This is why Elon Musk is way more dangerous than Trump

There are always worse political figures waiting in the wings.

In Israel, for instance, Benjamin Netanyahu is a relative moderate compared to some members of his cabinet, like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who believes that letting two million Palestinians die of hunger in Gaza is “justified and moral.” In Russia, ultranationalists to the right of Vladimir Putin espouse racist and anti-immigrant views, while the country’s Communist Party recently declared that Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin was “a mistake.”

And then there’s Donald Trump, whom scholars consistently rank as the worst president in U.S. history. Even here, in a country of only two main parties and a blanderizing political discourse, worse options abound. Imagine if Trump’s successor actually believed in something other than his own enrichment and self-aggrandizement? What if Trump is simply preparing the ground for an authentically far-right leader to take over, someone even more extreme than Vice President J.D. Vance or Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR)?

Elon Musk is prepared to use a lot of his considerable fortune to test that proposition.

What Musk believes

It’s tempting to believe that Elon Musk decided to create a new political party in a fit of pique because of his personal falling-out with Trump. In public, however, Musk links his decision to the recent passage of Trump’s legislative package and the several trillion dollars that the measure will add to the national debt. After bonding with Trump over eviscerating government, Musk was no doubt appalled to discover that the president, in the end, turned out to a more conventional tax-less-and-spend-more Republican.

Either way, Musk announced last week the creation of his new America Party. The details of the party platform are scant, as you might guess from a party created by tweet. Musk has naturally emphasized “responsible spending,” debt reduction, and deregulation. He has also added pro-gun and pro-crypto planks to his expanding platform along with “free speech” and “pro-natalist” positions.

These preferences might qualify the America Party as a typical libertarian project — if it weren’t for Musk’s Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration, his support of the neo-Nazi party Alternative für Deutschland, and his fantastical accusations of “genocide” against the South African government for its treatment of white farmers. Not surprisingly, Musk entertains extreme views on race, genetics, and demography. As The Washington Postreports:

He has warned that lower birth rates and immigration are diluting American culture and the cultures of other majority-White and Asian countries. “We should be very cautious about having some sort of global mixing pot,” he said earlier this year. He has called unchecked illegal immigration “civilizational suicide” and “an invasion,” though he himself was working illegally, in violation of his visa, after he deferred his enrollment in a Stanford University graduate program to launch his career in the United States in the 1990s. He also warns that declining birth rates are leading to “population collapse,” and, having fathered over a dozen children, stresses the importance of “smart people” having more kids.

In his latest sign of malign intent, Musk removed controls from the artificial intelligence component of his social media platform. The newly unshackled Grok — named after a verb in Robert Heinlein’s sci-fi novel Stranger in a Strange Land that means a deep, intuitive understanding — began to rant antisemitically. As they say in Silicon Valley: garbage in, garbage out.

You might argue that it doesn’t really matter what Musk says or does, given that his approval rating plummeted to 35 percent during his tenure as DOGE-in-chief. Even his popularity among Republicans has dropped from 78 percent in March to 62 percent after his break with Trump in June.

But Americans are political amnesiacs. The ravages of DOGE, the insults traded with Trump: all of that could disappear down the memory hole once Trump’s economic program starts to hurt the blue-collar constituents that supported his 2024 candidacy. That’s when Musk will likely dust off his earlier criticisms of the “big and beautiful bill” and start promoting his new party in earnest.

Billionaires gone wild

Trump, a billionaire who has consistently overstated his assets and his importance, proved that an idiot with a big bank account could buy the presidency. Now along comes Musk with even more money, a bigger ego, and a comparable lack of shame.

Musk’s political trajectory resembles Trump’s in other respects as well. They’re both supreme opportunists who have changed their political views to suit the moment. Musk used to donate to both Democrats and Republicans, considered the prospect of a Trump presidency to be an “embarrassment,” and believed in the importance of addressing climate change. He was always something of a libertarian in his embrace of the free market, but there was little indication in the early 2000s that he would veer off into extremes.

If historian Jill Lepore is right, however, Musk is just returning to his roots. His current views uncannily echo those of his grandfather, J.N. Haldeman, who moved from Canada to apartheid South Africa where his racist views were more the norm. Lepore writes that Haldeman, in the 1930s,

joined the quasi-fascistic Technocracy movement, whose proponents believed that scientists and engineers, rather than the people, should rule. He became a leader of the movement in Canada, and, when it was briefly outlawed, he was jailed, after which he became the national chairman of what was then a notoriously antisemitic party called Social Credit. In the 1940s, he ran for office under its banner, and lost. In 1950, two years after South Africa instituted apartheid, he moved his family to Pretoria, where he became an impassioned defender of the regime.

