| | Lavanya Ramanathan is a senior editor at Vox and editor of the Today, Explained newsletter. |
Whizy Kim is a senior reporter at Vox covering wealth, economic inequality, and consumer trends. |
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Lavanya Ramanathan is a senior editor at Vox and editor of the Today, Explained newsletter. Whizy Kim is a senior reporter at Vox covering wealth, economic inequality, and consumer trends. |
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What's driving Elon Musk's political ambitions? |
Michael Swensen/Getty Images |
It's not an overstatement to say that Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, is Donald Trump's biggest fanboy — and patron — in the 2024 election. He's literally, and comically, leaping at Trump's side at rallies. He's tweeting (including, frequently, dog whistles and misinformation). And to the dismay of some, he has let Trump tweet, too. In the spring, Musk launched a political action committee, simply called America, lined up other high-profile rich guys from his Rolodex, and then threw an additional $75 million of his own money into the pot. According to filings with the Federal Election Commission, America PAC has spent more than $100 million on getting Trump re-elected, sending hundreds of canvassers out to talk to voters one-on-one in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And of course, this week, Musk pledged to give away a million dollars a day until the election to registered swing-state voters who signed his PAC's petition, only to reportedly receive a letter from the Department of Justice warning that the contest could be in violation of federal voting law. As Musk's politics move ever rightward — or at least, as Vox's Zack Beauchamp writes, toward "a specific type of edgelord bigotry that drifts frequently into debunked conspiracy theories" — it's worth asking what he wants to get out of the whole deal. An appointment to some unnamed new "government efficiency" commission? Untold power over the agencies that seek to regulate his companies? Or, improbably, a tax break? What does loyalty to Trump net him — or anyone else courting the former president's favor — in the end?
I spoke with Vox senior reporter Whizy Kim, who has been reporting on Musk, his fans, lawsuits, and even his text messages since the months leading to his 2022 purchase of Twitter, to try to understand where Elon Musk the man, the media mogul, and the politically ambitious demagogue intersect. What does Musk really want? And if he gets it, what will it mean for the rest of us?
(Our conversation has been condensed for length and lightly edited.)
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Lavanya Ramanathan: When you look back on the moment Elon Musk bought Twitter, and now consider it in the current context of how he's now trying to invest heavily in politics, do you see parallels there? Whizy Kim: I don't think it is at all an accident that Elon Musk decided to buy Twitter, and then slowly became more politically vocal. He has a huge megaphone now. He's the owner of a site that a lot of people still use, especially for stuff that's related to the news. So I do think that there is a direct connection between him first talking about how Twitter should be this public "town square" where everyone can have their beliefs heard, where free speech is respected, to today, where he has reinstated a lot of banned accounts, including Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and other incendiary figures. There's also much more right-wing content that you see on the site if you visit X today compared to a few years ago. There's been a big transformation in the way Americans perceive Elon Musk since then. Besides the fact that the value of Twitter has tanked and the number of users has declined, you've written about his fanboys, the people that really looked up him — predominantly young men. Is he still really influential with this set? In the past, he was definitely seen as more of a liberal hero. Not that he was always supporting Democratic candidates and politicians, but he was a guy who had popularized electric vehicles. When I talked to his former fans for a piece, a lot of them talked about how they were drawn to his passion for climate change and the environment. He cared about the future of humanity. And they saw him as very much like a mythic heroic figure, kind of a Tony Stark. They admired how much he seemed to be in service of civilization, not just with Tesla, but even with SpaceX, and wanting to further humanity's mission beyond Earth.
And then the more he talked on Twitter, especially about his political views, they realized he could be very volatile. He could really lash out at anyone who criticized him. Several people told me that doesn't seem befitting of a CEO of several major companies, acting childishly and immaturely in reaction to someone maybe making a good point.
