Elon Musk owns powerful companies, rockets, satellites, the X network. Now, together with Donald Trump, he’s taking aim at his biggest project: the erosion of liberal democracy.
By Markus Becker, Simon Book, Max Hoppenstedt and Marcel Rosenbach
Perhaps one should simply listen more closely to Elon Musk. Recently, for example, in his interview with the far-right US talker Tucker Carlson: So far, no one has tried to kill the Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, he said, “because it would have been pointless” - and called her a “puppet” and a “marionette”. Amid much laughter. He had previously tweeted and deleted similar things. Because he realized that some of his fans might understand that as a call to action?
Or his tirade against Taylor Swift, the most successful musician of our time, an avowed Democrat, smeared by the Trump camp as a “childless cat lady”. A day after Swift publicly endorsed Kamala Harris, Musk wrote to his 200 million followers on X: “Nice Taylor … you won … I will give you a child and protect your cats with my life.” Just a crude joke? Or a threat of rape? Misogynistic, in any case.
A normal company boss probably wouldn’t have survived any of these statements in office.
Recently, Musk appeared alongside his new close friend Donald Trump, who returned to Butler, Pennsylvania a few days ago to let fans celebrate him at the site of his rally. With him on stage stood Musk, dressed in a “Dark MAGA” cap, Make America Great Again in black letters on a black background. In this getup, he spoke and painted the darkest pictures, serving the crowd a pile of hair-raising untruths:
The Harris camp wants to steal the election, abolish democracy, silence them. The only one who can preserve the Constitution of the United States, save the nation, is Trump. “We must win. We must,” Musk called out to Trump supporters. Otherwise, “this will be our last election here.”
Another boundary crossed, again without consequences.
Probably one should not only listen more closely to Elon Musk. You actually have to. Anything else would be naive.
In 2016 and 2020, the sharpest attacks on the US election came from the shadows: Russian troll factories tried to manipulate the public covertly. The Capitol stormers gathered online primarily in dark niches of the web.
This time, the attacks are coming from one of the heart chambers of the country: Silicon Valley. And they can be observed on an open stage, read in feeds clicked millions of times by Musk and the online mob following him.
The richest man in the world, equipped with a big mouth, a fortune of 250 billion dollars, a publicly celebrated penchant for intoxicants against his depression and illnesses, an astonishing love for autocrats and dictators, a now strictly right-wing worldview and a hatred for everything woke, leftist, queer or even just too democratic, embodies a completely new type of magnate: He not only controls access to the masses. But also to virtually inexhaustible sources of money. And, most importantly, to state-of-the-art high-tech infrastructure.
For months, Musk has been supporting Trump’s re-election with his own specially founded supporter association, called a PAC, pumped up with hundreds of millions of dollars. Time and again, the two met at Trump’s Florida club Mar-a-Lago to broker the deal. In the past three months alone, Musk transferred a whopping 75 million to @America’s account - to capture votes. The PAC promises a $47 cash bonus to all those who recruit a new Trump voter in the swing states who pledges to the PAC’s goals. Musk himself has just set off on a multi-day roadshow through Pennsylvania to convince people there of world savior Trump.
According to the mission statement, @America - and thus Musk - is about taking a hard line on immigration and having as little regulation as possible, for example on gun ownership. The multi-entrepreneur has been pursuing his crusade against any form of “wokeness” since his once son-born daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson publicly disowned him. He had been a cruel father who “desperately seeks attention and validation from an army of conspiracy-theorizing online users,” she wrote on the web. Previously, Musk had declared her “dead” because of her decision to live as a woman - and as a victim of the “Woke mind virus”.
The billionaire’s weapon of choice against this virus is his platform X, formerly Twitter. Here he not only incites hatred himself. He also uses X to specifically amplify the reach of Trump’s lies - and delete unwanted criticism. Colloquially, this is called censorship. Yet Musk had allegedly once bought the former Twitter to secure humanity’s right to free expression.
Musk not only dominates the world of tweets. The power he can wield through his various companies is nothing short of dizzying.
Since 2008, his automaker Tesla has put seven million electric cars on the roads - which Musk could control remotely if he wanted to. Without his space company SpaceX and its rockets, NASA today can hardly launch a single satellite into space. With Neuralink, Musk recently obtained regulatory approval in the U.S. to implant chips into human brains. Musk’s satellite Internet provider Starlink brings broadband connections to the most remote corners of the earth - and to every modern battlefield. Including Ukraine and Israel. It’s hard to imagine what would happen if he simply shut down the network there.
An anti-democratic attitude paired with power over mobile, flying, digital, and high-tech infrastructure - typically, those are the ingredients for the villain’s role in a James Bond movie. “The World Is Not Enough” would fit well. Unfortunately, this dystopia is not playing out in the cinema, but in reality.
Elon Musk’s companies left a request from DER SPIEGEL unanswered. But even so, one can grasp the historically new dimensions of power Musk has accumulated. Perhaps best by comparing him to other moguls whose influence is or was not exactly small either.
