Opinion | Elon Musk just had an awfully strange, yet illuminating week

Elon Musk isn’t just the richest man in the world, the biggest donor to President-elect Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign and arguably the most successful crony capitalist of all time. He’s also an avid conspiracy theorist and a purveyor of misinformation. And when it comes to the way he censors critics and elevates his preferred political ideologies on X, he’s a massive hypocrite.

Additionally, over the past few weeks, Musk has yet again demonstrated a soft spot for racists, a keen interest in bullying institutions he can’t control into submission and, like Trump, incoherent political principles he’ll jettison the moment they run counter to his feelings. 

Days after Musk praised the extreme-right, Nazi-sympathizing political party Alternative for Germany (AfD) as “the only hope for Germany,” Mediaite reported that Musk is a paid subscriber to an openly racist, pro-apartheid South African X account. (Musk did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)

But just this week, Musk and his DOGE co-chair Vivek Ramaswamy have been mired in a MAGA civil war — aired out on his fetid cesspool of toxic discourse, X — in which they were on the less racist side. 

At issue are the DOGE tycoons’ support for H-1B visas to lure the best international tech workers to America — which the xenophobic MAGA faithful considers a betrayal of the anti-immigration platform they’ve so long expected from Trump. After Ramaswamy slammed American culture for supposedly “venerat[ing] mediocrity over excellence,” a predictable wave of racism and antisemitism from high-profile MAGA accounts followed. (One such prominent account tweeted, “Indians are the foot soldiers for the jews.”)

Pretty disgusting and horrific stuff! And yet, it’s hardly out of character for Musk’s X. 

And while Musk reportedly said he bought the site formerly known as Twitter because he was worried about the “future of civilization” and wanted to end what he and his allies incorrectly asserted was the deliberate suppression of conservative accounts — some verified MAGA accounts have complained that they’ve been summarily demonetized and stripped of their blue checkmarks. (Musk didn’t comment on these complaints directly, but he did post on Thursday that “any accounts found to be engaged in coordinated attacks to spam target accounts with mute/blocks will themselves be categorized — correctly — as spam.”)

Also this week, Musk re-upped his attacks on Wikipedia, exhorting his followers on Tuesday to “Stop donating to Wokepedia until they restore balance to their editing authority.” Musk, who claimed he offered to buy the online community-edited encyclopedia for a billion dollars if it rebranded as “Dickipedia,” amplified a troll account that shared a misleading graphic that falsely indicated Wikipedia spends almost a third of its budget on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) efforts. 

Writing in Arc Digital, Nicholas Grossman explained that Wikipedia is quite transparent with its budgets, and “most of the ‘equity’ spending funds Wikipedia contributors in less covered countries and non-Western languages, while the spending marked ‘safety and inclusion’ helps various contributors deal with disinformation, persecution, and complicated or repressive laws. The result is that, for example, an entry on Uganda is written by credentialed experts on Uganda and actual Ugandans, rather than, say, a brigade of racist Elon Musk fans from North America … Whatever you think of DEI training seminars, that’s not what this is.”

Grossman added that “Musk has been going after Wikipedia for a while because its entry for Elon Musk doesn’t go along with his self-promotional myth-making, and other entries prioritize the truth over his preferred distortions.”

This is the Musk playbook: prioritizing his feelings over facts, and self-interest over altruism.

Endorse a virulently racist, anti-immigration political party in Germany — then endorse an increase in visas so that your preferred immigrants can come work at your American tech companies.

Regularly declare yourself a free speech absolutist and decry Twitter’s previous owners as censorious partisans with opaque moderation policies — then severely throttle X accounts under the vague pretense of fighting “spam.” 

Obsess over supposed media “bias” and “lies” — then share false information about a largely trustworthy and self-correcting website that even your obscene wealth can’t bend to your will.

For the world’s richest man, it’s not about honesty and principles, it’s about ego and vibes.