There’s an ad circulating on the TV networks that you may have seen. It features a working-class union black guy who calls himself “Buddy,” and he says that he’s voting for Kamala Harris because Donald Trump wants to give tax breaks to billionaires and Buddy thinks that’s not cool.
Somewhat conspicuously, when the ad starts in on how terrible it is for billionaires to get tax breaks, Team Kamala simply has to throw up a picture of Elon Musk in a tuxedo.
Musk has now become the Left’s new Emmanuel Goldstein, the figure of the Two Minutes’ Hate that all of their votaries must condemn. And why? For the sin of having backed Trump.
The dishonesty that underlies the ad isn’t hard to unpack, of course. Most of America’s billionaires are leftist ideologues, and for a number of reasons. First, the oldest and surest way to be a billionaire is to inherit a fortune of that size, and the descendants of the great 19th- and 20th-century captains of industry are quite plentiful.
And what we know about the inheritors of great wealth is that their appreciation for the work that went into its creation is inversely proportional to their contribution to that process.
It’s almost a cliche at this point that trust-fund babies are going to lean left. In fact, the capture of elite institutions by the Left, and particularly higher education institutions like those of the Ivy League, was done in no small part for this precise purpose. Indoctrinating the children of those Americans who created the immense fortunes that our rise to economic superpower status would inevitably produce into Marxist ideologues was the single greatest victory the Left has ever achieved. It’s allowed the Left to worm their way into positions of power and wealth that a sane nation would never knowingly choose to give them.
Another reason most billionaires tend to be leftists is that the newer billionaires disproportionately come from the tech sector.
There’s a difference between the “old” economy and the “new” economy. The “old” economy was and is based on the manufacture, sale, and delivery of tangible goods and services. Cars, for example, or bread. Or legal or medical services. In the old economy, it was and is fairly simple to describe how one might make a fortune. And in the old economy, an absolute understanding of, and guidance by, objective reality and natural law is a requirement. You must have knowledge of physics and geometry, for example, if you want to build a bridge that won’t fall down.
The “new” economy is different. It isn’t based in objective reality so much as it’s based in creativity and ingenious ways to warp reality. The digital space is a wonderland in which efforts are made to alter the human condition beyond its nature, so Facebook, for example, is a place where deeply unhappy people post smiling, AI-filtered photos of themselves in order that others might believe untrue things about them. And algorithms shape what is seen on people’s news feeds not based on what’s true but based on what they click on and what might offer the largest dopamine rush.
Facebook isn’t atypical of what Silicon Valley is doing.
People who believe it’s right and proper to warp reality rather than respect and make use of it are predisposed to political leftism.
That the culture of the tech sector and other “new” economy industries is hedonistic and irreligious, if not anti-religious, only contributes to this.
Musk is an interesting figure because he has a foot in both camps. He’s undoubtedly a tech guy, as his fortune was made building PayPal, an online payment system that has facilitated a huge portion of the growth of the tech sector and the public’s willingness to transact business over the internet. But Musk’s contribution to tech was still rooted in the principles of the old economy. PayPal, despite some of the woke abuses of its current management, is nonetheless built around the same basic rules a bank would operate under. All Musk did was to apply those to an app that facilitated transactions across banks or other financial institutions, or even bypassed them, and created a public expectation of trust around those transactions.
Then his next venture was Tesla, which appealed to a lot of “new” economy types but at the end of the day is very much an “old” economy venture. Yes, Teslas are electric cars (for now; one imagines he’s eventually going to move toward hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles or even back to the internal-combustion engine, assuming an eventual change in auto regulation), and yes, they’re built differently than traditional internal-combustion vehicles are, but auto manufacturing is nonetheless governed by the principles of “old” economics.
Does the car look good? How does it perform on the road? Is it comfortable to operate? Does it last?
And then, Musk’s next venture was SpaceX. As futuristic as the vision around SpaceX is, fundamentally it’s still an “old” economy venture. SpaceX builds and fires rockets to bring people and things to space. And its chief driver of operation is that it launches communications satellites — many thousands of them so far — to support the development of Starlink, Musk’s telecommunications venture that will provide internet connectivity at high speed and low cost to everyone on earth eventually (or, at least, everyone who subscribes). This is going to put traditional cable and satellite providers out of business before long, and it will make Musk far and away the richest man on earth if he isn’t already there.
