“We are on the edge of the precipice,” wrote a user in a post X commenting on the photo it portrays Donald Trump engaged in a conversation with Elon Musk and Dana White, two super rich people who are part of his staff, at Mar-a-Lago, Palm Beach, Florida, Trump’s private residence and political base where the former and next president of the United States has decided to follow the counting before celebrating the clear electoral victory with family, friends, collaborators, financiers, admirers from all over the world.
If not on the edge of the precipice (depending, of course, on your point of view), However, we are on the eve of an unprecedented and worrying scenario. The role of Musk – who with a legacy of 201.4 billion dollars he is, together with the founder of Amazon Jeff Bezos, one of the richest men in the world – in the electoral campaign that brought Donald Trump back to the White House, it is still unclear how he will continue now.
In recent months he has played a decisive role in supporting and financing the tycoon so much so that the new president himself announced a few weeks ago that he could give him a place in the next American administration as minister of “simplification” and cuts. He will not be able to have official duties (unless he gets rid of his companies) but will be a sort of shadow man for the decisions that will be made in the Oval Office.
If in the past the great economic powers had remained behind the scenes of every presidency, now Musk with his financial and media overpower – and his interests distributed in strategic sectors for the economy and democracy itself – will be a constant presence next to the president. Even without government positions.
Of South African origin, Musk is the co-founder, president and CEO of Tesla (electric car industry). Founder of SpaceX (aerospace industry). Co-founder and CEO of Neuralink (neurotechnology). Co-founder of PayPal (finance), OpenAI (artificial intelligence) e The Boring Company (geotechnical engineering). He became the owner of
With him, By analyzing the datasets published by the 746 political contents posted by Musk – those in which he mentions terms associated with voting such as “Donald Trump”, “Kamala Harris”, “voting” and “ballots” – they totaled 17.1 billion views, more than double the views of all “political campaign ads” across the entire United States during the same period.
Businessmen financing the electoral campaigns of American candidates is certainly nothing new and with a system that is also quite transparent in the States. With Musk, however, we are at a new, different chapter, perhaps more worrying for the very rules of politics and democracy.
Musk made his support for Trump official after the attack suffered by the new president in Butler in July by announcing monthly donations in favor of Trump through an electoral committee that he created ad hoc. The America Political Action Committee (PAC) was founded in May to support Trump through actions such as advertising campaigns, but by law cannot directly finance the candidate. Other large entrepreneurs from BigTech and Silicon Valley would also be part of the PAC, a large electoral base for Democrats in the past, but recently much more inclined to support right-wing and conservative politicians.
Among these there are, in addition to Musk, Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, the financier Michel Robert MilkenUber co-founder and former CEO Travis Kalanick and a dozen other people including Steven Mnuchin, Rupert Murdoch, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, investors among others in Facebook, Stripe, OpenAi and Airbnb. All united by a strong aversion towards the Biden administration, tired of the role that Democratic politics is having towards the technology market.
Venture capitalists, creators of famous startups, have become openly pro-Trump and smiled at the recent appointment of JD Vance as his deputy, since he too is a man from Silicon Valley. The tycoons look towards The Donald not so much for ideological reasons, but rather for opportunities.
But let’s get back to Musk. SpaceXthe company with which he wants to get to Mars, produces satellites, rockets, shuttles and space modules for Washington, and benefits from substantial public contributions. But in the short term, Elon aims to put his self-driving Teslas on the road. «There should be a federal approval process for these vehicles»he hoped for October 23, just a few weeks after his friend Donald had proposed making him head of a “Commission on Government Efficiency charged with making recommendations for drastic reforms of the federal government.” Trump said during the election campaign that he would reduce federal spending with cuts of “at least $2 trillion.” Will it be guided by Musk and his cost-cutting policies that he pursues in companies?
When Musk returned with Trump to Butler to hold a rally, he expressed his support for the Republican leader and the American political scientist Ian Bremmer tweeted: «Democracy is not made to tolerate such a concentration of money and disinformation». With Trump-Musk, a new leadership was born that combines power and wealth in a perhaps dangerous, certainly excessive concentration of power that has nothing to do, for example, with the old conservative right. Reagan, Thatcher, they changed many things, for better or for worse, but they had a sacred respect for the rules of the game. Which has now completely disappeared.
“What matters even more than wealth itself,” he wrote Daron Acemoglu, Nobel Prize for Economics, «is that these billionaires are considered entrepreneurial geniuses with unique levels of creativity, audacity, foresight and expertise across a wide range of topics. If you add to this the fact that many of them control the main means of communication, i.e. the main social media platforms, you get a scenario almost unprecedented in recent history».
Economic and social inequalities were one of the keys to Trump’s victory who won the vote of the poor, the impoverished middle class scared of inflation and immigration, but also the super rich. An apparent contradiction held together by the leadership of the tycon who defined himself as a “poor man with money”.
The response of politics (American, but not only) to growing inequalities is another critical point identified by Acemoglu in this tangle between power and wealth: «Of course, it is not all the fault of the billionaires if US politics is favoring the increase in inequalities (although they certainly push for policies that go in this direction). However, if they abuse the immense social status that wealth offers them in conditions of growing inequality, these individuals should assume their responsibilities», the Nobel Prize winner’s reflection, «This is particularly true when they exploit their status to promote their own economic interests to the detriment of others, or to polarize an already divided society with provocative rhetoric or behavior aimed at seeking prestige. ANDalready wielding excessive social, cultural and political influence, the last thing we should want is to give these out-of-control billionaires even more public platforms, for example in the form of its own social network, as in the case of Musk currently owner of and expenditure which are at the origin of these enormous disparities.”
More politics would be needed, but politics seems to be swallowed up by these figures, certainly visionary and brilliant, who combine wealth and power, which means control of social media. The embrace between Musk and Trump demonstrates that the center of gravity of power in Western democracies has shifted and that politics – governed by precise rules, checks and balances – has lost much of it to the advantage of other subjects, those who Giuseppe De Ritasociologist and legendary president of Censis, recalled in a recent interview with Corriere della Sera: «The power today is in the production chains, in the large platforms, all horizontal entities. The power lies there, not in Parliament, in the direct election of the leader: all things that, for heaven’s sake, we will still talk about in thirty years when I will have been dead for a while.” And referring to the friendship between Giorgia Meloni and Musk himself, he added: «In my opinion, Meloni, by instinct, when she talks to people like Larry Fink of Blackrock, or other extended platforms, it is because she has understood that the influence is there. If she poses ecstatically in front of Elon Musk, perhaps it is because she has understood that he is part of a power that may not be known well, but is probably capable of more than the fight for the premiership.”
Every government, especially European ones, will have to talk to Musk: «It has a substantial monopoly on satellites. Can you afford not to talk to Musk?», Defense Minister Guido Crosetto had declared some time during a hearing in the Senate Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.
