I’ll tell you about Musk’s culture war
Elon Musk's ideas, thoughts, theories and projects. The article by Enrico Pedemonte, author of the essay "The farm of humans", taken from Notes by Stefano Feltri
Some time ago, a group of Elon Musk's friends hid the tycoon's cell phone in the safe of the hotel where he was staying. They wanted to stop him from tweeting at least overnight. At three in the morning Musk called hotel security and ordered them to unlock the safe. It is just one of the anecdotes, contained in Musk's biography written by Walter Isaacson, which describe his obsessive-compulsive behaviors.
The maniacal manifestations of the richest man in the world do not stop even in front of heads of state. Gathering flowers from the news of recent months: he replied "fuck" to European Commissioner Thierry Breton who had asked him to moderate the content on X; he addressed Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski with “shut up, little man”, claiming the non-existence of an alternative to Starlink, his satellite network; asked his 218 million followers whether “America should free the British people from their tyrannical government”; he has repeatedly stated that only the far right of the AfD can save Germany; and recently wrote a post, then deleted, absolving Hitler, Stalin and Mao of the mass crimes committed, attributing all the responsibility to their subordinates.
Often, analyzing Musk's daily outings we focus on their bizarreness. And there is no doubt that they are bizarre, the result of a brilliant and autistic man animated by a sacred fire that pushes him to destroy the old world to create a new one of his own invention.
But we often forget that Musk is only the spearhead of a group of conservative technologists and intellectuals committed to attacking American democracy. Musk's is a cultural war that is shaping a part of public opinion (not only that of the US) by exacerbating distrust towards the State and public administration.
In particular, the main objective of this battle is the destruction of the cultural hegemony of the progressives.
In the hundreds of posts he publishes every day on
He recently invited public employees to report (with anonymous reports) colleagues who still follow the DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) rules now abolished by Trump. When Wikipedia updated its page about him to include a reference to the outstretched arm salute, Musk accused the site of being just “an extension of mainstream media propaganda” while urging his followers not to donate to the online encyclopedia; in October 2023 he promised a billion dollars if Wikipedia changed its name to Dickipedia, where dick is the epithet commonly used to indicate the male member.
Musk's relationship with Trump
Many are wondering when Trump's romance with Musk will end. Some argue that it is already over after, in a recent meeting at the White House, the president reduced the role of the tycoon, attributing hiring and firing to the heads of departments. Others say that in the future Musk will no longer bring his son into the Oval Office after he smeared his boogers on the president's desk, prompting him to have it disinfected.
But it is not certain that the divorce between the two is imminent.
Musk is the main communicator of Trumpian ideology: why should Trump antagonize the man who controls one of the most widespread social networks and every day floods the cell phones of hundreds of millions of citizens with his thoughts? After all, Musk, with his destructive Stakhanovism, is only applying himself to implement the strategy indicated for years by Vice President JD Vance, who not only has a growing influence on the president, but is now universally considered the future of the Republican Party.
A couple of years ago Vance assured that Trump, once he returned to the White House, would "fire every single mid-level bureaucrat and every administrative state official and replace them with our people."
In 2021, interviewed in an anti-feminist podcast, he said that the United States needs "a program similar to that of de-Baathification in Iraq" (i.e. the campaign to eliminate members of Saddam Hussein's Baath party) hoping for "a de-wokeification program" to purge the public administration of all employees of the woke left. On another occasion he reiterated the need to "destroy the universities", the cradle of progressive hegemony over American culture.
Musk, with his prestige as a brilliant entrepreneur, is the armed wing of this strategy. The Doge directed by him, in addition to being an instrument for sacking public employees and lightening the state budget, is a formidable propaganda machine.
The fact that the results obtained so far are laughable from an economic point of view and often harmful to the efficiency of public administration does not mean that the message spread is devastating for the image of the welfare policies traditionally practiced by democrats.
His influence on the president has been profound to this day. It was he who convinced Trump to appoint his friend David Sacks as “Czar of artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies”. According to what the president wrote on his social network “Truth” – Saks will be responsible for “two key areas for the future of American competitiveness” and “will safeguard free speech online”. Then Trump announced (again on Truth) the creation of a "strategic cryptocurrency reserve" to ensure that "the United States becomes the Cryptocurrency Capital of the World".
