Elon Musk: Star Trek Stalinist He’s pioneering an age of autocracy

As we approach the anniversary of Donald Trump’s second presidential victory, now is a good time to reflect on the world’s richest and most powerful man. No, not the President of the United States — but Elon Musk. After buying Twitter three years ago, the billionaire effectively reshaped elite discourse overnight, before then going on to bankroll Trump’s third presidential campaign to the tune of $280 million. And if that represents the largest series of individual political donations in global history, that pales compared to what comes next. Earlier this month, Tesla announced a new compensation package potentially earning Musk $1 trillion, assuming he helps his firm reach a series of lofty performance milestones.

Regardless of whether Musk does secure his full payout, when someone finally becomes the world’s first trillionaire, odds are it’ll be him. When that happens, his wealth would rival or exceed the GDPs of Portugal, Greece, New Zealand, and Hungary combined. As he’s already shown, Musk has the means to influence any political campaign in his adoptive country. But his immense wealth also allows him to astroturf political movements on virtually any global issue. Witness, if nothing else, his apparent support of Tommy Robinson in Britain, echoed by similar enthusiasms from Paris to Berlin.

Should one man control this much wealth, and thus have the power to tilt the scales of global politics at will? Regardless of your answer, it’s striking how much access Musk’s staggeringly deep pockets secured him on Capitol Hill. Politics moves so fast now that the specifics are easy to forget. But the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) wasn’t just about advice or tech contracts — though Musk received those as well — but deciding whether government agencies deserved to live or die. Within months of the election, key civil service departments were gutted under Musk’s watch, with hundreds of thousands of federal employees fired via the vagaries of a proprietary algorithm and Musk’s cadre of 20-something tech graduates.

If DOGE was a characteristically juvenile nod to Musk’s meme-lord sensibilities — and if the Musk-Trump pact has lately acquired the will-they-won’t-they trappings of a Nineties romcom — their relationship is nonetheless one of the great turning points in American history. After all, it ultimately represents the de facto takeover of the federal government by the world’s wealthiest man, not merely for moneymaking, but to ideologically reshape it in Musk’s preferred image.

What is this new Muskian ideology he’s imposing on America? Like many on the American Right, Musk puts on a good show of believing in the mythology of classical liberalism and small government, while also cloaking himself in the aesthetics of techno-libertarianism. In truth, though, the ideological roots of his worldview go deeper and darker. Beneath that meme-saturated branding lies a politics shaped as much by late 19th-century Social Darwinism as by any genuine commitment to “liberty” or open markets, all leavened by a healthy reliance on government backing.

To put it differently, Musk adheres to a brand of Social Darwinism, imposed from the top down. Think small government for you — and the working-class slobs you struggle alongside — but big government for them, the rightful rulers of the universe. Shortly after ensconcing himself at the White House, wandering its hall like an awe-struck child, Musk landed a $5.9 billion US Space Force contract, as well as a $200 million deal to implement xAI in the Defense Department. That’s echoed by an expanded SpaceX contract, one valued at perhaps $4 billion. The optics, of course, are damning. But more than that, these arrangements speak to the billionaire’s fundamental reliance on state munificence.

Not that Musk is only concerned about economics. Notwithstanding his large and obscure number of children, he often acts online like an angry incel — paranoid and petulant to the core. Over the years, Musk has entertained more than a few white supremacist narratives on his X feed. Though he seems to have once attended an anti-Apartheid concert, his South African upbringing may also have encouraged him to worry about racially charged civil strife. Due to his omnipresence online, certainly, he has legitimised fringe white-supremacist rhetoric that was once relegated to the fringes of cyberspace: witness the growing popularity of Groypers and other “black-pilled” race-based groups among a subset of Gen Z.

The amplification of these far-Right ideologies could prove to be one of the most consequential global shifts of the coming decade. Yet in a horseshoe-like twist, Musk’s reactionary paranoia also coexists with an unshakeable belief in radical futurism — from intergalactic colonies to brain implants. Transhumanism and extreme technophile utopianism — not typically labelled “Right-wing” — pervade nearly everything Musk offers. Whether it’s boring massive underground tunnels, apparently meant to “solve” car traffic, to manufacturing humanoid robots to replace low-skill labourers, Musk’s projects would have horrified traditional British conservatives from Oakeshott to Burke.

