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Elon Musk’s Mortal Threat to Democracy

The world’s richest man—saying he’s “wised up” to the fiction of self-government—is leveraging his wealth to sway elections, threaten Congress, and alter the global balance of power.

Elon Musk delivers a Sieg Heil–style salute during Donald Trump’s inauguration celebration last year.

Should we worry that the world’s richest man, a self-appointed arbiter of all things cool or not, seems to have decided that democracy is deeply cringe? On the Fourth of July, while millions of Americans enjoyed fireworks displays and their dogs and cats cowered under beds in auditory terror, Elon Musk was having a conversation about the relative merits of “makers” and “takers” with a self-published science fiction author on X, the socia-media platform he happens to own.

“Elon, this is the moment where you’re supposed to wise up and abandon classical liberalism,” Devon Eriksen wrote. “If you let takers vote, they will not only take more and more, they will make it more and more rewarding to be a taker.… Universal suffrage leads to universal suffering.”

Musk’s reply? “I have wised up.”

As an alarmed David French noted in The New York Times, Musk’s response recalled weirdo techbro investor Peter Thiel’s infamous 2009 declaration that he “no longer believe[d] that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

Thiel may have been an early recruit to Big Tech democracy-bashing, but many others have followed his example. Elites in and around Silicon Valley, perennially angry about wealth taxes and government regulation of people like them, have become increasingly hostile to democracy itself. Egg-headed venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has declared that “democracy is fake” and holds up F.T. Marinetti, the Futurist who co-authored the 1919 Fascist Manifesto, as a personal hero. Tech entrepreneur and author Balaji Srinivasan, a former partner at Andreessen Horowitz, has become the Valley’s loudest proponent of what he calls the “network state”—a scheme to supplant boring old democracies with high-tech city-states lorded over by kinglike CEOs. Meanwhile, neo-reactionary monarchist Curtis Yarvin, formerly known as the alt-right blogger Mencius Moldbug, has become what Thiel biographer Max Chafkin calls the “house political philosopher” of the tech world’s fraternity of democracy haters; Thiel has funded his ventures and Vice President JD Vance, another Thiel protégé, considers him a friend.

It’s more than a little alarming that Musk has decided to join this motley crew. He’s obviously a powerfully situated foe of self-government, just because he’s got so much damn money, with his net worth hovering around a cool trillion. Beyond that, though, he now wields unprecedented geopolitical clout thanks to his ownership of more than 80 percent of the voting shares of SpaceX—a stake that gives him control over Starlink, the leading satellite Internet service. This Musk property is now a vital part of the tech infrastructure in 160 countries around the world—and not just for those living in rural or remote areas who would otherwise be without........

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