There was a time, not long ago, in which most people might have scoffed at the idea that Elon Musk, an entrepreneur with aspirations to save the world from climate change, would become a right-wing folk hero. And yet, that’s precisely the transformation he underwent this year. The billionaire CEO of Tesla—now known for his ardent support of Donald Trump and his endless philippics against the “woke mind virus”—has become a major power player in the MAGA-verse, and is set to head up a new initiative in Trump’s second administration, so called the Department of Government Efficiency. In the latest episode of Inside the Hive, VF special correspondent Nick Bilton and New York Times tech reporter Kate Conger unpack what brought Musk into the MAGA-verse, how he plans to gut the regulatory state under Trump, and why the duo’s ego-fueled bromance may be destined to blow up. “I think we are on a collision course of personalities with these two,” Conger predicts. “[Musk is] going to want complete control…and I don’t think Trump is going to be willing to give him that.”
In many ways, Musk’s right-wing transformation has been years in the making. And in Bilton’s view, it didn’t happen purely for financial reasons. “It’s always personal with Elon. It’s not just business. Everything is driven by personal. And from what I’ve heard, the first sign of him shifting from the left to the right was COVID, when they tried to shut down his factories,” says Bilton. “And the second sign was when his daughter, [Vivian Wilson], turned against him very, very publicly.” Bilton added that Musk blames “the left” for his poor relationship with Wilson: “I think that that was the thing that finally pushed him over that edge.”
Elsewhere in the episode, Bilton and Conger discuss the implications of the 2024 election, as well as broader ideological shifts in tech, including what Conger calls a political “persecution complex” among the C-suite. “I think that there’s some really pernicious trend in Silicon Valley of people seeing any opposition or criticism as persecution, right? And you see this from Travis Kalanick thinking the taxi industry—which was already struggling when he came along—was like this epic force fighting against him, to tech CEOs who feel like they’re having to combat their woke workforces or whatever,” she says. “Even Musk, thinking that he needs to eradicate that mindset from within Twitter. And I’ve spoken to tech executives who have donated to [Kamala Harris] and supported her campaign who still were just, deeply, deeply offended by the appointment of Lina Khan and the way the FTC aggressively pursued campaigns against the tech industry. So there’s this big persecution complex within the industry that Democrats have to grapple with.”
