Elon Musk, unelected president and agent of chaos

Friday was just another day on Elon Musk’s social media platform X. Aided by an algorithm that always seems to favor the owner, his nearly 210 million followers — now greeted with the phrase “The people voted for major government reform” — watched as Musk clashed with the racist far right over the visas Silicon Valley companies use to recruit skilled foreign workers. They also received a mixed array of promotional messages from his companies — Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, and X itself — heard Musk (a father of 12) warn of the global decline in birth rates, and listened to his promises of colonizing Mars. They also saw Musk amplify the argument of a Covid denier with just 327 followers, who defended Americans’ right to buy guns “so we don’t get locked in camps for having a virus with a 99.9% survival rate.”

Even in this era of hypernormalization, when the absurd has become commonplace and vice versa, it’s difficult to grasp that behind this flurry of messages is not only the richest man in the world but one of the most influential figures on the planet. Musk is also a player with sudden political power in the United States. He’s the guy who whispers in Donald Trump’s ear, a businessman who wields great influence over the new administration of the world’s leading power — even though no one voted for him. Critics have even begun calling him “President Musk” in an attempt to address two egos so massive that they seem destined to collide sooner or later.

For now, the Musk-Trump relationship is holding up. The president-elect addressed those comments last Sunday in Phoenix, Arizona, during one of his signature long, rambling speeches, denying any fear that Musk — who is always by his side and practically lives at Trump’s Florida home, Mar-a-Lago — might take his job. It was surprising, given his penchant for putting himself above others, that Trump offered a purely practical reason to debunk those concerns: Musk won’t do it because he can’t. The law prevents it. “You know why he can’t be? He wasn’t born in this country,” said Trump of Musk, who was born in South Africa.

Musk’s rise in the circles of influence surrounding the new occupant of the White House could hardly have come as a surprise to the voters who backed the Republican candidate. By re-electing Trump, they were effectively supporting Musk, who donated at least $260 million to Trump’s campaign. Not only did they believe in Trump’s ability to improve their lives by lowering prices, cutting taxes, expelling illegal migrants, and, ultimately, make America great again, but they also trusted his business skills. After all, Musk’s fortune continues to shatter records: as of Saturday, it had reached $450 billion, more than double the fortune of the second richest person, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder.

Perhaps those voters were unaware that Musk’s successful business strategies include using chaos as a redemptive weapon — a playbook he began applying in Washington last week, when a series of tweets were enough to derail a bill negotiated between Democrats and Republicans that would temporarily prevent a government shutdown. Or perhaps, driven by a shared resentment of elites, these Trump supporters were looking for just that: someone to shake things up and see what remains after the cataclysm.

Readers of Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography on Musk, published last year, will spot the parallels between Musk’s actions last week and his business playbook. In one of the book’s most revealing passages, Musk fires 75% of Twitter’s workforce (chaos) after buying the platform for $44 billion in 2022, then rehired only those who met his criteria (purification). Elsewhere, Musk tells Isaacson that when he first met Trump in 2016, he thought he was “the world champion of bullshit.” What happened afterwards to radically change his opinion of the president-elect is a question that Isaacson does not answer.

Destroy and rebuild

“All of his companies have undergone this kind of traumatic restructuring,” said Chuck Collins, an expert on inequality at the Institute for Policy Studies, in a phone interview last week. Collins, a scion of the Oscar Mayer fortune who gave up his inheritance to study the tactics of American billionaires seizing political power, explained: “Musk always says that if you fire people and the company continues to operate as before, then you haven’t fired enough. He believes in making deep cuts and then rebuilding. That’s his leadership model.”

Now, Musk seems poised to apply this model to the U.S. administration. Trump has appointed him, alongside fellow billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, to head the so-called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). This entity is not part of the executive branch, has no clear powers as of yet, and its mandate — saving money and streamlining the government — is vague. It’s not even an original idea; similar efforts have yielded few results since the Reagan era.

The proposed spending cuts also clash with Trump’s signature promises, such as tax cuts and mass deportations of illegal immigrants. During Trump’s first term, U.S. debt soared to $8 trillion. The first setback of Trump 2.0 came last week during the government shutdown crisis, when he failed to persuade Congress to lift the spending cap, which would have allowed him to get started on those costly projects as soon as possible.

The recent government shutdown crisis served as a clear reminder that Musk and Ramaswamy will not have an easy task ahead. U.S. public debt exceeds $36 trillion, and the Congressional Budget Office forecasts it will reach 166% of the gross domestic product by 2054 (compared to a record 99% this year). The duo has stated their goal of cutting $2 trillion from a system that spent $6.7 trillion in 2024. Of that staggering sum, $800 billion was allocated to military spending — a sector that many Republican representatives are reluctant to touch, as defense contracts significantly impact their districts’ economies. Another unpopular option would be to reduce health benefits or food stamp programs.

