Not long ago, Elon Musk was a darling of American progressives - a visionary bringing electric cars to the people and voting Democrat for more than two decades. Now he is their self-appointed nemesis, clearing the US government of a ‘viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America'. So, how did Musk make the political voyage from left to right in record time?
For three decades after he arrived in North America as a teenager, Elon Musk cleaved closely to the instinctive liberalism of most of his Silicon Valley peers.
He voted for Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. He called himself a “centrist”. He was embarrassed by his South African father voicing his approval of Donald Trump at dinner parties.
Then, quite suddenly, he not only endorsed the Republicans but campaigned for Trump; and, at the President’s inauguration, extended his right arm in a ... well, let’s just call it an instantly recognisable gesture associated with right-wing politics.
Musk is far from alone in abandoning middle-of-the-road liberalism. But few wield such enormous power.
In appointing him to run the Department of Government Efficiency, Trump has granted Musk the authority to reshape America and its place in the world.
With carte-blanche to cut US$2 trillion ($3.5t) from the federal budget, he has fired thousands of government employees and shut down whole departments.
A recent weekend spent “feeding USAid into the woodchipper” sparked chaos around the world and destroyed 60 years of soft-power diplomacy.
Musk said in an Oval Office press conference that his mission was to “restore democracy”. His opponents say he is acting illegally.
What is certain is that his ambitions go well beyond the United States; he has intervened in both German and British politics to endorse populist, anti-immigration parties.
Understanding his motives might tell us what comes next.
The Telegraph spoke to half a dozen people who know or have known Musk.
They paint a picture of an imaginative and hard-working, but also thin-skinned and impulsive individual with long-held beliefs about free speech, space exploration and his own special role in shaping mankind’s pan-galactic future.
While associates point to different turning points, all agree Musk’s sharp rightward shift was propelled by a series of personal grievances.
Out of Africa
Elon Musk was born in Pretoria in 1971, and spent his formative years in the privileged and somewhat-oblivious world of apartheid South Africa’s English-speaking white middle class.
Much has been made of his upbringing in the racially segregated country.
More than one of his enemies have suggested he must, consciously or unconsciously, carry the prejudices of apartheid in his world view.
Steve Bannon, the right-wing ideologue who briefly served as a strategist and chief of staff in Trump’s first administration, called white South Africans “the most racist people on Earth” in a furious attack on Musk last month.
Others paint a more nuanced picture.
His father, Errol Musk, who was briefly a member of the anti-apartheid Progressive Party, told the Telegraph that Elon, along with his brother and sister, grew up with basically liberal outlooks.
But he said they also learned to avoid politics in general when they moved to America because of the stigma that being a white South African then carried with it.
Whatever the truth of this, Musk himself says one part of his foundational philosophy was indeed laid down at the time.
“I had sort of an existential crisis when I was, I don’t know, 12 or 13, about the meaning of life. I read many of the religious texts and books on philosophy, you know I was like reading [Arthur] Schopenhauer and [Friedrich] Nietzsche and whatnot,” he told Alice Weidel, the leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, in a live-streamed conversation last month.
“But then, I read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” Musk said.
In Douglas Adams’ comic masterpiece, a race of super-intelligent beings builds a supercomputer to find “the answer to the great question of life, the universe and everything”.
The computer gives the answer “42” – but says it would need a more powerful computer to work out what the actual question is in order to make sense of it.
That, says Musk, “led me to conclude that we should aspire to expand the scope and scale of consciousness, so that we’re better able to know what questions to ask about the nature … about the answer that is the universe”.
“So we should just seem to take the set of actions that lead to a greater understanding of the universe.”
Mostly harmless?
The path from Douglas Adams-inspired consciousness expansion to shredding chunks of the American government and endorsing the German far right is not an obvious one.
Yet many of Musk’s acquaintances believe this basic quest still guides him today – even his recent sudden turn to Trump, his gleeful destruction of USAid, his embrace not only of the populist but the extreme right in America, Britain and Germany.
“That’s his favourite book. And everything is inspired by [the book],” insists Naomi Seibt, the right-wing German freelance journalist who introduced Musk to the AfD.
“If you ask Grok [X’s AI tool] what Elon Musk is inspired by, it will give cultural examples, but it’s always going to mention The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy because for him it’s about discovering the secrets of the universe,” she says.
Amerikkka
In the summer of 1989, a slight, gawky 17-year-old Musk arrived at a grain and oilseed farm near the remote town of Swift Current in Saskatchewan, Canada.
Mike Teulon, his cousin, remembered a hard-working, “down-to-earth” kid who pitched in around the yard.