Rupert Murdoch, for example, owns newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and TV channels like Fox News worldwide, the man and his titles are staunchly conservative, right-wing in case of doubt. But he himself has never publicly appeared as an opinion leader, nor did he ever aspire to political office. Musk, on the other hand, is the loudest voice on his own global platform. In the event of a Trump election victory, he wants to become part of the U.S. government. Trump has already promised him that.
In the 1920s, former Krupp director Alfred Hugenberg bought himself a media empire to wield in the election campaign: “Make the right wing strong for me!” In 1933, Adolf Hitler appointed him Reich Minister of Economics. Today, the conservative is considered a stirrup holder for the dictator.
Hugenberg, Hitler? Does this overestimate Musk’s historical role?
So far, he has always been underestimated. German car managers long had nothing but scorn and derision for Tesla - until they only saw Musk’s taillights. Similar with SpaceX. The very idea of wanting to compete with the state-owned NASA seemed completely crazy to many. Not to mention his mission to colonize Mars and reuse rockets.
In fact, SpaceX has long since overtaken NASA. Last weekend, the arms of the launch pad caught his Starship’s rockets again, a crazy spectacle. The American space agency now regularly uses the Musk rocket to bring new crews to the space station.
Pushing boundaries, destroying boundaries is something like Musk’s entrepreneurial elixir of life. Boundaries of technical feasibility, boundaries of what is conceivable, boundaries of the planet. Musk embodies the figure of the Silicon Valley system disruptor like no other. The man has disrupted entire industries and overcome seemingly ironclad laws.
Now he is applying this principle to politics - and has found his suitable partner in Donald Trump.
The biographical development is bizarre. Musk once declared himself a “moderate”. Within a few years, he has become not only a right-wing political hardliner, but also an avowed opponent of the liberal democratic USA. The troll-in-chief has mutated into a political agitator. One could say: Donald Trump is probably the greatest current threat to the free world. But his buddy Musk is at least public enemy number two.
It would be both naive and dangerous not to take Musk seriously on this, his probably most enormous and most consequential mission. So far, the man has only had one experience: No one can stop him.
Paige Holland-Thielen chooses a restaurant with a gluten-free menu, heads for a table in the garden, orders a sandwich. She recently moved here with her partner, to Rochester, Minnesota. Far away from California or Texas, far away from Elon Musk. The places where Musk’s companies are located, says the woman with long, curly hair, are beautiful. But nothing would bring her back there.
Holland-Thielen has been through an odyssey. For four and a half years, the engineer worked in a leadership position at Musk’s space company SpaceX, accompanying rocket launches and satellite flights. When she started in Austin, Texas, in 2018, Holland-Thielen says, SpaceX was “a dream job.” “I’ve always loved space. Now I had the chance to really make something happen, to shoot real rockets into space.”
At least since Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, humanity has known how close genius and madness can sometimes be. And listening to Holland-Thielen, it was similar with Musk as in the novel, in which the evil, murderous alter ego of Dr. Jekyll gradually breaks through.
Dr. Elon and Mr. Musk? “That Elon can be an asshole,” Holland-Thielen says, she knew when she signed on with SpaceX. Only the extent and speed of his radicalization were unimaginable to her.
Holland-Thielen sips her water, then reports on Musk’s escalation, at first slow, then progressing ever faster. There’s this scene from the early 2020s, for example. Holland-Thielen was a team leader, responsible for the organizational process of rocket launches at SpaceX, when she learned through a colleague that Musk was currently on the way to a customer in a private jet with his - male - team leaders. “Everyone was there. Except me. Even though everything converged with me,” Holland says.
An oversight? That’s when she first realized how Elon ticked, Holland-Thielen says. But when she told her manager about it, suggesting complaining directly to Musk about his sexism, he advised against it: That would lead directly to dismissal. He and the team, however, could not afford to lose Holland-Thielen at the moment.
Soon Holland-Thielen found out that it wasn’t just happening to her. She and her colleagues had to put up with sexual harassment in the workplace several times. One higher-ranking employee, for example, once reacted to a graphic with a “sexual allusion to an erect penis,” asking her, “How can we get it up, higher, highest?” Musk himself had spoken many times on X and in internal emails about his “wiener,” his sausage - and wanted that to be understood as a joke in hindsight. That’s also what it says in a letter to the board of directors and a lawsuit Holland-Thielen and other employees filed against Musk in 2022. Both are available to DER SPIEGEL. She and seven other SpaceX managers were fired as a result.
Almost nothing is left of Musk’s once-touted “No Asshole” and “Zero Tolerance” policy toward foul-mouthed, abusive bosses, the employees complain in the letter. SpaceX’s “current systems” and “culture do not live up to the company’s stated values.” Musk, who considers the lawsuits unfounded, mocks people based on their gender, sexual orientation, age or religion. The billionaire treats and judges women according to their bra size, runs “his company in the dark Middle Ages” and offers “those who question the ‘Animal House’ environment that they can find another job if they don’t like it.”
All of this, the employees conclude, leaves only one conclusion: “SpaceX must quickly and expressly distance itself from Elon’s personal brand.”
In fact, SpaceX is farther from that than ever. As with Tesla, Musk has filled the company’s supervisory bodies with friends and relatives, at least people loyal to him. No objection is to be expected. Musk, the largest shareholder himself, exercises three roles simultaneously: Chief Executive Officer, Chief Technical Officer, and Chairman of the Board.
