We Need To Talk About Elon
Elon Musk jumping in the shape of an X onstage at a Trump rally. Image taken from NPR.
Elon Musk is the richest man in the world. As of the moment I write this post, his net worth is well over four hundred billion dollars, and it’s rapidly growing to boot.
To put that into perspective, imagine that you had $400 billion USD. In practical terms, you could never spend all that money in a human lifetime, unless you’re about to become immortal. Which is far from impossible given just how much technology has advanced in recent decades. Even so, that’s an insane amount of money, and Musk is evidently using it to buy the U.S. government.
Given his close alliance with now-President Donald Trump (as much as it pains me to utter those words), Musk has been in the news a lot lately. And, given just how much Trump’s mind has been going over the last few years, Elon Musk is effectively already President of the United States. It doesn’t matter that he’s technically ineligible to be commander in chief - he is Trump’s “puppet master.”
During the “celebrations” surrounding Trump’s inauguration the other day, one moment in particular has captured the Internet’s attention. Given just how taboo the gesture is in a civilized society, I will not put an actual picture of it in this article; to me, it’s equivalent to using the N-word with a hard R. But yes, I am referring to the moment when Elon Musk gestured at the ceiling with his right arm slanted toward the heavens.
The New York Times, in their infinite anticipatory obedience, have described “speculation” being drawn over the gesture. Quite frankly, I struggled over my decision to even include that link there, because the New York Times has arguably enabled Trump more than any politician. A broken clock is right twice a day. The media is indeed the enemy of the people, because their sane-washing of the MAGA movement helped them return to power.
The other claim I want to address is that Elon Musk, who is autistic, was merely stimming. I want to be clear about one thing: I’m on the autism spectrum myself, and I remember rocking back and forth a lot as a child. Even now, I love rocking chairs and hammocks. These days my stims are mostly vocal, but I do rock and flap on occasion. Sometimes it weirds people out; I get it.
But let me make one thing clear: You don’t make that gesture by accident.
The salute Elon Musk made at the inauguration is one with a very dark past. The people who popularized it were responsible for one of the most horrific events of the last few centuries. The Nazi salute is now associated with the Holocaust, the systematic murder of six million Jews and millions of other “undesirables” in Europe. And no, another visit to Auschwitz is not going to make us believe Elon isn’t anti-Semitic.
Indeed, Germany, the country whose government spearheaded these atrocities, is now among the most progressive countries on Earth. It’s far more progressive than the United States, at any rate, when it comes to bigotry in all its forms. There are in fact laws against Holocaust denial, and if you make that salute in public, you will probably be arrested. Here, we let Elon get a pass.
I’m not saying Elon Musk is going to commit genocide against six million Americans, but what I am saying is that he knew what gesture he was making, and was happy with how it would be perceived. Or at least, he wasn’t so unhappy that he would decide not to make it. And I know that the neo-Nazis and white supremacists seem to love it.
Another moment I want to touch upon is the one pictured below. It’s from the “Victory Rally” Donald Trump held the night prior to being sworn in as the 47th President of the United States.
Donald Trump at his “Victory Rally” on January 19, 2025. Image taken from ABC News’ website.
During this event, Trump claimed that Elon Musk “knows computers better than anybody. All those computers. Those vote-counting computers. And we won Pennsylvania by a landslide.” Now, if you call a 1.7% margin of victory a landslide, sure. It was a landslide. It was even enough to narrowly drag former three-term US Senator Bob Casey Jr. under the line. But that’s not the most important moment from this speech.
As much as I hate Elon Musk, he’s an incredibly tech-savvy individual; I’ll give him that. He manipulated the Twitter algorithm to prioritize hateful content, to the point where the site is virtually unusable except by users who love such content. Trump’s right about this.
Yes, on its own, the passage above is a non sequitur. But if you replace “and” with “so” in the last sentence, Trump appeared to state that Musk helped him cheat in the 2024 election and steal Pennsylvania from Kamala Harris.
There are two options here: Either Trump got confused again just like he did about whether or not there were airports in 1776, or he admitted to election fraud. And to be clear, I think the former option is more probable. It’s still not the sort of thing to joke about, even if Trump most likely got every single vote that was counted for him. Then again, Trump won’t tone down the rhetoric, not even when it almost got Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer kidnapped.
The most important thing to note is that Elon Musk is, right now, the most powerful person in the world. He has more power than Trump, Vladimir Putin, or even Xi Jinping. His power may not end with the United States. While I think other countries’ voters are smarter than Americans, only time will tell, and Musk has endorsed far-right parties all over Europe, something German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has acknowledged and condemned.
An image the Democratic Party posted on social media. Where was this energy from Democratss during the election? Image taken from the People’s Party website.
Some people think the bromance between Trump and Musk will be short-lived, that we’ll run into “trouble in paradise” early on in the administration. I hate to say it, but I believe this is likely false.
Remember, Elon Musk is the richest man in the world by far. He might even be a trillionaire in two years. If any Republican member of Congress waffles a bit on Trump’s legislative agenda, Musk has the wealth to single-handedly fund a primary challenger to that disloyal Republican. Even if incumbency is difficult to overcome in a primary, Musk can bully sitting Congresspeople and Senators into submission via the mere threat of a primary. As long as Musk offers that to Trump, I don’t see these two breaking up any time soon.
So what can we do?
Well, the obvious answer would have been to not elect Donald Trump as President, but that ship has unfortunately sailed. Failing that, it makes sense to boycott the platform Xitter (X/Twitter, pronounced “shitter”) as long as Musk owns it. It’s become a far-right, hateful cesspool that no decent person should support.
Furthermore, though he’s not quite as evil as Musk, Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, deserves condemnation for blocking his newspaper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris. When possible, we should aim to support local retail businesses as opposed to Amazon. All the books I’ve reviewed so far were purchased at small bookstores. To be clear, even if Harris had won, we should still have been doing this - Trump’s policies just make it more urgent.
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