He’s questioned mainstream scientific research and reporting on Covid-19. He promoted the drug hydroxychloroquine to fight it. He’s attacked state and local virus lockdowns, asserting they were violating Americans’ constitutional rights.
These days, Elon Musk has a lot in common with Donald Trump.
When the president visits Cape Canaveral on Wednesday, he’ll witness the first manned mission to outer space in a decade alongside the SpaceX founder and chief executive, a tech icon whose ideas have increasingly complemented Trump’s own over the course of the coronavirus crisis — to the delight of MAGAworld.
Musk has lost some of his fan base in recent months — the environmentalists who waited months to buy Teslas, the space acolytes who shared his fascination with rocketry, the fanboys who simply were Joe Rogan listeners and flamethrower enthusiasts — due to his frequent statements downplaying the severity of the Covid-19 crisis, his deliberate actions defying stay-at-home orders and his threat to uproot Tesla from California, which has some of the strictest Covid-19 restrictions in the country.
But the tech billionaire has gained new admirers — thanks to his public spats with California lawmakers over his desire to reopen his factories in spite of government orders, his desire to keep the lights on and, crucially, his growing disdain for media outlets such as CNN. His cryptic tweet about taking “the red pill” — a reference to The Matrix and an internet term that, broadly speaking these days, means that one is questioning the nature of political reality — was seconded by no other than Ivanka Trump, who tweeted in response: “Taken!”
“Elon has a lot in common with Trump [in that] they are both people that ‘shake the box,’” said Logan Cook, a prominent meme creator in Trump’s online base whose images under his online identity “Carpe Donktum” frequently make their way onto the president’s retweet pipeline, and whose internet-obsessed fanbase often overlaps with Musk’s iconoclastic libertarian internet cult. “Meaning that when they don’t like the way things are turning out, they aren’t afraid to pick up the box and shake it, creating new combinations of things that everyone before them had neatly packed in there.”
Musk’s statements may be as cryptic as his newborn son’s name: Observers were quick to point out that he’d added a red rose emoji, the symbol of the Democratic Socialists of America, at the end of his “red pill” tweet, throwing his vague endorsement of Trumpist ideals into doubt. But Trump-friendly conservatives eagerly welcomed a fellow Covid-19 skeptic into the fold.
Tiana Lowe, a conservative commentator for the Washington Examiner who recently wrote an article defending Musk, said she hoped it was a sign that Musk fans and Trump fans could find common ground over their shared enemies.
“We don't see him hinting and nodding and winking at the alt-right, and we don't see him hinting or nodding or winking at racism or sexism,” Lowe said. “But there is sort of an attitude of, if Texas is going to let me run my business, that's great. If fake news media is going to say lies about me, screw them. And I think that really does kind of resonate with Trump.” Musk’s representatives did not return a request for comment, and the Trump campaign did not respond to a request.
Before the Covid-19 crisis, the only things both men had in common seemed to be their shared desire to send mankind back to the moon, and their tendency for unfiltered, occasionally nonsensical tweets.
Musk, who is a registered independent voter and previously described his views as moderate, has openly criticized Trump in the past, suggesting in 2016 that he “doesn’t seem to have the sort of character” needed to be president, blasting him in 2017 for withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement and withdrawing from his business advisory groups as a result. In one of his rare political endorsements, he threw his weight behind Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who shared his views on a universal basic income in an increasingly automated society.
But unlike other tech billionaires, whom Trump often attacks for disagreeing with him, the president continued to express his admiration for the South African-born polymath, even before the coronavirus. “He likes rockets. And he does good at rockets, too, by the way,” he told CNBC at Davos back in February, calling him one of the “world’s great geniuses,” and “one of our very smart people, and we want to cherish those people.”
From the beginning of the crisis, Musk, the temperamental billionaire leader of SpaceX and Tesla, has frequently questioned mainstream scientific research, reporting and policy on Covid-19, to the point that Twitter was forced to deal with a wave of complaints suggesting they remove his tweets for spreading disinformation. He accelerated the proposal of hydroxychloroquine as a potential cure from the backwaters of Bitcoin twitter discussions into the mainstream, off of two tweets (“maybe worth considering…”), bucked government lockdowns in order to keep his electric cars in production and recently stated that he believed policies designed to keep Americans safe were violating their constitutional rights. As he bluntly tweeted in March: “The coronavirus panic is dumb.”
In the process, he’s done things that Trump and his followers more than happily applauded, such as slamming CNN in April when they reported that he had not distributed ventilators to California, as he had once promised. “What I find surprising is that CNN still exists,” he tweeted, followed by a flurry of evidence that he had sent said ventilators to hospitals across the state. And as Trump equivocates on states reopening their businesses, Musk as a wealthy private citizen with billions at his disposal and a noted reputation for erratic behavior, is able to do what he cannot: openly defy government lockdown orders, and tweet his anger at government officials with impunity.
Trump’s newfound kinship with Musk may not exactly be what Musk wants, said Lowe, but it’s an alliance that makes sense in this strange era, particularly when both of them share an enmity against Democratic politicians, bureaucrats, and the media in particular.
“Trump's negative partisanship, where he can galvanize [people] using the media as an enemy, is a very effective selling point. That is a way to get people who are very politically agnostic on his side,” she said. “I don't think it's good for society to vilify journalism, but it's a very effective selling point. And that's something that we saw completely with Elon Musk and the ventilators.”
Cook, however, cautioned that the Musk-MAGA overlap was likely temporary, citing past examples of mainstream figures’ occasional alliances with Trump, such as rapper Kanye West’s brief flirtation with the red hat.
“Trump has overwhelming support from everyday, average conservative/moderate working class people. However, the left has a firm grasp on what one might call the elite, and this creates a strange dynamic when a member of the elite breaks ranks and agrees with Trump,” he said. “Trump supporters and MAGA are very quick to embrace these defectors because of what they represent: cracks in the foundation. The support for Elon is very real, but it is most likely temporary because he will likely take a stance that is in opposition to Trump in the future.”
The only thing that would fully enshrine Musk into the pantheon of MAGA gods alongside West is if Musk were to wholeheartedly endorse Trump, said Jared Holt, a reporter at Right Wing Watch, a progressive group tracking conservative activism and media.
“As far as I know, Elon Musk has not come out hard in support of Trump yet, so I don't think that there's as much widespread buy-in from the MAGA movement for Elon just yet,” Holt said. “But if Elon follows up this red pill tweet with something that's maybe more directly supportive of the president or, hypothetically, he appears with Donald Trump Jr. somewhere — that sort of thing, I think, could eventually work its way into a Kanye type of moment. But I don't think we're there yet with Elon Musk.”
