09.01.2025

Rockets and ressentiment

What on earth is he up to? Paul Demarty investigates the life and times of a half-mad billionaire

Elon Musk has been having a strange couple of weeks.

What should have been a victory march to the office of the memeified government department created specially for him and fellow capitalist eccentric, Vivek Ramaswamy, has been somewhat marred by a great controversy the two unwittingly sparked over high-skilled immigration. Suddenly, all the nice friendly racists Musk has cheerfully promoted over the past year or two by manipulating the X - formerly Twitter - algorithm began to shellac him and his friends continuously for weeks. It’s a rough old time for a man so obviously and pathetically dependent on the approval of others.

Meanwhile, he has turned his attention - and his chequebook - to Europe. He seems eager to back Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD), the German far-right outfit already running high in the polls, as that country approaches fresh Bundestag elections. He had also mooted throwing financial muscle behind Nigel Farage’s Reform party in this country, but suddenly seems to have cooled his attitude to Farage, who is unwilling to join him in designating Tommy Robinson a political prisoner. Musk now claims that Reform needs a new leader.

All of this is of a piece with his recent public statements - almost all on his social media fiefdom - that have grown increasingly indistinguishable from those of any other far-right ranter (barring the H1B fracas). He is suddenly obsessed - as the right is once more - with grooming gangs, accusing Jess Phillips and Keir Starmer of being “rape genocide apologists” and so on (an accusation clearly only intelligible in the light of ‘white genocide’ conspiracy theories).

The pace of Musk’s radicalisation has been remarkable. Given his current profile, as a screwloose frothing racist, it is sobering to remember that, for most of his career in the public eye he has barely shown any political interests at all - at least, beyond those that directly fill his pockets. He bought Twitter, but the casual and pervasive insanity of that platform seems to have eaten away at his mind in a couple of short years. Previously, he was little more than a technocratic neoliberal with certain techno-utopian leanings. Now he cheerfully chats back and forth with white nationalist anonymous posters, or ‘anons’ (at least he did until the visa disputes split him from them).

Degeneration

The story of this man’s degeneration is, unsurprisingly, linked with the degeneration of the surrounding political culture, which had to degenerate to a certain point for him to become famous in the first place, and then again, further, to drag him into the abyss of racist idiocy. He is remarkable only for insisting that none of the rest of us miss his ‘evolution’.

Musk is hardly a self-made man. We are reminded of Bertell Ollman’s parable of capital accumulation:

A young reporter asked a leading capitalist how he made his fortune. “It was really quite simple”, the capitalist answered. “I bought an apple for 5 cents, spent the evening polishing it, and sold it the next day for 10 cents. With this I bought two apples, spent the evening polishing them, and sold them for 20. And so it went until I amassed 80. It was at this point that my wife’s father died and left us a million dollars”.

Elon was born to a bourgeois family in apartheid South Africa, with links to the liberal Progressive Party - effectively a loyal opposition to the ruling National Party. His father Errol made a great deal of his money as a dealer of emeralds from various mines in the country. His childhood seems not to have been terrifically happy. His parents divorced early in his life, and he lived with his father, with whom he had a tempestuous relationship. He struggled socially at a series of miserable-sounding schools, as kids on the autistic spectrum usually did in those days. But he also grew up at a time when computer education meant learning to code, to hack, to tinker: activities for which he showed an early and considerable aptitude.

As a young adult, he moved first to Canada (his mother was Canadian, making the immigration process easier), and then to Silicon Valley, in the first florid days of the dot-com bubble. He made a fair packet of money selling his first start-up to the PC manufacturer Compaq, and then created something he called X.com (“.com” having become de rigeur for the branding of ambitious start-ups by then), an attempt to create a sprawling platform for various banking and financial purposes. It was hopelessly unfocused, but appeared at the same time as Peter Thiel’s PayPal, with which it merged. Thiel later offloaded Musk in a boardroom coup - he was always the weak link in the so-called ‘PayPal mafia’ that looms large in the Valley to this day - but in the process, Musk became extremely rich indeed.

Finance was never really Musk’s obsession, however. He had been weaned on golden-age science fiction; payments would never have the same appeal as the things we know him for today (revolutionary automobiles, rockets, satellites, eccentric infrastructural conjectures). By 2001, he was already numbered among those who took the colonisation of Mars as a serious goal, and after failing to purchase ICBMs from Russia (strange to think that this was once a plausible business opportunity …), he decided to make his own damn rockets for the purpose, founding SpaceX. A few years later, he became an investor in a young electric car company called Tesla, and rapidly set himself up as the chairman and CEO.

This is, more or less, the Musk I first encountered, when I was making my first steps into a software engineering career early in the next decade. I can say, without claiming any particular foresight, that I always found him a slightly ridiculous figure. From a general Marxist outlook, it is increasingly hard to take any CEO’s self-image seriously, when capital is today so extensively socialised by the operation of great institutional investors. There is always something of the shabbily performative about them: middle managers dressed up as Roman emperors for the office Christmas party; and never more so than in those days in the wake of the great crash, when the role of such institutions and above all the capitalist state was more obvious than ever.

