The guy who pitches ideas for electric jets to Tony Stark 👇
The guy who giggles at his own fascist cosplaying 👇
It’s utterly cringe. I heard this described last week as like someone winning a contest and being invited up on stage: “me? I won?”. But as Jacob Silverman says, Musk is “the most public face of the radicalization of America’s billionaire class”.
Musk is not alone. He’s been joined by a raft of tech executives, venture capitalists, Wall Street financiers, and other cantankerous members of the business overclass who together reflect a political realignment that first emerged during the Trump presidency. David Sacks, a venture capitalist and, like Musk, a PayPal alumnus, is a longtime conservative who has become vocally, bitterly anti-Democratic, his ascendancy to the top of the tech-MAGA hierarchy symbolized by a stilted speech he delivered at this year’s Republican National Convention. Shaun Maguire, a partner at Sequoia Capital, announced a $300,000 donation to Trump in May, and has been stumping hard for the ex-president on X. And this past summer, tech billionaires Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz offered their support for Trump on their podcast, citing Biden’s proposed tax on unrealized capital gains.
https://newrepublic.com/article/185438/musk-silicon-valley-tech-embrace-trump
In the developing discourse around the tech bro fascist turn there’s been a tendency to counterpoise structural and cultural explanations: they are doing it to prevent regulation and a capital gains tax hike or they are doing it because the San Francisco has turned into a weird microclimate incubating elite neurosis. The reality is of course that structural and cultural explanations need to go together, which makes me want to dig into Silverman’s phrase “over the edge” here:
What really sent him and his colleagues over the edge was the end of the free-money era: In 2022, the Fed started raising interest rates, and the crypto industry, which had been anchored by multibillion-dollar frauds like FTX and Terra, crashed. As the flood of easy money that had tempered the worst of the Covid-19 economic decline turned into a trickle, the economy became less forgiving to entrepreneurs risking vast quantities of other people’s money on speculative bets. The change could be seen in the seven months in 2022 between when Musk agreed to buy Twitter—and then tried to back out—and when he was sued into consummating the deal. The Federal Reserve raised interest rates four times during that period while Twitter’s stock price fluctuated, making the deal far riskier for Musk (and his lenders) by the time he finally acceded to it. What started as a very expensive troll became a $44 billion albatross.
https://newrepublic.com/article/185438/musk-silicon-valley-tech-embrace-trump
What does it mean to go ‘over the edge’? Tech lords weren’t the only ones to lose their shit (literal definition: lose one’s composure) under these circumstances. One of the stranger stories of the last couple of years, which fleetingly makes me wish I’d ended up in a media department so I could justify devoting a few months to stuff like this, has been the radicalisation of landlord TikTok. The business model of buy-to-let was predicated upon a macroeconomic environment, leading a vast tranche of deeply mediocre people to congratulate themselves for their business acumen, where in reality they were just being given access to a cash machine created by the state. Once interest rates were hiked the cash machine which they had experienced as an inviolable right no longer functioned, leaving what seems to be a non-trivial number of them fulminating about the ‘great reset’ (though obviously the algorithmic incentives of platforms will play a role in steering this reaction as well).
It’s difficult to have the rug pulled out from under your feet. It’s difficult to have conditions which you assumed were necessary revealed to be utterly contingent. If we take Corey Robin’s definition of conservatism as fundamentally a counterrevolutionary impulse, a reflection on the experienced loss of power, there’s reason to think that intensifying social and cultural change (which the last decade has brought in spades) will tend to be a conservatising force. The more power you have, the more sensitive you will be to business becoming harder, even if it’s an objectively ridiculous conclusion to draw. Whereas the petite bourgeoisie might have more substance to their claims, at least a subset of billionaires have become vastly richer while simultaneously becoming more shrill about their oppression.
This is made worse by the manner in which the media system which is tied up in those changes has radically accelerated the pace at which cultural reactions are catalysed and disseminated, not least of all through the loops which leave actors bound up in the consequences of their own actions. It’s a strange and potent situation which I suspect we’re only beginning to see the consequences of.
Mark Carrigan 