The shutdown crisis also revealed that Musk has a direct line to a handful of Republican politicians, some of whom proudly boasted on television that they are in regular contact with him. Part of the American dream is accumulating vast wealth, and financial success is no stranger to a system where at least 50 members of Congress have more than $10 million in the bank. Yet, as economic historian Jonathan Levy pointed out in an email on Saturday, the symbiosis between these politicians and the richest man in the world is “historically novel.”

Levy, author of Ages of American Capitalism (2021), a revealing alternative history of the country, offers a perspective on the present era that began in 1980, which he describes as the Age of Chaos. According to Levy, “capital left fixed physical structures, to become more financial, intangible, leveraged, roving and unsettled.” He argues: “Americans have lionized businessmen and entrepreneurs for a long time, including Silicon Valley entrepreneurs since the 1980s. Musk’s intervention is far more brazen. He has, even before he bought it, used Twitter to build a popular constituency of his own. His public and transparent alliance with Trump is perhaps unprecedented in the annals of US politics.“

During the government shutdown crisis, Musk received support from other notable disruptors, including Kentucky Representative Rand Paul and Marjorie Taylor Greene (Georgia), who suggested naming Musk as Speaker of the House — a proposal that would place him third in line for the presidency. “Nothing would disrupt the swamp more than electing Elon Musk,” Paul said.

While such a scenario seems unlikely, Musk — who will not receive compensation for his role leading DOGE — has made it clear that he does not want to be a civil servant. Instead, he appears content with what Collins calls “the ultimate oligarch movement” — the “blatant exercise of the power of wealth to shape culture to his liking.” As Collins points out: “This is not the first time this has happened, but the speed with which Musk has gone from accumulating his fortune to consolidating his political influence is unprecedented.”

That power is driving him to accumulate even more wealth, which has doubled since the election. Tesla’s stock price has risen by 90%, even as sales have stalled, with Wall Street relying heavily on Musk’s influence in Washington to secure the rollout of electric cars and advance autonomous driving legislation. Analysts also expect that SpaceX, which has already taken over some core functions of NASA, will benefit from Musk’s close relationship with the White House.

The big question, then, is not whether Musk will benefit from his association with the president-elect, but how long the honeymoon between the two will last, given how little the latter has traditionally tolerated those who overshadow him. “It is hard to believe that Trump’s ego will be able to share the same stage with Musk,” says Levy. Collins notes that at least the business interests of the real estate magnate and the titan of aerospace, automobiles, media, and telecommunications do not overlap, which could help maintain peace — but he does not rule out the possibility of “gladiator fights between billionaires.”

That idea harks back to Peter Turchin’s influential book, End Times, which describes a society drained by the elite, who control all the wealth. In this vision, the growing number of elites battle each other for dominance over a disenfranchised populace drawn to disruptors like Trump. Turchin — not one to shy away from apocalyptic narratives; he is famous for predicting in 2010 that Europe and the United States were entering an era of escalating instability, which would peak around 2020 — described November’s elections as “a bloodless revolution in which the ruling elites [the Democratic Party] were ousted by counter-elites [Musk and Trump].”

In this atmosphere of latent confrontations, speculation abounds about how long the alliance between the hardline wing of Trumpism — predominantly white and staunchly nationalist — and the duo of Ramaswamy, a first-generation Indian immigrant, and Musk, an iconoclastic libertarian rather than a conventional conservative, can last. The first skirmish erupted online over Christmas. The spark was the appointment of Indian-born Sriram Krishnan as a White House adviser on artificial intelligence, a relatively low-profile position. This triggered a defense by both billionaires of H-1B visas — the program tech companies use to recruit talent, much like Musk himself benefited from in the 1990s — against attacks from Laura Loomer and other figures on the racist far-right, who argued that such policies undermine American workers and contradict Trump’s anti-immigration stance.

The controversy spiraled into a heated debate about whether American culture fosters the education of top engineers, the boundaries of free speech online, and Silicon Valley’s growing influence on the new administration. Unsurprisingly, Musk, with his penchant for provocative humor, seized the moment in what some Washington media outlets — perhaps prematurely — described as Trumpism’s “civil war.”

On Friday — just another normal day on Musk’s X — the South African business magnate dismissed Loomer and other far-right MAGA figures who opposed him as “contemptible fools [who] must be removed from the Republican Party, root and stem.”

In an unusual show of restraint, Trump remained silent amidst the uproar. However, by Saturday night, he broke his silence, telling the New York Post that he has “always” been a supporter of visas. The comment served as a subtle but clear signal that his relationship with Musk remains intact.

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