Would Donald Trump have gained reelection if not for the backing of the world’s richest man? We’ll by no means know. However that man, Elon Musk, gave Trump more than $130 million through his just lately based America PAC. Now, as Trump begins to employees his administration, Musk has extra affect than anybody. It will be arduous to argue that it wasn’t cash nicely spent.
Musk’s affect is already obvious. He has hardly left Trump’s aspect since Election Day. And on Tuesday night, he was announced as the top of a brand new authorities “division”—the Division of Authorities Effectivity, or “DOGE,” a reference to a stale web meme—with a broad, if additionally imprecise, remit to chop waste and rework the federal government.
Musk spent the ultimate month of the marketing campaign showing continuously with Trump at rallies, the place he jumped round onstage, told crowds he was “Darkish MAGA” and, later, “Darkish Gothic MAGA,” in some way managed to mess up the “USA” chant, and gave away $1 million checks to individuals who signed a pro-Trump petition. On this final level, Musk may have violated federal marketing campaign finance legislation; on the others, Musk was—at finest—an ungainly determine.
“America is not only going to be nice,” he announced at Trump’s now-infamous Madison Sq. Backyard rally on October 27. “America goes to achieve heights that it has by no means seen earlier than. The longer term is gonna be wonderful!”
Even earlier than formally endorsing Trump in July 2024, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO purchased Twitter—which he subsequently renamed X—with the categorical function of amplifying right-wing content material. He began using his private account, for which he has over 203 million followers, to share reactionary views about unlawful immigration, the declining American start charge, trans folks, and “the woke thoughts virus,” typically dozens of occasions a day. An April 2024 investigation by NBC Information found that, beneath Musk’s management, there have been at the least 150 “Premium” accounts—i.e., customers who had been paying a nominal subscription charge to spice up their account—making explicitly pro-Nazi posts, lots of which racked up tens of millions of views. And a Washington Publish evaluation in October revealed that Republican-aligned accounts on X had been getting way more engagement than Democrat-aligned ones.
Musk was rewarded for his service by spending election night time with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, which he has reportedly barely left over the previous week. Trump thanked Musk in his victory speech, calling him “a brand new star”—Musk has been a public determine for greater than 20 years and is undoubtedly probably the most well-known folks on the earth—and a “tremendous genius.” Within the coming months and years, we’re certain to see much more of Musk, as Trump has promised him a attainable Cupboard place: “secretary of cost-cutting,” which doesn’t but exist. Musk says he needs to slash the federal funds by a 3rd and has welcomed as a necessity the financial despair such extreme cuts would trigger. As we put together for a second Trump time period, each signal means that Musk will act as a type of shadow president, wielding huge energy over the numerous areas of governance that Trump has no real interest in. How did we get right here?
Now we have the dot-com bubble to thank for elevating Musk to this place of unprecedented energy. Within the mid-1990s, after graduating from the College of Pennsylvania, Musk moved to Palo Alto and did what many younger males had been doing then: He turned a serial entrepreneur within the brand-new web sector. The World Extensive Net opened to the general public in 1991 with a single web site. By 1992, there have been 10 web sites, and by 1994, there have been 3,000. In 1995, when Musk burst onto the scene, it turned evident that the web wasn’t only a enjoyable new invention. It might make folks very, very wealthy very, in a short time.
The dot-com bubble started on August 9, 1995, when browser firm Netscape Communications had its preliminary public providing on Nasdaq. By the closing bell, the corporate was price $58.25 a share and had a market worth of $2.9 billion ($120.51 and $5.9 billion in 2024 {dollars}, respectively). In a single day, founders Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark turned rich past their wildest desires. Thus started an unprecedented speculative increase that may final till March 2000.
In 1995, Musk co-founded the corporate Zip2, an web metropolis information. As he tells the story, he was so broke that he slept on the sofa at his workplace as a result of he couldn’t afford an house, showered on the YMCA, and shared a single pc along with his co-founders.
“The web site was up in the course of the day and I used to be coding it at night time, seven days per week, on a regular basis,” Musk has said. “If you happen to do the straightforward math, and say if any individual else is working 50 hours [a week] and also you’re working 100, you’ll get twice [as much] achieved in the middle of a 12 months as the opposite firm.”
In March 1999, on the peak of the dot-com bubble, pc firm Compaq acquired Zip2 for $307 million in money, for which Musk obtained $22 million. He used a few of that cash to discovered X.com, an internet monetary companies firm. (Sure, his fixation on that letter goes again greater than 20 years.) In 2000, X.com merged with software program firm Confinity, which was renamed PayPal in 2001. PayPal had a profitable IPO in February 2002 and, in July of that 12 months, was acquired by eBay. In line with CNN, this deal netted Musk, PayPal’s largest shareholder, $165 million, though the determine could also be larger.
All through the 2000s, 2010s, and 2020s—lengthy after the dot-com bubble burst in March 2000—Musk continued to leapfrog from tech firm to tech firm, consolidating his wealth. In 2012, he first made it to the Forbes billionaires checklist. By 2020, his internet price surpassed that of Mark Zuckerberg and Invoice Gates. Whereas most early dot-com wealth was erased, the bubble additionally propelled a brand new class of mega-billionaires to energy. If you happen to survived the early-2000s crash, you benefited enormously—and acquired to reside by way of an extended period of low rates of interest after the 2008 financial crash that seemingly made you even richer. In 2024, the dot-com bubble has been largely memory-holed, however Musk, maybe its largest beneficiary, stays.
