If Bernie Sanders is right that Elon Musk’s recent intervention marks the point at which America definitely made the transition into oligarchy, what is his end game? Where is it going? What is he hoping to achieve beyond getting ever wealthier?
As well as teasing at interventions into UK politics in support of Reform, he made an intervention into German politics in support of the AfD:
Early this morning, Musk posted on X that “only the AfD can save Germany.” The Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD, is one of Germany’s furthest-right parties, whose jingoistic desires don’t just stop at mass deportations. AfD politicians have reportedly discussed “remigration,” the process of deporting nonwhite residents, including naturalized citizens and their descendants. These views are presumably not just finding their way to Trump; they are broadcast to millions of people who log on to X.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/12/elon-musk-x-congress-shutown/681120/
If this graph is an accurate representation of Musk’s own social media activity (and the evidence does suggest that he is authoring his own tweets) I find it hard to understand how he could sustain an engaged and coherent agenda. My own experience of sometimes posting 100+ times per day is that it leaves you feeling fragmented and wired, unable to focus for more than a few seconds at a time. Musk has an infrastructure of cognition and action around him which potentially mitigates those effects, with the accumulating Matthew effects of being the richest and most powerful man in the world meaning that stuff happens in effective and sustained ways even as his psyche potentially unravels.
Or is there an ideological grand strategy as Seth Abramson suggests? Personally I’ve long thought he’s a liberal conspiracy theorist but one of the things which makes him so potent is that his conspiracy theories are largely reality based. Or is this simply a lot of cultural noise being made in order to achieve a regulatory environment suitable for his agenda? The threat to Tesla (which is still the basis of the overwhelming majority of his wealth) from China’s BYD, as well a trade war between the US and China, has necessitate a more violent embrace of the political?
Note that I’ve offered three types of explanation here: personal, cultural and structural. The realist insistence will always be that adequate explanation involves each of these three elements. What would that look like in practice? I don’t think I’m the right person to answer that question (sitting at the intersection between tech journalism, cultural political economy and geopolitics etc) but I really hope this becomes an urgent priority for those with the right expertise.
Barring a fight to the death between Trump and Musk in which the former is victorious, I’m certain we’re at the start of Elon Musk’s global rise rather than in the middle of it. This is the start of the story, what happened previously was the prologue.
Mark Carrigan 