Elon Musk: The World’s Worst Trillionaire

A large inflatable figure depicting Elon Musk in Times Square in New York on Thursday. Seth Wenig/AP

Hooray, Elon Musk is a trillionaire. You catch that last week? It was all over the news, with splashy headlines proclaiming that X-boy is the first human to enter the four-comma club. Of course, much of his wealth is on paper and tied to the inflated value of SpaceX, which went public on Friday. Most notably, the main media stories about Musk reaching this milestone sidestepped an important fact: The guy is a racist conspiracy monger.

The accounts of Musk’s newfound trillionaireness in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal neglected to mention that the world’s richest man is a dangerous purveyor of paranoia and hate.

As many are hailing Musk’s entry into this league of one, it’s a good time to review his record as an alt-right extremist who’s amplified and promoted noxious, dangerous, and false ideas. So let’s go for a non-comprehensive jog down memory lane—sticking only to recent years.

In October 2022, after Paul Pelosi, the husband of Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was brutally assaulted at their San Francisco home, Musk spread an article from an obscure website that claimed the assailant was a male prostitute and the attack stemmed from a drunken dispute between Pelosi and this man. “There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye,” Musk posted on Twitter, which he had recently purchased. The site Musk referenced had reported during the 2016 election that Hillary Clinton was dead and had been replaced by a body double, and his post illustrated his penchant for recklessly echoing bullshit conspiracy theories.

A few months later, Musk put up a post comparing Jewish billionaire philanthropist George Soros to the Marvel supervillain Magneto, and he contended that Soros hates humanity and “wants to erode the very fabric of civilization.” His anti-Soros messages, broadcast to his 125 million or so followers, were widely excoriated as advancing antisemitic tropes.

In August 2023, after rebranding Twitter as X, Musk began harping on a bogus theme: White South Africans were the victims of genocide. He would push this idea in subsequent years. Last year, the Grok AI chatbot on X, unprompted, was telling users that South African “whites are targeted due to racial motives.” Trump, too, would champion this BS claim intended to suggest that white people are the real victims of racism. No surprise, numerous fact-checks noted this claim was false.

Musk engaged in antisemitism again in November 2023 in response to an X user who had declared that Jews encourage hatred of white people and that by supporting immigration Jews show they don’t like the United States “too much.” This tweet appeared to be aligned with the far-right great replacement theory, which holds that liberals, Democrats, and elites are bringing immigrants into the United States to replace white people. (The night before the infamous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, white nationalists and neo-Nazis marched through the University of Virginia campus and chanted, “Jews will not replace us.”)

Musk replied to this post, “You have said the actual truth.” His response drew more than 6 million views—and widespread censure for its apparent endorsement of antisemitism. Days later, Musk posted a message that appeared to legitimize the long-debunked Pizzagate conspiracy theory that maintained Democratic officials and others had run a child sex-trade ring out of the basement of a Washington, DC, pizzeria that did not have a basement. He has embraced Trump's lies about the 2020 election, endorsed conspiratorial suspicions about voting machines, and repeatedly boosted the false charge that US elections are largely fraudulent due to widespread voting by undocumented immigrants—a move that undermines American democracy.

Musk has been a loud voice in the anti-DEI crusade that denigrates Black people. In January 2024, he maintained that diversity programs at United Airlines and Boeing made air travel less safe, pushing a favorite theme of alt-right bigots. Responding to an X user who suggested the IQs of United Airlines pilots who attended historically Black colleges and universities were lower than those of Air Force pilots, he wrote, “It will take an airplane crashing and killing hundreds of people for them to change this crazy policy of DIE”—a misspelling of the DEI acronym. In another post, he commented, “Do you want to fly in an airplane where they prioritized DEI hiring over your safety? That is actually happening.” Within hours, that post received 14 million views.

During the 2024 campaign, when Trump cooked up the ridiculous and false accusation that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing and eating people’s pet cats and dogs, Musk promoted this racist crap and amplified several memes that spread this calumny. As you no doubt recall, during an inauguration rally for Trump, he made a stiff-arm gesture that was compared to a Nazi salute—and then joked about it. Days later, he endorsed the far-right, anti-immigration AfD party in Germany, which some scholars have labeled as fascist. Addressing an AfD rally remotely, he proclaimed that there is "frankly too much of a focus on past guilt and we need to move beyond that”—a remark interpreted to suggest too much attention was paid to the Holocaust, a favorite talking point of right-wing, antisemitic extremists.

The list goes on. Earlier this month, Musk used his X platform and his own posts to stoke the anger that has led to horrific anti-immigrant violence in Northern Ireland. That was no surprise, given that Musk has been a supporter of Tommy Robinson, the British anti-immigration extremist who’s a proponent of the white replacement theory and who’s been credibly accused of racism, and last year bankrolled Robinson's legal defense against terrorism charges. (Last week, British police detained Robinson in Heathrow airport under counterterrorism laws, as he returned from a trip to Russia, where he met with Musk's father, Errol, and praised Russia as a "civilized society.")

Musk has engaged in so much objectionable conduct. His willy-nilly destruction of US government agencies at the start of Trump’s second term led to much hardship and severe consequences for the nation. Perhaps worst among all the sins of his DOGE outfit was the decimation of USAID. Musk, a maniacal detractor of this agency, which spent tens of billions of dollars annually to combat starvation and disease in poor nations (as well as to fund programs to detect and contain deadly infectious diseases that could spread to the United States), absurdly blasted USAID as “evil” and a “criminal organization.” That was bonkers. But his successful effort to destroy USAID has resulted so far in the estimated deaths of 263,000 adults and 518,000 children overseas. The annual budget for USAID was about $28 billion. One trillion dollars could have funded it for 35 years—and saved tens of millions of lives.

