Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images; Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty; Rebecca Zisser/BI
No one has torched their image in service of Donald Trump like Elon Musk has.
Sure, Musk started tearing down his altruistic billionaire Tony Stark image when he bought Twitter and turned it into an alt-right Mojo Dojo Casa House. But after his fawning talk with Trump on Monday, the unmasking was complete. The man who claimed his chief aims were to save humanity, champion free speech, and lead the world into a better future came across as just another lap dog clumsily debasing himself in the political arena to serve his wealth.
Plenty of other people have been steamrolled by Trump. And like Musk's $45 million-a-month commitment, other billionaires have raised and donated eye-watering sums for Trump. The difference is that they don't all allow Trump to belittle them publicly. That sort of embarrassment is reserved for people who try to publicly control him or join his administration. It's only after power brokers enter Trump's domain that they begin to look bumbling and ineffectual. Musk decided to get the jump on that. After watching Trump's ego flatten anyone in its path, no one within thousands of miles of Mar-a-Lago thinks they can drive the Trump bus anymore. But evidently, Musk has been on Mars (politically).
When he introduced Trump on X, the Tesla CEO said he wanted to give Americans the opportunity to get to know Trump — as if Trump hadn't been in power or campaigning for a decade. As if Musk's attention had the power to cast Trump in a new light. Musk also said he wanted to allow Trump to talk in a safe environment — as if Trump doesn't do two-hour free-flowing sets at his rallies once a week. It may have been understandable for people in 2015 to be curious about Trump's values. Nine years later, it's probably safe to say everyone knows what he stands for. Even other rich Trump donors have wondered to the media why they're donating money to a candidate who is already so "well defined." Enter Musk, who has approached politics with the same energy as the people who pioneered crypto, who sought to reinvent finance, unaware that everything they were doing had been done already and better, or cynical enough to think no one would notice.
It's only after power brokers enter Trump's domain that they begin to look bumbling and ineffectual. Musk decided to get the jump on that.
In practice, Musk's amateurish event rollout resulted in 45 minutes of technical glitches before his conversation with Trump even started. And then the real reputation torching began. Over and over in the two-hour, seven-minute conversation, Trump trampled on the values that constructed Musk's brand (warranted or not). When Trump claimed the biggest threat to humanity was not the climate crisis — partly because it would provide humans with more oceanfront property — Musk lamely muttered an "OK." You would think the man who said citizens needed to "revolt" against the fossil-fuel industry and decried its government subsidies in 2016 would have more to say about that. Instead, he asked listeners not to demonize the oil and gas industry and insisted that the climate could wait. It was only after about 1 ½ hours of Trump drilling into Musk with his now stale, unhinged xenophobic meanderings that Musk offered a flimsy defense of the reality of the climate emergency.
The Tesla/SpaceX/X CEO was run roughshod on his core issue, and then Trump guided Musk down a rabbit hole that led to Musk airing some of his own weirder opinions. He praised Trump for not silencing the media during his administration — as if a free press is something a president kindly bestows on American citizens at their discretion. If you didn't know last weekend that the engineer who wants to send people to Mars also wants to get rid of the Department of Education, now you do. Even his defense of renewable energy sounded untethered from reality.
"Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed, but now they're full cities again," Musk said as he argued the merits of nuclear energy to Trump. "That's great," Trump said, sounding bored.
Ostensibly, the point of the talk and Musk throwing his weight behind Trump was to have the former president cosign the Elon agenda — mostly deregulation in ways that allow Musk's companies to do what they want while receiving large government subsidies for his projects. The rugged libertarian clearly needs something from Washington, or he wouldn't be asking. He has said publicly that he wants to do away with America's climate regulations to disincentivize big carmakers from making electric vehicles and maintain Tesla's dominance in the market. But whenever Musk tried to get Trump to give this "assistance for me but not for thee" ethos an endorsement during the Monday chat, he was ignored. It turns out Musk is willing to not just spend big money to get his way in Washington but also beclown himself for it.
The whole thing was not exactly the type of performance that you would want to hear from someone whose (stated) aim is to save humanity. Musk's callous, faux intellectualism used to be something only the very extremely online of us experienced; now, his involvement with Trump has blasted it through the giant megaphone of a major presidential campaign. It turns out his values crystallized into policy mean voting for a candidate who loathes the free press and wants to "drill, baby, drill." Musk used to make a lot of noise about the urgency of Earth's climate crisis. This drew billions of dollars in investment for his projects in the private and public markets. Now it seems like none of that was really serious — at least, not if he's serious about Trump. A lot of rich and powerful people, like the billionaire oilman Harold Hamm, are clear about why they support Trump. He is for them, so they are for him. Now we know Musk isn't any different. Maybe he never was.
Stupid Soros
Musk's attempts to wrangle Trump for his personal gains are not the only ways that he is jumping into electoral politics. Based on the early returns for these other efforts, he appears no more successful at influencing the microscale of politics than he is at working the hallowed halls of power.
Musk's endeavor to start a super PAC — a slush fund for political activism — has been a flop, according to recent reporting from The Wall Street Journal. The stated goal of the PAC is to register some 800,000 new voters, who would, in theory, boost Trump. Musk tapped his fellow Silicon Valley entrepreneur Joe Lonsdale in April to start raising money. Lonsdale's pitch to prospective donors was that if they ponied up some cash to get things rolling, an unnamed wealthy benefactor (Musk) would take care of funding the PAC and ensuring its success after the launch. After that, Musk hired Denis Calabrese, a GOP consultant who was once sentenced to 18 months in prison for tax evasion and faced a lawsuit while at another political action committee over allegations that he took kickbacks from vendors. The matter was settled out of court. After Calabrese's efforts for Musk produced no fruit — aside from investigations from two state governments — he was fired in July and replaced with men who worked for Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. So far, it seems the PAC has done little aside from creating a faulty webpage and collecting some data from confused would-be voters. The Journal reported that the PAC hadn't even mailed out voter-registration forms.
Real political influence — which requires focus, dedication, and organization — eludes him.
If you've been paying rapt attention to the Muskiverse, this incompetence won't surprise you. The billionaire was bilked out of $50,000 in 2019 after he hired a felon to dig up dirt on Vernon Unsworth, a diver who rescued a bunch of kids from a cave in Thailand and later sued Musk, alleging defamation. It's the kind of embarrassing incompetence a powerful billionaire would never want to put on display. But now that it's applied to big-money politics, it's fodder for a much wider audience.
For the past few weeks, Venezuela's leader, Nicolás Maduro, the violent strongman who is clinging to power by the skin of his teeth, has been painting Musk as the capitalist boogie man — a right-wing George Soros who is manipulating Venezuela through X. Musk responded by saying he would take Maduro to Guantánamo Bay himself, riding a donkey. Hardy har.
Middle-school jokes and authoritarian propaganda aside, so far, Maduro is giving Musk entirely too much credit. Musk's chat with Trump drew about 1.1 million concurrent listeners at its peak, about one-third of the audience Fox News gets on prime time. Much to his frustration, the more Musk tweets (if that's what you call them now), the fewer people want to look at his posts. Real political influence — which requires focus, dedication, and organization — eludes him. Every day for the past two years, Musk has shown the world that regardless of the immensity of his wealth, his power is honed for tasks like whipping up online trolls and annoying politicians across the globe. An Avenger, he is not.
Linette Lopez is a senior correspondent at Business Insider.