Tesla CEO Elon Musk posted on his X account that he would not be donating to either political party in the upcoming November election on March 6, 2024. Now, months later, the statement feels almost comedic, having seen how far he’s gone from this statement to physically being inside the White House alongside President Donald Trump. But understanding how we got here is what’s most crucial to seeing the type of far-right Republican he has turned into.
Musk is the face and funding behind several famous tech companies, including Tesla and SpaceX, but, in 2025, he is making headlines in much more controversial ways as the Senior Political Advisor to the President of the United States. Having helped the current president get re-elected via massive donations and holding events nationwide, Musk cemented himself as a figurehead in the new Trump administration.
For those less familiar with the eccentric billionaire mogul, Musk is also the majority owner of companies like Twitter, which he renamed to “X,” and The Boring Company, an infrastructure organization that spun off SpaceX. Over the past decade, he has ingrained himself in the popular culture thanks to his frequent posting on X, breaking more common social norms of the time by interacting directly with people online and being lauded as this “nerd turned tech superhero,” thanks to his programs that focused on reducing the world’s carbon footprint and his more liberal stances on global issues. He was seen by many, including myself, as a so-called “good billionaire.”
His persona didn’t become tainted until his controversial acquisition of Twitter. In 2022, Musk began to post more about his opposition to current government practices, including his issues with the pandemic. He began sharing more far-right conspiracies, even propping up prominent, controversial figures such as Alex Jones and Jordan Peterson. He began to speak more on topics he was far less educated on, such as foreign immigration and politics in the U.K., even endorsing a German anti-immigration party in the last election.
The power he holds is concerning due to his account being engineered to send out a notification to the millions of users on X, putting him in the perfect position to bring about catastrophic change to U.S. politics.
Beginning in early 2024, Musk focused a lot more on U.S. politics, discussing the upcoming election but remaining fairly bipartisan. He would even host “open discussions,” where he would use open channels called “Twitter Spaces” on X to post from multiple politicians, usually both conservatives and liberals, and act as a “moderator.” It did not take long for his views to begin spiraling towards somewhere dangerous, however.
He began to see the Democratic Party, the one he had voted for several times in the past, including in 2020, as a party of “division and hate” and proclaimed that he would become a Republican. He began to urge others online to switch parties.
While he had spoken originally about not donating to either party, the Wall Street Journal reported him donating $50 million to “Citizens for Sanity” in October 2024, a PAC – Political Action Committee – that focuses on targeting Democrats on topics of medicine and transgender rights, a very sad sentiment given the existence of his own trans daughter. He began to endorse several different Republican career politicians, including Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy and eventually Donald Trump himself.
Along with this, Musk began to subscribe to several of the hot-button political dogmas of the current Republican Party, bonding him further with them. He began to tout online and at conventions several messages about illegal immigrants stealing money and jobs from the U.S., how transgender and transition therapies should be banned, and even denying the usefulness of several important governmental bodies, such as the FAA and CDC.
In the past few months, Musk has slowly made himself more and more connected within the U.S. government. In his current position, he oversees several committees and groups, the largest and most concerning of these being the newly created DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency. This group was founded by Trump in his second term with the sole focus of “reducing government spending,” which he found to be excessively egregious in the previous administration. This program is entirely focused on cutting funding from crucial government programs, such as US-AID and the Department of Education.
It is impossible to discuss this situation without addressing the elephant in the room: Musk is not a natural-born U.S. citizen. Born in South Africa in 1971, he originally emigrated to Canada at the age of 17 to avoid conscription, which was mandatory at the time for all white males under the apartheid government. He gained Canadian citizenship through his mother but did not become a naturalized American until 2002.
There have been a handful of senators who were not birthright U.S. citizens. There have been many representatives and mayors who immigrated to the U.S., but by helping Trump get elected into office, he threw away any semblance of a precedent. He has gone where no one thought he should go. No naturalized citizen has had a governmental position as high-up or as influential as Musk.
What makes this even more hypocritical is that Musk is a major contractor for the U.S. government, with SpaceX sending several rockets to the ISS and even recently being commissioned to bring back the marooned astronauts aboard the space station. This creates an enormous bias where, in his position, he can give himself massive contracts that he did not previously have and may not have received otherwise. When former President Jimmy Carter was elected, he was forced to sell off his peanut farm to avoid this bias. Unfortunately, the days of Carter are long gone.
The power that Musk currently holds over hundreds of millions of Americans is extremely concerning, as he and Trump are actively ignoring precedents set by administrations from past centuries. The rhetoric and messaging he constantly posts on his own social media platform are being pushed out to millions, if not billions, of people who are being tainted.
Not everything has been good for the wannabe ruler, with Tesla’s stock dropping by billions, reaching a point of critical no-return where he could potentially even be ousted by his own board. Everywhere, Cybertrucks are being vandalized and Tesla fanboys are being mocked online. He is not alone in his idiocy, with the Trump administration failing to bring about any lasting or significant savings within the governmental budget.
Trump and Musk’s descent into far-right, extremist politics has begun to set an even more horrifying precedent: billionaires can do whatever they want in this country and the people cannot do anything about it. We have been seeing in recent months how this duo is overturning programs and laws with shocking speed, all in the hopes of maintaining the most control over one of the largest economies, militaries and general landmasses in the world.
In a land that touts its freedoms, we are seeing unprecedented levels of xenophobia, literary suppression and a political divide larger than ever. But what people fail to understand is that the real divide is not Republicans versus Democrats; it is the working people vs. greedy billionaires.
Musk was not elected into office. He has no political background. The most interesting thing about him is that he has more money than anyone else in the world. So why is he the one deciding how our lives should work? His impacts on the U.S. government may be massive, but they do not have to last.
Around the country, people are fighting back in any way they can: judges are blocking his DOGE initiatives, journalists are calling out his major hypocrisies and even regular people are trading their Teslas in, understanding the type of man that they are supporting. That is all it takes. Musk may be painful to deal with, but he does not have to be the end; it is possible to rally against him.
