Editorials & Other Articles

Elon Musk: The World’s Worst Trillionaire
His wealth isn’t the only thing that’s extreme.
by David Corn
Mother Jones Washington DC Bureau Chief

Hooray, Elon Musk is a trillionaire. You catch that last week? It was all over the news, with splashy headlines proclaiming that X-boy is the first human to enter the four-comma club. Of course, much of his wealth is on paper and tied to the inflated value of SpaceX, which went public on Friday. Most notably, the main media stories about Musk reaching this milestone sidestepped an important fact: The guy is a racist conspiracy monger.

The accounts of Musk’s newfound trillionaireness in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal neglected to mention that the world’s richest man is a dangerous purveyor of paranoia and hate. As many are hailing Musk’s entry into this league of one, it’s a good time to review his record as an alt-right extremist who’s amplified and promoted noxious, dangerous, and false ideas. So let’s go for a non-comprehensive jog down memory lane—sticking only to recent years.

In October 2022, after Paul Pelosi, the husband of Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was brutally assaulted at their San Francisco home, Musk spread an article from an obscure website that claimed the assailant was a male prostitute and the attack stemmed from a drunken dispute between Pelosi and this man. “There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye,” Musk posted on Twitter, which he had recently purchased. The site Musk referenced had reported during the 2016 election that Hillary Clinton was dead and had been replaced by a body double, and his post illustrated his penchant for recklessly echoing bullshit conspiracy theories.

A few months later, Musk put up a post comparing Jewish billionaire philanthropist George Soros to the Marvel supervillain Magneto, and he contended that Soros hates humanity and “wants to erode the very fabric of civilization.” His anti-Soros messages, broadcast to his 125 million or so followers, were widely excoriated as advancing antisemitic tropes.