Equipped with such omnipotence, Musk has shed any shyness about using his company as a means of coercion. SpaceX is indispensable not only for NASA. With Starlink, Musk also has enormous blackmail potential - against democrats as well as despots.
The company appears in almost every global crisis: Starlink is used by paramilitary forces in Sudan, to fight Houthi rebels in Yemen, or in a hospital in the Gaza Strip. When Russia invaded Ukraine two and a half years ago and destroyed communications infrastructure across the board, it was Musk who, in an allegedly generous act, quickly restored Internet access to Ukrainians: He had Starlink activated there and donated receiving antennas. And when Hurricane “Helene” recently hit the southern U.S. states, President Joe Biden had to call on Musk for help to provide 30 days of free Starlink use for the areas affected by the hurricane.
The more chaotic and insecure conditions become in the world, the better for Musk. From this perspective, too, Donald Trump would be a blessing for him. Global Internet traffic via his satellites has tripled in the past year alone. Starlink now has three million customers in 99 countries. More than six and a half billion dollars, analysts estimate, Musk is likely to turn over with them per year. 7,000 of his satellites circle the Earth today in low orbits, accounting for about 60 percent of all active spacecraft. One could say: Musk has long dominated space as well.
How far he goes with this arsenal was recently shown in Brazil. When a constitutional judge there dared to ban Musk’s short message service X from the country because the platform was continuously spreading disinformation and thus endangering public order, Musk insulted and threatened the court and Brazil’s president - and finally picked a bizarre fight over his Internet provider Starlink, which is essential for local farmers, for example, who often control their machines with the help of the service.
In the end, Musk accepted the millions in fines to get X unlocked again. But that seems to have only reinforced him in his furor - as his enthusiasm for Brazil’s former right-wing populist president Jair Bolsonaro shows.
For Holland-Thielen, her former boss is now a “dangerous person.” She says she can’t understand how people can still work in his companies and drive his cars. “I never want to give Elon another dollar or get one from him,” she says. “I’m very, very shocked by what he’s become.”
Whatever. If this is inappropriate, let me know and I’ll delete them.
Chapter 2: The Attack on Democracy
In a former factory hall in Palo Alto, Peter Barrett strolls past a gigantic indoor slide before slumping into a chair in a conference room and crossing his legs. Barrett is founder and chief technologist of Playground, one of those venture capitalists that turn startups into corporations and their founders into multimillion-dollar CEOs with their investments in Silicon Valley. Barrett was once one of those himself. His computer games forge Rocket Science Games wanted to combine the best of Hollywood and Silicon Valley on the screen. To do that, he brought some of the country’s most talented programmers on board, including a certain Elon Musk.
The company flopped a few years later, Musk moved on. Even then, Barrett says, he could see that Musk actually wanted to “do his own thing.” “He was very, very smart. Each of us knew that one day he would become an entrepreneur.” To this day, Barrett has a noticeable fascination for Musk’s drive. SpaceX and Tesla are “incredible companies,” Barrett says. Elon’s curiosity, his unbridled will paired with modesty, were “outstanding.” Then he pauses rhetorically.
“But his political views are a mystery to me.” His former friend Musk, now “not the boy I knew. And that’s very confusing and perplexing to me.” Today, South African-born Musk, once an immigrant to the U.S. himself, rails against migrants, denies climate change with Trump, which he once wanted to fight with Tesla.
Why? Barrett, long financially independent himself, shakes his head. Being a billionaire can be a challenge. “Because suddenly you can do anything you want.” There are no more limits for “messianic characters.” Musk apparently thinks “only of himself,” no longer of the common good. “And that’s very human. When people cheer you long enough, you start to believe some of it at some point.”
Money corrupts character, the saying goes. But does that make his former employee Musk a danger to humanity? Barrett doesn’t have to search long for an answer. X is “not a good way” for Elon to use his technical talent. But a “real challenge” - because the platform can be “used as a weapon to threaten democracy.”
When Elon Musk took over Twitter two years ago, he made two promises to the world: the platform would be politically “neutral” under him - and free of any censorship. He hoped he would thereby “promote democracy and civil discourse.”
In fact, right after the purchase, Musk began rebuilding Twitter into a political agitation machine. The price of $44 billion seemed grotesque. But the economic consideration falls short. Musk can now undisturbed create the reality in which he apparently lives - or wants to live.
With the takeover, Musk fired the majority of the international teams that had previously moderated the most blatant content. At the same time, he reactivated numerous blocked user accounts, including many of conspiracy ideologues and right-wing extremists. When authoritarian regimes like Turkey demand deletions and bans, Musk readily complies. Journalists he doesn’t like are sometimes blocked. Musk parted ways with a well-known U.S. TV moderator who was supposed to get a new format on X before the first episode aired: He didn’t like the questions for the talk show guest - that was Musk himself.
Like an authoritarian guru, Musk rants on X against illegal migrants, established media and the “woke” zeitgeist. He regularly spreads conspiracy myths that are suitable for undermining trust in democracy and its institutions.
