The Rise of Elon Musk
Could he be MAGA's kryptonite?
In a few short months, Elon Musk has become an almost omnipresent force in our lives. The world’s richest man, with a net worth of more than $400 billion earned from Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, X, and other investments, is the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, a completely made-up “department” created ostensibly to reduce government waste. Instead, it appears to be the vehicle by which Musk is quite literally taking over the federal government before our eyes.
After helping Trump win reelection, Musk wasted no time establishing his dominance in Washington, using his social media platform to manipulate public opinion and bully public officials. Because DOGE is set up outside the federal government, Musk isn’t subject to conflict of interest laws or to oversight by anyone besides Donald Trump, who has given him wide latitude to do whatever he wants as a “special government employee”. It’s been a remarkably effective strategy, which may be why Musk is getting away with what he’s been doing since the inauguration.
Make no mistake, under normal rules, this is all illegal: commandeering the federal payment system by force, installing a team of neo-Nazi GenZ hackers, and unilaterally shutting down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). He also reportedly has big plans for the Treasury—namely, tanking the dollar to convert us to a blockchain system. It would make a hell of a movie script, but it’s our reality. It’s also a constitutional emergency.
Maybe in the long run this is a good thing. Hear me out. Everyone in anti-Trump world has war stories from trying to converse with a MAGA loved one about Trump. These discussions tend to go off the rails quickly. But Elon Musk? He’s a potential chink in the armor, the Achilles heel that reveals MAGA for what it always has been: an anti-American movement led by a conman.
Has there ever been a bigger comic book villain in our times than Musk, short of Trump himself? The one-time Democrat turned “dark gothic MAGA”, QAnon promoter, neo-Nazi supporter, and now junta leader has been called “evil” by everyone from Steve Bannon to the EU’s rule-of-law chief. That’s quite a range. I would argue that Musk’s ubiquitous presence in MAGA opens up new, persuasive avenues of debate that can help us build resistance to this administration among Americans, even those who are otherwise inclined to support Trump.