Elon Musk might be the most powerful man in America.

Donald Trump has put his patron in charge of the federal bureaucracy, allowing Musk to tailor the administrative state to his whims, which are far-reaching and almost certainly unconstitutional. The tech mogul has shuttered a government agency in defiance of Congress’s will, orchestrated mass layoffs at myriad other bureaus, and threatened to cancel payments that he deems illegitimate.

Musk lacks Trump’s official powers, of course. But his vast wealth — and the primary challengers it could fund — strikes fear into the hearts of Republican lawmakers, and threatens to upend key state-level elections. Meanwhile, through his control of X, Musk is driving news cycles in nations the world-over.

All this invites the question: What motivates Musk’s pursuit of personal power, and his apparent contempt for constitutional constraints upon it?

On some level, this query is unanswerable (no one can know with certainty what motivates Musk, not even Musk). On another, the answer may seem straightforward (Musk is not shy about broadcasting his grandiose ambitions to colonize Mars, save America from the “woke mind virus” etc.).

But as I’ve been forced to contemplate Musk’s worldview in recent weeks, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about another man who despised social justice movements, evinced disdain for liberal democracy, and dreamed of reorganizing government with a cabal of likeminded, tech-savvy elites: Joshua N. Haldeman, a prominent 20th-century chiropractor, aviator, politician, conspiracy theorist and anti-Semite — who was also Musk’s maternal grandfather.

Haldeman’s belief system shifted markedly over the course of his life. But throughout his political evolution, he gravitated toward a few core premises — a set of hateful and anti-democratic ideas that bear a striking (and disconcerting) resemblance to those of his grandson.

In saying this, I do not mean to assert that Musk’s views are identical to Haldeman’s, nor even that the billionaire’s ideology was necessarily influenced by that of his grandfather. Such influence is conceivable: Although Haldeman died when Musk was a child, he has spoken reverentially of his grandfather and was close with his maternal grandmother, Winnifred Haldeman. And Musk’s father has suggested that she shared some of her husband’s extremist views. This said, there’s no direct evidence that Musk ever took an interest in his grandfather’s politics.

Nevertheless, I think the similarities between Musk’s political ideas and his grandfather’s are worth noting, if only because they illustrate the timeless appeal — an enduring dangers — of their peculiar brand of conspiratorial elitism.

Musk’s grandfather once wanted to replace democratic government with a benevolent dictatorship of engineers

Toward the tail end of the Great Depression, Haldeman joined a radical — and radically strange — political movement called Technocracy Incorporated.

The brainchild of the eminent engineer Howard Scott, Technocracy Incorporated argued that both democracy and market capitalism has grown obsolete. As the group explained in its 1939 pamphlet, “Technocracy in Plain Terms,” a citizen’s vote “has positively no effect on the actual operation of the country, for the country is not run by politicians anyway.” Yet in the name of this fraudulent democracy, society was allowing incompetent politicians to grossly mismanage the economy.

Meanwhile, capitalism had been rendered inoperative by its own development. Technology was rapidly condemning workers to permanent unemployment — and rendering businesses unprofitable — by exponentially increasing productivity and output. At one point, Scott warned that “computers” were soon “going to do away with your accountants and your engineers, and it is also going to do away with your executives, as well as the blue collar and the white collar.”

Neither the electorate nor the price system was fit to govern economic life in this new world. Together, they were propelling humanity toward catastrophe.

And yet, the Technocrats argued, if we simply entrusted governance to a small group of tech-savvy elites — led by........

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