“I’m not evil, I’m just misunderstood.”
Back in 2021, when Elon Musk made this rather tongue-in-cheek confession on Saturday Night Live, one might have been forgiven for giving him the benefit of the doubt. At that stage, he was merely the quirky billionaire owner of Tesla, and, while having a fair few controversies under his belt, was no more a social pariah than any other big tech mogul. Named Time’s person of the Year that year, he was praised for using his platform to raise awareness about Asperger’s syndrome, moving cryptocurrency into the mainstream and expanding the electric vehicle industry.
That was, of course, all before his takeover of X/Twitter. Three years later, and Musk has become synonymous with the platform, which has in turn been transformed into a hotbed of misinformation, radicalisation and hate.
The latest behaviour causing widespread concern from Musk is the fact he is offering voters in America the chance to win $1m a day. As the US election draws closer, Musk announced that “America Pac”, his pro-Trump political action committee, would give away the sum every 24 hours until November 5 to a randomly selected person — if they had signed his petition, which proports to support free speech and gun rights. Prior to this he had offered to pay registered voters in swing states $47 (£36) to sign the same petition.
It has raised concerns of it’s closeness to illegal vote buying from some political commenters and at a rally in Philadelphia earlier this week, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Musk “thinks that dangling money in front of a working person is a cute thing to do when the election of our lives is before us because that’s what people and billionaires like that do.”
It comes a few months after he weighed in on the far-right, racist rioting in the UK, which had been fuelled by conspiracy theories on X. Responding to a tweet with footage of the disorder that said the riots were due to the "effects of mass migration and open borders", Musk tweeted, "civil war is inevitable".
Despite being criticised by Starmer’s official spokesperson, Musk didn’t stop there. “Shouldn’t you be concerned about attacks on *all* communities?” Musk asked in response to Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s rightful condemnation of violence towards British Muslims. He then called the Prime Minister “#TwoTierKeir”, referencing the far-right, debunked conspiracy theory that the police treat white, right-wing protesters more harshly than minority left-wing groups.
Musk personally amplified Tommy Robinson’s posts – a fringe, four-times jailed extreme right British activist – multiple times since the riots, retweeting and replying to him, boosting his profile to Musk’s almost 200 million followers. Robinson is one of many who have used the site to fan the flames of the riots. “Get there and show your support,” he wrote on X the day after the Southport stabbings. “People need to rise up.”
Five days after his first intervention on the UK riots, Musk promoted another far right British figure – Ashlea Simon, co-founder of Britain First – who posted a fake Daily Telegraph story claiming that Starmer planned to send British rioters to detention camps in the Falkland Islands. The Telegraph quickly pointed out the post was fabricated, and Musk deleted his tweet, but only after it had made about two million impressions, and did not issue an apology.
The Tesla CEO’s latest conduct is part of a wider, and increasingly troubling pattern both of his personal radicalisation, and that of the platform he owns.
So how did Musk go from edgelord tech bro, to disinformer-in-chief?
From bullied school child to Silicon Valley’s “next big thing”
Born in Pretoria in 1971, during the apartheid regime in South Africa, Musk’s family had form when it comes to semi-autocratic tech ventures. His grandfather J. N. Haldeman was a hardline anti-Communist from Canada and led the anti-democratic and quasi-fascist Technocracy movement in the 1930s and 40s, and moved the family to apartheid South Africa in 1950.
Maye Haldeman, Musk's mother, was a finalist for Miss South Africa and has been a supermodel for fifty years, while his father, Errol Musk, worked as an engineer and aviator. The family was wealthy during Musk’s childhood due to profits from a Zambian emerald mine his father was involved with.
Walter Isaacson, Musk’s biographer, describes Musk an awkward, lonely child who was often bullied and beaten up in school, felt bored by his studies and would often call other kids “stupid”. When Musk was 10, his parents divorced, and, despite a tumultuous relationship with his father, he chose to live with him. Isaacson writes about one incident where, after an altercation with a fellow student, Musk Junior was thrown down concrete steps and heavily beaten by the boy and his friends, leading to him being hospitalised. He described his father shouting at him after he was discharged, saying "I had to stand for an hour as he yelled at me and called me an idiot and told me that I was just worthless".
Musk came to regret the decision to move in with his father, and the pair are now estranged. (Musk Senior is now a conspiracy theorist who has called Biden a “pedophile President,” has two children by his own stepdaughter, and said that “the only thing we are here for is to reproduce.”)
Musk started college at the University of Pretoria, but never finished his degree, leaving South Africa in 1989, at seventeen. He initially moved to Canada, where he studied at Queen's University in Ontario for two years. He then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied physics and economics. After a spate of internships in Silicon Valley, Musk was accepted into a PhD program in materials science at Stanford University, but he deferred his admission and ultimately decided not to attend.