According to an analysis by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Musk posted 50 misleading or false posts about the U.S. election via his channel from January to July of this year. They were viewed around 1.2 billion times. The secret services of the GDR called this strategy “erosion.” Under Musk, Twitter has become a “home for hate and disinformation,” law professor Maya Wiley tells DER SPIEGEL. The billionaire directly promoted the accounts of white racists and neo-Nazis, says the chair of the largest association of U.S. civil rights movements.
Musk biographer Walter Isaacson describes a “demon mode” that Musk sometimes slips into. A kind of dark tunnel the billionaire gets into. “Then he gets dark and retreats into the storm in his head,” is how Musk’s ex-partner, Canadian musician Grimes, describes it. She talks about Musk’s emotional awareness being developed differently than in average people. “He has different moods and many quite different personalities, and he switches between them extremely quickly.”
For X, the new boss is damaging to business. Almost all major advertising clients, such as Apple and Disney, have now withdrawn from the platform. Musk announced he would sue them, accused them of “blackmail” and threw a “Fuck yourself” after them. According to investment firm Fidelity, X’s market value is now only around $9.4 billion - not even a quarter of the purchase price.
From his fans, however, Musk gets frenzied applause for his course. They like and retweet every crude claim, many admire him unconditionally. When Musk spread in July that voting machines and mail-in ballots were too insecure and only in-person voting should be allowed, only agreement was found among the most widely circulated comments. Recently, he made the claim that Democrats want to import millions of migrants, who then allegedly vote for them by a majority. This nonsense was read more than 100 million times.
Musk and X seem to have long since spun out of control. These are not good signs for the avalanche that is currently rolling toward social networks, public communication and democracy as a whole: AI-generated content.
Musk is also involved here. After all, he once co-founded OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. In 2018, he left, and recently even sued co-founder Sam Altman because the company was no longer developing the technology for the benefit of humanity, but for pure profit.
Publicly, Musk enjoys the role of warning against the dangers of AI. In fact, he has long since launched a new AI company of his own, with a possibly far more dangerous model.
Through xAI, he offers paying X users a generative AI called Grok. The program delivers texts and now also images within seconds. Unlike ChatGPT, for example, there seem to be few moral, ethical or legal boundaries, but answers “to almost any question.” When the latest version of Grok was released in August, users reported that they were able to generate instructions for bomb making and Nazi propaganda without much ado. Or a plan for how a rampage at a school could be made as deadly as possible. In one test, analysts even had the AI draw a picture showing Musk in a classroom - holding an assault rifle.
Musk has since downplayed this, saying Grok is an AI committed to truth and that any errors are being corrected immediately. He touts Grok’s big advantage over the AI competition as the program’s ability to “access X in real time.” However, scientists at Northwestern University near Chicago see this very thing as the danger. “X is not exactly known for its accuracy,” the AI experts write. Musk’s AI could produce “misinformation on a large scale.” Moreover, Grok has no comprehensive safeguards in place to prevent misinformation from spreading uncontrollably.
Examples already exist. After Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the Democratic presidential nomination, Grok spread the false news, shared millions of times, for over a week that candidates could no longer be changed so late in the race. Ministers from five U.S. states complained helplessly to Musk that Grok had lied about the U.S. election process.
Is this the political battlefield of the future? Social networks in which an unrestrained and unbridled AI is at the service of trolls and enemies of democracy, autocrats and despots of any color and provenance, giving them the opportunity to produce lies in unprecedented quantity and convincing quality? Does truth, does democracy even stand a chance against this?
The beauty for Musk is that he can’t even be held liable for such madness.
“The original sin,” says German media scholar Joseph Vogl, currently teaching at Princeton University in the U.S., was the year 1996. That’s when the U.S. government restructured its telecommunications law so that platform operators can no longer be held liable for the content distributed on them - but their users can. The calls for violence and discrimination that exist today on X and at Musk’s behest are an effect of this privilege, he says: “In a democratic media world, this liability privilege would have to be abolished.”
Meanwhile, Musk is creating facts, shifting resources, talent and money from his companies toward xAI for months. He’s building the next big thing, a “computer gigafactory” that’s growing on the site of an old industrial factory on the outskirts of Memphis. Nothing less than the “world’s largest supercomputer” is what it’s supposed to become.
Theoretically, he could one day feed this monstrous machine with the unimaginable mass of data his various companies collect all over the world. For example, the data that his millions of Teslas record daily on the world’s roads. Or the data generated by SpaceX’s rocket launches. Or possibly the data that Neuralink will soon collect from human brains.
Artificial intelligence could be the interface for Elon Musk to connect his previously rather disparate empire. Someone like him has all the resources to be at the forefront of the AI race as well. Especially if he saves everything that makes the technology expensive and complicated: a well-positioned security department that contains the machine and protects humanity. xAI would thus become a powerful central hub in Musk’s empire, a data cockpit at whose control knobs the billionaire himself would sit. Next to him perhaps his buddy Trump. Possibly as president. Duo infernale.
Here’s a better translation. It’s long.
Trump Crony Elon Musk: Public Enemy Number Two
Elon Musk owns powerful companies, rockets, satellites, the X network. Now, together with Donald Trump, he’s taking aim at his biggest project: the erosion of liberal democracy.