Musk was not there for agriculture, however. He was draft-dodging to avoid being sent to fight in South Africa’s border war in Namibia and Angola.
He never left North America. In 1992, Musk moved from university in Ontario to Pennsylvania on an exchange programme. Two summers later, he ended up in California’s Silicon Valley working two internships at once, at an energy storage start-up by day and a video game company by night.
By 1995, he was in California and working in the sector in which he would make his fortune, launching an online Yellow Pages directory with his brother, Kimbal, called Zip2. After the pair sold the company, Musk set up the payments company PayPal, whose sale to eBay would net him a US$176m fortune.
Mars
Musk showed little interest in politics for most of the next few decades, although those who worked with him noticed several threads that would have a direct impact on his transformation in the 2020s.
The first was an obsession with the red planet.
After making his first fortune with PayPal, Musk began to think about what to do with his new money.
Settling on space exploration and electric cars, he cold-called Jim Cantrell, an American rocket expert who had worked on Mars projects for the French space agency.
“It was a Friday afternoon and I was on my way home from work … and he called me and started telling me that he got my name from a mutual friend and he needed to buy Russian rockets for [the] Mars mission he wanted to do, and I was the guy to call. And so that kind of started things out,” said Cantrell.
“From the start he was talking about Mars. It’s all about Mars. Everything he does is about Mars. That’s what I just got. Everything Elon does is about Mars.
“For years, people thought I was the lunatic by proclaiming this, and in fact, now he’s saying it openly.”
The Russia rocket deal never took off. But Cantrell would become one of the founding consultants in the establishment of SpaceX.
He remains convinced Musk’s embrace of Trump is only one more step towards the dream of not only reaching Mars, but of settling it and building a self-sustaining city.
“There might be a bit of ‘f*** you’ to the left because we all have those kinds of sentiments about people who’ve underestimated us or tried to hold us down unfairly. But I think if you view the majority of his interest here, it’s going to be going to Mars,” said Cantrell.
“With Trump, I think he believes that he can co-opt the US government to help in going to Mars.”
Obsession
The unrelenting focus on Mars was just one example of a characteristic single-mindedness, bordering on obsessiveness, that acquaintances say he applies to everything.
“He’s extremely focused, he’s extremely bright, he’s technically very competent and he is pretty attuned to business opportunities,” said Professor Sir Martin Sweeting, founder and executive chairman of Surrey Satellite Technology, a space start-up that Musk invested in during SpaceX’s early years.
“But he is, as I say, very, very focused. And you know, he’s not particularly concerned about collateral damage in that process,” Martin said.
“He has very clear views as to what he thinks the solutions are to particular technical issues. And so if you agreed with him, you know, that was great. But if you had a different view, then that was going to be pretty hard to fight, unless – and it was probably fairly rare – that you could prove that he was wrong in the technical sense,” he said.
One result is that SpaceX acquired a reputation for a high rate of staff turnover, as those exhausted by Musk’s work schedule or frustrated by his vetoing of their ideas left.
“Either you’re with Elon or you’re just not part of his work,” said one former employee who asked to remain anonymous.
The flip side of this one-track mind is a sensitivity to criticism that could prove distracting, even crippling.
“He was totally preoccupied with what people were saying about this or that on Twitter,” said a former Tesla employee who worked with Musk during that era.
“It was almost paralysing. You would be in a meeting and he would see a critical tweet and, off the cuff, change a whole plan we had spent weeks on.”
In 2018, Vernon Unsworth, a British cave diver involved in the rescue of a group of trapped Thai schoolchildren, sued Musk for calling him a “pedo guy” after Unsworth accused him of using the emergency for a PR stunt.
Musk won the case after his lawyers successfully argued he had apologised and deleted the offending tweet. But it was symptomatic of how his quick temper and instant tweeting could land him in trouble.
“He’s absolutely brilliant. He’s probably the most brilliant guy I’ve ever met. He’s impatient. He doesn’t suffer fools lightly or politely. And I think fools started about IQ of 120 and down for him. And he’s quick to jump to conclusions,” said Cantrell.
Absolute freedom
That character flaw would soon clash with the third plank of Musk’s character: his self-image as a “free-speech absolutist”. He has referred to the position as being akin to a “Kobayashi Maru problem” – a reference to a test cadets in Star Trek were expected to take that was impossible to pass.
Critics these days say Musk’s free-speech evangelism just means his freedom to decide what other people say.
X, after all, has been accused of blocking the accounts of critical journalists since he acquired the platform.
Yet his rhetoric seems to draw on a genuine and long-held belief in the dangers of censorship – however badly he lives up to it today.
