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What is Musk's real political game plan?

17 5
tuesday

Elon Musk has emerged as one of the most influential and controversial powerbrokers in the new Trump administration.

He spent at least US$277 million (about A$360 million) of his own money to help Donald Trump win re-election, campaigning alongside him around the country.

This significant investment of time and money raises the question of what the world’s wealthiest person hopes to receive in return. Critics have wondered whether Musk’s support for Trump is just a straightforward commercial transaction, with Musk expecting to receive political favours.

Or does it reflect Musk’s own genuinely held political views, and perhaps personal political ambition?

Decoding Musk’s political views and tracking how they have changed over time is a complex exercise. He’s hard to pin down, largely by design.

Musk’s current X feed, for example, is a bewildering mix of far-right conspiracy theories about immigration, clips of neoliberal economist Milton Friedman warning about the dangers of inflation, and advertisements for Tesla.

Historically, Musk professes to have been a left libertarian. He says he voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020.

Musk claims that over time, the Democratic party has moved further to the left, leaving him feeling closer politically to the Republican party.

Key to Musk’s political shift, at least by his own account, is his estrangement from his transgender daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson.

After Vivian’s transition, Musk claimed she was “dead, killed by the woke mind virus”. She is very much alive.

He’s since repeatedly signalled his opposition to transgender rights and gender-affirming care, and diversity, equity and inclusion policies more broadly.

However, if the mere existence of a trans person in his family was enough to cause a political meltdown, Musk was clearly already on a trajectory towards far-right politics.

Rather than responding to a shift in the Democratic party, it makes more sense to understand Musk’s changing politics as part of a much broader recent phenomenon known as as “the libertarian to alt-right........

© The New Daily


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