By Markus Becker, Simon Book, Max Hoppenstedt and Marcel Rosenbach
Perhaps one should simply listen more closely to Elon Musk. Recently, for example, in his interview with the far-right US talker Tucker Carlson: So far, no one has tried to kill the Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, he said, “because it would have been pointless” - and called her a “puppet” and a “marionette”. Amid much laughter. He had previously tweeted and deleted similar things. Because he realized that some of his fans might understand that as a call to action?
Or his tirade against Taylor Swift, the most successful musician of our time, an avowed Democrat, smeared by the Trump camp as a “childless cat lady”. A day after Swift publicly endorsed Kamala Harris, Musk wrote to his 200 million followers on X: “Nice Taylor … you won … I will give you a child and protect your cats with my life.” Just a crude joke? Or a threat of rape? Misogynistic, in any case.
A normal company boss probably wouldn’t have survived any of these statements in office.
Recently, Musk appeared alongside his new close friend Donald Trump, who returned to Butler, Pennsylvania a few days ago to let fans celebrate him at the site of his rally. With him on stage stood Musk, dressed in a “Dark MAGA” cap, Make America Great Again in black letters on a black background. In this getup, he spoke and painted the darkest pictures, serving the crowd a pile of hair-raising untruths:
The Harris camp wants to steal the election, abolish democracy, silence them. The only one who can preserve the Constitution of the United States, save the nation, is Trump. “We must win. We must,” Musk called out to Trump supporters. Otherwise, “this will be our last election here.”
Another boundary crossed, again without consequences.
Probably one should not only listen more closely to Elon Musk. You actually have to. Anything else would be naive.
In 2016 and 2020, the sharpest attacks on the US election came from the shadows: Russian troll factories tried to manipulate the public covertly. The Capitol stormers gathered online primarily in dark niches of the web.
This time, the attacks are coming from one of the heart chambers of the country: Silicon Valley. And they can be observed on an open stage, read in feeds clicked millions of times by Musk and the online mob following him.
The richest man in the world, equipped with a big mouth, a fortune of 250 billion dollars, a publicly celebrated penchant for intoxicants against his depression and illnesses, an astonishing love for autocrats and dictators, a now strictly right-wing worldview and a hatred for everything woke, leftist, queer or even just too democratic, embodies a completely new type of magnate: He not only controls access to the masses. But also to virtually inexhaustible sources of money. And, most importantly, to state-of-the-art high-tech infrastructure.
For months, Musk has been supporting Trump’s re-election with his own specially founded supporter association, called a PAC, pumped up with hundreds of millions of dollars. Time and again, the two met at Trump’s Florida club Mar-a-Lago to broker the deal. In the past three months alone, Musk transferred a whopping 75 million to @America’s account - to capture votes. The PAC promises a $47 cash bonus to all those who recruit a new Trump voter in the swing states who pledges to the PAC’s goals. Musk himself has just set off on a multi-day roadshow through Pennsylvania to convince people there of world savior Trump.
According to the mission statement, @America - and thus Musk - is about taking a hard line on immigration and having as little regulation as possible, for example on gun ownership. The multi-entrepreneur has been pursuing his crusade against any form of “wokeness” since his once son-born daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson publicly disowned him. He had been a cruel father who “desperately seeks attention and validation from an army of conspiracy-theorizing online users,” she wrote on the web. Previously, Musk had declared her “dead” because of her decision to live as a woman - and as a victim of the “Woke mind virus”.
The billionaire’s weapon of choice against this virus is his platform X, formerly Twitter. Here he not only incites hatred himself. He also uses X to specifically amplify the reach of Trump’s lies - and delete unwanted criticism. Colloquially, this is called censorship. Yet Musk had allegedly once bought the former Twitter to secure humanity’s right to free expression.
Musk not only dominates the world of tweets. The power he can wield through his various companies is nothing short of dizzying.
Since 2008, his automaker Tesla has put seven million electric cars on the roads - which Musk could control remotely if he wanted to. Without his space company SpaceX and its rockets, NASA today can hardly launch a single satellite into space. With Neuralink, Musk recently obtained regulatory approval in the U.S. to implant chips into human brains. Musk’s satellite Internet provider Starlink brings broadband connections to the most remote corners of the earth - and to every modern battlefield. Including Ukraine and Israel. It’s hard to imagine what would happen if he simply shut down the network there.
An anti-democratic attitude paired with power over mobile, flying, digital, and high-tech infrastructure - typically, those are the ingredients for the villain’s role in a James Bond movie. “The World Is Not Enough” would fit well. Unfortunately, this dystopia is not playing out in the cinema, but in reality.
Elon Musk’s companies left a request from DER SPIEGEL unanswered. But even so, one can grasp the historically new dimensions of power Musk has accumulated. Perhaps best by comparing him to other moguls whose influence is or was not exactly small either.
Rupert Murdoch, for example, owns newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and TV channels like Fox News worldwide, the man and his titles are staunchly conservative, right-wing in case of doubt. But he himself has never publicly appeared as an opinion leader, nor did he ever aspire to political office. Musk, on the other hand, is the loudest voice on his own global platform. In the event of a Trump election victory, he wants to become part of the U.S. government. Trump has already promised him that.
