The Dreary Inevitability of Elon Musk's Rightward Shift
Elon Musk is widely and correctly seen as a right--wing troll. Yet it wasn’t too long ago that Musk saw himself as a moderate who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020 despite ostensibly also supporting Kanye West’s presidential campaign.
It was only recently that Musk very dramatically announced that because the Democrats had become the “party of division and hate” he could no longer support it and was leaning towards Florida’s famously Gandhi-like governor Ron DeSantis as his choice for president in 2024.
It’s rich that Musk could look at a party whose most prominent figures include Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ted Cruz, Tucker Carlson, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Broebert and Clarence Thomas and decide that they were the party of peace, love and acceptance and their enemies the party of division and hate.
If Musk’s words surprised anyone it’s probably because they assumed, with reason, that he was already a staunch Republican.
Musk would undoubtedly tell you that he has not changed at all. He’d say that he has remained a cautious, civic-minded centrist while the Democratic Party underwent a radical, dangerous shift that leaves pragmatic souls like himself no choice but to throw their weight behind the ostensibly LESS radical party of Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene, the one they recently overturned Roe vs. Wade and made abortion illegal.
Musk is right in the sense I don’t think his core values shifted because he does not have core values beyond acquiring money and power and bending the world to his fickle will.
What Musk does care about is perception. He wants to be seen as cool and hip, funny and outrageous, a real life Tony Stark.
If you want to seem funny and hip and cool, you’re going to want to associated with the same party as Beyoncé, Bruce Springsteen, Taylor Swift and John Legend, not Chachi and Stephen Baldwin.
Also, Musk is very much interested in having sex with supermodels, singers and actresses young enough to be one of his many, many children, and nothing promises to turn off the most beautiful women in the world like expressing support for Ted Cruz or Donald Trump Junior. I’m guessing Grimes wasn’t too interested in watching The FOX News Business channel or listening to Alex Jones.
Musk wanted the cool kids to like him and think he’s cool and roughly one hundred percent of the cool kids are on the left.
At some point, however, Musk must have figured that it didn’t matter how much money he had, or how many famous women he had sex with, he was never going to be accepted by the cool kids.
For starters, Musk was not, and never will be cool. I should know. I am extremely uncool as well. But it was also apparent that Musk wasn’t a real leftist, or even a moderate, really.
Musk’s politics are the politics of relentless self-interest. So it makes sense that the richest man in the world would revile a party that subscribes to the radical notion that billionaires should pay their fair share in taxes.
When Bernie Sanders tweeted that sentiment last year, the not at all thin skinned mega-billionaire responded with, “I keep forgetting that you’re still alive.”
Musk hates paying taxes and unions, so it’s not exactly a shocker that he’s voting for the anti-tax, union busting party.
You can get away with a lot more on the right. If you’re a greedy, narcissistic, transphobic, Union-busting, Babylon Bee-loving, conspiracy theorist asshole who is constantly picking fights and antagonizing people unnecessarily, you’re going to be criticized harshly for those characteristics on the left, but will be hailed as a hero, maverick and free thinker on the right for the exact same qualities.
The right is so overjoyed that Musk is just as Hateful as they are that they’re willing to overlook the whole electric car thing.
Musk recently responded to a tweet by Hillary Clinton—a woman he apparently felt should be the most powerful person in the world just six years earlier—saying that it was unfortunate that right-wing propaganda led one lunatic to attack an 82 year old with a hammer with a link from a crackpot website proposing that Nancy Pelosi’s husband was actually injured in a drunken gay tryst gone awry.
The Tesla founder later deleted the tweet but the damage was done. Musk had shown his true face and his genuine beliefs and it was absolutely horrifying.
As with Bill Maher, you can have Elon Musk, Republican Party. Despite Musk’s ostensible voting record, he was never really one of us to begin with.
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