Of all the people celebrating the re-election of former president Donald Trump, few have as much to celebrate as Elon Musk. Less than a week after November 5, his fortune had risen by $70 billion (around €66 billion), a monstrous return on an investment in Trump's campaign that already seemed inordinate: $120 million over just a few months.

The conversion of the richest man in the world into one of Trump's most fervent activists is a recent one. In 2020, the former Democrat, who used to extol the virtues of his company Tesla regarding its support of LGBTQ+ rights and financed candidates from both parties (though he abstained from presidential campaigns), was asked by the New York Times journalist Kara Swisher about his political views: "I'm socially very liberal. And then economically right of center, maybe, or center. I don't know," he told her. He wished only for the president to be a "normal person with common sense and whose values are smack in the middle of the country."

That Musk has become unrecognizable. Now, night and day, he shares his dark ruminations on X (formerly Twitter, which he bought in 2022) about invading migrants, transgender people and the "woke virus" threatening human civilization. With the zeal of a convert, he dedicated himself to Trump's re-election campaign, leveraging his immense fortune, global communications platform and reputation of entrepreneurial genius. The president-elect recognized this effort, praising him in lengthy panegyric the day after his re-election: "A star is born: Elon! (...) He's a super genius. We have to protect our geniuses. We don't have that many of them."

Musk's political changeover represents a boisterous version of a broader shift among a section of Silicon Valley, which has traditionally leaned toward the Democrats but is now leading toward the far right. Several industry tycoons have espoused, to varying degrees, this same political turn. Olivier Alexandre, a sociologist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and author of La Tech: Quand la Silicon Valley refait le monde ("Tech: When Silicon Valley remakes the world") recalled how in 2016, Trump's election had nonetheless been a "moral shock" for the tech world. Former Democratic donors such as the investor David Sacks, the founders of the world's largest investment fund Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, and the twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss – made famous by the film The Social Network (by David Fincher, 2010) for not having created Facebook – have followed the same trajectory. Along with others, they joined Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, made immensely wealthy by his investment in Facebook. Thiel was the first among them to back Trump and is now at the heart of this new political movement.

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