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I hear a lot of similarities between him and Donald Trump there. What do these two men have in common? Personality-wise, and just in terms of their worldview, what I really noticed from the X conversation that they had in August was that they both come from a place of feeling personally aggrieved. Trump at many points talked about how his opponents had engaged unfairly against him, all of these criminal court cases against him, these trials, because they don't want him to win the election. They've both frequently been critics of the media. Elon Musk has also talked about how legacy media is really biased and doesn't platform the truth. They could sort of look at each other and say, "Yeah, you get me. We've both been unfairly attacked." And what is their end game here? What does Elon Musk stand to gain from an association with Trump, and now a financial stake in Trump's victory? Under the Biden administration, Elon Musk felt that a lot of these regulatory agencies are staffed with people who are keeping a close eye over corporate misbehavior. His companies have been investigated or fined by different government agencies, whether it's the Labor Board, OSHA, the SEC, or the Department of Transportation, and Elon Musk sees this as unfair. Even if he acknowledges that his companies didn't follow safety regulations, he'll be like, well, those safety measures are stupid, anyway. I think I know best. I run my company. I am an expert in these fields. The government is just clunky and slowing us down. One of the things that he proposed during the Trump interview was some sort of government efficiency commission. And Trump was kind of like, oh, yeah, that's a good idea … and maybe you can help run it. Essentially, that kind of commission would slash the budgets of a lot of regulatory agencies. Trump and Musk are sort of framing that as creating a government that's more sensible and efficient about the budget, but really, it could also potentially serve as a way to flush the budgets of agencies that have been coming after his companies. If he has Trump's ear, you know, he could say, "Well, maybe if you want to appoint a new person to the Labor Board, it should be someone more friendly to businesses, rather than to workers." That's a potential kind of alliance that they could form. |
The Washington Post via Getty Images |
We know that billionaires, that Silicon Valley, are oftentimes more secretive about their involvement in politics. What Elon Musk has been doing is really shining a light on big business billionaire donors and the way they operate in the political sphere. So it's easier to see. Where does this end for Musk, if Trump wins, or if Trump doesn't win? I do think that he will continue to be more politically vocal, because he's opened up a can of worms. It's harder to go back when there's a long record of him coming out for a Trump crowd, officially endorsing him, and all of that. Elon Musk is the evolution of what started from Peter Thiel. When Thiel first came out as this mega-conservative donor, people were like, wow, he's so open and vocal in a world that tends to be more liberal. Now, we have Elon Musk, we have David Sacks, all these other Silicon Valley figures who are trying to elect Trump. But obviously, one of the reasons why these wealthy, influential figures try to stay quiet is because they want to play both sides, right? Elon Musk has come out so vociferously as pro-Trump and criticizing Biden and criticizing Kamala Harris. If Kamala Harris wins, is there room for Elon to come back and say, "Hey, let's still work together in some capacity?" That's going to be a much harder road. |
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| | Musk's million-dollar giveaway |
Listen for more on how Elon Musk has become Trump's most important fundraiser and how his hands-on approach is breaking political norms, according to Tim Higgins and Dana Mattioli of the Wall Street Journal. |
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Celal Gunes/Anadolu via Getty Images |
The USA is MIA on environmental treaty: The United States has some of the strongest environmental laws in the world, produces leading environmental research, and invests billions into fighting climate change and wildlife decline. Yet, the US is the only nation in the world, other than the Vatican, that hasn't joined the Convention on Biological Diversity — the most important global treaty to conserve nature. Forgot your password again? Don't worry about it: For over a decade, a group called the Fast IDentity Online Alliance, or FIDO for short, has been working to make the world less reliant on passwords. The group, which includes major players like Apple, Google, and Meta, has already been successful in a widespread push for multifactor authentication use. Grade-tracking apps are giving kids anxiety: School apps like Blackboard, Schoology, and Google Classroom have become ubiquitous in the lives of many students and their parents. But while they make communication between teachers and families easier and provide valuable info on student progress, constant academic monitoring can be a point of stress and burnout. Fish farming is supposed to be sustainable — but there's a big catch: The world now consumes more fish raised in farms than fish caught in the ocean. But according to a new study, fish farming might kill far more wild-caught fish than previously thought — a finding that throws the aquaculture industry's sustainable branding and global institutional support into question. "We know what Donald Trump wants. He wants unchecked power." Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris is using the last days of her campaign to emphasize her belief that former president Donald Trump has fascist tendencies. This approach may be in response to the closeness of the presidential race, but when President Joe Biden tried the same strategy, it wasn't exactly effective. |
The FDA recalls Cymbalta: The Food and Drug Administration announced a Class II recall of more than 7,000 bottles of Duloxetine. Used to treat anxiety and depression and commonly known under the brand name Cymbalta, a chemical in the drug "may increase the risk of cancer if people are exposed to them above acceptable levels and over long periods of time." [USA Today] American Airlines sounds the alarm on line cutting: The airline is testing a new technology that will give an "audible signal" to gate agents if a passenger attempts to board their plane early. The system has been rolled out in a few airports across the country already. [The New York Times] |
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A portrait of American trans teendom |
The trend of talking about trans kids without talking to them has become an unfortunate recurring theme in media coverage of transgender issues. It's one that my former colleague Nico Lang set out to rectify at scale — not through a single conversation with one or two trans teens, but through an entire year spent following the lives of multiple trans kids and their families in seven states across America. That close-up investigation resulted in Lang's new book, American Teenager: How Trans Kids Are Surviving Hate and Finding Joy in a Turbulent Era. What's wonderful about this book, besides the authority and nuance Lang brings as an award-winning reporter writing on their beat, lies in its ability to capture what trans people call "gender euphoria" — moments of joy in self-discovery, in the feeling of being comfortable in your own body. American Teenager never forgets that these are normal American teens in every way: These teens dance, sing, ride floats in parades, and wear too much Axe body spray. "They participate in the world just as the rest of us do," Lang notes. It's an urgent, powerful narrative, not just for the kids at its center, but also for the rest of us, whose decisions and whose empathy may help determine whether the world they have to navigate is one they can survive. —Aja Romano, senior culture writer |
Vladimir Vladimirov/Getty Images |
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Today's edition was produced and edited by senior editor Lavanya Ramanathan, with contributions from staff editor Melinda Fakuade and news editor Sean Collins. We'll see you tomorrow! |
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