Crack-Up Capitalism: How Billionaire Elon Musk's Extremism Is Shaping Trump Admin & Global Politics

this news is funded by viewers like you please support our work at democracynow.org this is democracy Now democracynow.org The War and Peace report I'm Amy Goodman Tech billionaire Elon Musk posted a poll early this morning on X asking quote America should Liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government yes or no the question was part of a series of misinformation filled posts on X social media platform that led the New York Times to report musk quote appears intent on exercising the same influence in European countries that he did during the American presidential election unquote

over the past few days musk lashed out at the UK's labor government also trashed a UK politician he' formerly backed the anti-immigrant populist Nigel farage with the far-right reform UK party musk's change of heart came after farage refused to support report the release from prison of far-right anti-immigrant islamophobic activist Tommy Robinson meanwhile musk also falsely accused UK prime minister kir starmer of failing to prosecute child rapists and supported a post on X that urged King Charles to dissolve the British Parliament and call elections to remove the labor government this comes after Elon Musk also backed

Germany's far-right anti-immigrant party a afd for next month's elections and is set to host a live discussion on X with its candidate for Chancellor German Chancellor Olaf Schultz responded to musk's endorsement saying quote I don't believe in courting Mr musk's favor I'm happy to leave that to others the rule is don't feed the troll he said meanwhile here in the United States the richest man in the world that's Elon Musk donated more than a quarter of a billion dollars toid president-elect Trump's campaign he's now shaping policy for the incoming Administration and it's believed he's made

since the election over $200 billion musk attended a New Year's Eve Gaya at maral Lago alongside Trump and has joined him on a number of calls with foreign leaders musk will co-head Trump's so-called Department of government efficiency or Doge last month musk played a key role in pushing Republican lawmakers to kill a short-term government spending deal at the last minute musk also got Trump's support for backing H1B visas for highly skilled workers despite opposition from Trump's anti-immigrant base meanwhile on Friday the Pulitzer prize-winning political cartoonist and talist quit the Washington Post after her editors rejected

a cartoon depicting billionaires genuflecting to president-elect Trump she says it was the first time time since she began working at the post in 2008 she had a cartoon killed because of who or what she chose to aim her pen at a draft of the cartoon depicts big Tech owners kneeling at Trump's feet ordering up sacks of cash among them Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos just two months ago the post featured aneles in a video celebrating her work I mean just look at all the autocrats that hate editorial cartoonists I mean not in

this country hopefully um but in you know a lot of my colleagues overseas are thrown in jail for doing cartoons about powerful people a lot of people don't realize that you know we're journalists we're opinion journalists but we are journalists and that is our job as editor cartoonist to bring up sometimes uncomfortable truths on Friday an Tales published an online post titled why I'm quitting The Washington Post in which she writes quote I will not stop holding truth to power through my cartooning because as they say democracy dies in darkness of course she is citing

the Washington posts motto this comes after Jeff Bezos prevented The Washington Post from endorsing kamla Harris for president and as Amazon's Prime video service announced its acquired exclusive licensing rights to a new behind the-scenes documentary about first lady Melania Trump Amazon also plans to donate $1 million to Trump's inauguration fund and said it would stream the event on Prime video as a separate in-kind donation worth another million dollar but more we spend the rest of the hour with a person who's documented the power of big Tech billionaires and the new tech specifically among others uh

Elon Musk the richest man in the world Quinn sodian professor of international history at Boston University his latest book is crack capitalism Market radicals and the dream of a world without democracy he's written several pieces for the new Statesman on Elon Musk including one headlined Elon musk's death drive sodan also recently contributed to the New York Review of Books running Symposium about the reelection of Donald Trump the return of trump too he's joining us from Boston just back from the American historical association annual Gathering here in New York Professor slobodian welcome to democracy Now um

the power of Elon Musk cannot be under estimated from here in the United States and we're going to talk about the Trump Administration well many are calling him of course president musk and vice president Donald Trump uh two the latest Kur fuffle in Britain and his support for the afd in Germany if you can talk about the significance of all of this yeah it's a pretty extraordinary situation to find ourselves in right I mean if you think back to 2017 there was a lot of concern in attention to the efforts of Steve Bannon to create

