Elon Musk and his Division of Authorities Effectivity have been rampaging by the federal authorities. However earlier than he was letting his DOGE crew by accident fireplace nuclear security staff 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 raised perceive him, seven Vox writers inform us what they’ve realized that helps them make sense of the billionaire.
A person with a rare danger 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 technique to destroy his fortune,” Vance writes. The gambles labored out, in fact, however simply might 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 towards a 350-pound champion sumo wrestler.
—Dylan Matthews
In hindsight, Musk’s 2018 feud with a British cave explorer might 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 provided to assist the Thai authorities’s rescue effort by contributing a mini-submarine. However authorities deemed Musk’s provide 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, stated that Musk’s provide “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 in any respect.
This incident revealed that Musk is exceptionally delicate to non-public slights and keen to inform defamatory lies about those that affront him. In case you are 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 an area degree somewhat than a nationwide one. He has absurdly argued that the Democratic Occasion 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 tens of millions 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 Companies to fight cyber assaults that use “social deception” techniques.
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 many others. — however I feel his obsession with defeating what he calls the “woke thoughts virus” actually is sort of essential. Like many, he was radicalized pretty just lately 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 really got here to imagine reversing that shift is likely 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 making an attempt to do at DOGE by attacking progressive establishments like nonprofit teams, universities, the media, and the “deep state.” And in contrast to lots of Trump’s first-term advisers, Musk has each the boldness to ignore authorized warning and the power to determine the right way to really make issues occur — no one anticipated him to successfully seize levers of energy inside authorities that allow his crew engineer mass layoffs of civil servants and block spending, however he did it. He’s a wrecking ball towards those that stand in Trump’s approach.
—Andrew Prokop
Elon’s acquired the blinders on dangerous
Within the decade and a half that I’ve been protecting Elon Musk and his firms, it’s been exceptional to see simply how a lot this man’s worldview has develop into trapped in an echo chamber. Issues acquired a lot worse when he purchased it. I’m speaking about Twitter, now X, and I’m left questioning every day if Musk seeks out data past what he sees in his feed or suggestions past what exhibits up in his mentions.
That is deep mind rot territory, and what’s taking place 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 taking place to the lives of on a regular basis People. Folks used to say what occurs on Twitter solely issues to different individuals on Twitter. Now, because of Musk and his mob, it’s shaping the way forward for america.
—Adam Clark Estes
A champion of “masculine power”
Musk and his allies are remodeling DEI critiques right into a protection of conventional masculinity the place warning and consideration are being recast as weak spot and the mark of losers. Underneath this framework, prioritizing variety is framed because the offender for why we’re failing at present.
When Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg stated firms want extra “masculine power” as a result of company tradition has develop into “culturally neutered,” he was voicing a rising Republican sentiment. Latest survey information exhibits that 79 p.c of Republican males and a hanging 67 p.c of Republican girls now imagine “society has develop into too smooth and female” — a large spike since 2011. This new rhetoric isn’t about bettering equality efforts — it’s about reframing warning as timidity. What started as pushback on particular variety initiatives is evolving right into a broader ideology during 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 changing into the quickest path to dismissal.
—Rachel Cohen
Trying 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 web site X pressured advert big 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 Road 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 methods.
A probe into Musk’s brain-computer interface firm Neuralink is up within the air after these FDA investigators have been fired (some have been requested to return). New emissions guidelines and tariffs may gain advantage Tesla over its rivals. And whereas the automobile firm’s gross sales in Europe have plummeted amid rising protests, a kneecapped Shopper Monetary Safety Bureau can now not examine a whole bunch 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 listing 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: individuals 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 tug 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, towards 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 1,000,000 further deaths yearly.
—Kelsey Piper
This story initially appeared in As we speak, Defined, Vox’s flagship each day e-newsletter. Enroll right here for future editions.