Instead, Musk and his brother Kimball, with money from their parents, launched Zip2, an online directory that sold its services to newspaper publishers. In 1999, during the dot-com boom, they sold it for more than $300 million. Musk used his share of the money to launch one of the earliest online banking companies. Its name? X.com. His friends were sceptical about the naming of the online bank, fearing it might be confused for a pornographic site. Musk dismissed their concerns, assuring them that the name was meant to be straightforward, memorable, and easy to type.
“I think X.com could absolutely be a multibillion-dollar bonanza,” he told CNN at the time. But in the meantime, “I’d like to be on the cover of Rolling Stone.” That year, US news platform Salon announced, “Elon Musk Is Poised to Become Silicon Valley’s Next Big Thing.”
SpaceX, Starlink and Tesla
In 2002, Elon Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, with just a minor mission: to make space travel more affordable and eventually enable the colonisation of Mars. Frustrated by the high costs and inefficiencies of existing space programs, his goal was to develop reusable rocket technology that could dramatically reduce the expense of space missions.
The company experienced failure after failure, but Musk was sure that success would come. Though their first rocket failed to reach Earth orbit in 2006, it was awarded a contract from NASA later that year. After two more failed attempts that nearly caused Musk and his companies to go bankrupt, SpaceX succeeded in launching the Falcon 1 into orbit in 2008.
The year after he founded SpaceX, Musk joined another business venture which would eventually come to define his career, and expedite his journey to becoming the world’s richest person. Founded by businessmen Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2003, Musk invested around $6.5 million in electric vehicle company Tesla, becoming both its largest shareholder and its chairman. He became CEO four years later.
According to Isaacson, “comradery is dangerous” is one of Musk’s workplace maxims. And it bears out in his business models – throughout the years, Musk has opposed unions, pushed workers back to the Tesla plants at the height of the pandemic— around 450 people reportedly got infected—and has showed a general disdain for workers’ rights. In 2021, a federal jury ordered Tesla to pay $137m to an African American former employee at the EV maker’s factory in Freemont, California, who said that Tesla turned a blind eye to racial abuse.
Musk’s companies have seen widespread, mainstream success. Tesla commands roughly two-thirds of the US’s electric vehicle market. SpaceX has received not only billions of dollars in government contracts but also more than a hundred million dollars in military contracts for missile-tracking satellites. Starlink – a satellite internet constellation project launched by SpaceX in 2015 – provides Pentagon-funded services to Ukraine. On a daily basis, his stamp is branded on various parts of the Internet, transport system, power grid and energy supply.
In 2021, Musk hit yet another milestone, becoming the world’s richest person. The same year, Time named him, rather controversially, Person of the Year. “This is the man who aspires to save our planet and get us a new one to inhabit: clown, genius, edgelord, visionary, industrialist, showman, cad; a madcap hybrid of Thomas Edison, P. T. Barnum, Andrew Carnegie and Watchmen’s Doctor Manhattan, the brooding, blue-skinned man-god who invents electric cars and moves to Mars,” wrote the magazine of the CEO.
Musk’s fears of “population collapse” – and his twelve children
It is not just Musk’s sprawling business empire which he seeks to rapidly, and often recklessly, expand. Musk is a pro-natalist – someone who believes a declining birth rate is a threat to civilisation. With his trademark vigour, he is doing his part to counter that threat, so far by fathering at least twelve children.
“Population collapse due to low birth-rates is a much bigger risk to civilisation than global warming. (And I do think global warming is a major risk),” Musk warned in 2022. “If there is not at least a birth rate which is keeping population constant, then people will disappear,” he has also proclaimed.
He met his first wife, Canadian author Justine Wilson, while studying in Ontario. The pair married in 2000, and had their first child, a son named Nevada, two years later, who passed away just 10 weeks after he was born. After his death, the couple used IVF to conceive, and Justine gave birth to twins (one of whom they named Xavier, in part after Professor Xavier from X-Men) and then to triplets. His business-like approach to his companies and his fatherhood also trickled into the couple’s relationship: when they fought, he told her“If you were my employee, I would fire you.”
Musk divorced Wilson, and shortly after proposed to Talulah Riley, a 22-year-old British actress who had not long before been living with her parents. They married, divorced, married, and divorced, before splitting for good in 2016. He dated then dated actress Amber Heard for a few months in 2017, after her separation from Johnny Depp, after reportedly pursuing her for five years. “I’m just a fool for love,” Musk told Isaacson. “I am often a fool, but especially for love.”
The following year, he and Canadian musician Grimes revealed they were in a relationship. The couple had their first child in 2020, famously named X Æ A-12, then changed to X Æ A-Xii in order not to breach California naming regulations.
In 2021, Shivon Zilis, a 35-year-old executive at Musk’s company Neuralink, gave birth to Musk’s twins, conceived by IVF. “He really wants smart people to have kids, so he encouraged me to,” Zilis said. At the same time, Musk was fathering another child via surrogate with his now ex-wife Grimes. (By this time, Musk had already had at least seven children). Grimes did not know that Zilis, who was a friend of hers, was pregnant by Musk. Zilis’s twins were born seven weeks premature, and the surrogate delivered Musk and Grimes’ child a few weeks later. In 2022, Musk and Grimes had another child, Techno Mechanicus Musk, nicknamed Tau.