a kind of transatlantic Coalition of far-right actors and parties imagine now here we are um only a few years later and there's a abandon likee figure but who also happens to be the wealthiest man in the world uh overseeing some of the most profitable companies in the planet who is leading that sort of effort to create a transatlantic Coalition so the mes are much much higher um they are being dealt with with perhaps even less kind of care than someone like Bannon which is an extraordinary thing to say but musk I think has entered this

field of Politics as a kind of scaled up version of his video game play with no real thought to the kind of consequences of the um disruptive effects that he's creating from here to Britain to Germany and Beyond um and let's talk specifically about the conversation we're having on this day on January 6th when uh the vice president uh kamla Harris who presides over the Senate will essentially certify her own loss and this fourth anniversary of what took place January 6th 2021 well I think that you know the January 6 is a is an appr

propo for a couple reasons one is um kind of silly but also meaningful which is if you look at the character that musk uses when he plays uh the game Diablo 4 which he describes as giving him life lessons and allowing him to see The Matrix um the guy kind of looks quite a bit like the qanon shaman so well known from January 6 so January 6 in a way kind of I think opened this um new uh era in American politics where the kind of surreal Fringe often online um communities have sort of entered

the world of sort of high politics and have scrambled the kind of coordinates of average rules of the game and the normal sort of protocols I think that musk is someone who is really a product of that kind of crossover effect where uh building up a kind of huge online community building up the sort of status as a global media influencer has now the capacity to actually shatter existing coalitions shatter existing standards of what normal politics is and his connections now to people like Nigel farage until recently Tommy Robinson the afd Georgia Maloney these are

signs of kind of a a willingness to shatter existing traditional party systems to embrace disruption kind of for its own sake and to really harness especially the power of the internet to um make possible things that had been previously impossible so to make certain forms of speech possible to make certain forms of um mobilization possible and to make things like you know the attempted Cuda in January 6 something that could actually be followed through to its conclusion and I think that you know the kind of the Horizon of what the kind of politics in real

life that he's someone like musk is aiming at is broadcast by him frequently on his own Twitter account most recently for example he celebrated naib bukele the leader in El Salvador as having done something that has uh happened in El Salvador and will happen and must happen in the United States which in El Salvador has been to imprison 2% of the adult population as an absolutely Draconian way of backing down on crime so this vision of sort of authoritarian strong man on polit politics sort of gloves off mass incarceration crackdowns on the one hand and

then a deregulatory kind of unleashing of the free market on the other hand is produce this kind of curious combination of on the one hand Elon Musk posting Milton Friedman memes all the time on the other hand um scare mongering about the quote unquote genocidal rape tactics of non-white immigrants in the UK so he's produced this this sort of uh surreal effect I think of sort of the strong state in the free market turning the sort of ferous vision grafting it onto all kinds of online Aesthetics and kind of video game Dynamics in ways that

have really I think blindsided for good reasons sort of mainstream normal politicians like Olaf Schultz Kier starmer Biden Harris who don't know how to deal with this kind of chaotic and energy which unfortunately has a huge amount of legitimacy behind it not only his multi-million dollar multi-million number followers on social media but keep in mind I mean he oversees Tesla which is a car company that is worth more than all the other car companies in the world combined um whose valuation has gone vertical since Trump's election whose stocks are held in the portfolios of many

many many Democrats who might otherwise find musk as a person and his politics objection of so he is a kind of a locomotive who has sort of attached himself to the very dynamics of both the online sort of meme Market but also the very much offline stock market in ways that makes him hard to reckon with and hard to actually oppose your most recent piece for the new Statesman has headlined Elon Musk wants us to have more children is demography the new front line of the culture wars uh explain well this is really a fixation

of musk that um Echoes throughout other Silicon Valley thinkers too which is a fear that demographic decline is coming more quickly than than many of us realize and that gets read in sort of two ways on the one hand um as he frequently says you know there will be no human civilization if there are no humans so there's this kind of universal fear of the reality of sort of long-term slow birth rates leading to literally fewer humans on Earth but more importantly for him is particular humans on Earth so if you look at the kind

