Elon the Destroyer
Musk is become death. And his illegal D.O.G.E. unit seems determined to put democracy, the Union, the global economy, and human life on earth through the woodchipper.
Elon Musk is often described as a James Bond villain. With his silly name, his unplaceable foreign accent, his unusual multinational background, his yen for rockets and electronic cars and boring devices, his false front as a genius inventor and successful man of business, his wretched sense of humor, his immense wealth, his amoral greed, his thin skin, his easily-bruised ego, his petty grievances animating a thirst for revenge, his obvious desperation for positive regard, his inability to shut up about his sinister plans, his ridiculous henchmen, his manipulation of multiple foreign governments as a non-state actor, his unfuckability, and his sadistic desire to hasten the end of the world, it’s not hard to see why. All that’s missing is a hunky British spy to escape from his clutches, foil his plan, steal his girlfriend, and drop some clever witticism as he’s sucked out of the airplane window, while Adele sings. (That particular Hollywood ending can’t happen, of course; Musk doesn’t have a girlfriend.)
But this comparison, tempting as it is to use, fails to adequately convey the threat that the Cybertruck Nazi poses. What I have come to realize these last few months is that the current head of D.O.G.E.—to be sure, an acronym straight out of Ian Fleming—is not Elon Stavro Blofeld or Muskfinger. The real Elon Musk is orders of magnitude worse than any 007 foe. What he wants to do will not just strangle democracy to death in the United States and everywhere, but, ultimately, end human life on earth.
I know that sounds hyperbolic, but I’m not trying to be funny now, nor am I exaggerating. Elon Musk is a living, breathing, skipping-like-a-dipshit extinction event.
If we must use pop culture to describe Elon’s true nature, let’s switch from From Russia With Love to Ghostbusters. At the end of that eschatological comedy (not to be confused with scatological comedy), the Ghostbusters stand before a portal to another plane, where Zuul heralds the coming of the shapeshifting god Gozer the Gozerian. “Choose the form of your destructor,” they are told, and Dan Ackroyd’s character inadvertently selects the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, a ridiculous junk-food mascot who suddenly materializes taller than the Midtown buildings and starts going Godzilla. That’s who Elon Musk is: the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. He’s pasty white, puffy, goofy, and seemingly too innocuous to be a clear and present danger. But that doesn’t mean he won’t bring about the end of the world if he isn’t stopped.
Who is up to that task? In the movie, New York had the Ghostbusters to save the day. In real life, we have. . . appeasement-happy ditherers Chuck Schumer and Amy Klobuchar. God help us.
I have long seen Musk as a traitor to democracy and a dire threat to national security. The day after he showed up at Twitter HQ with that idiotic sink—October 28, 2022—I wrote a piece called “Tower of Bab-Elon,” in which I said:
It seems insane that Musk would blow $44 billion just to burn something down. On the other hand, we just watched him tank Tesla, mostly by raving like a nerd fratboy on ketamine. Plus, it ain’t his money. His is just the pasty, punchable face of the fascist insurgency. As the closing date approached, remember, he was fluffing both Putin and Xi, to the degree that serious people have wondered whether he needed to register as a foreign agent under FARA—just as he cozied up to hateful dipshits Donald Trump and Kanye West. He may as well have USEFUL IDIOT branded on his forehead in Afrikaans.
The question isn’t will he sabotage Twitter, but how? Laying off three-quarters of the workforce, as he’s said he’d do, would be a fine way to start the destruction (he began last night by pink-slipping the legal staff, including the executive primarily responsible for eighty-sixing Trump). Charging for the service would drive away many users and blow up engagement like an exploding Tesla. Re-platforming the likes of Trump, Mike Flynn, and other noxious disinformation peddlers, trolls, and chaos agents would gin up the rage—and scare off more normies. So would amplifying fascist accounts (or, to be more accurate, amplifying them more). He could verify bad actors—as the old administration used to do—and take away blue checks from those who don’t toe the Muskovite party line. He could tweak the algorithm so that we don’t see the accounts we want to, and are force-fed others. He could sell our data and our DMs on the dark web. Or he could simply sack the entire support staff and play his virtual-reality fiddle while Twitter burns.