The dot-com bubble was a cultural occasion as a lot as an financial one. The press provided up glowing profiles of younger start-up founders like Musk. It was this press protection that helped create the trope of the start-up founder within the common creativeness: a younger, bold, Bay Space nerd whose pure love of science and expertise is justly rewarded with monumental wealth. The founder was surrounded by a utopian glow. He promised that the expertise he was harnessing would do outstanding, transformative issues (that it might additionally do horrible issues was not often talked about). The way in which the media talked concerning the web was giddy—giddy concerning the expertise and, above all, giddy concerning the wealth it was creating.
A 1999 CNN segment exhibits a younger Elon Musk receiving a McLaren he ordered to have a good time the Zip2 acquisition. “Again in ’95, there weren’t very many individuals on the web,” Musk says, summarizing how he went from showering on the Y to purchasing a $1 million limited-edition automobile. “And definitely no one was making any cash in any respect. Most individuals thought the web was going to be a fad.”
Because the automobile is unloaded from a supply truck, Musk, in his ill-fitting blazer, watches. He seems boyish, dumbstruck. “Wow,” he says to his then-girlfriend. “I can’t consider it’s really right here. Fairly wild, man.”
There’s a photograph—broadly circulated on social media—that shows Elon Musk and Peter Thiel in 2000. They every lean on one aspect of a boxy desktop pc, smiling sheepishly. Thiel wears a pink and blue striped rugby shirt, and Musk wears a blue button-up. Musk, not but 30, has a receding hairline and chipmunk cheeks. The 2 males look innocent, even cute. They don’t seem like they need to platform white nationalists, intestine the federal authorities, or bring indentured servitude to Mars.
The media lovefest prolonged lengthy after the dot-com bubble burst—certainly, it outlasted most of the firms lauded by the press throughout that first on-line increase. Musk routinely made visitor appearances on TV exhibits aimed toward nerdy, vaguely liberal viewers. He had a cameo on The Simpsons in January 2015, on The Large Bang Concept in November 2015, and on the Large Bang Concept spin-off Younger Sheldon in November 2017. As late as 2019, he appeared on Rick and Morty. Final fall, Walter Isaacson—hagiographic biographer of Steve Jobs, amongst others—launched a largely laudatory biography of Musk that hailed him as a brand new titan of business.
Such a media protection—each of Musk particularly and of Large Tech extra typically—papered over the truth that Silicon Valley has, for many years, been a hotbed of right-wing ideology, eugenics, and antidemocratic sentiment. It’s no coincidence that Elon Musk is obsessed with IQ and human copy: Stanford College, situated within the coronary heart of Silicon Valley, was a hotbed of early eugenics analysis and exercise within the early twentieth century, as Malcolm Harris described in his e-book Palo Alto.
Just lately, The New York Instances reported that Musk has provided his semen to acquaintances in an effort to enhance the nationwide start charge (a declare Musk has denied). Once more, there’s a actual by way of line right here. Beginning within the late Nineteen Seventies, optometrist Robert Graham started a sperm financial institution for Nobel laureates and folks with excessive IQs, chock-full of emissions from Silicon Valley luminaries. Amongst them was Silicon Valley godfather William Shockley, who believed that Black folks had been much less clever than white folks.
The conservative Hoover Establishment was based at Stanford in 1919 by alumnus Herbert Hoover, who’s most well-known for his presidential administration’s libertarian nonresponse to the Nice Despair. All through the 20 th and twenty-first centuries, the Hoover Establishment has performed a key position in staffing Republican presidential administrations and in incubating conservative insurance policies that focus wealth and energy within the fingers of a tiny minority. In the meantime, Silicon Valley has lengthy been deeply entwined with the US navy.
As we speak, a few of Musk’s liberal followers have felt betrayed by what feels, to them, like a heel flip.
“I believed you had been rational, Elon,” wrote my very own grandmother in a latest Fb submit denouncing him. It’s a typical sufficient sentiment. Musk’s affiliation with expertise and his media-created public picture as a type of real-life Tony Stark—an excellent, edgy inventor who was however centered on the general public good—brought on many to see him as an ally, or at the least as somebody curious about constructing a greater world.
My grandmother is a straight-ticket Democratic voter who had a profitable profession as a pc coder in Palo Alto and D.C. earlier than retiring within the early 2000s. She was additionally, till only in the near past, an Elon Musk superfan, believing him (and Silicon Valley extra typically) to be synonymous with the reason for science and expertise, which, to her and plenty of different liberals, are additionally synonymous with progressive values. My grandmother hates Trump and now struggles to make sense of the truth that her favourite public determine simply helped her least favourite public determine get reelected.
However “Darkish MAGA Elon” isn’t a brand new id. It’s not even a change of route. Musk is just revealing his true nature. And it’s not simply him. Peter Thiel has long criticized democracy, funded right-wing causes, and even complained about ladies’s suffrage. And unique dot-com poster boy Marc Andreessen, who now runs probably the most influential enterprise capital corporations within the business, released what’s mainly a techno-authoritarian-futurist manifesto in 2023. Then, this previous summer time, Andreessen introduced he would endorse Trump. Twenty-five years after the dot-com bubble, the masks is lastly off of Silicon Valley. What we’re seeing now from Elon and others is its true face.
