On 15th January, Sam Harris, the philosopher, neuroscientist, author and podcast host, revealed what lay behind his falling out with Elon Musk. Once, said Harris, they had been friends—so much so that, in the American way, they learned to shoot together.
And then came the pandemic. Harris doesn’t mention it, but in January 2020 Musk had tweeted about his ambition of sending one million people to Mars within 30 years. When, weeks later, Covid-19 came along, Musk seemed in no mood to be interrupted in his grand planning. In early March, when thousands were dying, with northern Italy in lockdown, the UK about to do the same, and it becoming apparent that the United States would shortly follow, Musk tweeted “the coronavirus panic is dumb”.
Harris privately took issue with his friend. “You have an enormous platform,” he reminded Musk, “and much of the world looks to you as an authority on all things technical. Coronavirus is a very big deal, and if we don’t get our act together, we’re going to look just like Italy very soon.” Musk allegedly replied: “Sam, you of all people should not be concerned about this.”
The exchange continued and culminated in a friendly wager about whether the US would reach 35,000 cases. Musk was confident that it wouldn’t. A few weeks later, when cases stood at well over half a million and deaths had reached 35,000, Harris reminded Musk of their bet. Musk never replied, and their friendship never resumed.
What had happened? This isn’t Harris’s explanation, but consider what happened to Musk’s favourite platform, Twitter, over the next two years or so. To combat misinformation about Covid and the anti-Covid vaccines—misinformation that was having big real-time consequences for public health—Twitter suspended more than 11,000 accounts and removed almost 100,000 tweets between January 2020 and September 2022. These removals were regarded by Musk not as an appropriate policy decided upon by the platform, but as a massive infringement on rights of free expression.
You’re a billionaire. You started from nothing, and you’ve revolutionised the way the world looks at communications and space travel. The tech world idolises you, and everyone calls you by your first name and laughs at your jokes, funny or not. And then the platform you regard as your unmediated connection with the world in effect disowns one of your cherished beliefs and declares it sententia non grata. What do you do? You buy that platform, and you use it to get your views on absolutely anything you think is important—at the moment you think it—out to tens of millions of people. Now you’re no longer an engineer, you really are a master of the universe, and you can make those who have annoyed you pay a price for their transgressions.
We have been here before, around 100 years ago. At its 1920s peak, the net personal worth of the US car-maker Henry Ford is estimated to have been more than $1.2bn—equivalent to around $20bn today. Musk’s wealth is estimated to be $447bn. Like Musk, Ford hadn’t invented the technology that helped make him rich—in his case, internal combustion—but his engineering skill and entrepreneurial genius had transformed an industry supplying luxury items to the Mr Toads of America into one making good cars for the ordinary American.
But Henry Ford seems not to have been a happy man. He had experienced several fallings out with investors in his companies, mostly people from the banking sector. He had hated America’s involvement in the First World War, and his very public opposition to military conflict had led to him being described as an “anarchist” by the Chicago Tribune, resulting in libel action.
In 1918, he authorised his closest aide, a second-generation German immigrant, Ernest Liebold, to buy a local weekly newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, which served the area near Detroit where Ford’s main factory was located. Ford brought in a respected journalist to edit the paper, established a feature called “Mr Ford’s Own Page” in which the magnate held forth (at some length) on a topic of his own choosing, and used Ford dealerships to promote subscriptions to those hundreds of thousands buying Model Ts.
By the summer of the following year, the Independent was losing money, and its circulation was in decline. Ford had just been on a camping trip with several other inventors and tycoons at which it was recorded that he blamed the Jews for causing the war and being responsible for lawlessness in America—more than two million eastern European Jews had migrated to the US since 1880. When he returned, looking for a way to revive his newspaper—and therefore his influence—he took advice from an experienced journalist on a New York paper, who he had employed to counsel him on public relations during the libel trial. “Find an evil to attack, go after it,” this hack advised, “and stay after it… If we get and print the right sort of stuff, one single series may make us known to millions... LET’S FIND SOME SENSATIONALISM.”
I’m looking now at the product of that advice. It’s the first volume of four books entitled The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, by Henry Ford Sr. The cover tells readers that it is a reprint of a series of articles appearing in the Dearborn Independent from 22nd May 1919 to 2nd October 1920. The original print run of the first edition of this book was between 200,000 and 500,000 copies. The books, like the paper, were distributed to all Ford dealers and sent to every public library in the US. Since Ford decided not to copyright the work (it was after all a labour of hate, not an attempt to earn money) it was reprinted all over the world
Chapter one is entitled “The Jew in Character and Business”, and explains that Jews don’t like to make things, but, rather, seek to control the business world through banking and usury. Chapter 12 is an exposition on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which takes that lie entirely at face value. By the time you get to volume three, the reader can discover how the Jews degraded baseball, how “Jewish Jazz Becomes Our National Music” and how the evil Irving Berlin edged out America’s delightful native balladeers. In all, over 91 consecutive weekly issues, Henry Ford’s paper led on the threat to the world of Jewish power.
