Hints that Elon Musk and Donald Trump are working their way toward an alliance have been increasing for months. Trump has wanted to tap Musk’s billions to solve some of his fiscal problems—like the hundreds of millions he owes after being found liable for fraud, sexual assault, and defamation.
As The Wall Street Journal reports, Musk might be offering something that Trump finds even more attractive than his bottomless wallet. Because Musk, along with fellow billionaire Nelson Peltz, is offering Trump a shiny new “data-driven” election system to stamp out voter fraud that doesn’t exist.
On top of that, Musk and Peltz are conducting regular soirees with other billionaires to convince them to turn against President Joe Biden. Musk isn’t satisfied with cutting a massive check for Trump; He’s trying to cut any support out from under Biden by putting pressure on other members of his billionaire boys club.
And he’s coordinating his efforts with regular phone conversations and meetings with Trump.
The get-togethers included a March meeting at Peltz’s 35,000-square-foot oceanfront estate where Trump, Musk, and Peltz joined to criticize Biden and plan for the fall election with “a group of wealthy and powerful friends,” which sounds like every conspiracy theory that Republicans have ever suggested. Except this one is real.
The budding alliance might seem surprising, considering Trump continually attacks electric vehicles, and Musk makes electric vehicles. Not so long ago, the two men were slinging insults at each other, but that was before Musk’s private jet started dropping in near Mar-a-Lago and Musk began insisting that the U.S. could only be saved by a “red wave” in the upcoming election.
Now, according to The Wall Street Journal, Musk is considering an “advisory role” in a second Trump White House. Trump and Musk have found common ground on immigration, where both are big fans of the racist Great Replacement conspiracy theory that insists progressives are seeking to destroy Western culture by allowing a flood of immigrants into the U.S. Musk has repeatedly spread and amplified lies about non-citizen voting and promoted the Great Reset conspiracy theory, which insists that COVID-19 was part of a vast plot to somehow install a “world government.” That’s just a fraction of the long list of COVID-19 and vaccine misinformation Musk has promoted.
More than anything else, Musk appears to be motivated by his hatred for “the woke mind virus,” by which Musk seems to mean anything that promotes diversity. Corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs have already been battered by claims promoted by Musk, including claims that Black pilots are the result of diversity hires.
It’s hard to know how many of Musk’s 180 million followers on X exist as more than bots in the system, and his recent troubles at Tesla might make him seem like more clown than Bond villain.
But this week, Musk convinced investors to plow $6 billion into his new AI startup, putting Musk back at the top of Forbes’ list of the wealthiest people in the world. When it comes to convincing wealthy people how they should invest their insane amounts of money, Musk has potentially unrivaled influence. And Musk is sitting down with Trump to tell these same billionaires to cut off any funds or support for Biden.
When it comes to Musk’s new voting system, the only description is that it is intended to “ensure votes are fairly counted,” which can easily be read as exactly the kind of scheme Trump tried to implement in the conspiracy leading up to the Jan. 6 insurrection. By no coincidence at all, Musk has downplayed events on Jan. 6 and spread lies about the insurrection.
If that sounds like the nation’s wealthiest and most powerful people are getting together to engineer the outcome of the 2024 election and install a system that ensures their power is never threatened by democracy, that’s because that’s exactly what it is. And it’s also something that has happened before.
As the Brennan Center for Justice explains, in 1932, the Nazi Party was broke, in disarray, and near collapse. Then Adolf Hitler and propaganda specialist Hermann Göring called a secret gathering of Germany’s wealthiest industrialists.
“Private enterprise cannot be maintained in a democracy,” Hitler told the group. If they would support him, he would get rid of workers’ rights and unions.
The response of the business leaders was reportedly “enthusiastic.” They poured money into Hitler’s enterprise, and less than a year later the Nazi Party was in control of the German government.
Sure, it’s always easy to pull out a Hitler analogy, but sometimes the jackboot just fits too well to avoid the comparison. This is one of those times.
It’s not hard to see what Musk wants from Trump: someone who will put a stop to pesky regulations as he flies giant rockets and safety concerns that would slow his rollout of self-driving robotaxis.
Musk definitely wants to stop Biden from applying a new wealth tax to the $56 billion gift Musk is expecting from Tesla stockholders. That wealth tax is almost certainly part of his pitch to fellow billionaires.
It doesn’t matter if Trump and Musk secretly hate each other; Neither of them is interested in making friends.
They’re interested in money and power, they want more of both, and they want to lock in a plutocracy that means no one can ever get in their way.
And they’re not even bothering to be secretive about it.
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