President Musk, If You Would Become Republican
It’s not too late for Elon Musk to recover his moral center.
On December 20, 2024, Elon Reeve Musk, who allegedly began his American journey as a smart, rich South African immigrant with an unclear legal status, was named on the floor of the United States House of Representatives as “President Musk.” History textbooks might highlight this date if he, like some evil vizier, usurps the 🍊🤡’s crown. President-Elect Trump seems mad, bro, that people keep repeating this bait. On December 22, Representative Tony Gonzales, a Republican from Texas, gushed: “Elon Musk is our prime minister.” Prime Ministers often have more power than their respective kings.
Until 2022, when Mr. Musk started more aggressively injecting himself into news cycles every fucking day, I had nothing against the man. I thought he might be a fellow traveler. I did not expect that, by 2024, Bloomberg and NBC would call him “the new Rush Limbaugh.” (The real Maha Rushdie routinely mocked Mr. Musk from behind his golden microphone for making electric cars, believing in climate change, and especially for his dream of colonizing Mars.) The Tesla CEO carried himself differently from other tech guys. He was a goth dude, in a long leather pirate coat, with delicate bangs and a moody, romantic stare, who watches Neon Genesis Evangelion and Death Note, moonlights as an EDM DJ, and plays Civilization, Bioshock, and World of Warcraft. He tweets while high on Ambien, smokes blunts on camera, goes to Burning Man, uses psychedelics at private parties, and takes ketamine medicinally. If they were for sale in the era when he was a rocking rebel, he would undoubtedly have been sporting one of our “Trump Is a Bitch” t-shirts, now available at Spreadshop. This is the type of cool nerd who was always welcome at my lunch table. You could have burned reefer every weekend quite happily with Mr. Musk.
When Mr. Musk started flirting with Republicans, I assumed he was “playing both sides, so that [he] always comes out on top.” He has a history of this—Forbes indicates that he has donated to Democratic and Republican candidates in equal measure.
From 2008 to 2016, he palled around with President Barack Obama. He “strongly supported” Obama, whose Department of Energy loaned Tesla $465 million, and any Republican during that time would have told you that the Obama administration was Tesla’s sugar daddy.
In November 2016, he endorsed for president Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, saying of Mr. Trump: “He doesn’t seem to have the sort of character that reflects well on the United States… just no.” “Just no” or “Fuck no” is exactly how the majority of Americans felt about Mr. Trump in 2016 when the dotard lost the popular vote.
June 2016, Mr. Musk cheered Norway announcing a ban on sales of fuel vehicles in 2025 as “amazingly awesome.” This is, of course, the kind of far-left radical environmentalism, interference in the market, picking-winners-and-losers, et cetera, that Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton were afraid even to be misconstrued as wanting. Only the wackiest of Democrats would go that far. Captain Planet would caution that this was too extreme. Ronald Reagan’s last brain cell would have exploded. Mr. Musk loved it.
Sleuths from Vice News discovered in October 2016 that Mr. Musk followed zero women on Twitter, “the same number as lived on Mars,” a factoid he denied having any meaning. He suggested that reporters put the real villain—presumably alluding to Mr. Trump, whose Access Hollywood tape would be made public by the Washington Post in the coming days—at the “top of the target list.”
In early 2017, he served on Cheeto Mussolini’s economic advisory council before ostentatiously storming away over America’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords. He joined the fight against Mr. Trump’s racist Muslim ban in court, tweeting repeatedly it was “not right.” He was clear and direct with his Twitter audiences that he knew Mr. Trump’s policies were morally abhorrent. He would go on to stress:
Understanding that the “last person to talk to Trump wins,” Mr. Musk warned it would be dangerous to have dumb, easily manipulated Donald under the thumbs of the “evil Steves,” Bannon and Miller. Four years before he would spend hundreds of millions of dollars funding exactly that, Mr. Musk imagined an “unbound” Mr. Trump thusly:
In the 2020 presidential election, Mr. Musk went on to vote for my man President Joe Biden, presumably because his firsthand experience and working eyeballs helped him understand that the orange man is, in fact, very bad.
On May 18, 2022, Mr. Musk abruptly announced that he would vote Republican because Democrats were not the “kindness party” anymore.
An odd statement, considering Republicans saw this and thought: this is a man I want to make president.
Closing my laptop that Wednesday, I called a friend to ask if Mr. Musk had been #MeTooed.
On May 19, Business Insider reported Mr. Musk paid a flight attendant $250,000 not to tell anyone he took his dick out during a massage. I strongly believe that he wrote this tweet knowing scandal was imminent. He typed it with his thumbs as fast as he could to ensure that the Fox and Friends would have his back.
On July 11, 2022, Mr. Musk, who had been publicly supporting the allegedly-child-grooming (according to Mr. Trump) Governor Meatball Ron DeSanctimonious, told the Donald to “sail into the sunset.” (A euphemism for: “Go fuck yourself.”)
