Elon Musk is becoming a one-man rogue state – it’s time we
reined him in
Alexander
Hurst
He has
bankrolled elections, stoked riots and ignored laws. We mustn’t make the
mistake of playing nice with the world’s richest bully
Fri 20 Dec
2024 07.00 GMT
Elon Musk
is, more or less, a rogue state. His intentions are self-serving and nefarious,
and his nation-state level resources allow him to flout the law with impunity.
To put it into context, if dollars were metres, Musk’s money would be enough to
take him to Mars and back, while a mere millionaire could only make a round
trip from Paris to Amsterdam.
The sheer
immorality of any one person possessing so much wealth is obvious to most
people with basic amounts of empathy. But when it comes to Musk and the other
14 people worth more than $100bn, the morality of it is almost a secondary
concern. Their individual wealth is a society-distorting threat to democracy in
the same way that economics has always recognised monopolies to be dangerous to
a functional market.
For $250m in
direct support – and an additional $44bn for control over X, nee Twitter, and
with it the algorithm behind what 300 million users see on their timelines –
Musk was rewarded with a co-presidency. What else are we supposed to make of
his appearance at Notre Dame’s reopening, joining Donald Trump and various
heads of state?
X’s
valuation may be dropping as swiftly as its user count, but that’s missing the
point behind the purchase. X served its purpose by helping elect Trump, with
one study suggesting the platform’s algorithm was tweaked to boost
conservative-leaning users. That Tesla stock has surged more than 40% since the
election surely has little to do with the company’s fundamentals and much to do
with investors speculating on an unprecedented boost to its fortunes to come.
Tesla and SpaceX grew into behemoths on the back of public contracts and public
subsidies, and from xAI to Neuralink, his other companies stand to benefit from
Musk’s inside influence over regulation.
Plutocracy
is not enough, though, because nothing is ever enough for the handful of men
who have everything. Musk’s new obsessions (beyond the validation and human
affection that he mistakenly believes he will find on social media) are
attacking public servants, slashing social spending and going after the most
vulnerable. “In most cases, the word ‘homeless’ is a lie,” Musk tweeted
recently. “It’s usually a propaganda word for violent drug addicts with severe
mental illness.”
The most
charitable interpretation is that Musk exists at various points along the
Dunning Kruger scale. He’s a fantastic venture capitalist, whose
sci-fi-enthusiast investments produced, let’s be honest, far more interesting
companies than something like luxury goods or fast fashion. But this provided
him with incalculably more resources to be a blithering moron when it comes to
things such as geopolitics, or how to build and organise a just society. The
less charitable interpretation – the one presented by his former friend Sam
Harris on a recent podcast appearance – is that he is “palpably, visibly
deranged … snorting ketamine and tweeting at all hours of the day and night”,
has been radicalised by his own algorithm and presents himself as Tony Stark while
actually being Dr Evil.
But because
plutocracy and pursuing a radical social agenda in the US still isn’t enough,
Musk has set his sights on other nations as well. Over the past half-year, he
has gone after Italian judges who blocked a migrant detention plan, promoted
misinformation and stoked riots in the UK, floated the possibility of
interfering directly in UK electoral politics by giving Nigel Farage’s party
$100m, and persistently ignored EU law regarding content moderation and
disinformation on X.
When rogue
states behave this way – election interference, active disinformation
campaigns, social media manipulation – other states call them out, or even
impose sanctions. Musk is not simply a private citizen with an opinion and a
large following. His sheer wealth, his control of X, and his new position
within the US government place him in a different category. So how do you solve
that kind of problem, or at least respond to it?
Musk’s
fellow billionaires have chosen the path of appeasement, if not outright
enthusiasm, making pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago to prostrate themselves before its
idiot king and the man behind the curtain. No real surprise there. What’s more
surprising is that prominent journalists and big media organisations have done
the same, fuelling Trump’s campaign to silence and intimidate through lawsuits,
such as his latest one against the Des Moines Register for having published a
poll he didn’t like.
The populist
premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, has a potentially more effective strategy of
taking on bullies – at least rhetorically. “We will go to the extent of cutting
off their energy, going down to Michigan, going down to New York State and over
to Wisconsin,” Ford said in response to Trump’s taunting about making Canada a
51st state and imposing tariffs. Likewise, when the Brazilian supreme court
judge Alexandre de Moraes refused to back down and treated Musk’s companies as
a single universe – freezing Starlink assets and ordering telecom providers to
block access to X – Musk blinked.
Soon it will
be the EU’s turn. What the union owes its citizens is not to play nice or mete
out a meek slap on the wrist over the various alleged legal violations by Musk
and X that are under investigation, it’s to firmly and intently show that even
interplanetary amounts of wealth don’t mean impunity, and that some things –
like democracy – are not for sale.
Alexander
Hurst is a Guardian Europe columnist
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