On September 11, 2001, Musk and Cantrell spent an exhausting and terrifying day trying to locate a friend who lived next door to the World Trade Centre.
The man was eventually found alive – he had managed to get out before the towers collapsed. In the evening, as they tried to process the enormity of events, Musk made a prediction.
“He said: ‘You know, this used to be the greatest country in the world, but it can’t be now because in order to protect ourselves from this kind of threat, the government will have absolutely no alternative but to curtail civil liberties, and that is going to be the death of this country’.
“And he said that includes free speech. And it was at that point I realised, wow, it’s really fundamental to him,” said Cantrell. “He was proved right, by the way.”
This was the Elon Musk who became the richest man in the world almost 20 years later: a wildly successful, highly driven Silicon Valley CEO with a social media addiction, a prickly sensitivity to criticism, and few political convictions beyond the importance of free speech and the imperative of colonising Mars.
His father Errol, with whom Musk has had a strained relationship, says at this stage his children in America were as instinctively liberal as their A-list Californian celebrity friends.
The Biden snub
The turning point for Elon, says Errol, came in August 2021, when Joe Biden gathered the CEOs of America’s leading car makers at the White House to discuss how selling electric vehicles (EVs) could generate jobs.
There was one notable absence. Tesla was the biggest electric car maker by sales at the time, but Musk had not been invited.
He took it as a snub. Whatever the cause of the rift – both men hinted it was about Tesla’s use of non-unionised labour – the antipathy was mutual.
Biden later pointedly refused to mention Musk or Tesla when referencing the electric car revolution, instead congratulating General Motors for leading the way.
By January 2022, Musk was calling Biden “a damp sock puppet in human form” and accusing him of “treating the American public like fools”.
In March 2022, after decades of voting Democrat, he publicly endorsed the Republican Party.
Into the culture war
In normal times, the richest man in America backing the party of low taxes and small government might not be much to write home about.
But the balance of power between owners and workers, the central political axis of the 20th century – and Joe Biden’s political career – is only a sideshow in the present battle for America.
“That Biden didn’t invite the guy who was probably the biggest EV manufacturer at the time to the EV summit was a deliberate snub, without a doubt, for reasons I don’t know,” said Cantrell. “But what’s kind of funny about the Biden thing is it was really reflective of this larger issue.”
As Musk’s rift with Biden and the Democrats grew, he suddenly came under attack from left-wing elements for whom he had previously been an idol.
“I think he had a bit of an awakening about what’s really going on politically in this country, that – both sides do it, but I think the left is far more guilty of it – of demonising people who don’t believe in them, which is, I think, offensive to his sense of free speech,” said Cantrell.
“So I think Biden opposing him was much more fundamental: it was a trigger.”
It was at this point, said Errol Musk, that Elon decided to buy Twitter – largely in response to the amount of vociferous criticism he was getting from other users.
As he fell out with Biden, Musk was enduring a more personal family drama that would drive him full throttle into the great American culture war.
In April 2022, Xavier Alexander Musk, Elon’s 18-year-old son, filed a petition with the Los Angeles County Superior Court in Santa Monica, asking to be legally recognised as female.
It was immediately clear this was about a deep family rift as well as gender reassignment: the petition requested not only the recognition of new female Christian names – Vivian Jenna – but also a change of surname because “I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form”.
Vivian Jenna Wilson came out as transgender at the age of 16. She was living with her mother, the Canadian author Jennifer Wilson, but, as a minor, needed the permission of both parents for medical treatment.
Musk granted permission, but in 2024 complained he had been “essentially tricked” into signing documents authorising medical treatment for transition by “evil” doctors.
“I was told Xavier might commit suicide … [it was] incredibly evil and I agree that people who have been promoting this should go to prison,” he said in an interview with Dr Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist. “My son Xavier is dead. Killed by the woke mind virus.”
Vivian Wilson has strongly rejected her father’s account, telling NBC he was well aware of the side effects of the medicine and that he was so absent during her childhood he had little idea what she was like anyway.
What is certain is that the saga deeply affected Musk. Deeply enough for it to become another of his burning, single-minded obsessions.
“I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus after that,” he told Peterson. “And we are making some progress.”
Britain
We can track Musk’s rapid political transformation through this period in his prolific posts on X.
In 2022-23, his politically themed posts nearly quadrupled, according to analysis by the Telegraph, while posts about Tesla and Space X dropped off.
The surge in political tweets was powered firstly by an increase in posts about US politics and Trump.
But he was also writing more and more posts with terms like “woke mind virus”, “snowflake”, “PC police”, “red pill” and “social justice warrior”.
