Musk and Trump: Alien vs Predator

An unstoppable force is about to collide with an immovable object. Whoever wins, we lose.

As the Republican primaries continue to go pretty much exactly as anyone who has been paying attention suspected they would, America (and, kicking and screaming along with the cultural hegemony, the rest of the western world) has started preparing for the inevitable Biden/Trump rematch. This time, Biden is fighting a different type of battle—against a man who tried, violently, to prevent him from being certified and has floated the idea of political assassination as a valid tool for achieving power.

It is also going to be a battle between two really old guys who are both probably too decrepit to be taking on a high stress job, and both of whom are legendary verbal gaffers on par with a couple of Grandpa Simpsons. But while all eyes are on this battle, we should prepare for another legendarily stupid rivalry to unfold.

Despite some notoriously naïve headlines toward the beginning of Elon Musk’s reign over Twitter that painted his politics as “difficult to pin down,” Musk has worn his ideology pretty openly on his sleeve. Prior to the 2022 midterm elections he directed users of the platform to vote Republican. He’s critical of non-white immigration, preferring a radical boost to “traditional” values that favour high birth rates and classic gender roles to ward off his fear of white culture in decline.

This is not the way, Jeremy W. Peters

He's one of the most openly far right business leaders in a world where people in similar positions typically like to obscure their opinions or even try to appear a little “woke” if it’s good for business. His affinity for eugenics pseudoscience reaffirms his priors when it comes to racial demographics and the worth of minorities and immigrants in the USA. He’s fiercely capitalist, of course, and opposes welfare. Opposes unions. Opposes public health measures and is at the very least vaccine skeptical. Opposes the media. Opposes government regulations. He’s strongly allied with political ideologues like Tucker Carlson, Chaya Raichik, and Matt Walsh.

So it’s kind of the two hundred and ten billion dollar elephant in the room—why isn’t Elon Musk MAGA?

For two men who share almost every value you have to consider it at the very least interesting that Elon Musk never talks about Donald Trump. It’s definitely not due to any desire to keep out of mainstream politics. Musk never expresses a strong belief that he doesn’t also think is crucial for the future of our species—it’s just that his vision for that future looks something very similar to the world of a dystopian young adult novel where future occupations are designated at birth by an unfeeling AI trained on Jim Crow literature.

This but racist

Even before and during Trump’s administration, Musk wasn’t eager to climb aboard the Trump Train. In the lead-up to the 2016 election he said that he thought Trump “wasn’t the right guy” and would make the United States look bad to the rest of the world. That was far from unusual, though—half of the most fiercely pro-Trump characters in government today said the same thing back when it looked implausible that he would be elected. The difference for people like Ted Cruz, who openly despised Trump until the exact moment he was named the Republican nominee, is that they spun on a dime and began to overcompensate with their public display of adulation and worship for the man.

Elon Musk simply shut up and never mentioned Donald Trump again. He barely ever made anything more than an oblique reference to Trump throughout his entire presidency, its aftermath, or his second campaign.

But the Venn diagram of Elon Musk superfans who are also Donald Trump superfans is pretty close to just a circle. They move in the same groups but never together, they’re frequently mentioned in the same sentence as though they’re the right wing Kennedy brothers assembling a Bizarro version of Camelot. The media hasn’t overlooked how similar they are in the new genre of right wing populism. They share real estate in thousands of cringy memes.

According to Walter Isaacson’s discussions with Musk for his biography, Musk’s hesitancy with Trumpism isn’t an illusion or a game, he just doesn’t much like the guy and thinks he’s the “world champion of bullshit.” A rare observation from Musk that’s absolutely spot on, although I don’t think it takes a rocket scientist or even just the guy who pays for them.

That really shouldn’t matter though. Elon Musk has never really been one to turn up his nose at grifters if the grifters further his ideology. Take his new embrace of Alex Jones, a man whose grift Musk is very well aware of. It was ostensibly the reason Musk didn’t want to reinstate Jones to the Twitter platform. Teaming up with Jones, however, was a move he ultimately came to see as being good for the platform, its engagement, and shifting the Overton window.

If Trump plans, as he says he does, to go full steam ahead on all of the causes Musk is most passionate about like stopping immigration and ending transgender recognition and healthcare, as well as obviously reestablishing American dominance of world finance and industry, then what is keeping Elon Musk from donning that red cap?

Elon Musk was very active in the Republican presidential primaries until very recently. Initially—even before Ron DeSantis announced his presidential run—Musk was a full throated supporter of a DeSantis campaign and administration. He even did what he could to assist with the initial campaign, debuting his candidacy announcement in a Twitter exclusive—an event that went about as well as the remainder of the campaign did.

The very moment that DeSantis’ campaign started to fall apart, Musk dropped him without so much as a lipstick goodbye note on the bathroom mirror. He switched seamlessly to Vivek Ramaswami, who in retrospect is a better fit—another punchable lying techbro venture capital hedge fund Pollux dipshit like a Captain Planet villain whose backstory is a used car salesman who got bitten by a radioactive supermarket middle-manager.

