Elon Musk and the Rise of the ‘Conservative’ Celebrity

T he Right has a strange relationship to celebrity. To many conservatives, celebrities are bad, unless they can possibly be considered right-wing, in which case they become heroes and their flaws are ignored in the name of fighting the culture war.

Just consider the case of Elon Musk.

Yes, Musk is a businessman and an investor and fabulously wealthy. But he’s also a celebrity far more famous than your average billionaire. His purchase of Twitter was a great way of keeping himself at the center of the elite discourse that the platform helps drive, thus amplifying his celebrity. And he’s used that extra attention to needle the Left, drawing cheers from the right — even though, as recently as a couple of years ago, it would have been inconceivable for anyone to consider him a right-winger.

Musk is a Silicon Valley guy. He named two of his children X AE A-XII and Exa Dark Sideræl. He makes electric cars, and I remember when those were the exclusive province of effete liberals. (In 2012, Mitt Romney called Tesla a “loser,” charging that the company had only succeeded because of the Obama administration’s grants and tax breaks.) He smoked weed on Joe Rogan’s podcast. He has at least nine children with several different women, some of whom were not legally married to him when they gave birth. One of his children with his first wife no longer wishes to be associated with him. (He blames communism, which he says is fashionable at elite schools, for their estrangement, and I personally cannot think of any other reasons a child who watched her father divorce her mother and quickly begin dating a much younger woman would not want to be associated with him.) He frequently praises China and the CCP, either because the presence of his businesses there requires him to toe Beijing’s party line or because he actually believes what he’s saying. Before this year he had only ever voted for Democrats.

In short, Musk’s long-standing beliefs, actions, and aesthetic make him about the last person you’d expect to be associated with conservatism in the public imagination.

So how did he become linked with the right? By being mad at liberals and making liberals mad at him. (A similar phenomenon is at work with Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, two journalists to whom Musk gave files relating to Twitter’s moderation under the platform’s previous owners: They are hardly conservative, but they have repeatedly expressed opposition to left-wing trends, and made themselves into something like honorary right-wingers in the process.) From Dave Chappelle to Johnny Depp, there are plenty of examples of celebrities who drew unexpected support from the right after becoming the object of progressive scorn. But the most obvious such parallel to Musk is Donald Trump himself. Appearance has been at least as important as reality to each man’s rise to right-wing prominence: The main way Trump owned the libs was merely by existing and being the president, just as the main way Musk owns the libs is merely by existing and owning Twitter. They are talismans, and as such it hardly matters what they do or don’t do: The mere fact that they make the Left mad is enough.

This suits Musk just fine, because he’s never articulated any sort of positive political vision. Sure, he says that pronouns are bad, the new moralism and censoriousness of the left is bad, and the previous management of Twitter and its approach to moderation were bad. But what is good? His own seemingly haphazard, chaotic efforts to reform the platform since he bought it have shown that he has no clear vision for how it should be moderated; he just has an emphatic belief that the way the previous owners were moderating it was unacceptable. First he says “comedy is now legal on Twitter,” and then he says that parody accounts impersonating real people will be permanently suspended unless they’re expressly identified as parodies. First he says that Twitter’s approach to free speech should mirror the First Amendment, then he bans Kanye West for tweeting a swastika. These are not the decisions of someone making slight alterations to the policies he had in mind from the beginning; these are the decisions of someone who gave no forethought to the obvious potential problems with the company he was buying, a man who had no plan beyond “don’t be the previous owners” and is now swinging wildly from one extreme to the other in a desperate search for solutions that work.

Of course, if Musk’s real aim in purchasing Twitter was to be fêted by the right, he didn’t need a plan. He just needed to engage in a power struggle with the people previously in charge of the platform and the liberals who regard his takeover as a threat. As Trump proved, a willingness to fight the enemy with sufficient gusto is enough to make right-wingers abandon their qualms; they will happily take all the high-profile culture warriors they can get. And if many of the principles conservatives used to stand for get lost in the bargain? Well, that’s a price many on the right are now willing to pay for the sugar high of owning the libs.