Yet amid this rush of contradictory ideological currents, it’s perhaps Musk’s ambition to colonise Mars, purportedly as a failsafe for Earth’s presumed collapse, that arguably represents the man in full. That’s starkest when it comes to his futurism. In an age of Icarian sci-fi projects like Saudi Arabia’s ludicrous Neom scheme, Musk’s space venture is the most extravagant techno-utopian fantasy of them all, even as the man himself has apparently convinced large swathes of the public that Martian colonies are not just feasible but actually existentially necessary.

Aside from materialising childhood Star Trek fantasies, it’s hard to find a compelling reason for such a quixotic mission to the fourth planet from the sun. Even assuming it’s possible to land a single human — much less the number needed to “colonise” the planet — the cost of the project would likely be in the neighbourhood of $1 billion per person, for a total of $1000 trillion. That kind of outlay, all in a country without universal healthcare or decent public transit, would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic.

Nor is funding the only problem here. Mars is, on average, over 225 million kilometres from Earth. Travelling there would take a minimum of seven to nine months of space travel— trapped inside a claustrophobic spacecraft. Anyone lucky enough to survive the journey would have to bring with them all the air, water, and food they needed, not just for the space voyage itself but for the rest of their lives.

All the while, life on Mars would resemble camping on an active volcano: permanently toxic, obscenely dangerous, and deeply unnatural. Once Mars mission astronauts arrived, these aspiring settlers would be forced to live an Antarctic-like existence, completely isolated from all normal aspects of human geospatial, social, and emotional life. If nothing else, there’s a good reason why the real Antarctica has no permanent settlements — no one can stand living there without losing their ever-loving mind. Now imagine that kind of existence, except 90% of it is underground and there’s no coming back.

Musk obviously knows all these details, yet remains completely undaunted. And it’s here, I’d argue, that his inverted kind of Social Darwinism comes to the fore. Notwithstanding his obscene personal wealth, a thoroughgoing Martian colony would necessarily require epic amounts of government funding — miserable living conditions on the Red Planet or continued squalor on the Blue Planet be damned. And if Musk truly believes in the necessity of humanity becoming an “interplanetary species”, he ought to then offer himself up as one of Mars’ first human residents. Of course that’ll never happen. Instead he’ll sucker poor, naïve — and almost certainly desperate — souls into doing it for him.

That’s obvious enough from his behaviour here on Earth. For one thing, Musk is virulently anti-labour, once saying he not only disagrees with the necessity of trade unions, but even the very idea. Among other things, he claims unions are a “lords-and-peasants sort of thing” that “create negativity in a company.” For another, he has got into ugly disputes with Tesla janitors trying to unionise, while also being found guilty by the US National Labor Relations Board — a notoriously weak agency compared to similar bodies elsewhere — for laying off hundreds of unionised workers in retaliation for their collective bargaining efforts.

Combined with his enthusiasm for red-blooded states like Texas, which has far laxer labour laws than spots like California, and it’s clear that a large part of his affinity for his adoptive nation is those aspects of American “exceptionalism” that align most with his Social Darwinist ideals.

Along these lines, it’s quite telling that unlike past industrial tycoons, Musk has also no major charitable operations. Even during the notoriously callous Gilded Age, figures like Andrew Carnegie preached that the ultra-wealthy had a duty to give away large portions of their money to the public. Many of that era believed their good fortune required social contribution. Musk, in contrast, sees such efforts as unnecessary — or worse, counterproductive. The few charities he does fund are either self-serving, like building schools and infrastructure near SpaceX facilities, or else engaged in other dubious practices. His eponymous foundation only donated $100,000 in 2024, and that to a libertarian think tank. Musk doesn’t even appear to grasp the basic function of most philanthropy: pretending to care.

