What is Elon Musk? Part 1
He's officially the richest and one of the most politically powerful private actors in the world, but he is most likely just a means to an end.
Elon Musk is one of the most prominent figures in the global news cycle. That was already the case prior to his involvement in Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign and subsequent proximity to the US president. Yet the publicly available analysis of Musk is remarkably homogenous, very predictable, and a lot of it is misleading. As the richest person on the planet, at least in accounting value, and a major influence on the politics and public narrative of the most powerful country in the world, there are few people more important to understand.
As with most of my other analysis, my take on Musk is very different to the dominant narratives. Here I will briefly lay out what I think Elon Musk really is. Maybe in later posts it will be worth unpacking these arguments in more detail, but for now this will give you a very different perspective on one of the world’s most powerful people.
Why Tesla stock is overpriced
At the root of much of Musk’s power and influence, and of course the primary source of his wealth, is the Tesla share price. It is worth emphasising the price because in many respects the stock’s price is entirely detached from the value and substance of the actual company behind it. Tesla trades at $315/share, which in my subjective estimate is at least 3 times what it should be trading at based on what investors usually refer to as ‘fundamentals’.1 It has largely retained its excessively high valuation despite recently plummeting sales in Europe and other parts of the world, along with repeated failures to bring products online when promised.
What you may not know is that a number of years ago some academic researchers stumbled across the fact that the Tesla share price was being artificially boosted by ‘bot armies’ on social media platforms:
After some brief reporting in the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post, the story disappeared. Six months later, Musk bought Twitter itself - using capital that he raised based on the same Tesla share price… The question of who had created the bot armies was never answered. Despite promising that he would increase transparency at Twitter and combat bots, one of his first actions was to block the data feed to research initiatives tracking bot networks. The source of the story about the bots boosting the share price, Botometer, had to shut down.
The key point is this: Musk’s power and influence has largely hinged on the Tesla share price. There is preliminary evidence of that stock being artificially boosted. The objective facts suggest it is heavily overpriced. That overpricing enabled Musk to take control of one of the world’s most important social media platforms.
Musk is funded by the ‘deep state’
With the recent fracturing of Musk’s relationship with Donald Trump, Trump and some of his right-wing allies have renewed attention to the extensive subsidies that Tesla and SpaceX have received from the US government. However petty and hypocritical Trump’s motives, he is right about one thing: in many respects the apparent success of Musk and Tesla is built on the tens of billions of dollars Musk has received for his various business endeavours. And not from just any part of the state, but primarily from the military and defence establishment.
In a previous post I also noted that Musk’s proximity to Trump was unconvincing and likely to be part of a broader maneouvre to ‘manage’ Trump by surrounding him with “lieutenants [who] despise him and are there to control and direct his actions”. The recent turbulence in the relationship between the two men is, in light of that original assessment, entirely unsurprising. Musk will stay close to Trump to the extent it serves the interests of the ‘deep state’ and where it does not, he will shift tack. Trump is a wildcard and can only be managed to a certain degree: once Musk has pushed that to its limits, it may better serve those interests for him to direct his energies elsewhere.
Musk is useful for the deep state in many other respects that have nothing to do with Trump. Through him they have direct control over arguably the most politically important social media in the world (Twitter/X). It meant they had almost unlimited and unexamined influence over it in a year (2024) in which elections were held in 70 countries, in an era when voting can be substantially influenced by social media manipulation.
It means that the deep state can invest in expensive and risky projects like SpaceX (with various possible military applications2) and Starlink (already put to use in the war in Ukraine and spun off to other military projects) without actually needing to allocate official government expenditure: instead it is funded by artificially boosting the Tesla share price.
The success of this ingenious scheme is reflected in the fact that Musk has also been able to cultivate relations with the US’s most powerful opponents, China and Russia. That is partly also testament to the remarkable weaknesses of those countries’ intelligence services. Musk did, after all, once reveal his true colours:3
Nothing says ‘deep state functionary’ like supporting the overthrow of democratically-elected governments to get hold of a country’s minerals. Stripped of the hype about his supposed genius (thoroughly debunked) and the supposed groundbreaking success of Tesla (also thoroughly debunked), the evidence points to Musk, instead, as a rather ingenious creation of the deep state. Just another stage in a long, costly and highly manipulative game for global technological, societal and geopolitical control.
More on other aspects of the Musk narrative, such as his relationship to South Africa and influence on Trump’s foreign policy towards South Africa, in Part 2.
With a price-earnings ratio over 200, 5 times more than the average of the S&P 500 during the tech bubble of the late 1990s.
Although the uses mentioned in the public domain are unlikely to be the most important.
The fact that Musk deleted this tweet is perhaps the greatest support for the view that it reveals his true political stance. After all, Musk styles himself as an unapologetic ‘free speech extremist’ and nothing in the tweet was illegal. The reason for deleting it was that what it revealed was strategically inconvenient.
A highly biased and misleading “analysis”
Every Major Player on the World Stage, every effective shaker with Agency, all of them possess agendas awry from Human happiness or fulfillment. NONE offer the 99%, ALL lead the Cattle. Bell Curve failures means zero species loyalty. A Darwinian Flaw, to be sure, perhaps one's answer to The Fermi Paradox?