But that year, Musk’s relationship with another of his children completely fell apart. The twins he shared with Justine turned eighteen, and one of them told Musk, “I hate you and everything you stand for.” His child, who is transgender, petitioned a California court for a name change, to Xavier to Vivian Jenna Wilson, citing, as the reason for the petition, “gender identity and the fact that I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.”
In a roundabout way, this is perhaps the life event that has shaped Musk the most profoundly. He blamed the estrangement of his daughter on what the Financial Times described in an interview with him as "the supposed takeover of elite schools and universities by neo-Marxists", and has said that her gender transition is primarily what sparked his drive to "destroy the woke mind virus", and latently, to take over Twitter.
‘Destroying the woke mind virus’ – the X/Twitter takeover
Before he came to eventually take over Twitter, Musk’s account on the platform had already landed him in hot water – ironically, due to an early instance of peddling misinformation. It regarded a bizarre witch hunt against the British diver who helped rescue 12 boys and their football coach from a Thai cave in 2018. After the coach cast doubt on the submersible rescue vessel Musk had delivered for the rescue operation, Musk entirely baselessly branded him “pedo guy”. (He has since deleted that tweet and others like it, and, in September 2019, won a defamation case against the diver who sued Musk for $190m over the tweet).
Three years later, when Musk tweeted that he had “funding secured” to take Tesla private at $420 a share – a bad weed joke, and which wasn’t true – he was forced settled fraud charges from the Securities and Exchange Commission. He paid a $20 million fine for a misleading remark that “led to significant market disruption,” with Tesla paying an additional $20 million and Musk forced to step down as chair of the company board.
It wasn’t until January 2022, that he began purchasing stock on the social media platform. That year saw a rollercoaster back and forth between Musk and the company, which saw him eventually closing a $44 billion deal to take over the social media service in October.
When Musk decided to buy Twitter, he wrote a letter to its board. “I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy,” he explained, but “I now realise the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form.” Musk gave Isaacson a different explanation for taking over the company: “Unless the woke-mind virus, which is fundamentally antiscience, antimerit, and antihuman in general, is stopped, civilisation will never become multiplanetary.”
How exactly Musk defines a “functioning democracy” is yet to be seen. But if his re-modelled version of X is anything to go by, it is a markedly dystopian vision. After Musk’s takeover, he immediately fired the Twitter teams tasked with battling misinformation. He subsequently implemented a “general amnesty” to thousands of accounts that had received permanent bans, including neo-Nazis, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and far-right activist Tommy Robinson, often engaging with these people himself. A few months later, he changed the verification system to allow users to pay for a blue verification tick, allowing subscribers to enjoy more visibility, and simultaneously making it harder to verify accounts of genuine public figures.
Misinformation climate change, the war in Gaza, the pandemic and elections have metastasised, alongside violent hate speech, often spilling out into real world events. And, while his platform has become more and more extreme, so has Musk himself, whose pivot towards hard-right, conspiracist ideology has led him – X’s most followed user – to recklessly amplify these claims, to his audience of almost 200 million.
From accusing billionaire philanthropist and Holocaust survivor George Soros, who donates to liberal causes of wanting “to erode the very fabric of civilisation”, to casting doubts veracity of reports on the identification of the man who attacked Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s husband in 2022, Musk has consistently, and with increasing frequency, plunged his own followers into a timeline rife with untruths. In 2023, after a gunman killed eight people at a mall in Texas, subsequent FBI-verified reports revealed that the attacker was a white supremacist with Nazi tattoos. Musk publicly doubted the claims, wondering if they were part of a “very bad psyop”, and liked posts from a user falsely claiming the shooter had been a Mexican gang member.
In total, Musk has made over 50 posts viewed 1.2 billion times since the beginning of the year that have been debunked by independent fact checkers, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate, reported by the Financial Times. They included a recent deep fake video that purportedly showed Kamala Harris calling herself “the ultimate diversity hire”.
He continuously weighs in on US politics – and has shown continuing support for Donald Trump. Prior to his offering $1 million rewards for registered voters in the current election, Musk made a joint appearance with Trump in the summer for a highly-anticipated and bizarre audio conversation on X. The pair discussed topics from immigration to inflation (incidentally, it was rife with technical glitches which left thousands unable to join).
So, where does Musk go from here? In the summer, Bruce Daisley, a former Twitter executive said that Musk should face “personal sanctions” and even the threat of an “arrest warrant” if he was found to be stirring up public disorder on his social media platform. It is certainly an unlikely scenario, and one that would no doubt accelerate Musk’s own martyrdom.
More plausible is that users will simply stop engaging. Usage of X in the US has dropped by a fifth since his takeover, with myriad alternatives cropping up. Perhaps this will be the way that X’s – and Musk’s – power fades; not with a bang but with a fizzle.
