Elon Musk and his Division of Authorities Effectivity have been rampaging via the federal authorities. However earlier than he was letting his DOGE crew unintentionally fireplace nuclear security employees and declaring that he cherished Donald Trump “as a lot as a straight man can love one other man,” he supported Barack Obama.
That’s, Musk is a sophisticated, mercurial man. To higher perceive him, seven Vox writers inform us what they’ve realized that helps them make sense of the billionaire.
A person with a unprecedented threat tolerance
Per his biographer Ashlee Vance, Musk earned about $250 million, or $180 million after taxes, promoting PayPal to eBay. He then rotated and threw the cash into new ventures: $100 million to SpaceX, $70 million to Tesla, $10 million to SolarCity. “Wanting constructing an precise money-crushing machine, Musk couldn’t have picked a quicker method to destroy his fortune,” Vance writes. The gambles labored out, after all, however simply may have bankrupted him. The urge for food for hazard extends to his private life. At considered one of his birthday events, Musk each had a knife thrower hurl blades at him as he was blindfolded, and made himself face off in opposition to a 350-pound champion sumo wrestler.
—Dylan Matthews
In hindsight, Musk’s 2018 feud with a British cave explorer may need foreshadowed the darkening of his politics.
That 12 months, 12 boys and their soccer coach grew to become trapped in a flooded collapse Thailand. Elon Musk supplied to help the Thai authorities’s rescue effort by contributing a mini-submarine. However authorities deemed Musk’s supply impractical and turned it down.
A world crew in the end rescued the boys. And in a subsequent interview, a British cave explorer who’d assisted in that effort, Vern Urnsworth, mentioned that Musk’s supply “had completely no likelihood of working” and that mogul “had no conception of what the cave passage was like.”
Musk replied by calling Unsworth a “pedo” and saying he would guess cash that the British diver was a predator, a declare for which the billionaire had no proof by any means.
This incident revealed that Musk is exceptionally delicate to non-public slights and keen to inform defamatory lies about those that affront him. If you’re keen to declare a rescuer of kids a pedophile as a result of he disparaged your mini-submarine, then how would possibly you reply to a Democratic president barring your organization from an electrical automobile summit?
In any case, now that he’s a political crusader, Musk has scaled up his manufacturing of incendiary and baseless accusations. He has accused British politicians of abetting “rape genocide,” merely as a result of they favored investigating baby intercourse abuse rings on a neighborhood stage moderately than a nationwide one. He has absurdly argued that the Democratic Get together imported unlawful immigrants in 2024 in a plot to steal the US election. And he has alleged that the US authorities paid the media outlet Reuters hundreds of thousands of {dollars} to have interaction in “giant scale social deception” —although in actuality, the primary Trump administration had contracted with the info firm Thomson Reuters Particular Providers to fight cyber assaults that use “social deception” ways.
Musk has lengthy been a thin-skinned liar. That was as soon as an issue for British cave divers; now, it’s an issue for the world.
—Eric Levitz
Don’t underestimate the obsession with the “woke thoughts virus”
There was a lot hypothesis about what drove Musk to throw himself into politics to such an extent — his wealth, going to Mars, and so forth. — however I feel his obsession with defeating what he calls the “woke thoughts virus” actually is sort of necessary. Like many, he was radicalized pretty not too long ago by the nation’s leftward shift on id points (he has cited mistrust of docs prescribing gender-affirming look after his trans daughter, who he has since fallen out with) and his habits suggests he actually got here to consider reversing that shift is without doubt one of the main causes of his life.
That is what he tried to do in his Twitter takeover and, in a way, it’s what he’s attempting to do at DOGE by attacking progressive establishments like nonprofit teams, universities, the media, and the “deep state.” And in contrast to a lot of Trump’s first-term advisers, Musk has each the boldness to ignore authorized warning and the power to determine tips on how to truly make issues occur — no one anticipated him to successfully seize levers of energy inside authorities that permit his crew engineer mass layoffs of civil servants and block spending, however he did it. He’s a wrecking ball in opposition to those that stand in Trump’s manner.
