Elon Musk’s advisory commission to President Trump, DOGE, wears a mask of populism to legitimize what can only be described as economic aristocracy.
If you have the displeasure of following Elon Musk’s account on X, the social media site he acquired in 2022, then you’ve certainly seen him repost video clips of neoclassical economics and contemporary conservatism darlings Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell with his own praising captions over whatever they are pontificating about.
It’s quite often the case that these Musk-endorsed clips see the two late public intellectuals spouting some neoconservative cultural or economic theory. It’s well documented that both Friedman and Sowell have serious flaws in their arguments for free-market principles, so much so that going through examples of these intellectuals’ theoretical misgivings here seems redundant.
Thinking about why Musk finds these thinkers’ ideas to be true is, however, an important endeavour in untangling the psychological complex that the multiple-company CEO possesses seeing as he has saddled up to the MAGA movement and Trump as a key advisor to the U.S. executive branch.
DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), which Elon Musk is heading alongside former presidential election runner-up Vivek Ramaswamy (who made his fortune on a miracle drug scheme for dementia medication), has as its raison d’être the exact kind of approach to politics that would come from uncritically assuming the arguments in favour of unfettered capitalism from Friedman and Sowell are correct: that the government should be as lean and non-interventionist in market interactions as possible so that the free market can work its magic. But the free market in this conception — as not only the best method for producing and distributing goods and services, but as a social Darwinist sorting mechanism — is separating out as it were the rational, worthy and valuable against their counterparts.
This kind of thinking has at its heart the metaphor of the invisible hand from the 18th century pioneering economist Adam Smith, who famously said that market interactions by self-interested individuals lead to the best outcomes for society despite no formal planning of the incentives of the system being involved.
Sound a bit like wishful thinking? If so, one only needs to look to a phenomenon like the 2008 financial crisis to see that largely unregulated self-interested financial actors (bankers, investors, etc.) will screw over the whole of society for short-term gains before regular folks figure out that the invisible hand theory is fanatical.
And yet this flawed thinking is what Musk and Ramaswamy — two unelected bureaucrats who now have advisory positions over the most powerful person in the world — think is true and plan to implement in policy. Concretely, what this ideology means, as the DOGE leaders and Trump have made clear, is deregulating, restructuring and lobbing off entirely essential government agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which protect millions of Americans from predatory business practices and provide basic welfare.
But I’m not going to litigate these policy proposals one at a time here (they’re disastrous). What I find fascinating is trying to get at the heart of Ramaswamy and Musk’s views of themselves and Republicans’ views of them and DOGE.
In essence, these billionaires see themselves as aristocrats — able, in their minds, through sheer economic power to implement a massive overhaul to the entirety of the U.S. government simply by virtue of their fortunes.
The not-so-subtle subtext of Musk’s endorsement-tweeting of various Friedman and Sowell speaking tapes alongside his ascension to lead Trump advisor is that if one takes the basic political-economic principle held by Friedman and Sowell — that the market uninterrupted is a smooth-functioning social-sorting machine that rewards rational and productive actors — then Musk clearly views himself and his billions as being a reflection of his superior rationality and worth as a human being. No doubt Musk is an intelligent man in specific domains in engineering, but to argue that his every dollar of net worth is somehow meritocratically justified — a perfect reflection of his status to society — is absurd for a number of reasons.
First, much of Musk’s net worth is locked up in speculation; his investor appeal is strong as he is notorious for overselling the capabilities of his products and company ambitions. Recently, Musk even predicted we’ll have a million people settled on Mars by 2050 (his Mars predictions have always been spotty, but they do attract investors to SpaceX).
A more important flaw with this asinine belief is that it underplays how the actual labourers at Musk’s multiple companies are integral to the success of his various companies at a monetary level; without them, there would be no products to procure profit in the first place.
Mind you, Musk’s two major companies SpaceX and Tesla both have high-profile scandals revealing serious workplace abuse, and he himself seems to see most of his workers as disposable peasants he can lord over. A neoliberal politico-cultural landscape such as ours which reifies the idea of the genius individual who triumphs over the mediocre masses to make a name for themselves probably doesn’t really help with Musk’s obvious superiority complex over the workers at his companies. However, even with this cultural bias in the coverage of Musk in the corporate Western media, one has to seriously have a problem if they can look at Musk’s fortune and the brutal scandals of worker abuse that have cropped up under his governance and think he’s that socially valuable.