of um conversations he's had especially in Italy with members of the brothers of Italy um the fascist derived party from which you know which Maloney now heads the fear is the loss of populations of a discreet culture so he's worried about the decline of particular European civilizations particular European cultures the Italian culture the British culture he has endorsed the great replacement Theory this notion that liberal politicians are encouraging immigration from non-white populations to build their own support but also to kind of um dilute and disorient the native or autoist population so his pronatalism is not

a kind of a general one that sort of hopes that humans can propagate themselves to prod produce hopefully more solution to human problems but it's the defense of particular human populations which he sees as endowed with more capacity for kind of economic productivity economic in uh intelligence and sort of economic um um performance so his immigration policy and his immigration language is now in the last two weeks has taken a very hard right turn many people have noticed that in December you could have seen him still posting about meritocracy and the idea that anyone can

make it in the United States if they work hard enough since January 1st almost exactly the stream of his posts has been dominated by um the the faces of um men who have been charged with u sexual crimes who are from uh Muslim majority countries he is doing everything he can to sort of hype up a very clearly racially coded fear of um sexual assault and crimes coming from immigrants of uh non-western backgrounds and pairing that with this idea of immigrants from non-western backgrounds as sort of welfare dependents who are not feeding into the mainstream

economy so his demographic fears are very much also part of his kind of uh hard crime um hard borders policy that is now starting to come to the four as his primary talking point let me ask you something I'm looking at a piece in the financial times Elon Musk lived in aate South Africa till he was 17 David saaks the venture capitalist who's become a fundraiser for Donald Trump and a troll for Ukraine left age five and grew up in a South African diaspora family in Tennessee Peter teal spent years of childhood in South Africa

Namibia where his father was involved in uranium mining as part of the apartate regime's clandestine drive to acquire nuclear weapons and Paul Ferber an obscure South African software developer and tech journalist living near Johannesburg has been identified by two teams of friends linguist as the originator of the qinon conspiracy which helped shape Trump's Maga movement Ferber denies being Q in short four of mag's most influential voices are 50-some white men with formative experiences in a part8 South Africa can you comment on this professor slobodian absolutely this is something I've written about in a couple of

my books um the centrality of southern Africa for the farri and for neoliberals is extraordinary um rodesia of course has been seen as a kind of a lost cause for the hard right people might remember Dylan rof the the um the um the farri um mass murderer talking about his his allegiance to the redian cause um South Africa in the time of apartheid was seen as a kind of a last Bull workk against the black socialism of postcolonial Africa in the time of of transition in the time of Mandela and the move to one person

one vote universal suffrage on the end of Apartheid it was cast by the farri and by sort of Libertarians and neoliberals as a kind of a prosperous site of gold production and Manufacturing that was now under assault by a socialist uh black majority government thec and for musk himself the experience of growing up there um with uh very authoritarian dictatorial father was a very dystopian one from the way that his biographer recounts it um there's memories that he recounts perhaps a little bit gleefully and perhaps through fabrication of sort of walking through uh puddles of

Blood on the way to rock concerts um he saw it as a kind of a social darwinist sort of all against all type environment which I think has now very much implanted into to his mind I think he discovers that again in the online world of um brutal so-called dungeon crawling video games where he spends much of his time and also in the kind of cyberpunk Worlds of of Science Fiction um and um um films and novels so I think that extrapolation which is in part based on the reality of very intense intercommunal conflict but

also becomes something that he can kind of Embrace to kind of give to permit his own sort of vision of nihilism really and this belief that all alliances are kind of provisional you need to defend your own as we know he's sort of being uh clear about sort of building compounds to which he can Retreat expanding his own genetic pool through you know a very large family using the federal government when it's useful you know tapping into to Federal um budgets becoming effectively a techno contractor for NASA through SpaceX selling his Services as starlink but

