Jeff Bezos read it right. If you’re not going to fight a thug then the best course is surrender. You may never feature in the pantheon of the great press barons, but, hey, you live to fight another day.
Elon Musk read it even better. Not so long ago he was a mild critic of Donald Trump, but he, too, worked out that the better course was to become a craven Trump cheerleader. Literally. And now he sits at the right hand of God—and if that prospect doesn’t terrify you, you’ve not been paying attention.
The gangsters are now in charge and Musk could barely conceal his childish delight at being part of the mob. You remember the surreal moment when he arrived at the front door of his newly purchased Twitter bearing a kitchen sink? Well, within hours of the Trump victory becoming a reality Musk posted a fake picture of him inside the Oval Office—holding, yes, a kitchen sink.
Trump will make Musk much richer. It’s calculated the man-child could personally benefit to the tune of $20bn through Tesla alone—and that’s before the multi-billion space contracts kick in. More worrying is the combination of two such frankly weird characters bonding with each other to preside over the free world, never mind the third musketeer—that other fawning oddball, Robert F Kennedy Jr.
With customary foresight Armando Iannucci chose this moment to launch a stage version of the terrifying Cold War comedy classic, Dr Strangelove. It tells the story of a paranoid US Air Force general who believes that fluoridation of the American water supply is a Soviet plot to poison US citizens and orders a bombing attack on Moscow, opening a path to a nuclear holocaust.
Ridiculously far-fetched. And yet there is something of the Strangelove about the team poised to move into the White House. RFK Jr celebrated Trump’s victory yesterday by posting a promise that the new president’s first act would be to advise all US water systems to remove fluoride from public water since (in RFK’s view) fluoride is a silent killer. If only Peter Sellers were alive to play all three characters.
Iannucci has particular contempt for Musk. “You can have fun at Musk’s expense,” he said recently. “But I find it menacing that people in charge of information are prioritising rumours and lies that conform to their point of view.”
Musk has appointed himself the arbiter of free speech for 350m or more people. He professes a child-like belief that truth will somehow win through in the chaotic space that he has enabled. He has an almost obsessional disgust for all mainstream media, telling the former Fox News propagandist Tucker Carlson recently: “X is the one place you can find out the truth, the only place.”
“You are the media now,” Musk posted to his 200m followers as Trump proclaimed victory. No, I’ve no idea what that means either, but he and his fellow populists share the view that if you “flood the zone with shit” you overwhelm anyone’s ability to mediate information, and thereby disrupt the ways in which democratic societies have traditionally rooted themselves in facts and reality. It has been called “manufactured nihilism”.
And people take him seriously. Last week the Telegraph splashed on a single tweet from Musk criticising Rachel Reeves’s proposed changes to inheritance tax on some farmland, even though Musk’s real understanding of almost anything about British life or politics could barely stretch to 280 characters.
More worrying is his tendency to act as a freelance operator in international politics, blurring all lines between national security, faux-diplomacy and personal gain.
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Musk has been in regular contact with Russian president Vladimir Putin since late 2022, with their discussions reported to touch on “personal topics, business and geopolitical tensions”.
Musk, who claims to have top-secret security clearance and who has forged deep business ties with US military and intelligence agencies, was reportedly asked by Putin to avoid activating his Starlink satellite internet service over Taiwan as a favour to the Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
Musk’s Starlink programme is also critical to the war in Ukraine—and X is awash with Russian disinformation campaigns. He is reported to have had other conversations with Sergei Kiriyenko, Putin’s first deputy chief of staff, who was accused by the US justice department last month of creating 30 internet domains, some on X, to spread Russian disinformation intended to erode support for Ukraine and influence the US presidential election. Among their tactics was to mimic real American media organisations, including the Washington Post.
“This is a story about oligarch capture of the US,” said Fiona Hill, the senior director for European and Russian affairs in the last Trump White House and a defence adviser to the UK government.
“If people like Musk get Trump re-elected, they’ll expect all kinds of regulatory gifts in their favour. He is in a position to command government contracts, potentially with a government position, and there are loads of militaries around the world dependent on his systems, not least Ukraine.”
Well Musk did—more than any other single individual—help Trump get re-elected. He threw hundreds of millions of dollars in the service of Trump’s re-election and effectively put his social media platform at his disposal. Meanwhile, he was reportedly in private secret communication with America’s number one enemy, who is himself actively waging war against one of America’s allies.
Bezos’ pre-emptive act of surrender damaged the reputation of a great newspaper in the greater service of his other companies. Robert Kennedy Jr will soon be forgotten. Trump 2.0, on the evidence of his most recent campaign appearances, is a rambling, unfocused shadow of his former self. He will do damage, for sure, but it may turn out that Musk is the one we should really worry about.
