepare for climate change or novel diseases, mobs seek to discredit, harass, and maybe even kill scientists, meteorologists, doctors, and emergency responders.

And remember, these are realms where we’re lead to believe Musk and MAGA don’t really see eye to eye. But what about where they do?

Musk won’t lose a millisecond of sleep when more than 300 million Americans lose freedom in their lives as their democracy swirls down the drain. He’ll happily inflict cruelty on racial and sexual minorities—indeed, he does that already.

And he’s simpatico with right-wing social engineering in general.

American conservatism has largely degenerated into something amorphous. It’s given shape anew each day by Republican leaders and influencers whose animating ambition is to antagonize liberals. But one of its remaining ideological through lines is a bias toward atomizing society.

Republicans hate cities. They don’t want suburbs to become more like cities, or exurbs to become more like suburbs. They hate trains and busses, and generally seek to crush efforts to help people commute to and from work without cars (preferably ones with internal combustion engines, though for Musk they might open their hearts to something cleaner). They’re anti-solidary by temperament and the idea that government can foster solidarity among publics terrifies them. They equate collective bargaining with communism. They deplore the liberal conception of safety nets, where the healthy subsidize the sick, until they, themselves age into poor health, and where those who work today are rewarded for supporting retirees with retirement support of their own in the future.

We’re in this together? Like hell we are!

In the society Republicans want to build, people live with their families in relative seclusion, drive to their offices (to jobs that are their only dependable sources of health insurance), return to homebound lives where recreational choices are limited to Fox News, other forms of right-wing media, gendered hobbies, chores, and Christian church (the only acceptable solidary institution).

Musk embodies this dim view of the human condition. He spends hours a day interacting with strangers on Twitter, and mainlining right-wing propaganda; he’s famously contemptuous of the people who work for him and has estranged himself from his children and former partners. He spoke recently of his dream that humans will become friends with their autonomous robot-servants. He equates the notion that people of means and privilege might want to build a more equal world with mental disease.

In that light, it’s no surprise he’s made common political cause with the party at war with the utopianism he once championed (back when he was selling expensive cars to wealthy liberals). The world Republicans envision closely resembles the one Musk has built for himself. He slots neatly into their corrupt hierarchy as an oligarch, where he’ll be protected from everything from legal accountability to market competition to human companionship.

Regular people are good enough to deserve a world with clean transportation and pioneering ambition without having to live at the mercy of unbalanced men and their courtiers. For us to claim that birthright, Musk’s top priority for the next two and a half weeks needs to fail, and he needs to be chastened for taking it on.