always I I think very much with this exit endgame in mind the same way that many people in South Africa have their own kind of gated communities into which they can withdraw if they can afford it with their own water systems and their own sort of power supplies this kind of Octavia Butler parable of the SE type reality is um one that someone like musk has sort of um sort of sadistically embraced in a way and I think that his sort of accelerationism by which he makes alliances recklessly one after the other with whichever kind

of far-right politician appears on his video feed and has a kind of a distinctive appearance you know Tommy Robinson does look like he might have stepped out of a video game Naomi cped the alternative for Germany influencer who he has done so much to boost sort of cultivates this sort of anime like appearance so I think that for musk and teal and others the experience of aparte and post-apartheid South Africa has for them filled this role of a kind of a bad future which is also inevitable and from which they have to just do everything

they can to kind of you know hunker down and shield themselves while also tapping into of course the extraordinary profits that are available in doing things like providing surveillance systems as paler does Teal's company providing weapon systems as andil does the Palmer lucky owned company that teal helped back and the various other ways that the old-fashioned military industrial complex I think is now just being extended with a a new kind of Silicon Valley kind of headquarters and then you have Elon Musk changing um his uh symbol on uh X and if you could explain with

Pepe the Frog which was appropriated by right-wing groups classified as a hate symbol by anti-hate groups due to its frequent use in racist and anti-semitic contexts the term kek A variation of LOL originated in the online gaming World frequently used by um identitarian right internet users and trolls a BBC reporting Southern Poverty Law Center link kek to Virtual white nationalist guard what is going on here well this part of it is very much a kind of a replay of the 201617 kind of moment right I mean we all remember when people like Richard Spencer were

getting a lot of attention for propagating these memes of Pepe the Frog using uh the emoji of a glass of milk to signify whiteness and so there is this kind of very Adolescent and juvenile level of kind of provocation that is well H characterized I think by Olaf Schultz trollish that musk again in his somehow middle-aged you know third or fourth adolescence still manages to kind of embrace and take a kind of childlike pleasure in and I think it's actually probably not a good idea to focus too much on um you know the number of

Pepe the Frog memes that he has posted or whatever I think these are more or less surface froth and distraction from the more serious uh interven I think that talk serious interventions and specifically as we move into the second Trump presidency with Elon Musk um wielding so much power um what do you expect to see from Trump too well as far as U musk's role in it I mean he himself has been openly inspired by not just bukele as I mentioned but also looking further Southward Javier mle in Argentina um you know frequently endorsed him

Trump also has met melee and there is a kind of sense that mle has for someone like musk sort of given us an example in advance of how you can realize your kind of technol libertarian Vision through authoritarian statist means which seems paradoxical but actually perhaps isn't so if you look at what mle has done I think it could help us to sort of understand what might um be proposing at least and that Trump might help carry out so what kind of things have taken the brunt under M well it's been things like universities the

freezing of um the inflation increases for University funding the freezing of other forms of scientific research the freezing of U the right to protest and collectively bargain the elimination of cultural programs the Crackdown on other forms of um of public expression and these are these are I think you know previews of the things that in the the sort of solutionist mindset the engineering mindset of someone like musk all forms of endeavor that aren't aimed at you know cracking this one Central Wicked problem whether it's um space travel or um the expansion of the military budget

are forms of waste so I think that we'll see a kind of a redirection of um funding obviously towards hard research and the slashing of funding to things seen as superficial forms of entitlement forms of um Education and Research those I think are the things that probably an austerity minded Democrat could Advocate as much as an austerity minded Republican and it's probably where they'll be able to create kind of alliances I think that the attack on Free Speech uh in the course of the protests over Gaza since October 6 have given us a kind of

a preview of how unwilling Democrats as well as Republicans are to actually stand up for the uh right of academic investigation in and expression in this country and I think that universities will really be the kind of the soft targets for many of those early Cuts well I want to thank you so much for being with us Quinn slobodian professor of international history at Boston University his latest book is cra up capitalism Market radicals in the dream of a world without democracy we'll link to your articles on musk uh for the new Statesman that does

it for our show um we want to thank everyone for helping to make this broadcast possible democracy Now is funded by viewers like you please give today at democracynow.org