Douglas Murray: Will Elon Musk Make America Great Again?

and then you turn out to support a republican wow do they come for you the left hates an apostate like that but it's it's a sign of of their ideological weakness and U um inability to uh accept reality in my hello and welcome to spectator TV today we're going to be talking about the power of Elon Musk because Elon Musk as the world's richest man is very much in news at the moment due to his close budding friendship with Donald Trump the reelected president of the United States Douglas Murray the spectator's very own Douglas Murray

has written a cover piece this week called Planet Elon uh in in which he explores this uh extraordinary relationship between the two men and what it might mean for American politics and the world Douglas it's easy to forget uh that not so long ago um and in fact still I think Elon Musk will refer to himself as a moderate Democrat um that 16 years ago he queued up to meet Barack Obama and shake his hand um that only in May last year he launched a SpaceX with Ronda santis um suggesting that he was at least

um open to the idea of Ronda santis as the Republican nominee and not Donald Trump and yet uh by August of this year here uh he was doing a SpaceX with Donald Trump and since then the two men seem to have become closer and closer so much so that some people are worried now that Elon Musk has perhaps too much of a hold over Donald Trump what do you put down what what where do you think that relationship began that closeness began what in Elon musk's mind changed I think all we can really go on

is the public record and that shows that it was the would be assassins bullet uh in Butler Pennsylvania that changed everything as I say in the piece the cover piece in The Spectator this week um that attempted assassination of Donald Trump on stage that incredibly near Miss um had a lot of consequences which historians will uh ruminate on but the one of the most powerful was that there was an immediate response from Elon Musk and some others Bill Amman uh is is another example of people who just saw this moment saw how perilously close America

had come to an absolute catastrophe um saw Donald Trump's response to that very close shave and his fight fight fight and decided that even if they've been teetering before or wondering about a public endorsement now was the time to get behind behind uh former president Trump and uh Bill Amman did that in a tweet Elon Musk did it in a tweet and in a way that changed everything and one of the things it changed was that first of all Elon Musk showed that he was Allin with Trump and when Elon Musk is Allin he really

is Allin and he didn't just commit his considerable resources to the campaign he encouraged others uh to join him in uh funding for the Trump campaign but most crucially in a way was that he actually put his his time into campaigning with and for Donald Trump and that that really uh had an enormous effect on the campaign um I think that you know the the world's richest man uh is sort of most obvious label for him but he he deserves in a way a different label which I mean the world's great innovator uh this is

a man who as I mentioned a few weeks ago in The Spectator parallel parked a rocket in his spare time and um and so he's an aspirational figure as well as an inspirational figure for a lot of people and I think him throwing himself all in behind Trump just had had a huge add-on effect to the already uh uh growing Trump campaign there was a lot of talk in the run-up to the election and indeed since uh about um Trump's appeal to men uh and in talking about the shooting there we are talking about uh

a very male reaction to uh masculine virtues and it's interesting that that seems to be a growing Force among liberals among Democrats this sort of recognition that male manly attributes are important well well yes I mean um it's funny to be in a world where that's surprising um it's only because of the weird sort of white dudes for camela sort of fakery where uh there was an attempt to pretend that the most important thing in this election was for white dudes to fight for their daughter to be able to abort their grandchild faster or later

um that that seemed a strange appeal to uh uh voters um yes I mean I I think that to a great extent there is a reaction to uh a massive overreach on the part of the left uh the overreach was of course all of the gender wooow woo nonsense of recent years all the all this just stupid time wasting all of the all of the rudness the just horrible language that was used against men and not just language but I mean hiring and and much more um it it being perfectly possible for people people to

say you know we just we need more women or we need few white men or all of this sort of thing it was incredibly divisive uh very racist um and of course I mean it's impossible to imagine it happening any other way around I mean you know if you advertise if you said you know we just we need lots more men in this particular industry and women shouldn't apply I think I think we'd hear from women a bit about that um and and so yes there was this massive overate by the by the left against