DeSantis is basically Ted Cruz if Ted Cruz was breastfed until he was 35, so he’s at least understandable as a non-MAGA Republican option. But Vivek Ramaswami is so MAGA that, if he actually had won the Republican nomination, he would still have voted for Trump instead of himself. He had no intention of being president, he’s just a bombastic showman who thought the best way to get Trump’s attention for a position in his government was to run against him while making a vomit-inducing show of fawning adulation.

Corporate needs you to find the difference between this picture and this picture.

So why would Elon Musk, if he didn’t want Trump, and didn’t want him specifically due to the density of his bullshit, throw all of his energy behind a younger, skinnier, more ethnic Trump whose entire personality is very transparently bullshit?

The answer to this puzzle becomes clearer if you think of Elon Musk and Donald Trump not as two men whose interests perfectly align so much as two identical magnets with the north poles facing one another.

One of the most defining personality traits of both Elon Musk and Donald Trump is that they both see themselves as the smartest human being and most deserving of wealth, power, and success on the planet. Their drive to define an era of history in their own image is something that overwhelms any other motivation or desire that they have. It is, in both cases, a deeply solipsistic and all-encompassing ego. Neither of them will tolerate pretenders.

This is definitely a mutual phenomenon. Trump doesn’t talk about Musk very often, despite the fact that the amount of power Musk wields as a non-governmental entity is phenomenal. You would assume that Trump wants to entice Musk on side for the same reasons you would assume vice versa. But on the rare occasion Trump does talk about Musk, it’s with a clear air of derision and, very notably, the exact same criticism that Musk has of Trump—that he’s a liar and a bullshit artist.

I think that they hod a mirror up to each other that shows something neither man can accept. Behind their similarities, these are in many other ways two very different men. Musk is a strong ideologue who thinks history will thank him for curing it of delusions of human equality and the mental impurity of empathy. On some level he thinks it’s a burden that he carries as the smartest or at minimum least blind human on Earth, but that he deserves the spoils of success.

Trump, on the other hand, is just a pharaoh. I honestly don’t think he cares strongly about any of the issues that make him popular as a Republican leader. His view of himself is that of a master tactician who has figured out which views to pretend to have in order to best achieve a god-like status. The fact that a lot of those views involve abject bigotry shows the dim view he has of everyone who isn’t himself. Still, I don’t think he’s a true white supremacist simply because he doesn’t rank other people that way. That is, as people at all. He doesn’t think he’s great because he’s white, he thinks he's great because he’s Trump. He’s a Trump supremacist.

Musk wanted DeSantis or Ramaswami to rise to the level of president simply because he knows they are sycophants. He knows that either one of them in charge of America would bring excellent opportunity for quid pro quo arrangements. Importantly, neither of them would have stood up to him or demanded loyalty. A DeSantis or Ramaswami president would treat Elon Musk much the same way as they are both treating Donald Trump now. More than a president who shares his values, Musk just wants a president who will lower his taxes, strip his regulations, and otherwise get the hell out of his way. They would be happy enough in return just to have an oligarch in charge of all the satellites and media infrastructure who hates Mexicans and Muslims as much as they do and has no qualms about saying it.

But Trump is going to want him to bend a knee, and that’s what he cannot abide. It’s very important to Elon that he’s a bigot on his own terms, and that the bigotry is his own, not as a racism virtue signal to a pretender to the bullshit artist throne.

Barring some kind of amazing, beautiful, hilarious miracle too bizarre for this universe that would see Nikki Haley win the GOP nomination for the general election, we’re about to enter a media landscape the nature of which I can’t predict. Elon Musk, who purchased outright an entire chunk of internet communication infrastructure for way above cost specifically so that he could wield greater control over the zeitgeist, is going to have to weigh his strong desire for a Republican executive against the fact that the only option for his endorsement is going to be Trump.

The Donald might outwardly project the same values and goals as Musk, but what’s important to remember, and what I’m pretty sure Musk knows, is that Trump is also the most vindictive human being to ever spawn in the Milky Way. For Musk, having a friendly executive involves much more than just having a racist in the White House—it’s having somebody who will leave him to his own devices and never demand he follow somebody else’s blueprint.

And Trump has no particular need for Musk either. After all, this is a man who started his own social network just to prove he didn’t need Twitter—which he never returned to, even by Musk’s invitation, which should tell you something else about their animosity. If Trump really intends to take as much advantage of the presidency as the party will permit, which seems to be infinite at this point, then who knows whether he could simply seize Twitter and SpaceX and roll it into the government to send a message to an insubordinate oligarch?

2024 is going to be plenty stupid, and it’s going to suck, and nobody is going to have fun. Politically, we can hope Joe Biden rises to the challenge, deals the last blow to the Donald Trump disaster, and there isn’t too much violence in the aftermath. In the online media landscape it’s going to play out as two grown men waiting for the other to kneel.