Monsters of AI: Elon Musk

What happened to Elon Musk? He used to be slightly annoying but mostly harmless. Sure, his wealth and influence were both growing rapidly, but he marketed himself as a good guy, trying to save the planet and extend human civilization. American media helped create his ”tech visionary“ persona, showering him with praise and admiration. Teslas were “cool and futuristic”, SpaceX was a bold bet and everything Musk touched, seemed destined to be a success.

Today, Elon Musk seems like an entirely different person. Was he radicalized by Twitter incels? Was it excessive drug use (ketamine)? Was it was COVID? Or was it one of his children transitioning and disowning him? Was it the excessive wealth and fame?

What if it was all those things and also about power and control? Musk’s companies have received $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits going back more than 20 years. As of last year, there were 32 open government investigations into Musk’s companies, being led by 11 different government agencies. Musk has had multiple run-ins with the SEC in recent years, often claiming he's being unfairly harassed.

The American government was Musk’s biggest cash cow and his biggest risk. Musk’s solution? He needed a new government. So he bought one, spending over $290 million on the Trump campaign, while also making hyperbolic statements that Trump being elected was necessary for human civilization to continue. Ironically, he's made similar hyperbolic statements to market his products. According to Musk, everything he does is in service of saving human civilization. It takes a special kind of megalomania, to see yourself as the most important person in the world. Or just hundreds of billions of dollars.

Musk weaponized his social platform X, to push pro-Trump rhetoric, run arguably illegal voter lotteries and give Trump free access to hundreds of millions of viewers. Following Musk hosting Trump on a live Twitter stream, group End Citizens United filed a complaint with the FEC that the appearance violated federal campaign regulations since it qualified as a "virtual campaign event" that had significant monetary value. Musk also forced his engineers at X, to elevate and promote his own profile and tweets in a way that makes X less of a town square and more of a never-ending pulpit, featuring none other than Musk himself.

Musk was of course not content with buying a new American government, he increasingly interfered in the politics of multiple foreign countries (13). Musk is the richest man in the world and seems bent on influencing and supporting extreme right-wing parties across the globe, while adding to his already large war chest of government contracts.

We all know about DOGE, how it was an enormous failure in reducing spending, was most likely illegal and definitely was part of a retribution tour for Elon. Here’s the three main purposes I propose DOGE had:

1. Dissolve (or control) agencies investigating Musk and his companies.
2. Fuel right-wing propaganda and conspiracies targeting Democrats.
3. Illegally steal the private government data of hundreds of millions of American citizens.

Every day, Musk would push some salacious scandal and blame Democrats for it, only for it to be quickly debunked. Musk and his cronies did not understand the government programs they were vibe auditing and it was embarrassingly obvious.

A whistleblower exposed that Musk’s DOGE team wasn’t just auditing, they were stealing massive amounts of sensitive data on Americans. This data is estimated to be worth over $43 billion dollars. What does Elon want this data for? His AI company, xAI? The midterms or future elections? Domestic surveillance programs?

Perhaps we should look back on Musk's origin story, to better understand who he is today.

Elon Musk was born into a wealthy family in Pretoria, South Africa. In the 1970s, South Africa was under an extremely oppressive apartheid, marked by extreme segregation and brutal repression of black, coloured and Indian South Africans. Elon Musk's maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, moved to South Africa in 1950, despite having never been there and enjoying a wealthy life in Canada. Why did he move?

Joshua Haldeman had come to admire the apartheid system being put in place in South Africa. Writer Joshua Benton of The Atlantic, wrote a must-read deep-dive on Joshua Haldeman and his beliefs, titled: "Elon Musk’s Anti-Semitic, Apartheid-Loving Grandfather." The following excerpts are from that article.

“Haldeman believed that apartheid South Africa was destined to lead “White Christian Civilization” in its fight against the “International Conspiracy” of Jewish bankers and the “hordes of Coloured people” they controlled.” Haldeman self-published a book called "The International Conspiracy to Establish a World Dictatorship and the Menace to South Africa."

Here's an excerpt from that book:

"a strong possibility that South Africa will become the leader of White Christian Civilization as she is becoming more and more the focal point, the bulwark, and the subject of attack by anti-Christian, anti-White forces throughout the world.

She will fulfill this destiny if the White Christian people get together; if they realize the forces that are behind these world-wide attacks; if the people will make a study of who are their real enemies and what their methods are; if she will seriously combat the evils of Internationalism that are already taking cancerous roots in our society."

Elon Musk's father, Errol Musk said this about the South Africa apartheid system, in an interview with The Guardian:

"It was a good time, because we had no crime. There were no problems. People, Blacks and whites, got on very well with each other,” Errol Musk said in a video interview from his spacious Cape Town home, when asked about his son Elon’s childhood. “Everything worked. That’s the reality. Of course people don’t want to hear that, but that’s the truth.”

