Opinion | Is Anyone Scarier than Elon Musk?

Elon Musk deserves all the praise he gets for disrupting and reinventing complacent industries. Indeed, he has overseen the revolutionizing of rockets (SpaceX), the streamlining of electric car production and the building of robots (Tesla), the development of an implantable brain-computer interface capable of translating thought into action (Neuralink), and the creation of a satellite internet network that no country can rival (Starlink). Yet he is someone we decidedly do not want in government, be it as an efficiency czar advising on what federal programs to cut or in any other position, not even as an ambassador. 

Before I tell you what it is that brings me to this position, let me enumerate what it’s not.

I’ll start with one of the elephants in some of the rooms where I spend time. In them are many people who consider Musk a shameless antisemite. Even before he bought his favorite social media platform—Twitter, now X—he posted and reposted a wide assortment of conspiracy theories to his massive following. He engaged with antisemitic accounts and occasionally flirted with outright antisemitism in his own posts. In 2023, he went head-to-head with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), repeatedly blaming the Jewish group for a significant decline in X’s advertising revenue, evoking the long history of antisemites using Jews as scapegoats. The rift between X and the ADL, the highest-profile American organization dedicated to fighting antisemitism, was mended, but after a requisite apology tour of Auschwitz, Musk has merrily gone on with his injudicious endorsements of content that is sometimes antisemitic but more often just plain off the wall. (I don’t want to rehash all the X-Lord’s many online antics, but one that sticks in my craw is how he plays right into antisemitic tropes by lashing out against his fellow billionaire George Soros. Any invocation of Soros in this climate reeks of antisemitism, subtle or not, and it drives me nuts that a Holocaust survivor, now 94, has become the modern Jewish caricature and punching bag.) 

All this said, I don’t think Musk is a true antisemite. Rather, he is a man who is particularly vulnerable to conspiracy theories, of which antisemitism is the foundational theory. This vulnerability, according to Walter Isaacson in his 2023 book Elon Musk is something Musk inherited from his father, Errol Musk. Now 78 and estranged from Elon, Errol is a lifelong rearranger of facts. By 2021, according to Isaacson, “He was a full-throated denier of COVID vaccines, Trump’s election loss and the 9/11 terrorist attacks.” Isaacson details how Errol later wrote to Elon that “the Left (or gangsters) have got to be stopped. Civilization is at stake.” Errol, however, is not Elon’s only ancestor with a conspiratorial bent. His maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, who was raised on a farm in the central Canadian plains, was the chair of the national council of a movement known as the Social Credit Party, which Isaacson describes as having a “conservative streak tinged with antisemitism.” The group’s “first leader in Canada decried ‘a perversion of cultural ideals [caused by the] disproportionate number of Jews occupying positions of control.’” 

Musk cannot be tarred with his ancestor’s errors in judgment, but what is clear is the ease with which Musk can be corralled by and used by antisemites and other trolls, as a person and as the owner of a powerful social media platform, which he considers a modern-day public square. True antisemites are consistent in their Jew-hatred; they don’t shift with the wind as Musk does to further whichever whim or need is front and center at the moment.

You might still find the position that Musk isn’t an antisemite, voiced by the Jewish editor-in-chief of a magazine read largely by Jews, controversial or disputable, and if so, I understand. But let’s set aside the is-he-or-isn’t-he-antisemitic question, because it’s not the reason why I feel so strongly that Musk should never serve in government.

It’s not because Musk is captivated by conspiracy theories, although that is awful and dangerous. The United States government has already had a revolving cast of characters who have indulged in conspiracy theories, although none of them owned a platform that is one of the most reliable tools of spreading them, let alone commanded 202.7 million followers. Only former President Donald Trump comes close: While he was president, and until he was banned from Twitter in January 2021, his @realDonaldTrump account amassed 88.7 million followers to whom he “spoke” to several times a day. His account by that same handle on Truth Social, owned by Trump Media & Technology Group of which Trump himself is the majority owner, has 7.96 million followers. By the way, the official @POTUS account of President Joe Biden on X has 36.8 million followers. 

It’s not because Musk has his own ideas on what constitutes censorship and free speech and disparages the media, including editors such as myself who weed out some of the craziest voices. Obviously, he prefers the Wild West mano-a-mano zeitgeist of his own media company. “I think it is far better for information to sort of bubble up from the voice of the people than to have it be decided by a handful of editor-in-chiefs of newspapers,” he told attendees at a recent Trump rally in Pennsylvania. “In America, people are starting to realize that the legacy media is just a propaganda machine.” In Musk’s self-serving opinion, “citizen journalism” on X is the future of journalism.

