Tech CEOs: what poor gods they do make. For all the ink spilled on Elon Musk over the last decade, he will not be remembered alongside Cornelius Vanderbilt and Andrew Carnegie, nor even Bill Gates. By turning himself into a cartoon figure, Musk has ensured that whatever his ultimate effect on the world and in politics, it will be inseparable from his public posturing, his memeing, his trolling, and his off-putting personality. He is the definition of a cult figure, but cult figures are not meant for the upper echelons of business or politics. And more specifically, tech nerds are not.
It already seemed back in November as if Musk’s independence and loud public image would keep his tenure short. And now he is set to leave, with the man himself stating he wants to focus on Tesla; yesterday, he said he plans to spend “a lot less” on political donations in the future. Trump himself has said that Musk won’t be around much longer. He has apparently alienated a great deal of Trump’s staff, in particular Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, who keeps the trains running on time.
A key and overlooked moment in Musk’s decline occurred in February, with his full-throated endorsement of Trump quoting Napoleon to indicate the president is above the law and constitution. Trump’s statement is a typical-for-him power move, all bluster and stubbornness. Musk retweeted it with 14 American flags at 14:14 in the afternoon. The 14 can only refer to the white supremacist “14 words” slogan: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
From praising Germany’s AfD to tweeting “Stalin, Mao, and Hitler didn’t murder millions of people. Their public sector employees did,” Musk hasn’t done much to distance himself from the more vulgar, racist nativists. But this was the first instance of Musk knowingly invoking (albeit cryptically) white supremacist slogans, moving from fellow traveller to active ideologue. Anti-Trumpers have had a terrible habit of crying wolf, making it very difficult to separate truth from hysteria, so when something without plausible deniability like this came around, it got no momentum.
“Anti-Trumpers have had a terrible habit of crying wolf, making it very difficult to separate truth from hysteria.”
This particular tweet didn’t blow up, so perhaps Musk got away with it, but it nonetheless points to the crux of the issue: Musk is a foreigner. Not an immigrant (though he is), but a techie in a non-techie’s world. J.D. Vance may get into grammatically correct arguments with other big names on Twitter, but Musk traffics with the randos to the point that you could almost think he is one of them, and when he slips up and embraces the 14 words, he shows that he ultimately is of the people, not above them. If you haven’t spent time in political circles, it is hard to realise just how forbidden it is to publicly associate with the great unwashed, but there you have it. Donald Trump may do a photo-op working at a McDonald’s drive-through, but he would never associate with any of the customers.
The incident was even more significant because it showed that Musk didn’t know where the lines were. As one Trump ally said of Musk: “There’s a lack of an understanding about communications and why it’s important, that you massage things, that you talk about things, that you qualify things — they just don’t do it.”
In other words, Musk fell because he didn’t know how to play the political game. He was, to be blunt, too autistic for politics. He came from a world where there is far more tolerance for people saying whatever comes into their head, less respect for seniority and prestige, and a far heavier representation of autistic traits. He could not cross over into the political world without abandoning the very world he embodies and represents, neutering himself. His behaviour since creating DOGE shows him treating the government just as he’d treat a company that he’s CEO of.
On Twitter, you see techies like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Meta Chief Scientist Yann LeCun mixing it up in public. While few go as far as Musk in their vulgarity, it still shows that notions of aristocracy and privilege play out very differently there than they do in DC. The tech culture Musk comes from has much more porous social boundaries, where the idea of putting an inexperienced 20 year old in charge of mission-critical tasks is plausible, if not exactly a regular occurrence. Ideas of “paying one’s dues” and “staying in one’s lane” are quaint. Musk’s steroidal version of this ethic has tanked Twitter’s earnings and led him to spew unlikely and provably false tales of DOGE’s savings, but ignoring reality is nothing new in a world where Joe Biden was mentally competent and the Ukraine war was going to end on 20 January. Musk’s fatal error isn’t in the falsehoods, but his cultural style. He needed allies within the administration, not just a rabid anon cheering squad.
Compare Musk with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who convinced Trump (against much opposition) to sign on to a tariff policy that has no constituency outside of MAGA dead-enders and far-Left protectionists. Despite being loathed by most of the administration, Lutnick is not a public liability in the way Musk is. Lutnick gives soundbites like “[The EU] hate our beef because our beef is beautiful and theirs is weak,” which copy Trump’s style while also sticking to the programme. Meanwhile, Musk cluelessly asks Senator Ron Wyden, “Why does ur pp look like u just came?” And Lutnick’s tariffs will ultimately have far more impact than anything DOGE and Musk did, not because Lutnick is smarter than Musk or because Lutnick faced less opposition, but because Lutnick knows how to act and how to speak in Trump’s world, and Musk either doesn’t or can’t.
The response to Musk within the administration is always a combination of awe and bemusement. As one Trump adviser remarked, “They think he’s a genius, but he’s a one-man wrecking ball.” They’re half-right. Insomnia and bullying willpower do not a genius make, but they certainly can create the impression of one. Musk’s peculiar charisma and bulldozer-like approach bear some resemblance to Trump’s own blithely uninformed arrogance and entitlement, but the key difference lies precisely in their constituencies: personality cult MAGAists for Trump, personality cult techno-accelerationists for Musk. Any link between these two groups was purely hypothetical prior to Musk buying Twitter, and the MAGAists were destined to win out for three reasons. First, there are more of them. Second, they yell about immediate and popular issues instead of missions to Mars and freight tunnels. Third, and most significantly, they worship Trump instead of Musk, and Trump is ultimately in charge.
Musk will remain among the richest people in the world and likely serve for the Left in the coming years as a Soros-like bogeyman to replace the Koch Brothers, but as the “good billionaires” of the Democrats have shown, money cannot buy elections as easily as conventional wisdom had it. More money does not necessarily equate to better than. But Musk’s particular billionaire form is different from that of Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker. Pritzker is the old paternalistic oligarch we all know who sits back and tells the youth to get to work; Musk is, at best, a tweaked-out babysitter who occasionally shares his drugs with you. Over the last decades, the tech lords of our world have changed how all aspects of our lives are conducted (and with AI, continue to do so), yet there remains a cultural gap between the tech world and traditional civic culture that has not caught up. Indirect influence can only go so far. Peter Thiel, possibly the savviest of the lot, wisely stayed behind the scenes to boost Trump only to find that Trump and even Vance would ignore his own policy agenda at their whim.
The real question is whether that cultural gap between tech and politics will remain as large as it is now. For all their money, few people from the tech world have crossed visibly into politics, and figures like Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt have tended to exert influence from behind the scenes rather than attempt elected office. In a recent interview, a t-shirted Mark Zuckerberg explained why: “I’m like the most awkward person. People have been calling me a robot online for 20 years. It’s really done wonders for my confidence.”
These will never be the words of a political leader, no matter how rich. Nor, for that matter, will “Why does ur pp look like u just came?” Whatever ambitions Mark Zuckerberg has, there seems to be no room for an “autistic style in American politics”, but with the old elite dying, we may just be waiting for the right tech oligarch. If some future tech lord should somehow also possess the genuine charisma of an Obama or a Trump, the frustrated dreams of Musk and Thiel could rapidly be fulfilled.