In the 1920s, former Krupp director Alfred Hugenberg bought himself a media empire to wield in the election campaign: “Make the right wing strong for me!” In 1933, Adolf Hitler appointed him Reich Minister of Economics. Today, the conservative is considered a stirrup holder for the dictator. Hugenberg, Hitler? Does this overestimate Musk’s historical role?
So far, he has always been underestimated. German car managers long had nothing but scorn and derision for Tesla - until they only saw Musk’s taillights. Similar with SpaceX. The very idea of wanting to compete with the state-owned NASA seemed completely crazy to many. Not to mention his mission to colonize Mars and reuse rockets.
In fact, SpaceX has long since overtaken NASA. Last weekend, the arms of the launch pad caught his Starship’s rockets again, a crazy spectacle. The American space agency now regularly uses the Musk rocket to bring new crews to the space station.
Pushing boundaries, destroying boundaries is something like Musk’s entrepreneurial elixir of life. Boundaries of technical feasibility, boundaries of what is conceivable, boundaries of the planet. Musk embodies the figure of the Silicon Valley system disruptor like no other. The man has disrupted entire industries and overcome seemingly ironclad laws.
Now he is applying this principle to politics - and has found his suitable partner in Donald Trump. The biographical development is bizarre. Musk once declared himself a “moderate”. Within a few years, he has become not only a right-wing political hardliner, but also an avowed opponent of the liberal democratic USA. The troll-in-chief has mutated into a political agitator. One could say: Donald Trump is probably the greatest current threat to the free world. But his buddy Musk is at least public enemy number two.
It would be both naive and dangerous not to take Musk seriously on this, his probably most enormous and most consequential mission. So far, the man has only had one experience: No one can stop him.
Chapter 1: Personal Radicalization
Paige Holland-Thielen chooses a restaurant with a gluten-free menu, heads for a table in the garden, orders a sandwich. She recently moved here with her partner, to Rochester, Minnesota. Far away from California or Texas, far away from Elon Musk. The places where Musk’s companies are located, says the woman with long, curly hair, are beautiful. But nothing would bring her back there.
Holland-Thielen has been through an odyssey. For four and a half years, the engineer worked in a leadership position at Musk’s space company SpaceX, accompanying rocket launches and satellite flights. When she started in Austin, Texas, in 2018, Holland-Thielen says, SpaceX was “a dream job.” “I’ve always loved space. Now I had the chance to really make something happen, to shoot real rockets into space.”
At least since Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, humanity has known how close genius and madness can sometimes be. And listening to Holland-Thielen, it was similar with Musk as in the novel, in which the evil, murderous alter ego of Dr. Jekyll gradually breaks through.
Dr. Elon and Mr. Musk? “That Elon can be an asshole,” Holland-Thielen says, she knew when she signed on with SpaceX. Only the extent and speed of his radicalization were unimaginable to her.
Holland-Thielen sips her water, then reports on Musk’s escalation, at first slow, then progressing ever faster. There’s this scene from the early 2020s, for example. Holland-Thielen was a team leader, responsible for the organizational process of rocket launches at SpaceX, when she learned through a colleague that Musk was currently on the way to a customer in a private jet with his - male - team leaders. “Everyone was there. Except me. Even though everything converged with me,” Holland says. An oversight? That’s when she first realized how Elon ticked, Holland-Thielen says. But when she told her manager about it, suggesting complaining directly to Musk about his sexism, he advised against it: That would lead directly to dismissal. He and the team, however, could not afford to lose Holland-Thielen at the moment.
Soon Holland-Thielen found out that it wasn’t just happening to her. She and her colleagues had to put up with sexual harassment in the workplace several times. One higher-ranking employee, for example, once reacted to a graphic with a “sexual allusion to an erect penis,” asking her, “How can we get it up, higher, highest?” Musk himself had spoken many times on X and in internal emails about his “wiener,” his sausage - and wanted that to be understood as a joke in hindsight. That’s also what it says in a letter to the board of directors and a lawsuit Holland-Thielen and other employees filed against Musk in 2022. Both are available to DER SPIEGEL. She and seven other SpaceX managers were fired as a result. Almost nothing is left of Musk’s once-touted “No Asshole” and “Zero Tolerance” policy toward foul-mouthed, abusive bosses, the employees complain in the letter. SpaceX’s “current systems” and “culture do not live up to the company’s stated values.” Musk, who considers the lawsuits unfounded, mocks people based on their gender, sexual orientation, age or religion. The billionaire treats and judges women according to their bra size, runs “his company in the dark Middle Ages” and offers “those who question the ‘Animal House’ environment that they can find another job if they don’t like it.”
All of this, the employees conclude, leaves only one conclusion: “SpaceX must quickly and expressly distance itself from Elon’s personal brand.”
In fact, SpaceX is farther from that than ever. As with Tesla, Musk has filled the company’s supervisory bodies with friends and relatives, at least people loyal to him. No objection is to be expected. Musk, the largest shareholder himself, exercises three roles simultaneously: Chief Executive Officer, Chief Technical Officer, and Chairman of the Board.
