Why Musk’s brilliant corporate playbook has stalled in politics

Key topics:Elon Musk excels in tech but struggles with political strategyCriticism of Musk’s X posts as divisive and race-focused rhetoricLinks drawn between Musk’s views and technocracy or authoritarian ideas.From The Economist, published under licence. The original article can be found on www.economist.com© 2025 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved..The Economist.Politics is not exactly rocket science. How interesting, then, that Elon Musk is so bad at it. Unlike the two or three industries—and still counting—where Mr Musk has done as much or more than any other human this century to advance the species, politics does not require much technical sophistication or even rigour. The maths tend to be simple addition or division. Yet the calculations matter: the flourishing of the civilisation whose multiplanetary future preoccupies Mr Musk requires a healthy politics, much as his own companies, such as Tesla and SpaceX, counted on far-sighted government subsidies and contracts, not to mention the principled rule of law, to succeed. But unlike the other fields Mr Musk has shaped, his contribution to this bulwark of civilisation is to make it not more imaginative and optimistic but more atavistic and fearful, and just plain dumber.In politics, in contrast to other industries, Mr Musk has not chosen the path of revolutionary entrepreneurship. After falling out for a time last year with Donald Trump over his “Big Beautiful Bill”—Mr Musk called it “utterly insane and destructive” for its profligacy and cuts to clean energy—he announced a new political party, the America Party, “to give you back your freedom”. Maybe if he had committed to this party the creativity and drive he somehow applies to his six companies, he would have contributed to politics the constructive competition Tesla brought to the auto industry. The two major parties are surely as uninspired as the Big Three carmakers ever were. But he did not..Read more:.Elon Musk sticks with Tesla, plans to curb political cash.Politically, Mr Musk thinks inside a very old box. The bosses who ran America’s 19th-century political machines might marvel at the scale of the $1m lottery-style payouts he offered voters in battleground states before the 2024 presidential election, but the transactions themselves would be familiar to anyone who ever offered “walking-around money” to get their voters to the polls. Those bosses would also respect his approach to creating a more congenial news media by buying his own printing press, Twitter, now X. They would even recognise the apocalyptic tone he brings to campaigns, the dark inverse of the hype with which he sells his visions of imminent technological transformation. He claimed last year, for example, that the election of a state supreme court judge in Wisconsin was “going to affect the entire destiny of humanity”. Despite another “lottery” dangled before voters by Mr Musk, his candidate lost; humanity soldiers on.When it comes to the maths of politics, Mr Musk specialises in division. He practises the aggrieved identity politics he condemns on the left. To him, white people are a beleaguered minority—indeed, “a rapidly dying minority”, as he put it on X in January. An analysis by The Economist of Mr Musk’s X feed shows, within his torrent of remarks on many matters, a significant increase in the past three years in posts promoting racial consciousness among white people, urging them to defend or augment their power as a race. In January he reposted with a “100%” emoji an exhortation that “white solidarity is the only way to survive”. The underlying post was at odds with Mr Musk’s view of whites’ minoritarian status but in line with his racial hysteria, warning that “if white men become a minority, we will be slaughtered”.Mr Musk has denied being racist. But he seems to conceive of society, and power, in racial categories. He describes white people as having a shared transnational identity and political interest—the precise nature of both is unclear—that is under attack by non-white groups and white liberals. “There has been unrelenting hate and poisonous propaganda in the West against anyone White, straight or male over the past decade or more!” he wrote on X in February. “No more guilt trips.” He has applied to Germany the same theory that the dominant group is wrongly constrained by lessons of history. Addressing the hard-right Alternative for Germany party ahead of elections in 2025, on the eve of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, he said Germans must “move beyond” any “past guilt”. He warned that “German culture” and “German values” might be lost to “some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything”.Where man has, sadly, gone beforeFamily history may not repeat itself, but for Mr Musk it rhymes. Some eight decades before he posted about creating “the Martian technocracy”, his grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, a Canadian, joined a movement called Technocracy Incorporated. It aimed to transform Canada and America into the “Technate”, a society that would harness rapid technological change by abandoning democracy in favour of government by engineers and other technical experts. By the late 1940s Haldeman concluded “the Canadian government was usurping too much control over the lives of individuals and that the country had gone soft”, writes Walter Isaacson in his biography, “Elon Musk”. Haldeman moved his family to South Africa in 1950, as the apartheid regime was tightening its grip..Read more:.Political and Telco roadblocks stall Starlink's South African launch.By the time Mr Musk was in high school in the 1980s, black townships across South Africa were in revolt. The white regime imposed a state of emergency but, isolated internationally, it was entering its final years. In the elliptical telegraphy of X, Mr Musk has drawn a connection between that period and the politics of today. “Yes”, he wrote atop a message he reposted warning “the anarchotyranny, expropriation, and race communism that destroyed Rhodesia and South Africa are the same things they are bringing to America and the rest of the Occident.” Who, one wonders, are “they”? And, as Mr Musk prepares to list SpaceX in the most valuable stock offering in history, where is the “race communism”? Mr Musk’s role in catapulting humankind to the stars may make him, in retrospect, a hero of the age. What a shame that he is perpetuating some of humanity’s most primitive ideas, too. .Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.

Why Musk’s brilliant corporate playbook has stalled in politics

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