Eleven days before what may be the last fair election in this country, the federal government should not have allowed such a vital social media company to be scooped up by a shady character with the maturity level of a second grader—a South African whose scumbag old man owned an emerald mine—using investment capital that appears to be partially from Saudi Arabia. It’s a national security issue, ffs. Alas, there’s lots of things the federal government should not allow but seems neither willing nor capable of putting a stop to.
A few weeks later, in “A Bridge Too Far Right,” I picked up the theme:
Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter is a dire threat to national security, full stop. This was clear back in April, when he first floated the idea of buying the social media company (and when I began selling off my meager allotment of Tesla shares). And it was clear on October 27, when he formally took the reins. . .
In the last six weeks, Trump has broken bread with grotesque anti-Semites, Kanye West has come out as a full-on Hitler apologist, and Musk has done almost every single terrible thing I said he’d do. It’s inescapably, incontrovertibly clear now that Elon Musk is a bad actor, an agent of chaos. If he’s not working on behalf of hostile foreign powers—either knowingly or as a useful idiot—he is one of the world’s biggest assholes.
I know people are sick of Elon Musk. I’m sick of him, too. But the fact is that Twitter, for all its myriad flaws, is the most influential social media platform we have. It’s not just pop culture and sports and cat pictures. It’s used by journalists, activists, researchers, doctors, diplomats, and heads of state. It’s a critical source of both news and learned opinion. To dismantle Twitter is bad enough. To turn it into a font of fake news, of disinformation, of hate speech, makes us all less safe.
Musk has “gone to a different level now,” explains researcher Jim Stewartson. The model for Twitter 2.0 is 8chan—a repository for the worst filth the internet has to offer, including “CSAM, neo-Nazi indoctrination, misogynistic trolling, and every form of bigotry and hate imaginable.” Over the last few weeks, Musk has restored the accounts of a number of horrible people that had been banned under the previous regime for gross terms-of-service violations, including: insurrection enthusiasts Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene; Libs of TikTok and Jordan Peterson, sowers of anti-trans hate; misogynist Andrew Tate; Project Veritas; and actual neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin.
Musk does all this, disingenuously, in the name of “free speech.” But allowing that kind of ugly material on the world’s most vital social media platform is a recipe for disaster—which, one imagines, is the point. If I’m one of the key insiders in a brutal dictatorship—like, say, Saudi Arabia, where some of Musk’s investment capital came from—I don’t want Twitter to exist in its pre-Elon form. I either want to take it over and weaponize it for my fascistic purposes, or else blow it up completely. In six weeks, Musk has accomplished the former, and is well on his way to realizing the latter. Opening the floodgates to let in Nazis, sowers of hate speech, and disseminators of ugly disinformation will eventually chase all the decent people away. . . .
The online vitriol directed at so-called “groomers,” at the trans community, at Dr. Fauci, at the members of Twitter’s advisory board who resigned in protest at Musk’s stewardship, at the company’s former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth, will eventually lead to violence. Violence is the purpose of hate speech. Roth has already fled his Bay Area home because of death threats that were a result of Musk implying, ridiculously, that he condones pedophilia. Meanwhile, the hapless New York Times, our supposed paper of record, can’t figure out what Musk’s game is. . . .
The piece ends with this:
The far-right mantle of grievance-fueled white supremacy that fell from the grasp of Trump’s short fingers has been taken up by one of the world’s richest men. Unlike FPOTUS, Elon Musk is an actual billionaire, the scion of a South African emerald mine baron, a far-right hate monger known on Black Twitter as “Apartheid Clyde.” But he has been trust-washed by Saturday Night Live, by Dave Chappelle, by Grimes, by Hollywood mogul Ari Emanuel, by everyone who drives a Tesla (and who, like me, bought stock in the company). Most Americans don’t see Elon Musk as a dangerous fascist, but as the smirking genius who made electric automobiles and dreams of going to Mars.
