“I’m disgusted with Elon Musk and his rich cronies trying to buy this election,” Joe Biden wrote in X, three days before announcing he was withdrawing from his bid for re-election to the US presidency.
The post linked at the end to a website entitled “We must stop Donald Trump”.
“We are counting on this team to invest the necessary resources to stop him. Donate now,” he said.
It is now labeled: “Donate to elect Kamala Harris.”
In a tragic irony, however, it was Elon Musk’s X that the American president chose on July 21 to first post the announcement of his withdrawal from the race for the White House, before it was made public two minutes later through other social media, which are now considered comparatively more politically neutral ones like Instagram and Facebook.
Just a week earlier, Elon Musk had announced, with a post, his full support for the election of Donald Trump at the November polls.
He did so right after the assassination attempt on the former and would-be next US president, wishing X a “speedy recovery”.
So, once a supporter of US Democrats like Barack Obama, Elon Musk has now turned into a staunch ally of Donald Trump and, through X, a co-shaper of the pre-election political debate in the US, while at the same time spreading the word up to Europe.
Elon Musk, the prominent supporter of Trumpism
Elon Musk was once deeply skeptical of Donald Trump. In the 2020 presidential election, he says, he voted for Joe Biden.
“I used to be the party of free speech, but now it seems to be the party of censorship,” he said of the Democrats in his new, now-acclaimed interview on Jordan Peterson’s X channel.
A conservative and controversial Canadian psychology professor, YouTuber and author, who chose for the occasion a strange jacket filled with printed images of Jesus.
“Republicans are mostly, but not entirely, on the side of meritocracy and freedom,” Musk says now, despite the “culture wars” that have been waged by the conservative party and Republican governors across the US.
And especially in the state of Florida of Ron DeSandis, whom Musk had openly supported against “Hurricane” Trump, at the beginning of the Republican primaries.
However, despite his now open support for the convicted and felony former and potential next president of the USA, the world’s No. 1 crois insists on calling “ridiculous” the previous reports by the Wall Street Journal that he will donate 45 million dollars a month to the election campaign of Donald Trump.
He admitted, however, that his plans include “lower-level” donations to America PAC, which was created in June by tech billionaires to support the former president’s re-election campaign with influence and massive cash “injections.”
The support seems to be mutual
“I love Elon Musk,” Trump exclaimed at a campaign rally in Michigan, one of the swing states in the violently deindustrialized “Rust Belt.”
“We have to make life good for our smart people, understand?” he said before his supporters. “And he,” he said of the flamboyant boss of X, the giant of electric vehicles Tesla and the space company SpaceX, “is brilliant.”
Toxic rhetoric
Unlike other tech moguls, Elon Musk hasn’t spent a lot of money on political donations so far.
In the past, however, he has given his “ball” to Democrats and Republicans: from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, to George Bush.
In exchange or not, Tesla and SpaceX have benefited from government subsidies and contracts with the federal government.
A turning point in his relationship with Democrats appears to have been the exclusion of Tesla from an electric vehicle summit in 2021.
Since then Musk has begun to visibly swing more and more toward the opposing camp, going so far as to urge his millions of American followers on X to vote Republican in the crucial 2022 midterm elections.
The year by the way he bought the popular platform, mass “unlocking” accounts that had been closed due to misinformation and hate speech.
These include Donald Trump’s account, which was “locked” in the wake of the invasion of the Capitol in January 2021.
Systematically now, Elon Musk is succeeding with posts against the progressive-left forces and the “woke” culture.
It fuels far-right rhetoric and conspiracy theories
Now he is openly mocking, with disparaging comments, the pre-anointed – first ever African-American woman – new Democratic presidential candidate, Kamala Harris.
“I just want to thank Alexander Soros for not keeping everyone in the dark about who the next puppet will be,” he wrote the other day in a comment on X, under a post with a photo of the son of American-Jewish tycoon George Soros in his arms with Harris.
Just last January, meanwhile, he had visited the Holocaust Memorial in Auschwitz, trying to get rid of accusations of anti-Semitism, amid an uproar from his intolerant posts, but also mass departures of major advertising companies from the X platform.
The good and the interests
California’s Silicon Valley tech industry, a Democratic stronghold, has always been a liberal, progressive area. But the taxes and regulations imposed by the Biden administration have pushed industry tycoons to the Right.
There was a big uproar last March when it became known that Donald Trump had a meeting with Elon Musk and other wealthy tech donors.
There were “some discussions,” Musk said, adding meaningfully that Trump – a fossil fuel devotee and climate change denier – is a “big fan of Cybertrucks”, Tesla’s electric semi-trucks.
“I’m a big fan of electric cars,” Trump asserted last month, while reiterating his commitment to immediately abandon the Biden administration’s “mandate” to support the electric vehicle industry.
Otherwise he declared that he is an “Elon fan”, who is “doing an incredible job with Tesla”. Trump has promised his wealthy campaign donors since March to enact policies in their favor.
They are about lowering corporate taxes, approving fossil fuel mining licenses, supporting cryptocurrencies – which Trump has called a “fraud” in the recent past. Measures like these are now officially included in the political program of the Republican Party, approved at their National Convention in Milwaukee.
So, Elon Musk is angry with liberals over immigration, transgender rights, and the Biden administration’s treatment of Tesla.
A tycoon as a political shaper
Elon Musk’s endorsement of Trump cemented his shift to the far Right and him as a high-profile player in the polarized US campaign scene.
In support of his ideological “trenches” message, he recently announced that he is moving the headquarters of X and SpaceX from progressive California to ultraconservative Texas.
“My smartest friends, including those who live in the San Francisco Bay Area and have been lifelong Democratic supporters, are thrilled with Trump/Vance,” he wrote on July 21 in X, praising the choice of the extreme Ohio senator. J. D. Vance, as the Republican vice-presidential candidate.
Musk was an early supporter of Vance: a former entrepreneur with investments in tech and crypto companies, with a strong base from the white working class of the Midwest to the Silicon Valley plutocracy.
Reports have said that Musk has even discussed with Trump the role of a presidential adviser in the White House. He himself denies it. In any case, he already has enormous power in his hands.
In addition to his fortune, which exceeds $240 billion, he has more than 190 million followers on X.
A fact that in the digital age automatically makes him an influential player, political and non-political, inside and outside the US. He recently got into a bitter verbal spat with a Brazilian supreme judge over censorship issues.
A few days ago, he criticized the German government’s decision to ban the far-right magazine Compact, accusing Berlin of “violating freedom of speech”.
As recently as late 2023, meanwhile, he had happily responded to the invitation of Italy’s post-fascist Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, by attending the annual conference of her far-right party, “Brothers of Italy”.
