Crack-Up Capitalism: How Billionaire Elon Musk’s Extremism Is Shaping Trump Admin & Global Politics

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

Tech billionaire Elon Musk posted a poll early this morning on X asking, quote, “America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government — Yes or No?” The question was part of a series of misinformation-filled posts on Musk’s X social media platform that led The New York Times to report Musk, quote, “appears intent on exercising the same influence in European countries that he did during the American presidential election,” unquote.

Over the past few days, Musk lashed out at the U.K.’s Labour government, also trashed a U.K. politician he had formerly backed, the anti-immigrant populist Nigel Farage with the far-right Reform UK party. Musk’s change of heart came after Farage refused to support the release from prison of far-right, anti-immigrant, Islamophobic activist Tommy Robinson. Meanwhile, Musk also falsely accused U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer of failing to prosecute child rapists, and supported a post on X that urged King Charles to dissolve the British Parliament and call elections to remove the Labour government.

This comes after Elon Musk also backed Germany’s far-right, anti-immigrant party AfD for next month’s elections and is set to host a live discussion on X with its candidate for chancellor. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz responded to Musk’s endorsements, saying, quote, “I don’t believe in courting Mr. Musk’s favor. I’m happy to leave that to others. The rule is: don’t feed the troll,” he said.

Meanwhile, here in the United States, the richest man in the world — that’s Elon Musk — donated more than a quarter of a billion dollars to President-elect Trump’s campaign. He’s now shaping policy for the incoming administration. And it’s believed he’s made, since the election, over $200 billion. Musk attended a New Year’s Eve gala at Mar-a-Lago alongside Trump and has joined him on a number of calls with foreign leaders. Musk will co-head Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Last month, Musk played a key role in pushing Republican lawmakers to kill a short-term government spending deal at the last minute. Musk also got Trump’s support for backing H-1B visas for highly skilled workers despite opposition from Trump’s anti-immigrant base.

Meanwhile, on Friday, the Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist Ann Telnaes quit The Washington Post after her editors rejected a cartoon depicting billionaires genuflecting to President-elect Trump. She says it was the first time since she began working at the Post in 2008 she had a cartoon killed because of who or what she chose to aim her pen at. A draft of the cartoon depicts Big Tech owners kneeling at Trump’s feet [offering] up sacks of cash, among them Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos. Just two months ago, the Post featured Ann Telnaes in a video celebrating her work.

ANN TELNAES: I mean, just look at all the autocrats that hate editorial cartoonists. I mean, not in this country, hopefully, but in — you know, a lot of my colleagues overseas are thrown in jail for doing cartoons about powerful people. … A lot of people don’t realize that, you know, we’re journalists. We’re opinion journalists, but we are journalists. And that is our job as editorial cartoonists: to bring up sometimes uncomfortable truths.

AMY GOODMAN: On Friday, Ann Telnaes published an online post titled “Why I’m quitting the Washington Post,” in which she writes, quote, “I will not stop holding truth to power through my cartooning, because as they say, ‘Democracy dies in darkness.’” Of course, she is citing The Washington Post’s motto.

This comes after Jeff Bezos prevented The Washington Post from endorsing Kamala Harris for president and as Amazon’s Prime Video service announced it’s acquired exclusive licensing rights to a new behind-the-scenes documentary about first lady Melania Trump. Amazon also plans to donate $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund and said it would stream the event on Prime Video as a separate in-kind donation worth another million dollars.

For more, we spend the rest of the hour with a person who’s documented the power of Big Tech billionaires and the new techs, specifically, among others, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world. Quinn Slobodian is professor of international history at Boston University. His latest book is Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy. He’s written several pieces for The New Statesman on Elon Musk, including one headlined “Elon Musk’s death drive.” Slobodian also recently contributed to The New York Review of Books running symposium about the reelection of Donald Trump, “The Return of Trump—II.” He’s joining us from Boston, just back from the American Historical Association annual gathering here in New York.

Professor Slobodian, welcome to Democracy Now! The power of Elon Musk cannot be underestimated, from here in the United States — and we’re going to talk about the Trump administration — well, many are calling him, of course, “President Musk” and “Vice President Donald Trump” — to, well, the latest kerfuffle in Britain and his support for the AfD in Germany. If you can talk about the significance of all of this?