He also just began tweeting more. His total number of posts a year more than doubled during the period. From 5330 in 2022 to 13,313 in 2023. The total increased further last year.
Was all this part of the plan to expand human consciousness and reach Mars? Or was it a distraction?
He was certainly getting into time-consuming public feuds, often defined by the same pattern of a snub followed by a single-minded pursuit of the grudge.
When riots broke out in Britain following the Southport killings last year, Musk replied to an X post blaming the violence on uncontrolled immigration with the words: “Civil war is inevitable.”
The British government accused him of pouring fuel on the flames of disorder and refused to invite him to an investment conference in October.
Musk fumed that he did not “think anyone should go to the UK when they’re releasing convicted paedophiles in order to imprison people for social media posts”.
Sir Kier Starmer’s premiership was apparently added to the list of things Musk became determined to delete.
But an attempt to build an alliance with Britain’s populist right has been strained by similar behaviour.
In the summer of 2024, as his interest in British race relations was picking up, Musk replied to a video posted on X by Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK.
They finally met in person at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in December, and there was briefly talk of a US$100m donation to the party.
But when Farage diplomatically challenged Musk’s support for Tommy Robinson, a former BNP member who the British politician considers toxic, Musk posted: “The Reform party needs a new leader. Farage doesn’t have what it takes.”
Farage has tried to laugh off the spat.
“I found him very easy to talk to, very straightforward. People say he’s weird – well, he wasn’t,” said Farage of their meeting at Mar-a-Lago. “He happens to take a different view of that particular individual.”
Musk’s view, he suggested, was not unusual among Americans who are unfamiliar with Robinson, but “see the crackdown on free speech and the shutting down of debate, they can’t quite believe it and they see anyone who fights that and champions the fight back as good”.
But Farage is both a talented communicator and knows much more about the electoral landscape in Britain. Surely Musk took it on board when he explained his reservations about Robinson?
“Well, I don’t know about that,” said Farage.
The tensions remain. Last month Farage said X should remove a terror video that was watched by Axel Rudakubana, the Southport attacker, shortly before he murdered three children.
However, in accordance with Musk’s views on free speech, the video, which shows the stabbing of a bishop at an Australian church, is still there.
Germany
Things went better for Musk’s politics-by-X in Germany.
In the summer of 2024, roughly the same time he reached out to Farage, Musk replied to a post by Seibt by asking: “Why is it that every time I interact or I say anything about the AfD, I get so much negative feedback, am I missing something?”
“Not too long later he contacted me again to ask the same question in a private message, asking me what the AfD is all about,” she told the Telegraph.
Seibt was happy to help and quickly won a convert to the AfD’s cause. He began to post on X in support of the party.
In December, Musk wrote an article in Welt am Sonntag declaring the AfD as the “last spark of hope” for Germany, which he claimed was on “the brink of economic and cultural collapse”.
The following month, at Seibt’s suggestion, he invited Weidel to the conversation on X, where he explained his attachment to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
During the hour-long conversation, he also declared: “People really need to get behind the AfD, otherwise things are going to get very, very much worse in Germany.” Weidel claimed Hitler was not right wing.
Two weeks later he popped up on a video link at an AfD rally in the German city of Halle, and told the crowd the country had too much focus on “past guilt”. He added: “It’s good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything.”
The AfD says it wants to reduce immigration and slash taxes and regulations to boost economic growth. Its published manifesto, Musk argues, is neither racist nor fascistic – ergo charges of fascism are mere smears.
But it is what is not in the manifesto that alarms the AfD’s detractors.
Germany’s domestic intelligence agency considers the AfD’s youth wing an extremist organisation. In November the party had to expel three members for membership of a militant group planning an armed revolt. Last year it was embarrassed by a prominent member defending the honour of the Waffen SS.
Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, called Musk’s intervention a “disgusting” disservice to the memory of the Holocaust.
The comment editor of Welt am Sonntag also resigned in protest at having to publish the article.
Christian Wagner, a historian who runs the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial, said Musk was a “mixture of mad and right-wing extremist” to believe such things.
Wellbeing
Madness has been posited before to explain Musk’s erratic behaviour, not least by Seth Abramson, a critic of Musk who claims to have written the equivalent of two biographies about the SpaceX founder. Could it explain his political evolution?
In January last year, the Wall Street Journal reported executives at Tesla and SpaceX were worried that his alleged use of drugs, including LSD, cocaine, ecstasy, magic mushrooms and ketamine, was clouding his judgment.
Musk dismissed the story, saying he took voluntary drug tests because of a contract with Nasa and had never tested positive.