This situation is a blinking-red threat to national security, and must be treated as such by the White House. That the Twitter deal was permitted to go through at all, let alone two weeks before the midterms, was a grievous screw-up by the Biden Administration. The President must rectify this error.
. . . Biden needs to take a page from FDR and get creative here. He must use every means at his disposal to fight back, before the hate speech leads to more violence. To use a metaphor the Chief Twit might appreciate: Joe must throw the kitchen sink at Elon Musk. If the FCC can’t regulate Twitter, figure out which agency can, and have at it. Cancel the government contracts with Space X and any other Musk-owned company. End the electric-car-credits three-card-monte that is the source of Tesla’s revenue. If there are legitimate questions about the validity of Musk’s immigration to the United States, as some have suggested, then revoke his citizenship and send his anti-woke-mind ass back to the Transvaal.
As for Twitter, if the federal government can legally seize private property to build an interstate highway, why can’t it do the same to a rogue social media company in league with the bad guys? Call it “eminent bro-main.” At first blush, this might seem extreme, but I don’t know that re-deplatforming Libs of TikTok is on par with interning Japanese-Americans.
And if Musk’s is just the “pasty, punchable face of the fascist insurgency,” as I postulated six weeks ago, tell us. Don’t keep quiet to run some endless, futile counterintelligence op. Don’t do the thing you did with Trump, where you refused to identify him as a mobbed-up confidential informant. Come clean about it. Disclose to the American people who this hateful sack of shit is working for. Out the bad guy.
Again: the ultimate goal of hate speech, which has been brought back to Twitter with a vengeance these last six weeks, is violence. Whether or not this is what Musk intends, bloodshed will be the result, if things keep heading this way. With that in mind, Biden needs to use every tool at his disposal to protect the American people from this clear and present threat to our national security. Nothing should be off limits.
When it comes to Elon Musk, there is no bridge too far.
(Needless to say, Biden, as usual, did not take my advice.)
I’m not quoting that piece at length to crow about being right. To the contrary: while I recognized in 2022 that Musk was a five-alarm threat to national security, I badly underestimated him. He’s so much more corrosive than I thought.
Since I wrote those pieces a little over two years ago, Elon Musk has:
ruined Twitter completely
shut down Starlink in Ukraine to help Russia
hobnobbed with Kremlin assets and high-level Saudis and Emiratis at the World Cup
aligned himself, somewhat late in the game, with Trump
moved his operation to Pennsylvania for the final weeks of the 2024 campaign
behaved so bizarrely at a campaign event that Tim Walz said he “skipped like a dipshit”
manipulated the vote-counting computers (this according to Trump himself!)
per his pal Joe Rogan, known the winner of the election four hours before anyone else somehow
performed a “Heil Hitler” salute while addressing a crowd at an inauguration event—and then did it a second time
concocted the plan for the Department of Government Efficiency, or D.O.G.E.
hauled his kid around like a human shield
hired some Gen Z incels to take over the computer systems of the Treasury
put USAID “through the woodchipper”
. . . and that’s just off the top of my head. Like, he’s a fucking bad guy, okay?
Even worse is the fact that he’s just getting started. Incredibly, today is just the end of the second full week of Trump Redux. There are 206 weeks left to go—and that assumes the Rough Beast doesn’t stick around for a third term.
That’s plenty of time for Elon Musk to wreck the global economy, consolidate his oligarchical power, dismantle NATO, poison our alliances with other Western democracies, hand Russia a victory in Ukraine, silence all dissenters, send enemies of the Regime to Gitmo, conquer Greenland and the Panama Canal Zone, screw up the food supply, and, worst of all, accelerate climate change—and with it, the end of the habitability of the planet for us humans not on a rocket to Mars—with his crypto, his AI, and his other energy-sucking frivolities.
That’s what I mean when I say that Musk will bring about the end of the world.
