When protesters converged this past weekend across America, they seized on two central villains: Donald Trump and Elon Musk. On this episode, host and Vanity Fair editor in chief Radhika Jones, along with executive editor Claire Howorth and Hive editor Michael Calderone, discuss how perceptions of Musk have radically shifted from rocket-building billionaire to government hatchet man and right-wing troll. Contributing editor Zoë Bernard joins the show to discuss how Musk’s ethos reflects Silicon Valley and whether his more libertarian views on tariffs could hasten his exit from Washington.
The first thing to know about Musk is that he was not always a pro-Trump flamethrower. Bernard traces his political shift to around 2020, when entrepreneurs in California were “knocking up against more and more regulation,” she says. “So I think it was a convergence of, you know, hating the media and seeing institutions like the media as this arm of liberalism and the Democratic Party, and then also bumping up against these regulations that made it increasingly difficult for him to innovate with Tesla.”
His transformation accelerated during the pandemic, when he clashed with California health officials over the temporary shutdown of Tesla factories. Meanwhile, he did controversial spots on Joe Rogan’s podcast, like one in 2020 where he pontificated about “anti-globalization and anti-globalists,” says Howorth. “Those are all very [right-wing] terms now, and I feel like that interview was a seed.” But what may have tipped Musk over the ideological edge, Calderone notes, was being “snubbed” by Joe Biden, who conspicuously left him out of a 2021 electric vehicle summit: “He thought Tesla should be there and apparently they were not.”
Fast forward a few years, and after acquiring the site formerly known as Twitter and throwing his financial weight behind Trump’s second presidential bid, Musk has reemerged as a very different political powerhouse. But, as Jones points out, “it’s only a matter of time before the bromance between Trump and Elon goes south, and it does seem like there are some cracks showing in his relationship with the Trump administration as recently as the last few days.”
Take, for instance, the partnership that Trump announced months ago with Sam Altman’s OpenAI, a major competitor of Musk’s in the artificial intelligence space. Trump reportedly told three Cabinet members last month that Musk would leave soon. More recently, there are also the tariffs Trump announced last week, which have brought a bloodbath to Wall Street—and are already eating into Musk’s own net worth. “It’s hard for me to imagine that any of these billionaires that supported Trump are happy right now,” says Bernard. “Elon Musk included, but I think I don’t know what he will do politically, given that he’s put all of his chips in the Trump corner at this point. So, I mean, he can’t go back to the liberal side.”
“It’s actually kind of sad,” Howorth notes, “because his legacy could have been that of a climate change evangelist who made a beautiful, efficient, and relatively affordable vehicle and helped astronauts explore space and expanded medical understanding of the brain. And now he’s gonna go down as a chainsawing maniac.”
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