Appearing onstage with former President Donald Trump on Sunday evening, Elon Musk seemed to incarnate the fusion of right-wing conservatism and futurist politics that’s defined much of this GOP campaign. Just two years ago, when he bought Twitter, Musk took pains to seem like he was above conventional party politics — he reminded people he voted Democrat more than Republican, and recommended voting for Republicans only to “curb the worst excesses of both parties.” Now the the world’s richest man and self-styled free thinker is hard to distinguish from the anonymous trolls he once decried on his platform. Musk literally jumped around on stage with Trump, awkwardly proclaimed himself “dark MAGA” and in his brief remarks in Butler, Penn. offered a series of generic Trumpworld talking points. He invoked in heroic terms Trump’s defiant fist pump after he survived a July assassination attempt; he declared that “this election is the most important election of our lifetime” and that “the other side wants to take away your freedom of speech.” And there’s more of that on the way: Today POLITICO’s Alex Isenstadt reported that Musk plans to make repeated stops in Pennsylvania over the last four weeks before the election with the backing of his pro-Trump America PAC. The old, idiosyncratic Elon Musk was an environmentalist with an apparently sincere, if crude, emphasis on “balance” in politics and desire to marshal vast amounts of capital in service of his imagined sci-fi utopia. Now that Musk has openly entered the political conversation, he doesn’t look idiosyncratic at all: like legions of rank-and-file Republicans before him, he’s happy to take a back seat on stage to Trump and repeat his talking points. This puts Musk decidedly out of step with a set of Republicans who might otherwise be his natural boosters and allies: the new crop of right-leaning tech futurists who see a new America being born from a fusion of strong-handed industrial policy and the “founder culture” of Silicon Valley. Musk would likely deny any contradiction between his stock right-wing politics and ambitions of galactic dominance (he once warned that “woke AI” could literally kill people). There is a wing of the Republican Party that’s taking these issues seriously, taking the opportunity of Trump’s ascent to build a new policy consensus more in line with his populist economic instincts. But to look at Musk’s political preoccupations on topics like immigration, tariffs, and even basic ideas of how government should function, one finds him woefully out of step with that wonky tech right on a few key issues — and even occasionally with Trump’s instinctual project of American reinvention. Immigration is the most glaring example. Musk has become obsessed with the idea embraced by many Republicans that the Democratic Party has purposely tried to increase its share of the vote by bringing in immigrants from Latin America and registering them to vote. This flies in the face of a growing body of evidence that non-white, and especially Latino, voters are far more favorable to the Trump-era GOP than its predecessor, something many Republican activists have rushed to embrace. Musk himself is an immigrant from South Africa, and in the past has insisted that he’s a “big believer” in legal immigration. That, at least notionally, puts him in line with pro-growth futurists who have argued that Republicans should expand H-1B visa access to attract international talent, something for which Musk has advocated on X as recently as January. It also puts him directly at odds with Donald Trump, who has promised to crack down again on legal immigration after restricting it while in office. So… where does Musk actually land? The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Musk has donated tens of millions of dollars to groups led by Stephen Miller, Trump’s de facto (anti-)immigration czar, seemingly putting him on team “keep them out” even when it flies in the face of global competitiveness. Another area where Musk’s allegiance to Trump muddles his politics is on the economy and U.S. state capacity: Musk criticized President Joe Biden’s administration’s increased tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, which was actually an expansion of a Trump policy. Trump’s aggressive trade warfare on behalf of American manufacturing is a key plank of his support from right-leaning technocrats. But as a titan of industry dependent on low-friction global markets, Musk’s concern for Tesla’s bottom line clearly wins out — leaving him an old-school Reaganite neoliberal arguing against tariffs in a sea of interventionist “new right” tech wonks. (Although tariffs on Chinese EVs would notionally benefit Musk, his comments opposing them earlier this year would make any old-school free marketeer proud: “Things that inhibit freedom of exchange or distort the market are not good… Tesla competes quite well in the market in China with no tariffs and no deferential support. I’m in favor of no tariffs.”) The most glaring example of Musk’s vestigial “old Right” politics is his commitment to serve in a second Trump administration, heading a “government efficiency commission” that would in his words eliminate “waste and needless regulation in government that needs to go.” When DFD reported from a conference held by the right-leaning tech think tank the Foundation for American Innovation in September, most attendees who we asked about the commission indulgently chuckled at the concept. They seemed far more interested in using a muscular state to accomplish futurist policy goals than drowning it in the bathtub, to paraphrase erstwhile GOP icon Grover Norquist. By tying himself to Trump’s norm-breaking, revolutionary populism, Musk has combined his futurist brand with a novel political project that promises to reinvent American global hegemony. But on many of the policy areas that tech-savvy Republicans now think actually matter when it comes to inventing the future, like drawing the best talent to the United States and then having a government intelligent and resourced enough to figure out how to deploy them, Musk seems to be stuck in his and Trump’s imagined 1980s.
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