Elon, however, was perfectly poised for the general culture of the tech industry at the time. A long period where the prevailing ideological trend was essentially right-wing libertarianism was about to hit its first major challenge, when American corporate culture as a whole got its ‘social justice’ makeover. The direct agents of this change were those layers of society commonly called today the ‘professional managerial class’ (I leave aside theoretical difficulties with the term here), paradigmatically the watchmen and women of the human resources department.

Hive mind

At this time, however, the tech hive mind divided as well. There is a certain disastrous failure scenario in networked software systems called ‘split-brain’, when one half of the system completely loses contact with the other. Something like that happened to the great, networked, ‘wetware’ (ie, human) system of tech culture. One half stuck with the old libertarianism; the other half adopted what were increasingly the prevailing values of the broader professional class. Discussions, in the break room and especially on the key forums like Hacker News, Twitter and the relevant parts of Reddit, became tense.

One could imagine Musk ‘breaking bad’ under these conditions; but he was actually in a fairly good position to ride it out. After all, by now, his main business interest was in electric cars; he was a protagonist in the green transition, after a fashion, a matter about which the ‘social justice warriors’ cared a great deal. He was also a larger-than-life John Galt character, to satisfy the older cadre of libertarians, among whom one increasingly found the army of Elon superfans. With no countervailing pressure, a cult of personality could grow around him. He achieved his celebrity then.

It was fuelled by every SpaceX rocket launch, every new Tesla, every promise to build a ‘hyperloop’ (a spectacularly idiotic attempt to split the difference between private car operation and mass transit, that has led nowhere at vast, wasteful expense). Musk put himself front and centre of all these flashy launches. In a way, he was right to do so. Despite his awkwardness as a social actor, one could never doubt his enthusiasm - he sunk so much of his own money into hopeless boondoggles, be it hyperloops or Mars colonies. He was across all the details, and no wonder - it really was (and remains) his dream, far more than the infinite riches he had acquired from his glancing blow at PayPal.

Sometimes it could trip him up. When a young football team was stranded in a flooding cave complex in Thailand in 2018, Musk loudly set up a quixotic rescue effort via mini-submarine, with the Thai authorities attempting to ward him off; the rescue was in the end carried off by British and Australian divers, one of whom became so incensed by Musk’s interference that he told Musk to “stick his submarine where it hurts”. Musk bizarrely retorted by accusing this man of paedophilia, leading to court cases and an apology; but also the first real indication since his fame that he was capable of extremely strange behaviour under provocation.

From there, it perhaps seemed to mount up - the serial and strangely asexual marriages, which nonetheless produced children with names so strange that Michael Jackson might have thought it a bit much; the semi-competent meme-mongering; the enthusiasm for various idiotic cryptocurrencies; the endless, endless Twitter posting, some of which brought him to the brink of official investigations for share price manipulation.

By now, his fans were a small army, but they could never be enough. So it was throughout the culture: it was no longer enough for the ‘Bey-hive’ that Beyoncé should be popular, or for the Swifties that Taylor Swift should be popular, or for the Marvel fanboys that every successive movie should make a billion dollars. The fact that anyone at all demurred from this enthusiasm remained a stain on their enjoyment, and had to be fought with the tenacity of a medieval crusade. So it was with Elon himself: everyone who didn’t buy into his preferred self-image became the enemy - the Saladin of his own crusade.

Twitter

This seems to have driven him to his hostile takeover of Twitter, which - after tech stocks tanked following the Russian invasion of Ukraine - became a strange hostile takeover in reverse, with Twitter’s investors holding him in the courts to a stock price which was by now ludicrously inflated. Having taken over, there followed a massacre of jobs at the firm, with something like 80% of employees being nudged on to pastures new. (It is believed that most of those remaining were on precisely the kind of H1B contracts, which effectively indenture workers to their employers, that got him and Ramaswamy into such hot water last week.)

Elon promised a new dawn of free speech on the platform, which in reality panned out as a restoration of the accounts of various banned right-wingers who had fallen foul of the ‘social justice’-tinged ancien régime. He rolled out a subscription plan which effectively boosted these voices at the expense of the previous ultra-liberal power-posters. The place is still fun, to be fair, but its main channels are undoubtedly now sluices of bizarre racist poison. Over the course of his ownership of the platform, Musk has achieved his final form - a credulous chauvinist ranter, whose science-fictional fantasies - charming or infuriating according to taste - are drowned out by pure ressentiment.