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Yeah, it’s a pretty extraordinary situation to find ourselves in, right? I mean, if you think back to 2017, there was a lot of concern and attention to the efforts of Steve Bannon to create a kind of transatlantic coalition of far-right actors and parties. Imagine now here we are only a few years later, and there’s a Bannon-like figure but who also happens to be the wealthiest man in the world, overseeing some of the most profitable companies in the planet, who is leading that sort of effort to create a transatlantic coalition. So, the stakes are much, much higher. They are being dealt with with perhaps even less kind of care than someone like Bannon, which is an extraordinary thing to say. But Musk, I think, has entered this field of politics as a kind of scaled-up version of his video game play, with no real thought to the kind of consequences of the disruptive effects that he’s creating, from here to Britain to Germany and beyond.

AMY GOODMAN: And let’s talk specifically about the conversation we’re having on this day, on January 6th, when the vice president, Kamala Harris, who presides over the Senate, will essentially certify her own loss, and this fourth anniversary of what took place January 6th, 2021.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Well, I think that, you know, the January 6 is apropos for a couple reasons. One is kind of silly but also meaningful, which is, if you look at the character that Musk uses when he plays the game Diablo IV, which he describes as giving him life lessons and allowing him to see the matrix, the guy kind of looks quite a bit like the QAnon shaman, so well known from January 6. So, January 6, in a way, kind of, I think, opened this new era in American politics where the kind of surreal, fringe, often online communities have sort of entered the world of sort of high politics and have scrambled the kind of coordinates of average rules of the game and the normal sort of protocols. I think that Musk is someone who is really a product of that kind of crossover effect, where building up a kind of huge online community, building up the sort of status as a global media influencer, has now the capacity to actually shatter existing coalitions, shatter existing standards of what normal politics is. And his connections now to people like Nigel Farage, until recently, Tommy Robinson, the AfD, Giorgia Meloni, these are signs of kind of a willingness to shatter existing traditional party systems, to embrace disruption kind of for its own sake, and to really harness especially the power of the internet to make possible things that had been previously impossible, so to make certain forms of speech possible, to make certain forms of mobilization possible, and to make things like, you know, the attempted coup d’état in January 6 something that could actually be followed through to its conclusion.

And I think that, you know, the kind of — the horizon of what the kind of politics in real life that someone like Musk is aiming at is broadcast by him frequently on his own Twitter account. Most recently, for example, he celebrated Nayib Bukele, the leader in El Salvador, as having done something that has happened in El Salvador and will happen and must happen in the United States, which, in El Salvador, has been to imprison 2% of the adult population as an absolutely draconian way of cracking down on crime. So, this vision of sort of authoritarian strongman on politics, sort of gloves-off mass incarceration crackdowns, on the one hand, and then a deregulatory kind of unleashing of the free market, on the other hand, is — produced this kind of curious combination of, on the one hand, Elon Musk posting Milton Friedman memes all the time, on the other hand, scaremongering about the, quote-unquote, “genocidal rape tactics” of nonwhite immigrants in the U.K. So, he’s produced this sort of surreal effect, I think, of sort of the strong state and the free market turning the sort of Thatcherist vision, grafting it onto all kinds of online aesthetics and kind of video game dynamics in ways that have really, I think, blindsided, for good reason, sort of mainstream, normal politicians, like Olaf Scholz, Keir Starmer, Biden-Harris, who don’t know how to deal with this kind of chaotic energy, which, unfortunately, has a huge amount of legitimacy behind it, not only his multimillion-dollar — or, multimillion number of followers on social media.

But keep in mind, I mean, he oversees Tesla, which is a car company that is worth more than all the other car companies in the world combined, whose valuation has gone vertical since Trump’s election, whose stocks are held in the portfolios of many, many, many Democrats who might otherwise find Musk, as a person, and his politics objectionable. So, he is a kind of a locomotive who has sort of attached himself to the very dynamics of both the online sort of meme market, but also the very much offline stock market, in ways that makes him hard to reckon with and hard to actually oppose.

AMY GOODMAN: Your most recent piece for The New Statesman is headlined “Elon Musk wants us to have more children: Is demography the new front line of the culture wars?” Explain.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Well, this is really a fixation of Musk that echoes throughout other Silicon Valley thinkers, too, which is a fear that demographic decline is coming more quickly than many of us realize. And that gets read in sort of two ways. On the one hand, as he frequently says, you know, there will be no human civilization if there are no humans. So there’s this kind of universal fear of the reality of sort of long-term slowing birth rates leading to literally fewer humans on Earth.