Equipped with such omnipotence, Musk has shed any shyness about using his company as a means of coercion. SpaceX is indispensable not only for NASA. With Starlink, Musk also has enormous blackmail potential - against democrats as well as despots.
The company appears in almost every global crisis: Starlink is used by paramilitary forces in Sudan, to fight Houthi rebels in Yemen, or in a hospital in the Gaza Strip. When Russia invaded Ukraine two and a half years ago and destroyed communications infrastructure across the board, it was Musk who, in an allegedly generous act, quickly restored Internet access to Ukrainians: He had Starlink activated there and donated receiving antennas. And when Hurricane “Helene” recently hit the southern U.S. states, President Joe Biden had to call on Musk for help to provide 30 days of free Starlink use for the areas affected by the hurricane.
The more chaotic and insecure conditions become in the world, the better for Musk. From this perspective, too, Donald Trump would be a blessing for him. Global Internet traffic via his satellites has tripled in the past year alone. Starlink now has three million customers in 99 countries. More than six and a half billion dollars, analysts estimate, Musk is likely to turn over with them per year. 7,000 of his satellites circle the Earth today in low orbits, accounting for about 60 percent of all active spacecraft. One could say: Musk has long dominated space as well.
How far he goes with this arsenal was recently shown in Brazil. When a constitutional judge there dared to ban Musk’s short message service X from the country because the platform was continuously spreading disinformation and thus endangering public order, Musk insulted and threatened the court and Brazil’s president - and finally picked a bizarre fight over his Internet provider Starlink, which is essential for local farmers, for example, who often control their machines with the help of the service. In the end, Musk accepted the millions in fines to get X unlocked again. But that seems to have only reinforced him in his furor - as his enthusiasm for Brazil’s former right-wing populist president Jair Bolsonaro shows.
For Holland-Thielen, her former boss is now a “dangerous person.” She says she can’t understand how people can still work in his companies and drive his cars. “I never want to give Elon another dollar or get one from him,” she says. “I’m very, very shocked by what he’s become.”
Wait, is this legal? It’s starting to feel like I am breaking a rule here. There’s more.
Whatever. If this is inappropriate, let me know and I’ll delete them.
Chapter 2: The Attack on Democracy
In a former factory hall in Palo Alto, Peter Barrett strolls past a gigantic indoor slide before slumping into a chair in a conference room and crossing his legs. Barrett is founder and chief technologist of Playground, one of those venture capitalists that turn startups into corporations and their founders into multimillion-dollar CEOs with their investments in Silicon Valley. Barrett was once one of those himself. His computer games forge Rocket Science Games wanted to combine the best of Hollywood and Silicon Valley on the screen. To do that, he brought some of the country’s most talented programmers on board, including a certain Elon Musk.
The company flopped a few years later, Musk moved on. Even then, Barrett says, he could see that Musk actually wanted to “do his own thing.” “He was very, very smart. Each of us knew that one day he would become an entrepreneur.” To this day, Barrett has a noticeable fascination for Musk’s drive. SpaceX and Tesla are “incredible companies,” Barrett says. Elon’s curiosity, his unbridled will paired with modesty, were “outstanding.” Then he pauses rhetorically.
“But his political views are a mystery to me.” His former friend Musk, now “not the boy I knew. And that’s very confusing and perplexing to me.” Today, South African-born Musk, once an immigrant to the U.S. himself, rails against migrants, denies climate change with Trump, which he once wanted to fight with Tesla.
Why? Barrett, long financially independent himself, shakes his head. Being a billionaire can be a challenge. “Because suddenly you can do anything you want.” There are no more limits for “messianic characters.” Musk apparently thinks “only of himself,” no longer of the common good. “And that’s very human. When people cheer you long enough, you start to believe some of it at some point.” Money corrupts character, the saying goes. But does that make his former employee Musk a danger to humanity? Barrett doesn’t have to search long for an answer. X is “not a good way” for Elon to use his technical talent. But a “real challenge” - because the platform can be “used as a weapon to threaten democracy.”
When Elon Musk took over Twitter two years ago, he made two promises to the world: the platform would be politically “neutral” under him - and free of any censorship. He hoped he would thereby “promote democracy and civil discourse.”
In fact, right after the purchase, Musk began rebuilding Twitter into a political agitation machine. The price of $44 billion seemed grotesque. But the economic consideration falls short. Musk can now undisturbed create the reality in which he apparently lives - or wants to live.
With the takeover, Musk fired the majority of the international teams that had previously moderated the most blatant content. At the same time, he reactivated numerous blocked user accounts, including many of conspiracy ideologues and right-wing extremists. When authoritarian regimes like Turkey demand deletions and bans, Musk readily complies. Journalists he doesn’t like are sometimes blocked. Musk parted ways with a well-known U.S. TV moderator who was supposed to get a new format on X before the first episode aired: He didn’t like the questions for the talk show guest - that was Musk himself.
Like an authoritarian guru, Musk rants on X against illegal migrants, established media and the “woke” zeitgeist. He regularly spreads conspiracy myths that are suitable for undermining trust in democracy and its institutions.