Musk has lots of blood on his grubby hands—100 million ounces or so (if the above estimate is correct). He has poisoned the national discourse. Several studies have found a rise in racist and antisemitic speech on X after he took over the platform (and drastically cut back on content moderation). His attainment of Big-T status should not distract from his many transgressions. He deserves not celebration but condemnation. Yet when you’re that frickin’ rich, such minor matters as ending life-saving care for hundreds of thousands of people don't get in the way. Nor does spreading loathing, bigotry, and violence.

Musk is the only trillionaire we have and by far the worst. Perhaps we should ponder how our capitalist system produced such a dangerous lout and hatemonger as its first trillion-dollar-man.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland.corn@gmail.com.

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Othello. It’s quite incredible that 400 years after it was written, we’re still talking about Shakespeare’s Othello and the questions it prompts of race and racism. Will any of the movies or plays written these days do the same in 2426 (if we make it that far)? The new production of Othello at Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington, DC, starring Wendell Pierce as the Moor, highlights the wit in Shakespeare’s work, putting to good use Pierce’s charisma and his preternatural ability to turn on and off that twinkle in his eye. It’s a tough role to play, transitioning from a noble war hero much in love with the fair Desdemona to a jealous and enraged murderer, and Pierce renders it sublimely.

The production, directed by Simon Godwin, doesn’t lean any further into the racial politics of the play than what’s obvious. Iago, one of the all-time most despicable villains (here played deliciously by Ben Turner), disparages Othello in racist terms that Othello initially defies by showing himself to be a superb military leader and decent fellow deeply in love with his bride. Yet at the end of the day—or play—the white guy succeeds in manipulating the Other into a most heinous act. What did Shakespeare mean by that? People have been discussing this for years. (Here’s one example—and another.)

As I enjoyed Godwin’s well-conceived production—in which Othello, Iago, and their fellow soldiers are costumed in modern uniforms and equipped with the weaponry of today—what struck me was Shakespeare’s stab at Renaissance-era feminism. Shortly before the bloody climax, as Emilia, Desdemona’s attendant (and Iago’s abused wife), preps her lady for bedtime, she delivers a monologue in which she declares women have the same desires as men:

Let husbands know
Their wives have sense like them.
They see, and smell, and have their palates both for the sweet and sour,
As husbands have…
And have not we affections,
Desires for sport, and frailty, as men have?Then let them use us well. Else let them know,
The ills we do, their ills instruct us so.

These are the last words Emilia speaks to Desdemona, and in this production Melanie Field offers them with punch and vigor. So even as the play concludes with the lead gal a murder victim absent of agency, Emilia, who also perishes in the final scene, speaks words of gender defiance that still resonate today.

Spider-Noir. Imagine if Humphrey Bogart played Spider-Man. I’m guessing that’s the notion that led to Spider-Noir, the recently released Amazon Prime series starring Nicolas Cage as Ben Reilly, a New York City private dick in the early 1930s who moonlights as the Spider, a superhero with powers much like the more familiar web-slinger. The show is a triumph of IP. Given that several years ago the geniuses at Marvel concocted a Spider-Man multiverse which contains an infinite number of different versions of Spider-Man (Spider-Woman, Spider-Monkey, Spider-Bagman, and so on), this comic-book empire can keep churning out whatever Spider-Man content its creators can imagine. There’s always another alternative universe with its own Spider-Whatever. Why not Spider-Swift (as in Taylor)?

So it’s easy to mock the conjuring up of Spider-Noir, but hold on, for this is a rather impressive venture—a faithful and scintillating tribute to the classic American genre. For anyone who ever sat in a dark theater and was entranced by The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, or The Postman Always Rings Twice—or who read a James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, or Jim Thompson paperback—this Marvel offering is for you. It nails the essence of the artform: a down-and-out PI, a femme fatale lounge singer, a diabolical crime boss, a corrupt power structure in a city that never sleeps—surprising twists and turns and various betrayals that are shot at odd angles and in melancholic black and white. (A viewer can choose between a color or B&W version. But only a sap would fall for the full-spectrum rendition.)

Reilly is a boozy and disillusioned private investigator, a miserable washout, ever since the love of his life, Ruby, was killed by a criminal he once caught who was out for revenge. Naturally, the night that deed was done, Reilly was carousing with the guys. So he’s carrying a ton of guilt and has given up his superhero side gig as the Spider. But then Cat Hardy (Li Jun Li), a seductive nightclub singer, strolls into his office, looking to hire Reilly for a job that we (including Reilly) all know is not what it appears to be. And we all also know that Reilly is going to fall for this dame, get his heart broken, and be forced to revive the Spider. A particularly delectable part of this meal is Brendan Gleeson’s portrayal of Silvermane, the Irish mob boss who’s fighting with the mayor for control of a New York City coping with the Great Depression. And—here’s the Marvel twist—Silvermane has at his disposal a trio of goons with their own superpowers, each of whom served in the same army unit in World War I.

Cage pulls off a very deliberate Bogie homage, and the entire series brims with hard-boiled dialogue and tables that turn so fast you’d think they were Lazy Susans. It’s a clever send-up of noir and a well-executed example of the craft. Perhaps the stuff that dreams are made of.