Elon Musk, the New Hero of Populism

Elon Musk, the New Hero of Populism The useful narcissism of the new class of oligarchs Republicans have settled on their midterm argument: Democrats are all Communists. As an election strategy, this is as lame as it is ludicrous. But there is a small kernel of political reality underlying the new right-wing red-baiting: The emergence of a widespread public backlash against the extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of billionaires. This backlash shows up in multiple surveys. According to the Harris Billionaires Survey, 73 percent of Americans believe that wealth inequality is a serious national issue, up from 66 percent in 2022. A UMass Amherst poll found 58 percent of Americans saying that billionaires are a threat to democracy, with 45 percent saying that America is an oligarchy, “a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes.” Only 28 percent disagreed. And as I noted last week, citing research from political scientist Andrew Hall, Democratic fundraising has recently begun to lean heavily into denunciations of the undue influence of billionaires: So if you define anyone who raises concerns about the wealth and political power of billionaires as a Communist, well, in that sense you are defining a majority of Americans as communists. Why is the public backlash against billionaires going viral now? This is an interesting question, since both the concentration of wealth at the top and political spending by billionaires have been increasing for decades. For example, the Koch Brothers have been donating to the Federalist Society, the clique of right-wing legal lobbyists who created the Roberts Supreme Court, since the early 1980s. Fossil fuel interests have been spreading climate disinformation since global warming began showing up in the data. Political spending by billionaires has been immense for more than a decade, although it reached new heights to help Trump win the presidency and to win Republican congressional seats in the 2024 election. Why, then, has it taken so long for the popular billionaire backlash to reach critical mass? One answer is that Trump has brought American oligarchy out of the shadows and into the spotlight. As I noted last week, the spectacle of “the cavalcade of fawning tech bros at the Trump inauguration” was a clear wake-up call. Yet the display of billionaire fealty to Trump, I would argue, is part of a larger dynamic in which the new generation of American oligarchs have chosen to make themselves public figures and hence public targets. The fact is that billionaires have had immense political power for decades, but they chose to exercise that power from the shadows, veiling their actions through patriotic sounding right-wing PACs and think tanks. Only political junkies understood what was going on underneath the surface. Today, however, the new generation of the hyper-wealthy are out there and in your face, flaunting their influence rather than concealing it. And the poster child for this change is, of course, Elon Musk. To understand the significance of this change in the behavior of the hyper-wealthy, it’s useful to compare the lists of top individual donors compiled by OpenSecrets in different recent elections, specifically 2016 and 2024. In 2016, the top 100 donors split their spending almost equally between Republicans and Democrats, with 9 of the top 20 strongly pro-Democratic. This was unusual and surely reflected the fact that a significant number of Republican donors were appalled by Donald Trump. But by 2024, when Trump was again the GOP standard-bearer, most of these qualms and scruples had disappeared: the top 100 donors spent more than 3 times as much on Republicans as they did on Democrats, and only 5 of the top 20 supported Democrats. This, after Trump’s authoritarianism and corruption had become plainly evident. More to the point, consider who the top Republican donors were in 2016. People who follow politics closely have long been aware of the key roles in right-wing politics played by Sheldon and Miriam Adelson (gambling money), Paul Singer (vulture capitalist), Robert Mercer (computer scientist turned hedge funder), and Richard Uilein (shipping). But none of them sought the celebrity limelight, and it was always an uphill struggle to raise public awareness of their malign policy and political influence. The 2024 list still includes many of the traditionally quiet oligarchs. But, unlike before, it also includes a number of right-wing billionaires who love to put themselves in the public eye and offer their views on everything from fiscal policy to culture. These include Ken Griffin (hedge fund), Marc Andreesen (tech/venture capital), and Stephen Schwarzman (private equity.) And topping the list is, of course, Musk. He spent much of last year de facto running large parts of the U.S. government, slashing spending in ways that failed to save taxpayer money but did lead to serious degradation of government functioning and have already led to hundreds of thousands of deaths. Moreover, Musk’s narcissism – much like Donald Trump – has compelled him to make himself the center of attention in press conferences held in the Oval Office. And, like Trump, he doesn’t learn from his mistakes. He is now noisily weighting in not just on politics, the evils of wokeness and nonwhite immigration, and so on, but on The Odyssey. (He hated it and predicted, wrongly, that it would be a box-office disaster.) The larger point here is that there has been an important transition in America from the days when oligarchic power was mostly exercised in the shadows to the current era of flamboyant and extremist displays of billionaire influence. What caused the change? At least part of the cause is a shift in the origins of great wealth, from fossil fuels (e.g. the Koch brothers) and other traditional industries to the tech broligarchy. As Henry Farrell argues, many tech billionaires are caught up in the cult of “founders,” believing themselves to be superior beings entitled to special privilege and universal acclaim — which means putting themselves out in public. I would add that the tech industry has suffered a precipitous decline in public perceptions since its peak around 2015 — and the fawning tech bros at the Trump inauguration were, to a large extent, former culture heroes who want their glory days back. So surely part of the reason a majority of Americans now say that democracy is being undermined, that billionaires are running everything, is that the billionaires themselves are out there boasting about their influence. And their brazenness is actually doing the rest of us a favor. Mobilizing against the oligarchic threat to democracy was hard when the oligarchs were operating from the shadows. It’s easier now that some of them are out in the open. Elon Musk makes an unlikely hero of populism. But his odious and unbridled narcissism may very well help save the American republic. MUSICAL CODA When I talk to conservatives I know, they are also feeling that the billionaires are out of control, run everything for their own benefit, and need to be reined in. But they also believe that billionaire Donald Trump is working hard for the everyday average person when he puts someone like Elon Musk in charge of the government, and that the billionaire class SHOULD be running things because, as their immense wealth shows, they're so much smarter and hard working than the average person. I have no idea how you counter broken thinking like this. Whatever Musk's legacy might be, "crimes against humanity" will be on the list.