But more importantly for him is particular humans on Earth. So, if you look at the kind of conversations he’s had, especially in Italy with members of the Brothers of Italy, the fascist-derived party from which — you know, which Meloni now heads, the fear is the loss of populations of a discrete culture. So he’s worried about the decline of particular European civilizations, particular European cultures, the Italian culture, the British culture. He has endorsed the “great replacement” theory, this notion that liberal politicians are encouraging immigration from nonwhite populations to build their own support, but also, too, to kind of dilute and disorient the native or autochthonous population. So, his pronatalism is not a kind of a general one that sort of hopes that humans can propagate themselves to produce hopefully more solutions to human problems, but it’s the defense of particular human populations which he sees as endowed with more capacity for kind of economic productivity, economic intelligence and sort of economic performance.

So, his immigration policy and his immigration language is now — in the last two weeks has taken a very hard-right turn. Many people have noticed that. In December, you could have seen him still posting about meritocracy and the idea that anyone can make it in the United States if they work hard enough. Since January 1st, almost exactly, the stream of his posts has been dominated by the faces of men who have been charged with sexual crimes, who are from Muslim-majority countries. He is doing everything he can to sort of hype up very clearly racially coded fear of sexual assault and crimes coming from immigrants on non-Western backgrounds, and pairing that with this idea of immigrants from non-Western backgrounds as sort of welfare dependents who are not feeding into the mainstream economy. So, his demographic fears are very much also part of his kind of hard crime, hard borders policy that is now starting to come to the fore as his primary talking point.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you something. I’m looking at a piece in the Financial Times. “Elon Musk lived in apartheid South Africa until he was 17. David Sacks, the venture capitalist who has become a fundraiser for Donald Trump and a troll [of] Ukraine, left aged five, and grew up in a South African diaspora family in Tennessee. Peter Thiel spent years of childhood in South Africa and Namibia, where his father was involved in uranium mining as part of the apartheid regime’s clandestine drive to acquire nuclear weapons. And Paul Furber, an obscure South African software developer and tech journalist living near Johannesburg, has been identified by two teams of forensic linguists as the originator of the QAnon conspiracy, which helped shape Trump’s Maga movement. (Furber denies being ‘Q’.) In short, four of Maga’s most influential voices are fiftysomething white men with formative experiences in apartheid South Africa.” Can you comment on this, Professor Slobodian?

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Absolutely. This is something I’ve written about in a couple of my books. The centrality of southern Africa for the far right and for neoliberals is quite extraordinary. Rhodesia, of course, has been seen as a kind of a lost cause for the hard right. People might remember Dylann Roof, the far-right mass murderer, talking about his allegiance to the Rhodesian cause. South Africa, in the time of apartheid, was seen as a kind of a last bulwark against the Black socialism of postcolonial Africa. In the time of transition, in the time of Mandela, in the move to “one person, one vote” universal suffrage, in the end of apartheid, it was cast by the far right and by sort of libertarians and neoliberals as a kind of prosperous site of gold production and manufacturing that was now under assault by a socialist, Black-majority government, the ANC.

And for Musk himself, the experience of growing up there with a very authoritarian, dictatorial father was a very dystopian one, from the way that his biographer recounts it. There’s memories that he recounts, perhaps a little bit gleefully, and perhaps through fabrication, of sort of walking through puddles of blood on the way to rock concerts. He saw it as a kind of a social Darwinist, sort of all-against-all-type environment, which I think has now very much implanted into his mind. I think he discovers that again in the online world of brutal, so-called dungeon-crawling video games, where he spends much of his time, and also in the kind of cyberpunk world of science fiction and films and novels.

So, I think that extrapolation, which is in part based on the reality of very intense intercommunal conflict, but also becomes something that he can kind of embrace to kind of give — to permit his own sort of vision of nihilism, really, and this belief that all alliances are kind of provisional, you need to defend your own. As we know, he’s sort of been clear about sort of building compounds to which he can retreat, expanding his own genetic pool through, you know, a very large family, using the federal government when it’s useful, you know, tapping into federal budgets, becoming effectively a techno contractor for NASA through SpaceX, selling his services as Starlink, but always, I think, very much with this exit end game in mind, the same way that many people in South Africa have their own kind of gated communities into which they can withdraw, if they can afford it, with their own water systems and their own sort of power supplies. This kind of Octavia Butler Parable of the Sower-type reality is one that someone like Musk has sort of sadistically embraced in a way.

