Allies and aides to Donald Trump should be increasingly concerned by Elon Musk’s proximity to and influence on the US president-elect, the Yale historian and bestselling author Timothy Snyder said.
“Trump is a little guy, and Musk is a big guy when it actually comes to having money,” Snyder said. “And I think if you were a friend of Trump, you would be worried.”
Snyder expects that Trump’s soon-to-be home, the White House, will be a stage for uncomfortable and damaging discord between the president-elect and his most powerful ally, the world’s richest man.
“I think we overestimate Trump and we underestimate Musk,” Snyder said. “People can’t help but think that Trump has money, but he doesn’t. He’s never really had money. He’s never even really claimed to have money. His whole notion is that you have to believe that he has money. But he’s never been able to pay his own debts. He’s never been able to finance his own campaigns.
“Musk, with an amount of money that was meaningless to him, was able to finance Trump’s campaign, essentially.”
I think his goal now is to literally run the world behind the scenes. Notice he’s now trying to influence Germany’s elections.
I think he’s trying to attract these unsavory parties, because they are easy to be bought before and after they are in power. Then he can develop his tech any way he sees fit. If you look at how he’s been interacting with other tech leaders, it’s pretty freaky. He was hassling Dr. Hinton not too long before latching onto Trump.