The world took notice. The far-right thugs of 1920s Germany took great encouragement from Ford’s publications. They were translated into 16 languages and there were six German editions published between 1920 and 1922 alone. Visitors to Adolf Hitler’s headquarters over the years would find German versions of The International Jew on the coffee table and a portrait of the American billionaire hanging in Hitler’s office. After all, if someone as clever and successful as Henry Ford espoused the cause of antisemitism so vociferously, it must surely be true.
Ford eventually came under enough pressure from mainstream America to apologise for what he had published, distancing himself from the “real” authors of the pieces, while privately maintaining his belief in their truth. In 1938 he received one of the highest honours that the Third Reich could bestow, the Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle.
But what was this US billionaire doing intervening so directly and disastrously in world politics in the first place? And it’s roughly the same question—minus the anti-semitism—that Sam Harris asks of Elon Musk. Why is he doing this? “The problem with Elon,” writes Harris, is that he seems to make very little “effort to get his facts straight… and he regularly promotes… conspiracy theories manufactured by known bad actors, at scale”. So did Henry Ford. His antisemitism solidified into a quasi-ideology, stuffed with its own assertions and fake data. He used his money and voice to amplify it all over the globe. And, as with Musk, on his pet likes and dislikes, those around him either went along with it, fell silent or exited his presence.
It is difficult to explain this psychologically because, although most billionaires are likely to become egotists, not so many mutate into world-conquering monsters. Like Ford, Musk far preferred his mother to his father (although for some reason, at nine, he decided to live with the appalling Errol Musk in South Africa rather than his mother in Canada). Unlike Ford, who was merely underestimated, Musk was horribly bullied at school, and it may be that becoming so incredibly successful sparked in him the vindictive triumphalism that is so obviously part of his personality now.
Musk’s mission to create an ideal community on Mars is paralleled by Ford’s acquisition of 2.5m acres of Brazilian rainforest on which to build Fordlandia, a kind of “old town America” complete with a golf course. Ford’s attitude towards his employees and his son Edsel was dictatorial and his view of his own capabilities became messianic.
But the great similarity for our purposes is that—finding themselves incredibly wealthy and subject to intense flattery, but still hosting a brittle sense of their own worth—they decided to fight their personal battles in the most significant arenas they could find. Or buy them.
Ford became certain both that the Jews were behind a war that he had suffered for opposing, and that they were responsible for a financial system that he felt undervalued him. So he used his money to cause them horrible damage. In the preface to volume one of The International Jew, he (or his ghostwriter) explains that “not only does the Jewish question touch those matters that are of common knowledge, such as financial and commercial control, usurpation of political power, monopoly of necessities, and autocratic direction of the very news that the American people read; but it reaches into cultural regions and so touches the very heart of American life”.
If you were to substitute the words “woke mind virus” for “the Jewish question” and slightly update the language, you would almost perfectly capture Elon Musk’s big contention about the world. He told new buddy Jordan Peterson that he had been tricked into agreeing to puberty blockers for one of his children (during the pandemic, as it happens) and now, as far as he was concerned, that child was “dead”, murdered by the woke mind virus. This “virus” was now the number one enemy, not just for him, but the world. (One day someone will write a great book on how the trans issue metastasised, within a decade, from being a question of kindness and tolerance towards a tiny minority, to convulsing whole societies.)
Who had allowed that loss of his child to happen? Who had encouraged it? The liberals—the very people who had tried to shut down “debate” about the pandemic and the vaccines. The people from whom he had wrested Twitter. Whatever they did, whatever they said and wherever they were and whatever the facts might suggest, they became the enemy. Right now, Keir Starmer and the liberal left is to Elon Musk what Baron Rothschild was to Henry Ford.
Whereas Ford was relentlessly focused on one ethnic group, Musk seems rather to regard those who incite hatred against Muslims as allies, making their cause his in a desultory, careless way. When the actor Laurence Fox wrote a nonsensical post about the supposed takeover of English town halls by Muslims, Musk reposted it to his army of followers with the one word: “Wow”. When rioters pitched up outside British mosques and hotels last August he posted: “Civil war is inevitable”. He has taken against Nigel Farage because of the Reform leader’s refusal to embrace Stephen Yaxley-Lennon—also known as Tommy Robinson—and he has endorsed the far-right Alternative for Germany despite not giving any serious indication that he knows much about them. Where Ford’s hatreds were rifled, Musk’s are shotgun.
Their ends won’t be the same. Ford was irascible, but in the end could be persuaded that his antisemitic campaign was so bad for business that the game wasn’t worth the candle. I see no such capacity for restraint in the Elon Musk of 2025. He sleeps little, talks like a crazy person, looks unhealthy and seems unable to seek, let alone take, advice. Henry Ford died at 83 having passed control of his business to his grandson. I don’t think Elon Musk will manage to do either.
