Elon Musk's tech projects are inseparable from his authoritarian one

The media has an Elon Musk problem. His vision of the future is Cybercabs *and* mass deportations, and we must make that clear.

Greetings all. This week, a dive into the Elon Musk Question, and how we should engage with an unfathomably successful billionaire who’s also making daily posts about an “invasion” of undocumented workers, who’s helping to run the Trump ground game in Pennsylvania, and is “all-in” on a campaign that promises mass deportations and to exorcise “the enemy within” by force.

Thanks as always to readers, commenters, and subscribers—especially to paid supporters, who make this writing possible.¹ If you can spare a few bucks a month for writing that stands up to the tech titans, I’d be very grateful. Onwards, and hammers up.

Over the last week or so, two of the biggest stories in tech and one of the biggest in politics revolved around Elon Musk. This is not particularly surprising, given that he is the richest man in the world, is running some of the world’s largest and most visible companies, and is now among the most powerful supporters of Donald Trump’s campaign.

What is increasingly notable is the lack of connective tissue between these stories, which often appear to take place in their own sealed silos. Automotive outlets covered Musk the electric car guru, financial media surveyed Musk’s impact on the markets, tech sites surveyed—often critically—his new batch of robot-laden promises. But it felt like something was missing, something reflecting a general reticence to acknowledge that Musk, who posts almost daily about “floods” of “illegals” and “invading” migrant workers, has not only enthusiastically embraced, but is funding and accelerating a nativist and authoritarian program. And that Musk’s tech companies are now bound up inextricably in his political project.

Because there is no longer really any ambiguity here. Elon Musk is not an eccentric billionaire with a limited self-interested relationship to politics who occasionally says some off color things. He is in a league of his own, actively wielding his unparalleled wealth, generated from Tesla products and SpaceX government contracts, and his reach, multiplied by his purchase of Twitter, to reelect Trump and advance a policy agenda that reeks of authoritarianism and racial animus. He is the richest political operative in the world. And his project, as anyone who follows Musk on X already knows, largely revolves around two things—ending “Wokeness”, aka policies that favor inclusivity, and “securing the border” from undocumented migrants, who he has joined Trump in deriding and dehumanizing as “invaders.”

The Optimus humanoid robots in front of the Tesla cyber truck. Image via Tesla.

Those stories I’m referring to are, quickly:

1) That conspiracy theories, misinformation, and a simple lack of information dominated X, the platform Musk owns, during two catastrophic weather events—and on which, just a few years ago, Twitter would have been indispensable. X has completely collapsed as a reliable information ecosystem, thanks to Musk’s governance.

2) That Tesla, Musk’s most famous company, unveiled a suite of largely aspirational robotic prototypes in a much-hyped and widely discussed We, Robot event in Los Angeles—a “vision of the future” that includes remote-controlled robot bartenders, robot taxis, and so forth—that are key to sustaining his vast fortune.

3) That Musk’s involvement in the Trump campaign is total, as Musk is overseeing a Super PAC funded with $75 million from his own bank account, an effort to essentially pay voters $47 for voting for Trump in swing states, and is using his tremendous influence on a major communication platform to help re-elect the former president.

Now, take the Tesla event—much of the reporting and punditry around the show focused on Musk’s “vision of the future” but neglected to to engage with his other ongoing and very public future-building project with the Trump campaign.

Headlines from Elon Musk's We, Robot Tesla showcase event in Burbank.

It was jarring to see headlines and ledes and online discussion about how the autonomous cars and robot servants unveiled in Burbank represent Elon Musk’s “lofty vision of the future”—without considering the many other visions of the future Musk is not only constantly advancing on Twitter, but using his bottomless well of resources to realize. He is, for instance, campaigning to help Trump instate a program of mass deportation, restrictions on trans rights, of clamping down on inclusivity, of policing peoples’ bodies. These active political ambitions should perhaps hold more weight than Musk’s sleek, largely aspirational prototypes of robots and vehicles based on designs from decades-old science fiction movies.

It should also prompt further questions about why Musk is intent to extol the virtues of robot labor, marching out a small army of exemplary humanoid robots, making a pitch for a future filled with robot housekeepers and bartenders, while simultaneously heaping scorn on migrants who disproportionately do that sort of work right now. More than ever, we need to be asking who his projects’ futures are for, and who Musk is working to exclude from them. It has not gone unnoticed that Musk is both constantly decrying the falling birth rate in the United States *while* channeling rage at the young, mostly Hispanic migrants coming to the country as a “dangerous flood”—it seems there is, for Musk, a specific kind of person he would like to see more of in the US.

A cloud of dark irony thus hangs over events like the We, Robot showcase, because more than the actual Tesla units rolling off the production line, it’s Musk’s promises of the future; of full self-driving vehicles for the lucky, electric riot-proof trucks for the luckier, and escape to Mars for the luckier still, of untold and unrealized profit streams, that have sent the company’s stock price through the roof. That vision is what had made and continues to make him the richest man in the world. And that vision is dark, curdled, and occluded by racial animus.