—Andrew Prokop
Elon’s obtained the blinders on unhealthy
Within the decade and a half that I’ve been overlaying Elon Musk and his firms, it’s been outstanding to see simply how a lot this man’s worldview has change into trapped in an echo chamber. Issues obtained a lot worse when he purchased it. I’m speaking about Twitter, now X, and I’m left questioning each day if Musk seeks out data past what he sees in his feed or suggestions past what reveals up in his mentions.
That is deep mind rot territory, and what’s occurring on X appears to be, to a point, informing Musk’s plan to dismantle the federal authorities workforce. By all accounts, Musk’s habits is a realization of the right-wing mob mentality he’s cultivated on his social media platform, a suggestions loop that’s more and more out of contact with what’s occurring to the lives of on a regular basis People. Individuals used to say what occurs on Twitter solely issues to different folks on Twitter. Now, due to Musk and his mob, it’s shaping the way forward for the US.
—Adam Clark Estes
A champion of “masculine vitality”
Musk and his allies are reworking DEI critiques right into a protection of conventional masculinity the place warning and consideration are being recast as weak point and the mark of losers. Below this framework, prioritizing variety is framed because the offender for why we’re failing at this time.
When Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg mentioned firms want extra “masculine vitality” as a result of company tradition has change into “culturally neutered,” he was voicing a rising Republican sentiment. Latest survey knowledge reveals that 79 % of Republican males and a putting 67 % of Republican ladies now consider “society has change into too mushy and female” — a large spike since 2011. This new rhetoric isn’t about enhancing equality efforts — it’s about reframing warning as timidity. What started as pushback on particular variety initiatives is evolving right into a broader ideology by which questioning Musk-style risk-taking isn’t simply bureaucratic — it’s feminized. As this angle more and more permeates companies and authorities, prudence is turning into the quickest path to dismissal.
—Rachel Cohen
Seeking to profit his personal backside line
Whereas DOGE takes a chainsaw to the federal workforce, Musk is utilizing his energy to intrude with investigations and regulatory battles affecting his firms, whereas directing billions in profitable contracts towards his companies.
His social media website X pressured advert large Interpublic into shopping for extra advertisements on X, whereas warning of federal interference in a deliberate $13 billion merger with its rival Omnicom Group, in line with reporting from the Wall Avenue Journal. Musk’s rocket firm SpaceX desires to land profitable grants for Mars missions, whereas its subsidiary Starlink is aiming to take over Verizon’s contract to overtake the FAA’s communications techniques.
A probe into Musk’s brain-computer interface firm Neuralink is up within the air after these FDA investigators had been fired (some have been requested to return). New emissions guidelines and tariffs may gain advantage Tesla over its opponents. And whereas the automobile firm’s gross sales in Europe have plummeted amid rising protests, a kneecapped Client Monetary Safety Bureau can not examine lots of of complaints into Tesla.
Equally, firings on the Nationwide Labor Relations Board have prevented that company from ruling on investigations into Musk’s firms. The record of Musk’s conflicts of curiosity solely continues to develop.
—Avishay Artsy
The stakes are totally different now
A recurring theme in tales about Elon Musk: folks inform him that one thing is unattainable or too harmful, after which he does it anyway. Generally it’s an embarrassing failure, certain, however about half the time he appears to handle to drag it off, and within the non-public sector the successes greater than pay for the failures. The story of SpaceX specifically is filled with naysayers who stood by in awe because the rockets, in opposition to their expectations, actually labored.
The issue is that in authorities, Musk has moved from a world the place doing the unattainable half the time is an unimaginable achievement to a world the place failing to do the unattainable the opposite half of the time will imply catastrophic numbers of individuals die. If the cancellations of PEPFAR grants, malaria packages, and childhood vaccinations worldwide aren’t reversed, Musk’s newest gamble will present up on world mortality charts as one million additional deaths yearly.
—Kelsey Piper
This story initially appeared in At the moment, Defined, Vox’s flagship day by day publication. Join right here for future editions.