men and uh now there's a reaction to that but yes I mean it's also a thing of of serious times uh needing serious people and some serious uh uh courage um you know it turned out that much of this election was between um Donald Trump getting back up on stage after being shot in the air and saying fight fight fight and camela laughing crazily jokes that havn't been made um you know you sort of look out at the world and it's not hard to think who on the world stage do you want representing you you

know somebody who who who talks tough or somebody who who seems well I mean how can you say it without being sexist or being accused of sexism but who frankly you know a lot of people in the American public thought seem to behave like a wine mom um and always seemed to be a couple of glasses of chardonay down and and and you just couldn't get anything out of ideas wise or policy-wise yeah it was there was somebody who was a former supporter of Trumps who I was happened to be with uh shortly after the

uh assassination attempt and and she was not for Trump in recent years but I remember she said to me that was so darn you know masculine that was so darn you know Alpha that's what we need yeah you talk about serious seriousness there um and obviously Elon Musk is a very serious businessman in terms of his success and uh Donald Trump is a very serious politician or businessman turned politician in terms of his success but there also is a a deep silliness within both of them and I don't mean that in a critical way um

they do enjoy having fun they enjoy memes and they seem to understand what works online and is there this odd combination of sort of silliness and seriousness that seems to be driving the new Trump Coalition I don't know if I put it like that but I mean it's true that I mean uh you know one of the things that people have always you've written about this before Freddy they' always massively underestimated about Trump is that he's very funny and one of the reasons why people cued for years to hear him speak sometimes for hours was

because they liked hearing him riff and they liked him going off on uh um what does he call them weaves yeah um and and you know going on to and you know commenting on some idiotic thing said on The View or something and and they like that and of course the Trump critics always s said aha he's rambling or you know he said this thing they took things he said that were obviously jokes and they made him in they made them into just literal uh um claims they could then attack him on like you know

the claim that when he said you know Russia are you listening um you know I want Hillary's emails sort of thing it was a joke and the Democrats some years ago sort of decided to make that into a oh my gosh this is this is the candidate um actually begging the Russians publicly to hack uh the Democrat I mean it was you know so there's lots of things that that they underestimated Trump on and Elon Musk I mean it's a bit different he's very open about the fact that you know he's occasionally said his his

side hustle is as a comedian yeah he he he's one of those sort of tech people who understands memes he understands better than anyone he understands not just the internet but internet culture social media culture and he he's obviously had an enormous amount of fun for for for many years now uh uh riling people up with some of that stuff I mean Elon Musk only needs to uh retweet something and you know the whole British commentariat and uh and some of the labor party that's would go completely bananas um and uh you know and it

becomes a new story in the UK well I first of all Douglas I think you need to work on your weave I've been meaning to say this to you for a while your answers are are far too direct uh you need you need to master the weave secondly uh I wanted to say without getting po faced about this uh because obviously the silliness is fun and Elon Musk is an entertaining figure as well is a very interesting one but there are some legitimate concerns are there not with having uh the world's richest man being quite

so intimately invol involved as he seems to have been in recent days with an incoming American Administration I mean there are inevitable conflicts of interest there and it's not just uh kind of you know boring liberals who are upset about that sure um absolutely but I mean the president elect can have who he wants on his uh his team and um I mean you know when it comes to the Department of government efficiency which uh Elon Musk along with v ramaswami looks like he will be in charge of this is this is a very serious

project and it does actually need an outsider to do it um this is I mean this is something which the the so-called conservative government in the UK in the past 14 years occasionally tried to do which was cut government waste they they were never very good at it um and one reason why was because they tended to have um people who had never been in business in government being advised by civil servants who didn't particularly care about business um and it was very hard to do things like cutting government waste that's why you know the