Perhaps it is not chemical.
He certainly seems to be getting what most people would consider an unhealthy amount of screentime and a debilitating lack of sleep.
According to Telegraph data, Musk has tweeted 7651 times since Trump was elected President on November 5. Between then and December 31, an average of 134 tweets a day.
His posting patterns show he has recently been posting almost constantly at all hours of the day.
These are not scheduled tweets either: most of his posts now are replies, often one-word comments or emojis.
“If you sort of start to get involved in the internet sphere, it’s very easy, I think, for you to sort of drive yourself down your own rabbit holes,” reflects Martin.
“Possibly that’s part of it. And then if you combine that with his sort of innate character, which is very focused, very, very high contrast, very high self-confidence, and now he has the wherewithal to do whatever he wants – maybe that’s the result that you get out the end.”
Seibt, one of the few people Musk has spoken to at any length about politics, believes there is little mystery.
“The truth is that everything that he puts out there is actually just him, that’s really him. And when he says that his main motivation is to take us to Mars – and that’s to put it plainly – his main motivation is to prevent us from extinction and to help humanity thrive and take us into a better future. That’s actually what his goal is,” she told the Telegraph.
“That’s why every single thing that he does, like when he advocates for free speech, when he tries to save the West and our Western culture and everything – he wants to literally expand consciousness.”
She added: “And that’s what he’s doing with his AI programs, with Neuralink, for example ... His goal is to build this kind of supercomputer because he’s so inspired by his favourite book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”
Re-reading the book with this in mind, it is difficult to work out how anyone reasoned their way from Arthur Dent’s misadventures in space to the gleeful destruction of America’s overseas aid and development agency.
And yet, it is easy to find traces of Musk in Douglas Adams’ universe.
There is a smattering of Ford Prefect, Arthur Dent’s alien friend from Betelgeuse, in his struggles with human social cues.
But, in his publicly curated eccentricity, he resembles above all Zaphod Beeblebrox, the celebrity who runs for President of the galaxy just so he can steal the infinite improbability drive – a device that solves the problem of interstellar travel by putting you everywhere in the universe all at once.
How else could Musk simultaneously run seven companies; colonise Mars; fire thousands of American civil servants; defeat the “woke mind virus”; direct right-wing takeovers in Germany and Britain; and spend all day glued to his phone and compulsively posting on X?
There is no doubt many who know Musk personally are convinced of his benevolence.
Walter Isaacson, his authorised biographer – who is refusing press requests to comment on Musk’s recent behaviour – said in 2023 that Musk was motivated not by money or power, but by missions “that came when he was a little kid sitting in the corner reading the superhero comics”.
Isaacson argued there was an epic goodness to taking humanity into space, solving the problem of sustainable energy and preventing artificial intelligence turning evil.
Others, however, see nothing grander than vanity, greed and supreme arrogance.
“Elon is not a Nazi per se,” Philip Low, a Silicon Valley start-up entrepreneur who claims to have known Musk for 14 years, wrote after the arm-extending incident. “Nazis believed that an entire race was above everyone else. Elon believes he is above everyone else.”
“All his talk about getting to Mars to ‘maintain the light of consciousness’ or about ‘free-speech absolutism’ is actually BS Elon knowingly feeds people to manipulate them. Everything Elon does is about acquiring and consolidating power. That is why he likes far-right parties, because they are easier to control,” he went on.
Low did not respond to emailed requests for comment. Musk did not respond to requests to comment on Low’s allegations.
“This isn’t complicated to understand,” Connecticut senator and Musk critic Chris Murphy commented after Marco Rubio, Trump’s Secretary of State, announced he would not attend a G20 summit in South Africa.
“Elon Musk’s Starlink was denied a licence in South Africa and so he’s been on a revenge campaign to get them to reverse their decision,” Murphy said.
Pax Muskiana
In the past two weeks, Musk has realised many of his political goals.
In a magnificent revenge for Biden’s White House snub, he now has free access to the Oval Office and a free hand to fire as many federal employees as he sees fit.
His war on gender transition is also going well.
On January 29, Trump signed an executive order calling on the Health and Human Services Secretary to “take all appropriate actions to end the chemical and surgical mutilation of children”.
Most gratifying of all, Trump, in his inauguration speech, promised the US would launch astronauts to plant the “stars and stripes” on Mars.
Along the way, Musk has acquired awesome political power, directing his praetorian guard of 20-something programmers into all corners of the American state.
This week Time magazine ran a front cover of Musk sitting behind the presidential desk in the Oval Office – a far-from-subtle comment about where real power lies in the Trump White House.