Elon Musk Wants to Become a Trump/Q Hybrid
While Elon Musk has long showed signs of not being particularly stable or intelligent, the underlying assumption, given his role leading tech companies for much of his life, is that he at least knows something. His biggest supporters will always call him a genius without question, but while there were always some small reasons to doubt the claims, his most recent behavior clearly disqualifies him from being one.
Usually the biggest “proof” that Elon Musk is a genius is that he is super rich, sometimes the richest person in the world even. Well, let’s ignore the fact that money doesn’t equal intelligence, but if that were somehow true, do you know anyone else that threw away $44 billion? Because if money is intelligence, nobody has ever become dumber than Elon Musk, that’s for sure.
Still, I think we should be cautious and consider that maybe the guy really does have some kind of plan here. What could it be though? What could possibly be the goal of such erratic and seemingly self-destructive behavior? Not only has he thrown away a fortune, but he’s greatly tarnished whatever goodwill he had and his legacy has shifted from the man who would lead us to Mars to the King of the Internet Trolls.
My theory is that Elon Musk aims to fill a void. Well, two voids actually. With Donald Trump losing the limelight and his grasp on the MAGA movement he created, there are many Red Hats out there looking for someone to tell them what to do. They need an abusive authority figure to give their lives meaning, and it doesn’t seem like Donald Trump will be making a triumphant return to that role anytime soon. Aside from the buttloads of legal troubles finally catching up to him, his string of election losses and lack of support from the Republican establishment mean he probably won’t have the footing to claw his way back to the top.
Meanwhile, remember QAnon? I seriously hope you don’t, but for those who are fortunately unaware, there was essentially this absolutely insane online conspiracy club built around a fictional/anonymous persona called “Q”. The theory went that this Q person had secret insight into some big super secret plan that involved taking down all the biggest muckety mucks in the world (or at least the Democratic ones). There was an unhealthy dose of pedophilia panic thrown into the mix as well, and a great deal of election denying. The FBI even considered the QAnon movement domestic terrorism.
Eventually the QAnon stuff sputtered out too, after years and years of bold predictions that never came to fruition and an HBO docuseries that seemingly revealed the true, and lackluster, identity of Q.
So here we are now with two big movements that have lost faith in their leaders and lost most of their purpose. If “winning” is what they want, they aren’t going to experience that with Donald Trump or 4chan.
This is where Elon Musk has decided to step in. While he has shown some signs of rightwing radicalization for a while, he definitely went full throttle around the time of his purchase of Twitter. Most recently, he parroted an uninspired transphobic joke people like Ted Cruz, Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene have already made before.
If you’re plagiarizing jokes from Ted Cruz, I think it’s fair to say your career in comedy is over. But this joke tweet wasn’t just casually transphobic. It also pushed a favorite COVID conspiracy of MAGA and QAnon followers. Elon Musk called for prosecuting Anthony Fauci, and later double-downed on this claiming that Dr. Fauci had lied to Congress and implying COVID vaccines have killed “millions of people”.
The only thing that makes sense, other than Elon Musk falling down the same radicalization rabbit hole your grandparents did, is that he wants to position himself as the defacto leader of the MAGA and QAnon cults.
The big question then is to what end? The guy was already the richest person in the world, so financial gain seems an unlikely purpose here, particularly when you consider that taking on this position has come at great personal expense and will likely continue to lose him money for a while.
As a foreigner, Elon Musk is ineligible to become President. Therefore it’s unlikely he has political aspirations either, at least for himself. However, he could still wield a great deal of political power without ever being elected to political office. This seems to me the most likely goal of taking control of these movements. Right now, many are assuming that Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, will likely step in to take the mantle from Trump and lead the Republican Party with its cadre of MAGA cultists. While DeSantis checks a lot of the Trump boxes, he still has the stink of Republican establishment on him. He is a politician after all, something that MAGAs claim not to like, so it may not be a given that he’ll be able to wrangle the MAGA herd.
There are a lot of other tactics from the same playbook that Elon Musk is using too. He’s not just shouting conspiracy theories and pushing rightwing talking points. He’s also used his platform to bully corporations, threatening Twitter advertisers with boycotts if they didn’t keep advertising with him and adding an Apple tax to the Twitter Blue subscriptions on iOS (but no tax on Android). Trump and DeSantis both picked political fights with private businesses that didn’t “bend the knee”.
Elon Musk has also embraced the racism common in these two movements, unbanning many white supremacists and welcoming Kanye West back to Twitter after his antisemitic remarks.
He’s even taken a page out of Q’s book with his own “drops” called Twitter Files where he has been leaking internal Twitter documents and framing them as supporting some great conspiracy. While legitimate journalists and many rational Twitter users have been skeptical of his claims and the commentary by his partners in the leaks, a lot of his followers are eating up. Just like the QAnon predictions that ultimately meant nothing and went nowhere, these Twitter leaks have revealed nothing surprising and have taken mundane internal conversations about content policy decisions and turned them into fanciful proofs of corruption at the highest levels.
Given the importance of Twitter, and also SpaceX, it might be a good idea to do a serious national security review of Elon Musk. The truth is we can’t know his actual motivations. Whether intentional or not, it is certainly clear that Elon Musk is setting himself up to be a new Trump/Q hybrid, giving him direct access to and control over a movement of largely racist rubes with a grudge against society. We should care what he might do with that power.
Or, I don’t know, maybe he is really this dumb now.