It is interesting to remember that Saks is part of a group that was formed at the beginning of the century around PayPal, a company created to propose an encrypted electronic currency that was supposed to overcome the control of central banks. That group – defined in an ironically threatening way as the "PayPal mafia" – includes, among others, not only Sachs, but also Musk and Peter Thiel, who were the founders.
South African nostalgia
When Musk raised his arm in the Nazi salute mentioned at the beginning, some analysts remembered that these characters had all migrated from South Africa in the years in which many whites, seeing the old order crumbling, preferred to leave; and that at that time, among white South Africans, sympathy for Nazism was not uncommon.
Even Steve Bannon, a leading figure of the far right, underlining their “malign” influence on Trump's entourage, described white South Africans as “the most racist people on earth” and called on Musk to return to his home country.
Perhaps Bannon exaggerates but looking at the biographies of these characters it is clear that their culture of origin, which once defended the racial and economic domination of the white population, has left its mark.
Peter Thiel himself demonstrates this fear, a character who has a unique influence on the culture of Silicon Valley and that of Musk. (It was he, in 2008, who saved Musk's SpaceX from the brink of bankruptcy after three failed launches by investing 20 million dollars).
In 2009, in an essay that shook the American right (The Education of a libertarian), he stated that he "no longer believes that freedom and democracy are compatible".
In 2014, in From Zero to One, a book that sold millions of copies, he argued that "competition is for the weak" while "capitalism is founded on monopolies" which allow the accumulation of the capital necessary to finance research that can change the world.
Reading his writings comes to mind the cult of the superman who cannot be judged according to current moral rules because his actions are motivated by objectives and dreams that ordinary people are not able to understand and therefore cannot judge and hinder.
Supermen?
Every company created by Elon Musk is the expression of a utopian dream to save humanity that seems taken from Thiel's dream book.
When he founded Neuralink he did so to merge "the brain with artificial intelligence and kick off the next phase of human evolution". To achieve this goal he participated in the founding of both DeepMind (in 2014) and OpenAi (in 2018), the two leading AI companies from which he later left after breaking up with both partners (Demis Hassabis and Sam Altman).
When he created SpaceX he did so with the aim of conquering Mars, and this was part of a utopian thought that envisaged first the fusion between brain and computer, then the expansion into the universe by a new digital humanity.
The reader who raises his eyebrow in disbelief must know that suggestions of this type have been publicly espoused by Google leaders (in particular by Larry Page) and many other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, convinced that their technologies will lead to the creation of a new (transhuman) humanity and immortality. Sergey Brin (the other founder of Google) has repeatedly said that he aspires to “cure death”.
Larry Ellison (of Oracle) described mortality as 'incomprehensible'. Some of them (including Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAi) plan to have their brains frozen (a process that involves euthanasia) so that they can one day upload it to a computer and thus achieve digital immortality).
Musk is therefore only the richest (and most famous) exponent of ideas that have dominated the culture of Silicon Valley. His daily cravings express in an irrepressible way his desire to accelerate change and shake off the slowness of public administration and the caution of progressive intellectuals (American, but above all European).
The mirages generated by a technology that – in the descriptions of its creators – seems to have divine capabilities fuel the multiplication of techno-utopian tribes pervaded by ideas that are dangerously reminiscent of eugenics.
One of the latest born (Effective Accelerationism) preaches the need to accelerate research on artificial intelligence and in its programmatic manifesto claims that «accelerationism is simply the self-awareness of capitalism that has just begun: the general objective of humanity is to preserve the light of consciousness».
On the web page of this movement Musk comments: «This is why we must preserve the light of consciousness by becoming a space civilization and extending life to other planets».
If this is the perspective, the dismissal of a few million public employees appears to be an insignificant hiccup, and the weakening of democracy a necessary step. But if these are the suggestions that inspire the new American administration, perhaps we should start to worry.
(Excerpt from Notes by Stefano Feltri )
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/elon-musk-guerra-culturale/ on Sat, 05 Apr 2025 06:13:42 +0000.