Mr. Musk went on to post an animated GIF suggesting that Mr. Trump, once a proud insurrectionist, now resembled Grandpa Abe Simpson yelling at a cloud:
In rebuttal, Mr. Trump called him a “bullshit artist” (two years later, the 🍊🤡 would proudly swallow that shit) and offered this homoerotic fantasy:
In October 2022, shortly after Kanye West started to get really antisemitic, really fast, but before he went onto InfoWars to tell host Alex Jones he loved Hitler, the GOP House Judiciary tweeted:
Nightmare blunt rotation.
Mr. Musk, upset about fact-checking and moderation, would go on to purchase Twitter and unban Mr. Trump, Kanye West (who was quickly re-banned), and damn near every neo-Nazi in America. He suggested that America ought to elect a Republican Congress to bring balance to the Force.
Since then, his actions do not measure up to these words. Mr. Musk has not been working to “curb the worst excesses” of shit. He endorsed Mr. Trump, declared himself “dark, gothic MAGA,” skipped around on stage with the 🍊🤡, donated hundreds of millions of dollars to help the fascist get elected, replaced Melania in family photos, moved into Mr. Trump’s spare bedroom, and started hanging around the septuagenarian’s grandkids.
In reward for his devotion to the cause of American fascism, Mr. Musk was given a fake government department (named after a meme dog), and threatened America with economic suffering. (That Americans, upset about already-tamed inflation, chose to vote for a ticket explicitly promising more hardship will forever confound me.)
On December 19, 2024, Mr. Musk threatened to fund primary campaigns against congresspeople for being insufficiently MAGA. I am still not convinced his newfound devotion to the Republican Party is honest or true. He knew Mr. Trump was ill-suited to more than either a prison or sanitarium and has had no cause to change his mind. Mr. Musk might have concluded he hated the Democratic Party worse—because social justice warriors were mean to him on Twitter—but still, he chose to spend $250 million and significant time and energy supporting a man he has described as lacking the “sort of character that reflects well on the United States.” If Mr. Musk believes the Donald is too old, too stupid, too bereft of virtue, the only clear reason the Tesla CEO has to work with the man is that he believes that, because he is smarter and richer than Mr. Trump, he can control our idiot president.
Mr. Trump’s advisors have repeatedly told reporters that the Donald will eventually kick Mr. Musk to the curb—like a dog—out of annoyance or jealousy. This is likely. I recently spoke with a fortune teller, who told me the same.
On December 22, 2024, Mr. Trump publicly clarified “[he was] safe” and that the tech billionaire would not usurp his presidency. That makes me suspect he is not safe, and that he has become a bloated whore for a man who used to sign off as “[Marquis] De Sade” on Usenet.
For those of a less gothic temperament than Mr. Musk, the Marquis De Sade was not a figure any good man would emulate. It is from that evil aristocrat’s name we get the word “sadist.” De Sade was jailed as a violent rapist and a pedophile, and while imprisoned wrote graphic pornography promoting those characteristics in others. He is mainly quoted by dark-minded perverts who loiter in latex stores.
I have a suggestion for how to manage Mr. Musk. Fellow Democrats, hear me out—let us convince him to change teams again. He is likely to be open to it at some point—he certainly must expect to inevitably betray the Republicans. We have taken Mr. Musk’s donations in exchange for pursuing common causes before; we should be prepared to do it again. We know he is down for the wilder climate stuff, like carbon taxes, and would convince America to buy the Green New Deal if he got to call it Goatse.cx. Do not forget: his whole Tesla fortune is predicated on his belief that climate change is a real danger worth mitigating and that it might get so bad that we should consider getting a Mars colony settled before a catastrophe. The sort of thing stoned Democrats rant about in college dormitories across our great nation.
To be clear, he really likes that carbon tax:
We could also just graft. Try putting money in his pocket. Blue state and city appropriators should start begging Tesla to sell them some Robovans to replace their aging fleets of yellow school buses. He will get the message.
Nelson Mandela said: “If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.” And what is a partner to the Democrats? An enemy to the Republicans. Sure, it might take us down weird rabbit holes, but where we have common ground with the world’s richest man, we need to stand.
He is already pissing off MAGA. On December 26, after allegedly having her account de-verified and demonetized for criticizing Musk’s liberal views on H1B1 visas on Christmas, Laura Loomer cryptically tweeted:
We do not even know if she is talking about Melania or Elon.
I mainly know of Ms. Loomer as the young woman who chained herself to Twitter headquarters after being banned and sued HBO’s Bill Maher1 for claiming she was having an affair with the 🍊🤡. I am sure she is a nice person. But she has already noticed this avenue of exploitation, so Democrats ought to pay attention and find these places where they can work with President Musk against President Trump, or sow discord and convince the two billionaire narcissists to fight. Like a good neighbor, accelerate the divorce.
When the fated hour comes that Mr. Musk stops feigning adoration for the Mandarin Mussolini, I imagine the “old man” will be yelling at the clouds about it. No presidential work will be done for weeks because all of Mr. Trump’s energies will be devoted to firing off zingers. After doing the SWOT analysis for how he should go about avenging himself of those inevitable insults, Mr. Musk should purchase a Trump Is a Bitch shirt, available now on Spreadshop.
HBO is now Max.