Once, the chief executive of one of the world’s largest companies approvingly sharing a fabricated headline published by the leadership of a fascist party would have been news. For Elon Musk, it was just Thursday.
Unusually for Musk, his post, a retweet of the Britain First co-leader Ashlea Simon sharing a fake Telegraph headline about detainment camps in the Falkland Islands for the English rioters, was deleted shortly after being sent. In the 30 minutes it was live on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter that he bought in 2022, it managed to rack up almost 2m views.
Since the unrest across Britain began last week, Musk’s outspoken criticism of the government has surprised many. But it’s only the latest example of the billionaire’s progression down the radicalisation pathway.
After making his fortune in the dotcom boom, and growing it with his involvement in PayPal, Musk invested in Tesla in 2004, eventually becoming the company’s chief executive. For a time, Musk presented himself as one may have expected from a former software executive running an electric vehicle company: he spoke at length about the risk of climate change, while launching and investing in other projects like SpaceX, OpenAI and The Boring Company that could all be sold as matching a general vision of improving humanity’s future.
But around 2020, Musk’s public profile began to shift. He had always been a fairly engaged user of Twitter, but as the pandemic hit, he became a far more frequent poster and experienced his first brushes with the world of factchecking: breezy assertions about the danger or length of the pandemic led to calls for his account to be suspended for spreading misinformation.
In his private life, Musk’s relationships with his family were in turmoil. His relationship with Claire Boucher, better known as the musician Grimes, began to fall apart in 2021. Boucher, the mother of three of his at least 12 children, eventually ended up in court over custody rights.
According to his biographer, Walter Isaacson, around this period Musk began sending “rightwing memes and conspiracy theories” to Grimes, who replied: “Is this from 4chan or something? You’re actually starting to sound like someone from the far right.”
At the same time, his daughter Vivian came out as transgender and changed her name, declaring that she no longer wanted to “be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form”.
Musk himself has cited Vivian as a reason for his political shift, telling the pop psychologist Jordan Peterson that he had “lost [his] son [sic], essentially”, and concluding that his son “is dead, killed by the woke mind virus”.
“For a lot of people who are radicalised there is a formative personal experience that creates the cognitive opening for their radicalisation journey,” said one radicalisation expert, who asked not to be named because of fear of reprisal. “For Musk it seems that his daughter’s transition was that opening for him.”
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The expert also believes Musk at his core is a man with practically no principles “except whatever will enrich him, and a deep need for attention and validation. He’s been getting the latter in spades from the far right ever since he started on his rightward radicalisation and he’s constructed for himself the world’s largest echo chamber, which will only continue to fuel that.”
The expert added: “It’s worth noting he has rarely, if ever, experienced consequences for his actions, and has found success in attempting to bully reality into conforming with his beliefs.”
In July, Musk announced the creation of a political action committee, America Pac, which would be “mostly but not entirely” supporting the Republican party, since it backs “meritocracy and individual freedom”. Musk did not clarify how much he intends to donate to the Pac, but earlier reports had suggested he was considering giving as much as $45m a month.
The extent of Musk’s political transformation has even led some to worry for his wellbeing. In March, he said that he was “almost always” sober during his posting sessions on X, and that his use of ketamine to treat his depression was unrelated to his social media presence.