NHS is about the biggest employer in the world apart from the army of the Chinese Communist party I mean but in America this is a very serious problem America has a deficit roughly equivalent to the uh the the well roughly equivalent to Spain's annual budget um and uh the claim that Elon Musk made at the at the rally at Madison Square Gardens among other places the other week he might be able to shave two trillion of the uh the federal uh um spending in the US would have an enormous impact not just on uh uh

on on business on on taxpayers and much more it would have an important influence because that government waste in the US like in the UK is not just a waste of money it's a waste of money plus very anti-American uh ideology inserted into it um just like we have uh government waste plus anti-british ideology built into it in the UK um this includes things like you know I mean the education budget in the US the Department of Education The Unbelievable hold of uh people like Randy warten head of the teaching Union who Mike Pompeo I

think accurately described some time ago as the most dangerous person in America um somebody who globe s and who oversees an education system in the US which as president Trump said the other day um it spends more than almost any other country in the world on the education of its children and it has one of the worst education outcomes I mean I'm sitting at the moment in New York state and in New York state in recent years it's up to it was a one point J C up to almost $30,000 a pupil per year was

being spent on education and if you look at the education attainment rates K through 12 it's only just a slight majority literally just above 50% of students who leave K through2 with basic numeracy and only just over 50% of people of students coming out of that system with basic literacy um I mean that's worse than that's worse than educational attainment rates in many African countries with a tiny percentage of the same um uh spending per pupil why is that it has to be sorted out it has to be sorted out and arguably Elon Musk among

others is a very good person to do that because they need to strip out not just the waste but also the horrible ideology which is behind part of the waste there's quite a few people in Silicon Valley not just Elon Musk who have been on a similar Journey as as he has uh against ideology against a left liberal ideology if you like and I think they're pushing America towards perhaps a different kind of democratic politics where someone like Elon Musk um can be openly involved um in government uh and it's you know there are as

as we've said there is a potential for conflict of interest there a lot of potential for corruption there but it's a rather different model to what we've had in the past particularly under Democratic Administrations where the big money is very much in the background oh I don't think it's in the background at all in the Democratic party absolutely not I mean um uh look at the way look look at the amazing um uh uh Twitter or X feed of Alex Soros yeah um uh look at the look at the photographs he gets uh with every

single leading Democrat do you think Alex Soros gets all those photographs by having pulled himself up by his bootstraps and and and and and made something himself in this world or no of course not I mean the money in the Democratic party and the ideology of it is it has has been at least as as obvious as this uh so no I mean that is nothing new as for Silicon Valley figures I mean since Silicon Valley uh is responsible for so much of the success of the stock market um why would you not want uh

the the highest people involved in the highest performing companies in the world to um have some say in um in government uh at least to advise it I mean it it it would seem to me to be obvious only in Britain would do we have this idea that you know you should invite the biggest ads and failures in your country to advise the government um you know Britain you know has these convulsions gosh what will we do without Sue gray um meantime it's a good idea to have the best and brightest uh and most successful

figures uh advising government yes absolutely but there is perhaps attention is there not between if you think about the biggest Silicon Valley successes they are companies that are huge in size but not necessarily in the number of jobs they create and if you have that's not with Tesla I mean Tesla's amazing job Creator that's not true of Tesla and it's not true of SpaceX but generally something like Google or or Twitter X which musk now owns doesn't actually need that many employees and yet it's a very powerful and lucrative company I just wonder if there

will be a tension between Silicon Valley people being so involved in government and uh a trump Administration that's committed to reindustrialization I don't know we'll see I mean there's always tensions um but no I mean I I don't think so I think that people will I think the most important thing you can do is to have a government of as many talents as possible and um you know would that we had that in the UK um I I think there was a very interesting point that a number of people including Miranda dine the New York

Post pointed out I think around the time of Madison Square Gardens actually which is how interesting it was seeing the array of people who were on stage uh with Trump this time um it wasn't just family it wasn't just Republicans it was sometimes quite uh bewildering and often very funny array of people um I mean um and I'm assuming by the way that Hulk Hogan who did it gave a rip roaring performance at Madison Square Gardens uh I'm assuming he won't have any actual role in the administration but but it was it was very interesting

watching you know the Coalition somebody presented I think it was Miranda as as like the X-Men or um or The Avengers or something uh watching you know Tulsi gabard and uh um Elon Musk and RFK Jr and Dr Phil and you know all it was just it was very interesting because it it suggested you know in the campaign that it wasn't just about voting for Trump this time um it was that that Trump plus the people he had put around him just had this much broader appeal and um and I anyhow it's it's it's it's

going to be very interesting yes you're right Freddy there will be tensions for sure there always are but I mean I think it's more it's it's it's WrestleMania really isn't it it's uh and that's the influence perhaps of Linda mcmah and Vince mcmah who are of course the WWF family uh but introducing the cast of characters like that and Dana White of course you who was on that stage is UFC but let's get away from that because even though that is fascinating we're running out of time I I just wanted to ask you lastly about

