OhOnce, the fact that the CEO of one of the world’s largest companies approvingly shared a made-up headline published by the leadership of a fascist party would have made headlines. For Elon Musk, it was just Thursday.
Unusually for Musk, his post, a retweet from Britain First co-leader Ashlea Simon sharing a fake Telegraph headline about detention camps in the Falkland Islands for English rioters, was deleted shortly after being sent. In the 30 minutes it was live on X, the social network formerly known as Twitter that he bought in 2022, it managed to rack up nearly 2 million views.
Since the riots in Britain began last week, Musk’s outspoken criticism of the government has surprised many, but it is just the latest example of the billionaire’s progression down the path of radicalization.
After making his fortune in the dot-com boom and adding to it with his stake in PayPal, Musk invested in Tesla in 2004 and eventually became the company’s chief executive. For a while, Musk presented himself as you might expect from a former software executive running an electric vehicle company: He spoke at length about the risk of climate change, while launching and investing in other projects like SpaceX, OpenAI, and The Boring Company that could be sold as a combination of a broader vision of improving humanity’s future.
But around 2020, Musk’s public profile began to change. He had always been a fairly active Twitter user, but when the pandemic hit, he started posting a lot more and had his first brushes with the fact-checking world: his casual claims about the danger or duration of the pandemic led to his account being suspended for spreading misinformation.
In his private life, Musk’s relationships with his family were in crisis. His relationship with Claire Boucher, better known as singer Grimes, began to fall apart in 2021. Boucher, the mother of three of his at least 12 children, ended up in court over custody rights.
According to his biographer Walter Isaacson, Musk started sending “right-wing memes and conspiracy theories” to Grimes around this time, who responded: “Is this from 4chan or something? You’re actually starting to sound like someone on the far right.”
At the same time, his daughter Vivian She declared herself transgender and changed her namedeclaring that she no longer wanted “to be related to my biological father in any way.”
Musk himself has cited Vivian as a reason for his political shift, telling pop psychologist Jordan Peterson that he had “lost (his) son (sic), essentially,” and concluding that his son “is dead, killed by the waking mind virus.”
“For many people who become radicalized, there is a formative personal experience that creates the cognitive opening for their radicalization process,” said one expert on radicalization, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation. “For Musk, it seems like his daughter’s transition was that opening for him.”
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The expert also believes that Musk is, at heart, a man with virtually no principles “except those that enrich him, and with a deep need for attention and validation. The latter has been coming in torrents from the far right since he began his radicalization towards the right and has built himself the largest echo chamber in the world, which will only feed it.”
The expert added: “It is worth noting that he has rarely, if ever, experienced consequences for his actions, and has been successful in attempting to bully reality into conforming to his beliefs.”
In July, Musk announced the creation of a political action committee, America Pac, that would “mostly, but not entirely” support the Republican Party, as it supports “meritocracy and individual liberty.” Musk did not clarify how much he plans to donate to the Pac, but previous reports had suggested he was considering donating as much as $45 million a month.
The magnitude of Musk’s political transformation has led some to worry about his well-being. In March, He said he was “almost always” sober. during his X-posting sessions, and that his use of ketamine to treat his depression was unrelated to his social media presence.
