Photo: Sonny Tumbelaka/AFP/Getty Images
On the eve of the 2024 presidential election, Elon Musk has transformed himself into the veritable Republican shadow candidate.
Even before he officially endorsed Donald Trump following the Butler, Pennsylvania, assassination attempt, Musk had assumed an unprecedented role in the economic life and pop culture of his adopted country. Like Howard Hughes before him, he’s the United States’ wealthiest industrialist, with the government uncomfortably dependent on his companies and on remaining in his erratic good graces. In one election cycle, Musk has gone from tepid centrist — he’s a former Democrat who used to tout Tesla as an LGBTQ-friendly employer — to chief MAGA propagandist. With the zeal of a convert, Musk espouses a bitter nativism, defending the country from imagined hordes of migrant invaders and woke trans teachers.
While waving his own flag as a proud American entrepreneur dependent on U.S. government subsidies and contracts, Musk has also become a supranational billionaire power player with endless political and economic entanglements that transcend borders. As a political figure, he has his own foreign policy, and his interests don’t always align with those of the United States, nor of the right-wing MAGA movement with which he’s identified himself.
In Sweden, Musk is in a fight with unions and the postal service, which won’t deliver Tesla license plates out of solidarity with a mechanic’s union warring with the company, preventing the cars from being street legal. In Brazil, he conceded to a judge’s content moderation edicts for X. In China, he must maintain friendly, even obsequious relations with an authoritarian regime that could seize his mammoth Tesla factory on a whim and cut off his access to a crucial market for the company’s growth, although it struggles to sell in a year what BYD, the booming Chinese electric vehicle company, sells in a month.
Besides Trump, the most important politician in Musk’s life may be Russian President Vladimir Putin. The limited details of their relationship have dripped out over the last two years in articles in the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere, including from the political scientist Ian Bremmer, who claimed in 2022 that Musk had told him that his views on Russia and the war in Ukraine were informed by his conversations with top Russian officials.
“There’s no stopping Elon Musk, he’s going to do what he thinks he needs to do,” Putin said in an interview earlier this year with Tucker Carlson. “You need to find some common ground with him, you need to search for some ways to persuade him.”
As America’s oligarchs exercise their own foreign policy, they wield a form of transnational power that shouldn’t belong to any one person.
The language is that of a case officer working a potential asset. How much influence does Putin have over the richest person in the world, who’s also a key contractor for the U.S. security state? “In 2022, Musk was having regular conversations with ‘high-level Russians,’” according to the Journal. “At the time, there was pressure from the Kremlin on Musk’s businesses and ‘implicit threats against him.’”
If Russia is courting and coercing Trump’s most important backer, it’s important to reckon with the implications, especially on the political left, without falling into Russiagate hysteria or neocon hawkishness. It’s a national security issue that should matter to the left, because it’s also about a new kind of borderless plutocratic rule that has downstream effects for all of us. As America’s oligarchs exercise their own foreign policy, they wield a form of transnational power that shouldn’t belong to any one person.
Since its early years furnishing microchips for Minuteman missiles, the tech industry has been a paid-up member of the defense industrial base. In the post-9/11 years, the symbiotic relationship deepened between Silicon Valley — which discovered mass surveillance as a business model — and the security state, which discovered mass surveillance as a driving ideology. As billions of dollars in government contracts presented themselves, an industry that touted its utopian intent to “change the world” quickly sidestepped the moral quandaries of the war on terror years.
Now, “defense tech” is a booming investment category, as VCs rush to invest in startups that might soon deploy AI-powered drones to Gaza or Ukraine. Andreessen Horowitz, a prominent venture capital firm and a major investor in SpaceX, played a key role in financing Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. The firm has also invested heavily in Musk’s new AI company, xAI, citing it as an investment in “American dynamism.”
The geopolitics of Silicon Valley have been influenced by a militant right-wing ideology that may criticize the strategic errors of the Iraq war but is eager to supply weapons to US allies and support a costly military buildup to deter China. Top industry figures like Peter Thiel and Eric Schmidt, despite their political differences, both invest in surveillance technology, drone startups, and other digital-age tools that contribute to the permanent war economy. Their interests align with maintaining US military hegemony.
Musk, who holds a top-secret security clearance, has secured billions in federal contracts for rocket launches at SpaceX. The company, known for dominating the satellite launch market, is now involved in launching US spy satellites. Despite his public displays of patriotism, Musk has been linked to back-channel communications with Putin.
The popularity of Musk’s Starlink internet service, which provides global internet access through a network of satellites, has raised concerns about its potential military applications. While Musk claims to avoid involvement in military conflicts, Starlink has become crucial for communication in disaster and war zones, including Ukraine.
Musk’s decision to disable Starlink access for the Ukrainian military during a drone attack on Russian forces sparked controversy. He cited concerns about escalating conflict and potential war crimes as reasons for his actions. However, his intervention was seen as taking sides rather than promoting peace or diplomacy.
Despite efforts to restrict Russian military use of Starlink, reports indicate that Russian forces have acquired thousands of terminals. This has raised concerns about the technology being used to support Russian military operations in Ukraine. Musk’s close ties to Putin and his involvement in political activities have drawn scrutiny from both US security officials and the public.
As Musk continues to expand his political influence and media presence, questions arise about his alignment with US security interests. His support for right-wing organizations and his endorsement of Trump have raised concerns about his political motivations. With the potential for a second Trump administration, Musk’s growing influence in the political arena has become a point of contention among critics and observers. Can you rewrite this sentence for me?
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