This is part of Hello, Trumpworld, Slate’s reluctant guide to the people who will be calling the shots now—at least for as long as they last in Washington.
Elon Musk wasn’t always like this.
Years ago, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO was a liberal—or at least, he branded himself as one. He was an innovator, an idealist, and someone who wanted to literally jettison humanity from its earthly cradle into a more progressive future. He believed in global existential threats, like climate change. He seemed to believe in them so much that maybe he was going to be a person who did something about those issues—and he wasn’t going to compromise on it either, even if he went against the most powerful man in the world along the way.
Case in point: when he joined then-President Donald Trump’s business advisory council in 2017—then quit after Trump announced his decision to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate accords. “Climate change is real,” Musk posted on what was then still Twitter. “Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world.”
Eight years later, Musk is singing a slightly different tune. Not only does he have an outsize role in the incoming Trump administration, but he has also changed his outlook (at least his public-facing one) on climate change. His response to the devastating wildfires that have wreaked havoc in Los Angeles—disasters that are directly related to climate change—was to downplay climate risk as “much slower than alarmists claim.”
Exactly. Climate change risk is real, just much slower than alarmists claim.
The immense loss of homes in LA is primarily due to:
1. Nonsensical overregulation that prevented creating fire breaks and doing brush clearing.
2. Bad governance at the state and local level that… https://t.co/KByGVCjQ8N
This might seem small, but it underscores a much bigger shift in Musk’s worldview. No longer is he seen as the progressive innovator he once was. Now he’s a conservative firebrand, cozying up in Mar-a-Lago and bending the ear of the most powerful force in Republican politics in the modern era, if not all of history.
The shift can be traced back to the COVID-19 pandemic. From early in the days of the virus’s spread and global attempts to stem it, Musk often criticized public health measures such as the lockdowns, which directly affected Tesla factories from conducting business as usual. In May 2020, the billionaire even reopened the EV company’s Fremont factory, in defiance of California lockdown orders. Throughout that year, Musk was combative and contrarian, often minimizing the severity of the pandemic; he even inaccurately predicted that coronavirus cases would be “close to zero” by the end of April 2020. (The U.S. actually saw some of the highest numbers of COVID-19 cases in the world that month. A year later, we would set a record for daily deaths, logging 4,197 in a single day.)
From there, Musk began to steadily align his online rhetoric and business decisions firmly toward the right, especially throughout Biden’s term in office. This included the decision to move Tesla’s headquarters from California to Texas, throwing himself fully into the online culture wars and fighting against the “woke mind virus,” along with spreading unhinged right-wing conspiracies, as when he suggested that Nancy Pelosi’s husband had been attacked by a jilted lover. His transformation from a progressive to a conservative loon was perhaps truly completed with his somewhat involuntary purchase of Twitter, a move that allowed him to weaponize the platform for his newfound political perspective and turn it into a breeding ground for white nationalists, bigotry, and sexism (or, at least, more than it was before). All the while, he continued to push xenophobic conspiracy theories about declining birth rates while fathering child after child with everyone from Grimes to his own employees.
Perhaps the most consequential thing he did with his wealth and newly acquired platform, though, was use it to effectively underwrite Trump’s 2024 campaign—an effort that was, by all accounts, a raging success. Musk reportedly donated $130 million to Trump’s camp over the course of the election cycle. That’s on top of everything else he’s done to launder the former and newly elected president’s image over the past few years.
The result? Musk has effectively bought his way into American government. Not only does he have his own room at Mar-a-Lago, but he’s also been playing a massive role in Trump’s decisions on everything from Cabinet picks to phone calls with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to lobbying the government to hire SpaceX executives. He’s even slated to help spearhead the newly minted Department of Government Efficiency, a commission that—to be clear—isn’t a real governmental department. Instead, Musk and fellow right-wing Silicon Valley provocateur Vivek Ramaswamy are tasked with producing a report of recommended job cuts “with an eye to efficiency,” according to Trump’s press release on DOGE.
This might seem like a story about one man’s slow, pandemic-fueled descent into the pits of radical right-wing ideology, but the reality is, this is more of a story about one man’s ascent to the loftiest office in the land. Musk has achieved this due to his steadfast pursuit of one thing: wealth. In fact, he has always been driven by money and power. His positioning as a progressive champion for the environment was useful to him so long as it ensured those two things. When you look at his recent changes in opinion, it becomes clear that those are his only enduring beliefs—the rest can be swallowed up in hypocrisy. His companies have long relied on government contracts and lenient policies in order to survive and thrive; now he will try to limit governmental activity for everyone else. Despite his branding as a leader in sustainability, he will be allying with Trump, a president with a history of ravaging the country’s natural resources in support of fossil-fuel companies. There is no coherence, just pursuit of wealth and power.
So, in a way, Musk was always like this. He never was in it for the Earth or the environment or to turn humanity into a “multiplanetary species,” as he used to say before he decided to spend more of his time complaining about trans people. Musk was always in it for Musk. That’s why he has successfully positioned himself as a kind of tech messiah, blurring the lines between celebrity, business, and the government of the most powerful nation on the planet.
The problem is, there’s one other person who has figured out how to manifest that precise alchemy of celebrity, business, and government into a pure form of American dominance. So Elon Musk might have a room at Mar-a-Lago, but it’s anyone’s guess how long he’ll last in the White House. After all, Donald Trump sure does not like to share the spotlight.
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