Such results-focused brutality arguably hints at yet another current in Musk’s ideological bloodstream. In a funny way, technophile futurists like him and Peter Thiel arguably have more in common with Marxist-Leninists than they know. Both regard their political opponents as victims of “false consciousness” — unable to grasp the “scientifically” inevitable direction of history. Any dissent is seen not as disagreement, but as clear proof of ideological delusion. Their version of Progress is treated as inescapable and morally righteous. To question it is to endanger humanity itself. Thiel recently went so far as to liken critics of AI and technological acceleration to apocalyptic figures, and perhaps even Antichrists.

Musk is obviously no Stalin or Pol Pot. But like the undemocratic masters of the 20th century, he surrounds himself with sycophants, while believing that no one could possibly know more than him. When confronted with his failures, he also exhibits the same brand of epistemic totalitarianism — either denying or ignoring shortcomings and continuing to insist on his own revolutionary vision defining all legitimate knowledge. Despite frequent claims to the contrary, Musk did not buy Twitter to “restore free speech”. He bought Twitter to shape the narrative in his preferred image, providing free speech to his preferred groups and their preferred narratives. Like a true Enlightenment ideologue, with no acceptance of the limits of the human experience, Musk, like Marx before him, believes in truth with a capital “T”.

One good example here is Musk’s efforts to develop xAI, with the company hunting for “political bias” experts to ensure its large-language model is stripped of all supposed bias from its training modules. Whatever he might claim, genuine “impartiality” is impossible. Just as with academic peer review, choosing what constitutes a “non-biased expert” is itself an ideological act. Postmodernists were completely correct in this sense: no one is capable of decoding human society without bias. But like the Marxists of old, Musk’s supreme faith in scientism and rationalist pseudo-objectivity is his greatest intellectual failing.

Due to his South African birth, Musk cannot become US president. But, as he’s already shown, he can clearly buy unprecedented government sway. More to the point, there are signs he wants to formalise this influence by creating his very own political party. A few months ago, when the president he helped install grew tired of his presence, Musk threw a tantrum and announced the launch of his own political movement, the so-called “American Party”.

The debut of Musk’s party appears to be on hold, though, with its launch being used as a stick to prod the GOP towards anti-statist, low “entitlement” policies — the same Social Darwinist policies Musk believes must inevitably improve society. The American Party threat is rarely discussed, yet represents an important component in explaining why the GOP continues to hold the “small government” line in the ongoing shutdown of the US government, now a month old and counting. That American Party name is itself a highly telling moniker since it was last used by the extremely violent, ethno-nationalist Know Nothings of the mid-19th century.

The danger, then, isn’t just Musk’s erratic behaviour or his unchecked ego. It’s the precedent he’s set. A centi-billionaire — well on his way to trillionaire status — with no democratic mandate and no governing experience now wields unprecedented influence over both the American state and civic discourse. He controls one of the largest social media platforms, and has been allowed to fire government employees at will, treating American society as a sandbox for his own fantastical experiments. For Musk, society isn’t a fragile ecosystem. It’s a plaything for his brilliance to break and rebuild at whim.

Musk hardly started the trend of the ultra-wealthy trying to hijack the US government, but he’s also taking it to dramatically new heights, setting a precedent that’s being followed by tycoons from Bill Ackman to Bernard Marcus. In the 2024 election cycle alone, 100 American billionaires together spent some $2.6 billion in “donations”. To put that into perspective, a minimum-wage worker would need to work for over 174,000 years — and start during the last Ice Age — simply to gross that same figure. It goes without saying, of course, that this trend could yet have disastrous consequences for the average American, with millions feeling their votes don’t count and that whatever gains they secured during the 20th century are already slipping away.

As for Musk himself, the nearer-term danger is less that he’s a hubristic technophile huckster or a deluded space-faring Don Quixote. It’s that, like Stalin, he can afford to keep being wrong — forever. With wealth at this unprecedented scale, he can act, fund, fire, and build without opposition. And, if liberal democracy relies on key shared understandings, his outsized influence might signal something worse than just the rise of authoritarian wealth. Rather, it could ultimately herald a breakdown in our attachment to our mother planet and thus, the conditions for human flourishing. What an ironic “scientific” legacy that would be.

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