Elon Musk has been one of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs. And over the past year, he’s become something else: one of the most influential political figures. In this week’s episode, I will be talking about Elon’s increasing political influence and, in particular, how he uses the social media platform X to control the narrative, deploy public pressure, and turn his ideas into power. Plus: the Los Angeles fires and DEI, the fall of Justin Trudeau, and the end of fact-checking at Facebook. Stay tuned.
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the opening monologue:
I’ll admit at the outset that I haven’t always paid much attention to Elon Musk. He’s a very famous entrepreneur who started at PayPal, established the electric car company Tesla, and is sending rockets into outer space with SpaceX. I always saw him as primarily a business figure—certainly very accomplished, certainly very interesting in his own right, but not really in my area of interest in particular. But I’ve been watching him very closely and trying to understand some of the people around him, some of his ideas, and, most importantly, some of his tactics that he’s been applying to a new domain: politics.
In my experience, a lot of businessmen, when they get to a certain level of wealth and power within the business world, feel that they can jump into politics and make a smooth transition from a position of power and authority. Most of them can’t. In a lot of ways, political skill and business skill are distinct. Certainly, in politics, it helps to have a lot of money, capital, resources, and relationships, but it takes something that is fundamentally different. I remember a number of years ago, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, was traveling to Iowa, and the speculation was that he was thinking about a potential presidential run. Right at the outset, I thought it was foolish because this is someone who doesn’t command the kind of political presence that would be required to be a political candidate. I could see him getting chewed up in the debates and fumbling it on stage, and I always thought that was something that was quixotic. He probably made the smart calculation in setting that aside after that little moment.
Elon Musk is something different, though. It doesn’t appear that he has ambitions for elected office. An elected office—for example, running for a House seat or even a Senate seat in Texas—would be a dramatic downgrade in his political influence. He was born in South Africa, so he cannot run for the presidency. He was not a natural-born American citizen. But I would argue that he perhaps even has a position that is more powerful than all of these, perhaps even including the presidency. Not just because he’s a billionaire; there are many billionaires in the United States, many billionaires who even play in politics: Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos, a number of other people that have extraordinary, really unprecedented wealth. But they don’t have the level of political influence that Elon Musk does, and he’s only been playing politics for relatively few years.
I wanted to look specifically at how he’s using his media presence to exert political power. There are a lot of lessons in here that are important for conservatives, and thankfully, he’s shifted to our side on most of the issues, pushed for Trump, against censorship, and against the George Soros counter-empire that is also very influential. He does this in three ways, all of which stem not from his wealth per se, but from his ownership, control, and usage of the social media platform X.
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