Like his grandfather, Musk escaped his country of birth, in this case a South Africa just then shrugging off the apartheid system that had drawn J.N. Haldeman there. Eventually in Silicon Valley, Musk found a like-minded community. He palled around with Peter Thiel — and created PayPal together — before eventually falling out over artificial intelligence. Thiel, too, has uber-libertarian beliefs, as do other Silicon Valley disrupters like Marc Andreesen who have shifted rightward. They all have a fondness for the latest avatar of the Technocracy movement, Curtis Yarvin, himself a refugee from saner realms of the political spectrum, who has waxed rhapsodic over replacing a democratically elected president with a CEO-in-chief.

And that, perhaps, is the position that Musk imagines for himself. So what if the Constitution forbids a foreign-born president? As Trump has made clear, the Constitution too is ripe for disruption.

Anticipating Musk’s next move

Vladimir Putin was once a fairly conventional apparatchik before he donned the costume of a Russian nationalist. Viktor Orbán was an ego-driven liberal before he found political opportunity in Hungary as an illiberal autocrat. Musk’s political evolution could be compared to the trajectory of these two opportunists.

Musk has indeed cultivated a relationship with Putin over the last two years — after initially supporting Ukraine following Russia’s 2022 invasion — and has floated pro-Russian peace plans to end the conflict. Musk met Orbán at Mar-a-Lago, along with Trump, and has tweeted support in the Hungarian leader’s direction from time to time. But the illiberalism of Putin and Orbán is not really a model for Musk.

Instead, he has gravitated toward something even less palatable: Alternative für Deutschland. The AfD, founded in 2013, built its base on anti-immigrant sentiment, attracted extremists with its anti-Muslim and antisemitic rhetoric, and capitalized on anti-elite anger by railing against heat pumps.

Musk has framed his support of the AfD as a defense of “free speech,” a familiar tactic of those who routinely engage in hate speech. In an op-ed in the German Welt am Sonntag newspaper that was calculated to influence the German elections, Musk wrote that only the AfD could save Germany by “ensuring that Germany does not lose its identity in the pursuit of globalization.” This was a particularly rich observation from one of the most powerful promoters (and beneficiaries) of globalization.

Musk himself lost his earlier identity as a globalizer to become today’s xenophobe. It’s a new type of “whitewashing” whereby internationalism somehow loses its prefix in the laundering process.

The center, however, is not giving up so easily. Even as a larger portion of the electorate is supporting the AfD, the German establishment is mobilizing against the right-wing party. The country’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution determined in May that the AfD is an extremist organization. More recently, the Social Democratic Party began the process of banning the AfD, which requires that a qualifying group meet two criteria: it must threaten Germany’s democratic order and it must be sufficiently popular to pose such a risk. If, after a lengthy legal process, the party is deemed unconstitutional, it is dissolved.

Obviously, such a process can’t dissolve public support for the party’s positions. Currently the AfD is polling at 23 percent, behind the Christian Democrats (28 percent) but ahead of all other parties. For the time being, these other parties are refusing to collaborate with the AfD at a federal level, though there have been some cases of collaboration at the subnational level. A ban — of a party or of collaboration with that party — may be satisfying, but it doesn’t address the reasons that the party is flourishing.

The Musk Effect

In the first flush of Brexit and Trump’s electoral victory in 2016, Steve Bannon attempted to build a National International out of far-right governments, parties, and movements. He largely failed. Now, Musk has stepped up to the plate, with his media platform and his deep pockets.

As NBC reports:

Musk has posted online in support of right-wing street demonstrations in Brazil and Ireland. He has welcomed a new conservative prime minister in New Zealand and expressed agreement with a nationalist right-wing politician in the Netherlands. He’s met in person several times with the right-wing leaders of Argentina and Italy. His social media app X has complied with censorship requests from right-wing leaders in India and Turkey.

As Bannon discovered, the obstacles are many to creating a far-right network. Simply put, entities devoted to the politics of hate often end up hating each other as well.

Musk faces numerous speed bumps at home as well to the creation of a third party. The administrative hurdles are enormous, which is how the Democrats and Republicans have managed to preserve their duopoly.

“I was on a Zoom call yesterday with people talking about this,” one political analyst toldThe New York Times. “A lot of them predicted that he’s the kind of person who, when he finds out how hard this is, he’ll give up.”

But Musk, like his Silicon Valley buddies, knows how to apply maximum pressure to weak points in a system in order to make it crack. He has promised to focus on just a few races where he might have the greatest likelihood of winning. It’s the opposite of Trump, who was interested only in building a vehicle for his own self-advancement.

Musk is far more dangerous. He actually has ideas. They’re terrible ideas, to be sure. But they are motivating him to build something more durable and, in the long term, potentially more disruptive.

It’s too terrifying a prospect to grok.

• John Feffer is the author of the dystopian novel "Splinterlands" (2016) and the director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. His novel, "Frostlands" (2018) is book two of his Splinterlands trilogy. Splinterlands book three "Songlands" was published in 2021. His podcast is available here.