It’s not because Musk’s goal is to colonize Mars for humans as opposed to helping build a better society here on earth—and that he has said, including while speaking remotely at the Future Investment Initiative Summit in Saudi Arabia recently, that Space X’s ability to colonize Mars rides heavily on Trump and Republicans getting back into office.

It’s not because Musk is a person who admits to possessing poor human radar and an empathy-deficit due, in part, to the autism-spectrum disorder commonly known as Asperger’s, or that he has, again admittedly, difficulties with impulse control. None of this disqualifies someone from serving in government, although we have seen what havoc a leader with limited impulse control can wreak while in a position of power.

It’s not because he is a billionaire, with a colossal although fluctuating net worth of $292 billion, greater than the GDP of all but the 15 or so countries with the strongest economies. Rich people, including billionaires such as Trump and his former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, have always gravitated to government and have accumulated greater power by serving there, whether that was their intention or not. If Trump is elected, Musk could be in the company of other billionaires, such as investor John Paulson, who has his eye on leading the Treasury Department.

Nor is it the way he has been throwing money at the 2024 presidential election, flaunting voting laws. “It’s such an extraordinary scene that we haven’t really absorbed the magnitude of it—or the uniqueness of it,” Trevor Potter, a former Republican chairman of the Federal Election Commission and counsel to John McCain’s presidential campaigns, recently told The Washington Post. “You have the richest man in the world building a campaign apparatus with the Trump campaign at a time when one of the reasons he is the richest man in the world is all of the government contracts and business relationships that are controlled by who is in the White House.” Which gets us closer to my singular reason that it’s imperative Elon Musk is not given a government appointment.

Musk should not be in government because he has already amassed more power than almost anyone else on earth and more power than many governments, and not just those of small countries. He is a power to be reckoned with, even in a large country such as the United States. His power stems from the nature of his companies. Starlink, for example, gives him power over the government of Ukraine; it was up to Musk to decide if Ukraine could attack Crimea—and he decided no. When Hurricane Helene devastated the telecommunications infrastructure in North Carolina, Starlink stepped in to provide service. With Starlink alone he is a world-dominating player. For all intents and purposes, he also controls transportation between earth and the international space station through SpaceX. In addition, over the last year SpaceX has started to move into the business of building military and spy satellites. As if this is not enough, Musk owns databases of human behavior collected from Tesla drivers that are fueling his efforts to build robots, self-driving cars and the brain-computer interface. All this on top of owning X, a powerful disseminator of information. In other words, Musk has created and owns some of the most long-term strategic endeavors in human history. These kinds of power don’t dissipate during or after public service.

There is also the fact, as Potter referenced, that most of Musk’s companies are deeply intertwined with the U.S. government and came to be with government help. Well covered is Musk’s decades-long frustration with regulation, which he wants to see dismantled so he can launch new rockets faster and get autonomous cars on America’s highways sooner. His companies—and he himself—are also extensively intertwined with China and other countries as well as foreign leaders. As recently reported by The Wall Street Journal, since late 2022, Musk has been in regular contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin on personal as well as business and geopolitical matters. In one of these conversations, Putin asked Musk not to activate his Starlink satellite internet service over Taiwan as a favor to Chinese leader Xi Jinping. 

Everywhere you look, there are huge conflicts of interest with Musk, which don’t necessarily seem to disqualify folks from political leadership these days. But because of the nature of his companies, there is more at stake than with people like Trump or DeVos. Trump mostly owns resorts and golf courses, real estate, a bucket full of get-rich-quick gambits and an at-best second tier social media company that might not survive him. DeVos’s family is invested widely, and her brother Erik Prince founded Blackwater (now Academi), the notorious private military group that played a substantial role in the Iraq War as a contractor for the U.S. government. But even Blackwater’s influence pales in comparison to that of Musk’s companies. 

Musk is brilliant and sometimes ruthless in how he has built and run his companies. His appetite for risk is vast and exciting. But does that mean that he should be inside the government? No. 

First, the lessons of business do not always apply to government, which has a higher mission of serving citizens. Second, Musk’s talent for disruption and invention and his drive to quickly bring ideas to fruition are hardwired into human ingenuity. It’s important to remember that Musk, smart as he is, is one very lucky man who came along with the right set of traits in the right palace (Silicon Valley) at the right time—when the web was starting to grow and money was being showered on unproven business ideas. His rise was fueled and cushioned by government contracts at a time when the government was pulling back from investing in the future.

There are other brilliant people who can help make our government more nimble and efficient, who don’t possess such overwhelming power. Yes, people who are less flawed, and who don’t share his propensity for believing and spreading conspiracy theories. An Elon Musk in government is far too big a risk for the American people.