Back when X was still Twitter, I used as a pinned tweet a thread I wrote in 2018. It began like this:
Trump is a Russian asset, a mob money launderer installed by his mob whoremasters to sow chaos and weaken the US & our allies. EVERY SINGLE THING HE’S DONE since taking office is to achieve those purposes—that and to enrich himself personally.
and
Why do you think Trump installs uniquely corrupt & awful people to Cabinet positions? Pruitt, Zinke, Betsy, Rex/Pompeo, Wilbur “Melting Nazi Face” Ross. They are not there to serve us. They are not there to drain the swamp. They are there to BURN THE REPUBLIC DOWN.
and
Trump steals. He takes taxpayer money—your money and mine—and lines his pockets with it. He exploits his office to make himself richer. This is all he cares about.
There are plenty of things I got wrong in that thread—mostly, alas, the parts about justice coming for these filthy criminals. How naïve I was! But I was correct in my assessment of Trump as a Putin vassal, chaos agent, and breaker of things.
But Trump, I see now, is merely Zuul, the herald of the real destructor, Elon Musk. And MAGA hats off to him: the ongoing attempt to destroy USAID is truly the work of an evil genius. It checks all the boxes:
It draws on the ugly American tropisms toward xenophobia, conspiracy theory, antisemitism, and fear of the Deep State—all of which Musk has been actively promoting on X, where his feed is full of crazy anti-USAID propaganda, like “USAID, using YOUR tax dollars, funded bioweapon research, including COVID-19, that killed millions of people?” suggesting the agency is “an arm of the radical-left globalists.” (“Globalists” is, of course, neo-Nazi shorthand for “Jews.”)
It satisfies the sadism of Musk and Trump. As the former British diplomat Arthur Snell writes at Not All Doom:
There has been a lot of reporting of the anxiety and alarm among aid professionals working at USAID (the agency that implements American [official development aid]) but the real impacts are at the ground level in the places where that aid is spent. The UNFPA received about $160 million from the US government in 2023, contributing to “lifesaving work in critical contexts such as Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Haiti, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, the Venezuela regional refugee response, and Yemen, among others.” According to BBC reporting, this freeze disrupted security at a crucial camp in Syria for former ISIS members, as well as hitting projects and programmes all over the world.
Because USAID promotes fair elections in emerging democracies, Musk’s plan is deleterious for global democracy.
Because the United States abandoning foreign aid leaves a vacuum that will be filled by Russia and China, it’s good for Putin and Xi.
Finally, and most ominously, it’s a trial balloon to see how far our new fascist overlords can take it. “Foreign assistance doesn’t have a real constituency,” a plugged-in source tells me; therefore, USAID “is the guinea pig to see what [D.O.G.E.] can get away with and apply to other agencies. This is why the pushback now is critical.”
Most Americans have no idea what USAID is or does, fail to understand its critical importance, and will be easily persuaded that money going to “condoms in Gaza,” the idiotic rumor circulating on X this week, would be better spent at home. (As Al Jazeera pointed out, the condoms were going to a different Gaza, in town in Mozambique, to prevent the spread of HIV; in the other Gaza, the Palestinians are presumably not much focused on safe sex right now.) And while it seems reasonable, at first blush, to freeze funds for 90 days, doing so would effectively kill most of the programs—and also kill many thousands of people, while at the same time causing irrevocable longterm harm to our national security.
And that’s why USAID exists: it’s a key instrument in the U.S. soft-power strategy to promote and strengthen national security. As the USAID Stop Work website puts it: “Foreign aid is not charity—it’s an investment in America’s safety.”
Oh, and in addition to fucking with USAID’s funding, Musk’s crew of young incel goober engineers took down the agency’s website, which includes the Development Experience Clearinghouse, or DEC—a repository of all USAID programming: its reports, research, studies, and so on. The DEC is, or rather was, a complete institutional record of USAID’s work, free and publicly available. Now Americans can’t go there to learn about the agency’s incredible achievements—at the very moment when they would most want to do so. “Taking down the DEC is like taking a match to the National Archives,” my source says.