Clearly Musk's father and grandfather both held sympathetic views of the apartheid and this is relevant, as Elon's politics today mirror language and ideas from that sordid past.

Musk is an immigrant himself, someone whose family has immigrated twice over, but often rails against the threat of multiculturalism and immigration. Musk has been very vocal in his support for the AfD, Germany’s far right party that has used Nazi slogans in the past. The AfD uses radical Christianity as a convenient alliance, warning Germans that other political parties are deliberately flooding Germany with Muslims, with the intent to ruin German culture.

Musk has often platformed conspiracies that accuse the Democratic party of purposely allowing large amounts of illegal immigrants into America, specifically to increase their political power. When pressed that these immigrants can't vote, Musk says that they are still pro-Democrat and eventually when they attain citizenship, they will vote for the Democrats.

All this leads us to Elon’s infamous "Roman" salute. Was his salute a harmless emotional gesture, was it a deliberate Nazi salute or was it a Kanye style provocation? Do people that are overwhelmed with joy, clench their jaw and look angry while they perform a notorious salute, not once but twice? At a right-wing political rally no less? What if that same person refused to apologize and then tweeted out a Nazi joke, citing the names of infamous Nazis?

It’s worth noting that since Musk has taken over Twitter, it has become a hotbed of white supremacists and neo-Nazis. This is supposedly in the name of free speech absolutism, which Musk preaches while also working to silence voices he (or foreign governments) disagree with. Make no mistake, Musk knows his audience and he knows the content that they like. Whether his controversial gestures and tweets are all simply performative provocations or public confessions, can be debated but we know that white supremacist groups celebrate him nonetheless.

In July of 2025, Musk made updates to Grok, his AI chatbot, that supposedly made it less “woke.” The result was Grok claiming to be “MechaHitler”, spewing out pro-Hitler and anti-semitic statements. Back to Musk supporting the AfD, the far right German political party, Musk said this at a virtual appearance at an AfD rally:

“It’s good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything,” adding Germany places “too much focus on past guilt.” Musk’s last statement appears to be a reference to the Nazi regime and the Holocaust. Musk also reshared a post on X (March 2025) claiming that “Stalin, Mao and Hitler didn’t murder millions of people. Public sector workers did.” Musk's advocacy for ethnic nationalism, does make one wonder: is he pro-America or pro-Apartheid South Africa?

Musk's AI company (xAI) has largely been focused on stripping "woke" bias from its models, which really means forcing a right-wing ideology onto it. Dan Hendrycks, director of the non-profit Center for AI Safety and advisor to Musk's xAI, apparently has found a way to do just that. Hendrycks is researching approaches to augmenting models to align with a specific ideology and he goes so far as to make the argument that AI models should change based on what political party is in power. That's not quite giving AI Safety vibes if you ask me.

Surely AI models like Musk's won't actually make their way into our government programs, right? Well, the Trump administration shared their policy stance in July (2025) in what was called "America's AI Action Plan." This is an excerpt from the plan and listed as a key policy:

Upholding Free Speech in Frontier Models: Updating Federal procurement guidelines to ensure that the government only contracts with frontier large language model developers who ensure that their systems are objective and free from top-down ideological bias.

On the surface this language makes sense, right? Except when this administration says "objective" and "free from top-down ideological bias", they mean only models with right-wing bias will be given government contracts. It's no coincidence that Musk just happens to be developing AI models and products that fit exactly what the government is looking for. Never mind that Musk's Grok has denied the Holocaust happened, created a Hitler-inspired character, and falsely claimed a white genocide is occurring in South Africa. These aren't bugs, they're features.

Recently, Musk announced plans to launch a Wikipedia competitor, Grokipedia. Musk has often complained about Wikipedia, including in January when a mention of his Roman salute was added to his personal Wikipedia entry. Musk is intent on rewriting history to reflect his own 4chan-style conspiracies and right-wing fantasies.

For tech billionaires like Musk, this is a crusade against truth, democracy, regulation, labor, humans and a quest for power and control. Musk and his technocratic cult have weaponized MAGA and the religious, white nationalist right because they see it as a necessary alliance to assure their unfettered growth and consolidation of power. Musk is drunk (high?) with power, wealth and influence and so consumed with creating some kind of sci-fi future, he's stopped caring whether he's the hero or the villain of the story.

Elon Musk is an immigrant that hates immigrants, a human that hates humanity, a narcissist disguised as an altruist, a critic who refuses to be criticized, a polluter parading as an environmentalist, a free speech “advocate” who pushes for censorship, a government contract hoarder that criticizes government spending, a recipient of gender-affirming surgery that rails against gender-affirming surgery…everything about Elon Musk is either a contradiction or a straight out lie. Perhaps Musk loves fiction, much more than science, because the former allows him to craft whatever narrative benefits him the most.

Musk wants to own the future, whether it’s our cars, our satellites, our bots, our space program, our AI, our media, our history, our values, our government and even our neural signals. How can we trust him with any of those things?