Of course, it’s not hard to see why Musk feels himself to be legitimate in heading a committee like DOGE. The real curiosity arises in all the Americans on the political right who don’t seem to be concerned about this clear infringement of basic democratic governance.
The important question, then, is: How does an enlightened 21st century population not revolt at the very idea of economic juggernauts like Musk waltzing their way into highly powerful government-influencing positions without some form of election?
Part of the answer, no doubt, is that the Democrats’ continual selling out of the working class has made many in the U.S. upset and lose faith in the power of accountable democratic governance.
This same dynamic was largely why Trump won in 2016 as well. If there’s anything regular people hate more than being exploited by elites, it’s when those same elites claim to be progressive heavyweights, as if acting in the footsteps of MLK Jr. while, in especially recent times, continuing the status quo and ceding territory to right-wing framing on key issues like the border; this was the vice sin of the failed Kamala Harris campaign.
But another part of the answer to this question goes to something not so new: capitalism’s inherent drive to instability, chiefly in terms of wealth and income inequality, has not been reckoned with in the U.S. or the global public consciousness, largely due to the elites’ continued efforts to distort this truth.
The result of such a lack of fully cognizing our economic system’s failure to deliver prosperous and equal lives on a sustainable earth is that social mythologies predicated on repression and ignorance which serve the few winners of such a disastrous system cover over this failure, and the right eat up this ideology far easier.
Seeing as the Republican party is the party of big business, these social mythologies are ever-more explicitly held and acted on by Republicans as a self-preservation propaganda tool for the party’s business elite.
For Republicans, capitalism works. And for MAGA specifically, the only issues that arise from capitalism are when Democrats interfere with it, or it’s co-opted by Democrats through “wokeness.”
To return to the question I posed earlier, we can now attempt a more precise answer: Musk is not viewed, by himself or by his fellow Republicans, as an arbitrarily drawn aristocrat, but as what I am inclined to call an economic aristocrat that gains his legitimacy to rule not through the ballot but through a vague populist appeal and economic domination.
If this sounds paradoxical, that’s because it is.
Populism is, after all, a political tactic which seeks to appeal to ordinary people who feel dominated by ivory tower elites; how on earth, then, could the CEO worth hundreds of billions of dollars not also be such an elite who has nothing in common with a population where 60 per cent of its citizens live paycheque to paycheque?
Frankly, he’s not — but Musk is viewed by Republicans as trustable sheerly through the technocratic credentials that his economic domination over American society affords him. In fact, he’s trusted so much that for Republicans, he’s worthy of circumventing a clear conflict-of-interest position in advising a sitting president while having the business stakes he does in the same economy he can now influence from the executive branch.
This is, again, because Republicans lick the boot of America’s business elites and come to believe the economic system they exist in is fair, and that any economic shortcomings they’ve felt are the result of corrupt and woke Democrat elites.
While many have been quick to throw around the term fascist to describe DOGE, I wouldn’t go there quite yet, but it certainly is fascistic. The eschewing with democracy and allying the highest level of government with the power of business elites by an executive who has proven he has little care for the proper procedures of a functioning democracy, as the Jan. 6 riots he provoked demonstrated, should evoke the F-word from even careful commentators of the current U.S. political landscape.
Elon Musk is now undeniably a modern aristocrat, but instead of some pretense to a royal line of descent like in the feudal age, modern aristocrats like Musk gain their governmental power through the face of faux-populism and the wealth they accrue through technologic–economic exploitation and domination.
I saw a meme recently online that did a side-by-side of Elon Musk holding his son at a press conference (something he is quite fond of doing in front of the press) next to a shot from the 2007 character-study drama There Will Be Blood, a film which follows the life of the ruthless and misanthropic oil baron Daniel Plainview. The shot from the film in the meme is of Plainview holding his (illegitimate) son at a business meeting which he does cynically throughout the film to seem like an ordinary man to potential business partners. The caption of the meme sardonically reads: “How are you guys falling for this.” This might seem silly to take seriously, but after a little chuckle I realized it’s an utterly apt comparison.
Now — and I’m only half-joking — we have four years to see what a person with a Daniel Plainview-like complex will do as advisor to the president of the most powerful country on earth.