According to an analysis by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Musk posted 50 misleading or false posts about the U.S. election via his channel from January to July of this year. They were viewed around 1.2 billion times. The secret services of the GDR called this strategy “erosion.” Under Musk, Twitter has become a “home for hate and disinformation,” law professor Maya Wiley tells DER SPIEGEL. The billionaire directly promoted the accounts of white racists and neo-Nazis, says the chair of the largest association of U.S. civil rights movements.
Musk biographer Walter Isaacson describes a “demon mode” that Musk sometimes slips into. A kind of dark tunnel the billionaire gets into. “Then he gets dark and retreats into the storm in his head,” is how Musk’s ex-partner, Canadian musician Grimes, describes it. She talks about Musk’s emotional awareness being developed differently than in average people. “He has different moods and many quite different personalities, and he switches between them extremely quickly.”
For X, the new boss is damaging to business. Almost all major advertising clients, such as Apple and Disney, have now withdrawn from the platform. Musk announced he would sue them, accused them of “blackmail” and threw a “Fuck yourself” after them. According to investment firm Fidelity, X’s market value is now only around $9.4 billion - not even a quarter of the purchase price.
From his fans, however, Musk gets frenzied applause for his course. They like and retweet every crude claim, many admire him unconditionally. When Musk spread in July that voting machines and mail-in ballots were too insecure and only in-person voting should be allowed, only agreement was found among the most widely circulated comments. Recently, he made the claim that Democrats want to import millions of migrants, who then allegedly vote for them by a majority. This nonsense was read more than 100 million times.
Chapter 3: The Battle for the Future - AI
Musk and X seem to have long since spun out of control. These are not good signs for the avalanche that is currently rolling toward social networks, public communication and democracy as a whole: AI-generated content.
Musk is also involved here. After all, he once co-founded OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. In 2018, he left, and recently even sued co-founder Sam Altman because the company was no longer developing the technology for the benefit of humanity, but for pure profit.
Publicly, Musk enjoys the role of warning against the dangers of AI. In fact, he has long since launched a new AI company of his own, with a possibly far more dangerous model.
Through xAI, he offers paying X users a generative AI called Grok. The program delivers texts and now also images within seconds. Unlike ChatGPT, for example, there seem to be few moral, ethical or legal boundaries, but answers “to almost any question.” When the latest version of Grok was released in August, users reported that they were able to generate instructions for bomb making and Nazi propaganda without much ado. Or a plan for how a rampage at a school could be made as deadly as possible. In one test, analysts even had the AI draw a picture showing Musk in a classroom - holding an assault rifle.
Musk has since downplayed this, saying Grok is an AI committed to truth and that any errors are being corrected immediately. He touts Grok’s big advantage over the AI competition as the program’s ability to “access X in real time.” However, scientists at Northwestern University near Chicago see this very thing as the danger. “X is not exactly known for its accuracy,” the AI experts write. Musk’s AI could produce “misinformation on a large scale.” Moreover, Grok has no comprehensive safeguards in place to prevent misinformation from spreading uncontrollably.
Examples already exist. After Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the Democratic presidential nomination, Grok spread the false news, shared millions of times, for over a week that candidates could no longer be changed so late in the race. Ministers from five U.S. states complained helplessly to Musk that Grok had lied about the U.S. election process.
Is this the political battlefield of the future? Social networks in which an unrestrained and unbridled AI is at the service of trolls and enemies of democracy, autocrats and despots of any color and provenance, giving them the opportunity to produce lies in unprecedented quantity and convincing quality? Does truth, does democracy even stand a chance against this?
The beauty for Musk is that he can’t even be held liable for such madness.
“The original sin,” says German media scholar Joseph Vogl, currently teaching at Princeton University in the U.S., was the year 1996. That’s when the U.S. government restructured its telecommunications law so that platform operators can no longer be held liable for the content distributed on them - but their users can. The calls for violence and discrimination that exist today on X and at Musk’s behest are an effect of this privilege, he says: “In a democratic media world, this liability privilege would have to be abolished.”
Meanwhile, Musk is creating facts, shifting resources, talent and money from his companies toward xAI for months. He’s building the next big thing, a “computer gigafactory” that’s growing on the site of an old industrial factory on the outskirts of Memphis. Nothing less than the “world’s largest supercomputer” is what it’s supposed to become.
Theoretically, he could one day feed this monstrous machine with the unimaginable mass of data his various companies collect all over the world. For example, the data that his millions of Teslas record daily on the world’s roads. Or the data generated by SpaceX’s rocket launches. Or possibly the data that Neuralink will soon collect from human brains.
Artificial intelligence could be the interface for Elon Musk to connect his previously rather disparate empire. Someone like him has all the resources to be at the forefront of the AI race as well. Especially if he saves everything that makes the technology expensive and complicated: a well-positioned security department that contains the machine and protects humanity. xAI would thus become a powerful central hub in Musk’s empire, a data cockpit at whose control knobs the billionaire himself would sit. Next to him perhaps his buddy Trump. Possibly as president. Duo infernale.
All done.
I don’t think Spiegel will sue you for copyright infringement for providing translations on Lemmy… But you never know!
I’m probably fine. I am not in Germany. I just don’t want to make a problem for slrpnk.