Which brings us to X, the platform formerly know as Twitter, and formerly famous for being a pretty useful, if far from perfect, way to get important information during crises like the Hurricane Helene and Milton mega storms, and which has buckled under Musk’s arrogance and governance.

“I’M RUNNING OUT OF WAYS TO EXPLAIN HOW BAD THIS IS,” Charlie Warzel wrote in all caps, for the Atlantic, about the grim information ecosystem that led to meteorologists getting death threats from conspiracy theorists during a life-threatening hurricane. “The Future of Live News Online Sucks,” wrote Max Read, and it does. As Read notes, nearly every major social media platform has been TikTokified; influencers and highly followed content creators have taken over the role once served by journalism. It sucks the most on Twitter, where that TikTokification meets an environment where conspiracy theories and 4chan-grade malignancy are rewarded both by Musk’s blue check reply guy payout system and for emulating his own example. Where, for instance, Musk personally spread eye-catching conspiracy posts about FEMA’s response to the hurricanes.

I don’t think that we can ever say enough about how thoroughly Musk’s political proclivities and personal vainglory is responsible for the demise of the platform’s utility, even as well understood as the erosion there is by so many of its users, tech industry folks, and journalists. There have been no fewer than four major books on Musk’s disastrous and momentous takeover of Twitter, after all. And those of us who follow this stuff know how he fired his content moderators (along with just about everyone else). We know Musk famously had his engineers rig X’s algorithm to preference his own posts—after, the story goes, his fury at Joe Biden receiving more engagement on a ‘Go Eagles’ football tweet than he did. And that those posts are a blend of SpaceX rocket videos, scorn for immigrants, retweets of flatterers and interview appearances, assorted engagements with race pseudoscience, boosting of conspiracy theories, whatever video game he’s playing at the time (right now it’s Diablo), and, right now, above all (except for maybe the rocket videos) promoting Trump and attacking his critics.

Meanwhile, it was revealed that Musk had personally coordinated with the Trump campaign to suspend the account of Ken Klippenstein, a journalist who tweeted a link to his article leaking embarrassing materials to JD Vance, the vice presidential nominee. The ban was overturned after the story blew up, but this was almost exactly the sort of thing Musk bemoaned when he took over—government control over speech—and yet he was all too happy to do it to curry favor with his allies in the Trump camp.²

Given all that—and the fact that whether you follow Musk on the plaform or not, his posts are shoved onto your feed—it should be ultra-clear that X has become a vigorous and reliable propaganda outlet for Musk’s preferred policies and the Trump campaign. And that’s a major reason why X is a cesspool; its utility has been sacrificed to Musk’s ego, and to his own politics.³

And yet, despite the immense living record of Musk’s political projects, when he’s subjected to political coverage, the instinct still seems to be to frame Musk’s political activity in terms of his entrepreneurial spirit.

In a video for the New York Times, the campaign finance reporter Theodore Schliefer explains that, “Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, has involved himself in the U.S. election in a manner unparalleled in modern history.” Musk has invested his time, brand, and fortune in the project, Schliefer notes. Yet the subsequent analysis does not engage with the political program Musk is working to achieve, but the style in which he is doing so: “What you’ve got to know about Elon Musk is that when he’s in these crisis moments, when he feels like the world is against him, or the fate of humanity rests on his shoulders, he has a playbook—and that playbook includes a bet on himself.”

This is pretty indicative of much of the coverage thus far: Musk is doing politics as if he’s an innovator, pushing boundaries at crunch time, putting the company/operation on his own back—not someone supporting a program of mass deportation and a restriction of trans rights. But it just took me a couple minutes of scrolling through Musk’s feed to get hard evidence of what, exactly, Musk is fighting for.

Quote-tweeting another user’s post that shared a graph titled “Illegal Alien Gotaways” that purports to show a spike in migration under Biden and Harris along with the text “The Kamala-Mayorkas Invasion⁴ was an act of Demographic Warfare against all American citizens,” Musk wrote, as he often does, “True”. Per X’s metrics, this post was viewed by 30.5 million people. The day before, engaging with a post from Trump himself that read “AMERICA IS BEING INVADED—END THE OCCUPATION, LIBERATE AMERICA!”, Musk wrote: “If it looks like an invasion, sounds like an invasion and uses guns like an invasion, then … it is an invasion.” That one got 58 million views. “Google is controlled by far-left activists,” Musk tweeted in response to allegations that search results were unfavorable to Trump. 78 million views. You get the point; Musk is not just donating to Trump, he’s a surrogate; he’s going on a blitz with genuine enthusiasm for his program, which in these final days, is focused on the darkly apocalyptic—and demonstrably untrue—message that undocumented migrant workers are bringing the nation to ruin.⁵

Suffice to say that Musk’s dark turn has been insufficiently interrogated by the media, or challenged by his peers or partners. (For instance, formerly progressive billionaire Marc Benioff called Musk’s We, Robot display “one of the most inspiring visions of the future I’ve ever seen.”)