You could write this off as a cautionary tale about a single individual, and it would not be wholly stupid to do so - Citizen Kane, but with space travel instead of opera. Citizen Kane, after all, is a communist fellow-traveller’s merciless autopsy of the capitalist mind of his own day, not the less human for it. Capitalists must find their place within the system as much as workers, and while their lives are infinitely more comfortable and rewarded, they are not terribly freer. This was put acutely by Max Horkheimer in the late 1920s. Someone might

ask an acquaintance for a job in his firm … But his acquaintance knits his brow and says that that is objectively impossible. Business is bad, he says, and he’s even been obliged to let many employees go. The man should not be angry with him, for it is not within his power, his freedom doesn’t extend that far. The businessman is subject to laws which neither he nor anyone else nor any power with such a mandate created with purpose and deliberation … Boom, bust, inflation, wars and even the qualities of things and human beings the present society demands are a function of such laws, of the anonymous social reality, just as the rotation of the earth expresses the laws of dead nature. No single individual can do anything about them.¹

In Horkheimer’s sketch, the capitalist acquaintance acquiesces, stoically, to the reality of his situation. But it might go the other way - an endless raging against the obstacles endlessly ranged against him. Thus the increasing irrationality of Musk, his absorption into far-right conspiracy theories that would embarrass a Tommy Robinson-style football hooligan.

Yet we are not, in the end, only talking about him. He is, after all, part of a ‘mafia’, whose long-time capo di tutti capi is Thiel, a hardened far-right ideologue. Thiel, unlike Musk, is a man with some facility for the humanities, which he picked up from the eccentric French Catholic philosopher René Girard at Stanford University. His worldview is often caricatured as libertarian, but there have always been more than markets at work in his mind - he sees society as ineluctably stratified between an elect elite and an inert mass, but prone to mass outbursts of revenge powered by Girard’s mimetic desire. This crew also includes David Sacks, not any kind of serious intellectual but a prominent online provocateur.

The broader Silicon Valley and tech elite has tacked in their direction recently, having previously been unambiguously a funding bulwark of the Democratic Party. Marc Andreessen, a top-tier venture capitalist, became a prominent convert to the Donald Trump camp; other, smaller fry have followed. Those who were always Republican on the QT while ‘social justice’ was ascendant are more open about it now; those who truly have their eye only on their percentage (Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos, for example) are mending fences with the right. Musk may seem like a uniquely aberrant case, but his madness seems to have a rationality shared by his ‘saner’ colleagues.

Dependency

This rationality is rooted in precisely the thing that Musk’s heroic, Edisonian self-image cannot really grasp. These tech businesses are fundamentally dependent on the state. This dependency is expressed in many ways, but we could mention with respect to Musk that one cannot simply launch satellites into space on a whim; SpaceX, once we get beyond all the guff about colonising Mars, is a standard issue military-industrial contractor. Tesla’s healthy bottom line, meanwhile, is in large part thanks to the subsidy of carbon credits - Tesla makes an electric vehicle, and thus gets a certain amount of carbon credits, which can then be sold to (say) Ford so the latter can offset the production of giant gas-guzzling killdozers.

A useful point of comparison would be Bezos. His fortune is in the same ballpark as Musk’s; he, too, has a thing about outer space. Where they differ is their outward affect - Bezos is not a self-promoter in the same way, and it is hard to imagine him having a public meltdown. Yet his business, too, is dependent on government contracts (for Amazon Web Services and other things), and on government indulgence (when he aggressively union-busts). And so Bezos’s one major political intervention in recent years was to prevent his Washington Post from endorsing Kamala Harris. He wants to be inside the tent: and why wouldn’t he? There’s a lot of money at stake … So he makes nice, and doesn’t let his pride get the best of him. The unfreedom of social constraints described by Horkheimer is a small price to pay for going to outer space in a rocket more than usually shaped like a giant penis.

The Twitter purchase is likely to have been financially disastrous for Musk, but the worst consequence was to grant him a strange playground for social experiments in which he would be relentlessly exposed to feedback from his test subjects. This seems to have pushed him over the edge. In Britain, we find him currently inescapable, as he has succeeded in reviving the grooming gangs scandal - a quite genuinely dismal catalogue of failures on the part of the British state, of course, about which nothing meaningful has been done. He seems to believe he can cause the downfall of the Starmer government by setting himself up as a far-right sugar daddy; I have my doubts, and as I write it does not look like he will be successful in offloading Farage from the Reform leadership, but these are strange people, so who knows?

Perhaps more important is the question: how long will Trump put up with this? In the H1B controversy, Trump backed Musk and Ramaswamy, and thus more or less silenced their critics. The time will come soon, however, when he is back in power and trying to impose those deals he likes so much on other countries. A half-mad tech billionaire frothing away about regime change on Twitter at 5am will, sooner or later, prove a liability.

There is not much the rest of us can do except watch. After all, our politics is laughably vulnerable to the corrupting influence of rich men with time on their hands. That is - in the tech cliche - a feature, not a bug. It’s how the system works, and it cannot very easily be fixed without the unacceptable risk of political parties emerging, whether of right or left, that are not pre-emptively subordinated to British state interests and, by extension, the interests of the US. Even if Musk’s attempts to suborn our politics are ultimately doomed, he can do a lot of damage along the way.

1. Dawn and decline, translator Michael Shaw, Continuum 1978, p50.↩︎