Trump and Musk, the fable of the last alpha males

For several weeks now, a political alliance has been taking place before our eyes that could have an enormous impact on the future of the planet. Elon Musk — the richest man in the world — has joined the Make America Great Again movement by supporting the Republican candidate and champion of the global far right, former president Donald Trump.

Each of these names evokes immense power. But if Trump wins the presidency and this symbiosis materializes, this power will be enhanced on an incalculable scale. Both men seem very different on the surface, but they’re strongly united by their boundless egos and unbridled ambition. Both are spurred on by the desire for absolute power, as well as inherited prejudices that make them believe they are superior to all other human beings.

We know a lot about Trump. So, let’s look at Musk for a moment. Even though he says that he voted for Joe Biden in 2020, his flirtation with radicalism isn’t new. One of the reasons he gave for his 2022 takeover of the social media company Twitter — now known as X — was to defend a “functioning democracy.” Preserving civil discourse in the digital age is a laudable and even noble goal in a world infected by misinformation. But one of Musk’s first actions at X was to fire thousands of content moderators, who were the first line of defense against the spread of hate speech and fake news. Weren’t they critical to the defense of democracy?

Instead of promoting an elevated exchange of ideas, X has become the most powerful megaphone for political extremism, misinformation and racism. This is even more evident since July 13, when the interplanetary billionaire endorsed Trump, after the assassination attempt against him at a campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania. Since then, Musk has become Trump’s unofficial ambassador, while also praising a new crop of authoritarian leaders, including El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, Argentina’s Javier Milei and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni. He has promoted anti-immigrant rhetoric with lies and misinformation, attacking Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris day and night.

For Trump and Musk, Harris is a bête noire — the very embodiment of multiculturalism, woke ideology and feminism, which they both consider to be threats and obstacles to the imposition of their peculiar idea of how to make America great again… essentially, a country where white men rule.

Musk is known to have become one of the main donors to Trump’s 2024 campaign. In return, Trump said he would task Musk with auditing the entire federal government. The transactional nature of the relationship is clearly visible. But so far, the numerous news articles that have analyzed Musk’s support for Trump have paid little attention to a couple of key aspects: Musk’s admiration for Trump’s antics and their shared vision of white supremacy.

In a recent interview, podcaster Lex Fridman asked Musk why he supported Trump and what he hoped he would do for the future of the country and humanity. Musk replied that he was impressed by Trump’s reaction after the attack: “[He] displayed courage under fire.” He then added, without hesitation: “You can’t feign bravery in a situation like that.” To justify his support for Trump, he concluded: “I think you want someone who is strong and courageous to represent the country.”

The fascination with toughness, audacity and courage is something that cannot be faked, either. Musk has finally given in to the former president’s hormones, public displays of masculinity and lack of scruples. But perhaps there’s also something more than meets the eye: Trump’s tough character is the product of a long apprenticeship that ended up creating a monster.

According to critics and biographers, Trump’s personality was shaped by his father — Fred Trump — in his own image and likeness. Fred was the son of German immigrants and, at the age of 13 — when his father died — he and his mother had to take over the reins of a budding but prosperous construction business. In his search for the American dream, Fred learned that, to speed up procedures, he had to grease the bureaucratic hand… which is why he was ultimately investigated. He was also investigated for land speculation, racial discrimination in the rental of housing units, as well as overbilling. His son adopted some of these habits.

Although his son has repeatedly denied it, Fred also had a racist past. In 1927, when he was 22, he was arrested during a brawl at a Ku Klux Klan march, although no charges were brought against him. Donald’s public career has also been punctuated by racist episodes. Some of these were highlighted in the debate by Vice President Harris, such as having called for the reinstatement of the death penalty in New York to punish five young Black men, who were unjustly accused of raping and murdering a woman in Central Park. Or his well-known insistence on falsely claiming that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States and, therefore, was ineligible for the presidency.

But Fred Trump went further to shape his son’s temperament. Since Donald was a wayward boy, he was sent to a military academy, where the young man learned to be a bully under the guidance of a World War II veteran sergeant. Then, when the young heir took over the family real estate business, Fred entrusted him to lawyer Roy Cohn, who was known for his lack of scruples, his tendency to exaggerate, lie and manipulate and, no less, for his furious anti-communism and antisemitism, despite being Jewish.

Cohn — who lived a closeted life — hated people with such a passion that he even hated himself. When his doctor informed him that he was HIV positive and would soon die of AIDS, Cohn forbade him to ever mention the disease. From Cohn, Donald Trump adopted three golden rules. First: never ever admit a mistake or apologize. Second: never concede a victory to your rival. Instead, strengthen your position by attacking with 10 times more force. Third: no matter what those around you say, always follow your instinct. These rules have become the philosophy by which the tycoon has lived in the face of the world, as we have all seen.