And I think that his sort of accelerationism, by which he makes alliances recklessly, one after the other, with whichever kind of far-right politician appears on his video feed and has a kind of a distinctive appearance — you know, Tommy Robinson does look like he might have stepped out of a video game. Naomi Seibt, the Alternative for Germany influencer, who he has done so much to boost, sort of cultivates this sort of anime-like appearance. So, I think that, for Musk and Thiel and others, the experience of apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa has, for them, filled this role of a kind of a bad future, which is also inevitable and from which they have to just do everything they can to kind of, you know, hunker down and shield themselves, while also tapping into, of course, the extraordinary profits that are available in doing things like providing surveillance systems, as Palantir does, Thiel’s company; providing weapon systems, as Anduril does, the Palmer Luckey-owned company that Thiel helped back; and the various other ways that the old-fashioned military-industrial complex, I think, is now just being extended with a new kind of Silicon Valley kind of headquarters.

AMY GOODMAN: And then you have Elon Musk changing his symbol on X — and if you can explain — with Pepe the Frog, which was appropriated by right-wing groups, classified as a hate symbol by anti-hate groups due to its frequent use in racist and antisemitic contexts. The term “kek,” a variation of ”LOL,” originated in the online gaming world, frequently used by identitarian right internet users and trolls, BBC reporting Southern Poverty Law Center linked “kek” to a “virtual white nationalist god”? What is going on here?

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Well, this part of it is very much a kind of a replay of the 2016-’17 kind of moment, right? I mean, we all remember when people like Richard Spencer were getting a lot of attention for propagating these memes of Pepe the Frog, using the emoji of a glass of milk to signify whiteness. And so, there is this kind of a very adolescent and juvenile level of kind of provocation, that is well characterized, I think, by Olaf Scholz as trollishness, that Musk, again, in his somehow middle-aged, you know, third or fourth adolescence, still manages to kind of embrace and take a kind of childlike pleasure in. And I think it’s actually probably not a good idea to focus too much on, you know, the number of Pepe the Frog memes that he has posted or whatever. I think these are, more or less, surface froth and distraction from the more serious interventions. I think that —

AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s talk about —

QUINN SLOBODIAN: — Alternative for Germany is — 

AMY GOODMAN: — those serious interventions, and specifically as we move — 

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — into the second Trump presidency with Elon Musk — 

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — wielding so much power. What do you expect to see from Trump II?

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Well, as far as Musk’s role in it, I mean, he himself has been openly inspired by not just Bukele, as I mentioned, but also, looking further southward, Javier Milei in Argentina, you know, frequently endorsed him. Trump also has met Milei. And there’s a kind of sense that Milei has, for someone like Musk, sort of given us an example in advance of how you can realize your kind of technolibertarian vision through authoritarian statist means, which seems paradoxical but actually perhaps isn’t. So, if you look at what Milei has done, I think it could help us to sort of understand what Musk might be proposing, at least, and that Trump might help carry out.

So, what kind of things have taken the brunt under Milei? Well, it’s been things like universities, the freezing of the inflation increases for university funding, the freezing of other forms of scientific research, the freezing of the right to protest and collectively bargain, the elimination of cultural programs, the crackdown on other forms of public expression. And these are, I think, you know, previews of the things that in the sort of solutionist mindset, the engineering mindset of someone like Musk, all forms of endeavor that aren’t aimed at cracking this one central wicked problem, whether it’s space travel or the expansion of the military budget, are forms of waste.

So I think that we’ll see a kind of a redirection of funding, obviously, towards hard research and the slashing of funding to things seen as superficial — forms of entitlement, forms of education and research. Those, I think, are the things that probably an austerity-minded Democrat could advocate as much as an austerity-minded Republican, and it’s probably where they’ll be able to create kind of alliances. I think that the attack on free speech in the course of the protests over Gaza since October 6th have given us a kind of a preview of how unwilling Democrats, as well as Republicans, are to actually stand up for the right of academic investigation and expression in this country, and I think that universities will really be the kind of soft targets for many of those early cuts.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you so much for being with us, Quinn Slobodian, professor of international history at Boston University. His latest book is Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy. We’ll link to your articles on Musk for The New Statesman.

That does it for our show. We want to thank everyone for helping to make this broadcast possible.