Twitter and X because you mentioned this in your piece uh X I should say formerly Twitter um Elon musk's buying of Twitter and turning it into X how significant do you think that purchase was for free speech for this election uh for the future of um the Free World if we can call it that still oh I mean it was Aston ing um I had quite a close seat to some of what was going on um in that period and uh it was a it was an astonishing move um uh by musk uh he ended

up paying what was it 44 billion uh 42 44 I can't remember at the end um for for uh Twitter and I think it it has had a huge impact because what um parag and the others who are running Twitter before musk bought it didn't ever really concede was that they were the Town Square that Twitter had effectively become the Town Square the city Square um and sometimes you spoke to those people in private they say we know we never said we wanted to be the Town Square you know who who made us that well

you just ended up being that and the thing was that the rules of the Town Square kept changing and then we discovered that that the Town Square was being policed by total maniacs and that it was being policed by extraordinary ideologues um it was not just the town of square it wasn't like Speakers Corner in the UK it was Speakers Corner with like the bassage militia um uh um standing on the sides trying to take people out if they if they er and strayed from their ways I mean the the the combination of the way

in which uh Twitter before Elon Musk was Banning and muting conservative or C center right as well as right-wing uh voices the fact that they had um kicked Donald Trump himself off the platform um plus the fact that they were they were dampening stories and and stopping stories getting out don't forget that the people who talked about election interference in 2020 the New York Post for which I write um the New York Post um broke for Hunter Biden laptop story which was not just a story about uh um dickpic or something it was a story

about corruption in the first family and when the New York Post broke that story Twitter was one of the platforms that stopped the New York post's account that blocked it this was massive election interference which the Democrats other have still not conceded uh uh was the case um this this so the Town Square was was not a free place it was a completely ideologically captured Space by the left in America by this weirdo left what's more um in America of the kind of people whose main occupation seems to be to desire to trans children um

which by the way is something that musk himself obviously feels very strongly about and understandably and rightly um no these these weird freaks uh in California uh were effectively responsible for policing what the world could know and say and so when musk took it over and fired all these ridiculous content moderator types who who was were so inept their job even if anyone could do it he completely freed up the platform it freed up speech globally X is now uh the main news uh source for the world and um it had a huge effect so

um more than 40 billion was laid out it turns out to have been a a relatively cheap price for the effect that it's had a snip a snip but I mean it also instantly made him uh I mean he was getting a little bit unpopular in some quarters but it made him a real figure of hatred uh on the left globally uh and we see today that the guardian has pulled itself off um Twitter or will no longer be posting under the guardian handle how will we cope Freddy I don't know I don't know the

Public Square is ruined but it will be it will be interesting to see just lastly sorry about truth social and Twitter M uh because I don't think Donald Trump he started tweeting again during the campaign I don't think since the election Victory he has yet tweeted uh on Twitter X because he wants to promote true social so perhaps there'll be attention there I didn't he I think I think Donald Trump has many other things to preoccupy himself in the four years ahead I think truth social's very very high in his thinking but just quickly on

the thing of on the thing of people um turning against El musk is a very interesting thing that I mentioned the piece of course Peter teal um came out for Trump in 2016 it was very very early on that and took a certain amount of flack in Silicon Valley and elsewhere but the the hatred expressed to about Elon Musk on the left is the hatred that the left always has of somebody who they think is an apostate uh it it's it's much worse if you're just if you're always a conservative um they hate you less

if you they thought you were once their guy like you were the ones doing uh the green cars and then you turn out to support a republican wow do they come for you the left hates an apostate like that but it's it's a sign of of their ideological weakness and uh um inability to uh accept reality in my view well they're not about to accuse you of being an apostate anytime soon Douglas thank you very much for coming on spectator TV it's a great pleasure thank you