Also gone is the USAID’s foreign assistance tracker—the sudden removal of which, as Dave Harden, the former USAID mission director for the West Bank and Gaza, told Haaretz, makes debunking the onslaught of Trump/Musk disinformation “not so easy now, since the website is down, the X handle is down, the systems tracker is down.”
Expect this sort of wholesale woodchipping, and worse, to happen at every federal agency, with increasingly disastrous effects, if Musk is not exorcized from the government like the cacodæmon he is. Speaking of demons…
Getting back to eschatology—that is, the subset of theology that studies the End Times—let’s take a gander, just for fun, at the thirteenth chapter of the Apocalypse of John: the Book of Revelation that the Mike Johnsons of the country, and so many Trump voters, love so well.
I was surprised to discover that there’s not one but two beasts mentioned. The first beast—let’s call this one the Rough Beast—has a head that was “wounded to death, and his deadly wound was healed. And all the world wondered after the beast.” (John of Patmos does not make clear if the first beast he saw had Kotex on the side of its wounded-but-miraculously-healed head.) We are also told that “there was given unto him a mouth, speaking great things and blasphemies,” which also tracks, “and power was given unto him to continue forty and two months,” which is six months shy of a full presidential term.
But wait, there’s more!
“And I beheld another beast coming up,” John reveals. So, like, a separate entity. Beast #2 “exerciseth all the power of the first beast before him; and he causeth the earth and them that dwell therein to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed.”
The infamous “six hundred threescore and six” part of Revelation concerns the second beast, not the first: “And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand or in their foreheads, that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark or the name of the beast or the number of his name.”
To hell with 666. What could be simpler, as the mark of the (second) beast, than the single letter X?
Now, to be clear, I don’t actually believe in any of this eschatological hokum. I’m not suggesting that the Book of Revelation is explicitly fingering Donald Trump and Elon Musk as the two beasts of the Apocalypse. My TDS isn’t that acute.
What I’m saying is that we have to start thinking of them like they are twin Antichrists. Because that’s the level of threat—to democracy and the future of human existence—that Trump and Musk represent. What they want to do ultimately ends in actual Apocalypse.
Again: this is not hyperbole. The stakes really are that high.
Every MAGA policy is designed to harm Americans—just as Putin likes it. What does Goldfinger say to Bond? “I expect you to die!” In his first term, Trump was responsible for the deaths of some 300,000 Americans, whose lives would have been saved were it not for his negligent handling of the pandemic response. Already his retrograde policies have caused ample suffering and death. How many more will die when Musk chokes off financing for medical treatment, for medicine, for medical research? How many women will die in childbirth? How many people will starve if the ICE roundups and the global warming mess with our food supply? How many will die of tainted meat in a country without a functioning FDA, or denial of vaccines by the whale-beheading HHS head? How many refugees will get deported, only to be executed upon arrival? And so on.
Extinction is where this is headed. We have chosen as our destructor the Stay Puft Nazi Marshmallow Man, who, with his South African accent and nostalgia for Apartheid, is actively attempting to destroy the government, the Union, the global economy, and human life on earth.
Elon the Destroyer must be stopped. Now. Before it’s too late.
Photo credit: Los Angeles Museum of Art. Chola-era statue showing Shiva the Destroyer dancing. Elon Musk’s dumb face: U.S. AIR FORCE ACADEMY, Colo. Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk speaks with Lt. Gen. Richard Clark, Superintendent of the U.S. Air Force Academy, during the Ira C. Eaker Distinguished Speaker Presentation in the Academy's Arnold Hall on April 7, 2022 in Colorado Springs, Colo.
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Norm Eisen just dropped a lawsuit re invasion of treasury data and personal privacy..representing many special advocacy groups, pensions etc.
GAH to all of it.
But despite the truth, you did make me actually chuckle. "(John of Patmos does not make clear if the first beast he saw had Kotex on the side of its wounded-but-miraculously-healed head.)"
Thanks for the essay. I hope we prevail.