There’s no doubt that Musk sees himself in Trump’s mirror. His childhood in Pretoria was shaped to some extent by a chauvinistic, demanding and abusive father. His grandfather, meanwhile, wrote white supremacist pamphlets and saw Black people as a threat to white dominance in apartheid South Africa. The connection between a racist family and his MAGA affiliation is rarely discussed, but there’s a thread running through his economic libertarianism, belief in selective breeding, and visions of human progress through natural selection and technology. Apartheid deeply shaped Musk’s childhood. “To whites of a certain mindset, this inequality wasn’t due to apartheid. They thought it was inscribed in nature,” as Simon Kuper noted in his Financial Times column.

The other dominant trait in Musk’s upbringing was violence. When Elon was 10, he was beaten up by other kids at school. He ended up spending weeks in the hospital with serious injuries. But those injuries were small potatoes compared to the verbal beatings Errol Musk gave him for giving in to his bullies. His brother Kimbal says that the worst memory of his life was watching their father berate Elon after he left the hospital.

Walter Isaacson — one of Musk’s biographers — captures the indelible mark that Errol’s abuse left on his son: “His father’s impact on his psyche would linger. He developed into a tough yet vulnerable man-child, prone to abrupt Jekyll-and-Hyde mood swings, with an exceedingly high tolerance for risk, a craving for drama, an epic sense of mission, and a maniacal intensity that was callous and at times destructive.”

In Elon’s case, the maxim of psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung rings true: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

Musk has said that his father is a terrible human being, capable of the worst things imaginable. For example, he abused his mother and fathered two children with his stepdaughter. And it’s obvious that Elon isn’t responsible for the way his grandfather or father were, but it’s equally evident that he carries those marks with him. Some are reflected in his vision of the world. For example, like Errol, Elon believes that one comes into the world only to reproduce. Errol has had seven children with three women. Elon has had at least 12 with various women, most by in vitro reproduction methods, or through surrogate mothers.

But unlike his father, Elon spreads his seed throughout the world with a philosophy: we must avoid the decline of the world population — which is threatened by low birth rates — and improve the species with powerful genes (like his own). Essentially, this is reproduction as a vanity project. Such a philosophy has exceptions, of course. Musk is known to have a trans daughter — Vivian Jenna Wilson — who, according to her own testimony, has decided to shed her paternal surname. Ironically, Vivian attributes this to the verbal abuse her father doled out throughout her childhood, for not being masculine enough.

Musk has acknowledged that Vivian’s gender change is the main reason for his personal war against gender ideology, which he has called “the mental woke virus.” Trump has been more modest when it comes to the number of children he has fathered, but there’s plenty of evidence to show that his relationship with women has also been transactional.

Although it’s difficult to quantify, the biographies of Trump and Musk are the invisible bridge to understand the true link between these two titans. Both consider themselves to be “alpha males” whose mission is to overwhelm, dominate and conquer. Neither of them ever gives up or admits mistakes, even if they have to use all their power to twist the truth to their benefit.

Here’s a brief illustration of the magnitude of Musk’s ego. Those who follow his social media antics know that the Space X boss is a compulsive tweeter. Earlier this year, while attending the Super Bowl at the invitation of Fox News mogul Rupert Murdoch, Musk posted a message cheering on the Philadelphia Eagles. President Joe Biden — a native of Pennsylvania — did the same. Seeing that Biden’s tweet had generated 29 million views, Elon flew into a rage, leaving the game to fly back to San Francisco, where he called an emergency meeting with X employees. The reason: his message had only gotten 8.4 million views, while Biden’s had more than tripled that number. To please him, his team changed the algorithm, managing to rank the boss’s tweet higher. According to reporters at The New York Times, Musk’s tweets have priority over any other post and, thanks to this, they reach users of the platform… whether they follow him or not.

The analogy with Trump sending his supporters to storm the U.S. Congress on January 6, 2021 — in the face of his inability to accept his defeat in the 2020 presidential election — speaks for itself. These two men compensate for their fragile self-esteem with egos so inflated that they’re capable of extreme manipulation of reality, all to achieve self-gratification. Let us remember who we’re talking about: the richest man on the planet — who sees himself as the conqueror of Mars — and man who aspires to occupy the so-called most important office on Earth for a second time.

What could happen if these two egotistical narcissists carry out their marriage of convenience in a second Trump presidency? It would be best not to imagine it. Yet, it would be irresponsible not to.

A second Trump term — with Musk as his lieutenant and spokesman for the extremist right-wingers — would be equivalent to turning the White House into a casino, open to the most extravagant bets, large-scale acts of corruption and ceaseless outbursts in the name of libertarian ideology. One of them could be to withdraw from NATO on the pretext that the European Union wants to regulate X (as vice presidential candidate Senator J.D. Vance recently threatened). Or, why not use Musk’s Starlink satellites to patrol the southern border of the United States from space and spray migrants who try to cross the wall? That would be more efficient than having them in Springfield, Ohio, supposedly eating dogs, cats and other pets, or contaminating what remains of the (little) white blood in the United States.

Am I exaggerating? Maybe… but not by much. Trump and Musk are already separately a threat to democracy and the precarious stability of the world. There’s no doubt that together, in joyous symbiosis, they would put an end to these concepts in less than the four years of an American presidential term.

Does this fable have a moral? Yes: only voters, by punishing Trump at the polls on November 5, can stop this dystopia from becoming reality.