To some extent, this is to be expected. For a long time, the media struggled to convey Donald Trump’s authoritarianism and racism—it was a considered breakthrough when outlets decided to actually label the very racist stuff Trump said, labeling countries in Africa “shitholes” and so on, accordingly—and so it is with Elon. He hasn’t made an outright statement like that, but his companies, with which he is famously very closely involved in, often sleeping on the floors etc, have a history of fostering racist workplaces. I’ve always felt that the press—and his biographer!—have largely given Musk the kid gloves treatment on the subject, despite the fact that 6,000 black workers at a Tesla plant have been cleared by a judge to sue for racial discrimination, other workers have already successfully won suits on similar grounds, and then there’s the birthrate tweets and his penchant for surfacing accounts that claim people of color have lower IQs—on top of all the anti-immigrant posts that fill his feed.

I understand that much like Trump before him, Musk poses a problem—how do you appear ‘fair’ when reporting on a man who has accumulated such wealth and power, when the system is supposed to be a meritocracy, when he is popular among so many people, and yet constantly says, platforms, and backs so many openly odious things and projects, from quack race science to vilifying migrants to harassing journalists. In this way, Musk, like Trump before him, has both broken the media and is catnip for it.

But it’s time to get our act together. Seeing Elon Musk and vice presidential nominee JD Vance pat each other on the back over phallic images of one of SpaceX’s rocket launches on X—a genuinely groundbreaking technological advancement, cheered on by two men who would return moments later to stoking hatred with reactionary politics—I could not help but think of the Italian Futurists, who were similarly impressed with technological progress above all else, and so eager to tear up the past and silence their critics that they were among the first to join Mussolini’s Fascist Party.

As Rose Eveleth wrote in WIRED a few years ago, a

love of disruption and progress at all costs led [the Futurists] to construct what some call a “a church of speed and violence.” They embraced fascism, pushed aside the idea of morality, and argued that innovation must never, for any reason, be hindered. Marinetti and his movement cheered, for example, when Italy invaded Northern Africa. “Italian bombardment of Tripoli from biplanes and dirigibles was the first air bombardment in the history of the world, and thus a major technological innovation,” writes Eugene Ostashevsky. Today, some technologists praise drone warfare with similar language. “Though they painted themselves as scions of a new age, the Fascists and Futurists were really ultraconservatives ideologically,” writes Gabriel T. Rubin. Again, sound familiar?

It should, now!

That Musk’s politics have taken a reactionary, conservative turn is not news. That he has become an integral part of the Trump campaign’s ground game in Pennsylvania, that he is taking a central organizing role in key swing states, that he is propagating pay-to-vote schemes, and using his social media network as a megaphone for propaganda brings this all to a new level. Musk’s disdain for public transit and desire to abandon earth for Mars have always signaled an anti-humanist streak; now he is in a position to exercise more power in the name of progress, as he sees it, than ever before.

We—and especially “we” in the media—need to recognize this. There is not one silo for ‘Musk the entrepreneur’ the flawed visionary making a future of robot cars, another one for Musk the social media user who posts weird and objectionable stuff that gets him into trouble, and another one for the newfangled and ardent Trump supporter, who is advancing an ugly, authoritarian and racially charged program. It is all inseparable. Musk has made himself richer than God by selling investors, consumers, and the media on his vision of the future—now he is taking the final step, and using that accumulated capital to see that it’s he who decides who gets to participate in it.

1. And thanks to Jason Koebler of 404 Media for the edits on this piece. Any errors that remain are solely his fault, and not my own.

2. It will surprise few to learn that this is *precisely* the sort of behavior Musk decried when he asserted his Free Speech reign over Twitter after purchasing the platform; the “revelation” he made the most hay over in the so-called Twitter Files, Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi’s stories on the previous Twitter management, was about supposed collusion between the Biden Administration and Twitter’s content moderation team to remove posts it found offensive.

3. The right has long sought out a social media outlet that is both influential and happy—turns out it just needed an allied billionaire to buy one up and wring it out.

4. Refers to Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, alleging he and Harris organized an effort to encourage millions of undocumented migrants to enter the country, in order to give the Democrats a demographic advantage, assuming Hispanic always voters vote Democrat. It is both a deeply stupid conspiracy and one steeped in racism. And Latinx voters are shifting rightward regardless.

5. I want to pause here and emphasize just how nasty this stuff is. Too many of us have gotten anesthetized to this awful language—again, Musk pushing it in our faces every day has an effect—and how tragic it is that immigrant-bashing has become so normalized. Yes, Musk and Trump talking about “floods” and “invaders” and “murderers” and “the enemy within” is horrific, but it’s been tremendously dispiriting to see the lack of an institutional effort to push back on it, from Kamala Harris or the Democrats or really many other public figures. It’s hard to stomach how far we’ve drifted from barebones lines like “Immigration is what made America great” to seeing who can promise to weaponize the border guard more efficiently. But I digress.