And of course there is X, which Musk didn’t found but has transformed into a social platform based on the idea of free speech and the pursuit of truth. In that respect, he’s bringing old-economy principles to one of the most new-economy entities there is.
What characterizes his entrepreneurship is something much different than that of, for example, Mark Zuckerberg or Sergey Brin of Google. Musk generally doesn’t rush to buy out potential competitors who bring a better mousetrap. His is the better mousetrap. He makes sure of that before he enters a business space.
Think about the last Google search you made, and whether it met your standard. If what you were searching for was information on a topic on which the accepted conventional wisdom doesn’t seem correct, the chances are that you gave up before you could find anything useful.
An Elon Musk–driven search engine would never accept that level of performance.
Musk seems perplexed by the fact that he’s seen as a radical, and that’s not a surprise. His ideas and values are not radical. You’d probably describe Musk as a garden-variety 1990s moderate liberal, but that has gone greatly out of style in American politics, and it no longer has a place in the Democrat Party. When Barack Obama came along, one of his most profound effects on our politics was that he forced the liberals to choose either hard leftism — the choice Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Joe Biden and the rest of the Democrats’ current old-line power structure made in order to survive and succeed in Obama’s America — or irrelevance.
There are no more Joe Liebermans as a result. Joe Manchin might be the last one. Musk is one of a not-small number of old liberals who have wised up and shed many of their illusions as a result.
What’s so interesting about this new interview Tucker Carlson had with Musk is the entrepreneur’s thoughts on what that evolution has produced for him. He opens the interview joking casually about being prosecuted for any number of things in the event that Donald Trump, whom he’s enthusiastically and robustly backing, should lose the presidential election. Musk even quotes Lavrentiy Beria, the chief Soviet persecutor of dissidents and other undesirables under Joseph Stalin, as he famously said, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”
You can’t really argue, after what Trump has been through at the hands of the Biden administration, that Musk is off-base in expressing such concerns.
And to buttress his point, he notes that the Department of Justice has filed a very large lawsuit against SpaceX alleging that its hiring practices discriminate against “asylum-seekers.” There is another provision of law that makes it illegal for that company, engaged as it is in building rockets, the technology of which is quite similar to that of intercontinental ballistic missiles, to hire non-citizens.
Musk finds this contradiction insane, and it is, but it’s also very logical using the mindset of the tyrant that he admits he struggles to understand. Namely, that having contradictory laws is a great and desirable thing because every aspect of human behavior is then illegal in some respect, and this gives wide discretion for someone like Merrick Garland to pick and choose which law to enforce.
Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime. Or perhaps, depending on the man and his political favor or lack thereof, I will show no crime.
As in, those sex pests and perverts of great means and influence who currently populate the flight logs to Jeffrey Epstein’s pedophile island. Musk notes that many of them are sizable donors to and influencers for Kamala Harris, and there is a reason for that — they want to stave off the otherwise inevitable reckoning that their past deeds would entitle them to. He notes, prompted by a Carlson question, that Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn fame, who has been a deep-pocket Harris donor and before that attempted to engineer Nikki Haley’s anti-Trump insurgency in the GOP primaries, and before that bankrolled the ridiculous E. Jean Carroll fantasy sexual assault case against Trump, is quite nervous about this election and what a certain result could mean for him.
It’s a fascinating interview, and that’s hardly surprising given that Musk is a fascinating individual. He’s a truth-seeker and a curious man who examines things deeply in order to understand what makes them tick, and because of that, he’s now very interested in the morals and values that underlie society and its component institutions.
This goes about an hour and 48 minutes, and it is well worth your time.
Elon Musk is all in.
(0:00) Elon Musk Is All in on Donald Trump
(6:35) Providing Starlink to Victims of Hurricane Helene
(9:22) If Trump Loses, This Is the Last Election
(21:49) The Epstein and Diddy Client List
(33:38) Vaccines
(35:49) The Movement to Decriminalize Crime… pic.twitter.com/jNqB1ThqQz— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) October 7, 2024