Why leaders listen to Elon Musk

His obsequious interview with Donald Trump is only the tech billionaire’s latest incursion into politics.

Photo by Samuel Corum / Bloomberg via Getty Images

Elon Musk speaks in memes. In August he posted one depicting the Roman empire’s rise and fall on X, the social media platform he bought in 2022 for $44bn, which said: “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times.” Imprinted in red lettering over the final stage in this cycle were the words: “You Are Here.”

Musk, of PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX fame, sees himself as one of these strong men forged in hard times who will save civilisation from impending disaster. The West, in Musk’s world-view, has become decadent and fallen victim to wokeness. Illegal migrants crossing America’s southern border could soon be enfranchised and threaten democracy; trans ideology is only the start of the descent into the “woke mind virus”. Memes are the medium of choice for the bullish online right among whom such views are prevalent.

That makes Musk a fitting owner of X, a platform where memes are the lingua franca. Since he sacked its content moderators and reinstated banned accounts such as that of the nationalist campaigner Tommy Robinson, X has become an amphitheatre for the online right. Falsehoods like the claim that the Southport murderer was an illegal migrant now spread unabated. A fake name attributed to the attacker quickly trended in the UK. Marc Owen Jones from Northwestern University in Qatar tracked the social media discourse on the day after the incident and stated that there had been “at least 27 million impressions for posts stating or speculating that the attacker was Muslim, a migrant, refugee or a foreigner”. Musk shared with his 194 million followers a fake screenshot of a Daily Telegraph article claiming that participants in the recent riots would be deported to the Falkland Islands.

He also got into a spat with Keir Starmer during the riots, posting that “civil war” in the UK was “inevitable” – comments for which Starmer’s spokesperson said “there was no justification”. The exchange pitted an establishment stalwart who believes in the immutable nature of state authority against a libertarian billionaire who suspects government is intent on enacting an Orwellian nightmare. Musk has called Stephen Parkinson, the director of public prosecutions in England and Wales, the “Woke Stasi”.

Starmer is not the first political leader with whom Musk has sparred. He tweets about the Labour leader in the same vein that he tweets about the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, whose July election win is under dispute and whose National Guard have been depicted in online campaigns under the slogan, “To doubt is treason.” Since the election, Musk has prodded Maduro tweet by tweet, calling him a “clown” and accusing him of “major electoral fraud”. In a speech, Maduro responded: “Our new arch-enemy, the famous Elon Musk, wants to come with his rockets and an army to invade Venezuela.” To which Musk replied on X: “Does [Maduro] have space lasers? Because I do.” In July alone, Musk accepted a challenge to fight with the Venezuelan president and provoked a riposte from the head of His Majesty’s British Government.

Why did Downing Street deem Musk’s post worthy of a reply? He’s one of the world’s richest men. But few other billionaires attract such fevered opprobrium – or have such influence. Musk was born in South Africa, and studied in Canada and the US before dropping out of Stanford to enter Silicon Valley. He worked at PayPal alongside the tech mogul Peter Thiel before eBay acquired the company in 2002. With the proceeds, Musk founded SpaceX, which sells rockets to Nasa. In 2004, he became the largest shareholder of Tesla, the electric car company of which he is now CEO.

In his early Silicon Valley years, Musk leaned towards the Democrats. He was a Barack Obama fanboy who supposedly stood in line for six hours to shake the president’s hand. As late as 2022, he tweeted that he might create a donation vehicle to support “candidates with centrist views from all parties”. But the “fascist” lockdown restrictions during the pandemic and what he saw as growing censorship from the anti-meritocratic woke movement made him shift to the right.

After the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on 13 July, Musk endorsed the Republican candidate. A month later, Trump was back posting on X having been formerly banned from the platform following the 6 January riots. Musk had coaxed Trump away from exclusively posting on his own network, Truth Social. “I love Elon Musk,” Trump said at a rally last month. Meanwhile, since the spring Musk has led a political action committee aimed at boosting voter registration among potential Republican voters. He is putting both his money and his platform behind Trump.

Then, on 12 August, Musk interviewed the former president for two hours, broadcast live on X. Musk said he wanted a “conversation” to give Trump the space to speak freely. What transpired sounded more like a phone call between an ageing rockstar and a rich superfan who had won the meeting at a charity auction. Musk began by saying Trump’s defiance in the face of the assassination attempt was “incredibly inspiring”. From there, Trump rambled, spouting nostalgia for his administration and apocalypticism about the future. He described Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un as being at the “top of their game”. He said nuclear war was more dangerous than climate change and that Joe Biden’s intelligence would not register on the IQ scale. He boasted that Air Force One was nicer than Musk’s own plane. He praised Kamala Harris as a “beautiful woman” who looked like his wife. He lamented America’s lack of high-speed rail and promised the biggest deportation programme in history. On Ukraine, he said he had told Putin about the “things that I’d do [if he invaded Ukraine] and he said, ‘No way!’ and I said, ‘Way!’.”

Throughout, Musk mutely assented. The conversation brought Trump back into the X fold, garnered millions of views (despite an initial glitch) and cemented Musk’s position on the Trumpian right. Musk even made a play for a job responsible for cutting regulation in Trump’s administration. The event was PR-first politics, in the same way hyped-up heavyweight bouts are about the box office, not the boxing. But this was not even a contest. When Musk did disagree, such as over climate change, Trump ignored him. Their mutual admiration meant the conversation descended into obsequiousness.

There is a risk here for the Trump campaign: Musk represents a libertarian, online right that rejects state interventionism in favour of deregulation, low taxes and free trade. He seeks a return to the independence from government that he believes explains Silicon Valley’s initial success. But Trump has harnessed public rage against big corporations and wealthy elites. If it adopts the niche, ironic rhetoric of the online right, Trump’s campaign might lose its economic populism.

There are fewer dangers in the pairing for Elon Musk. X has become a vehicle for his own politics, a public square with a single proprietor. Panicked calls from columnists in the UK to arrest Musk for incitement fuel his claims that freedom of speech is under threat. Without his wealth he would be just another libertarian meme enthusiast. But Starmer and Trump both think Musk’s power means they must either befriend or oppose him. Neither believes he can be ignored.