Elon Musk’s worldview is eerily similar to his authoritarian granddad’s

Elon Musk might be the most powerful man in America. Donald Trump has put his patron in charge of the federal bureaucracy, allowing Musk to tailor the administrative state to his whims, which are far-reaching and almost certainly unconstitutional. The tech mogul has shuttered a government agency in defiance of Congress’s will, orchestrated mass layoffs at myriad other bureaus, and threatened to cancel payments that he deems illegitimate. Musk lacks Trump’s official powers, of course. But his vast wealth — and the primary challengers it could fund — strikes fear into the hearts of Republican lawmakers, and threatens to upend key state-level elections. Meanwhile, through his control of X, Musk is driving news cycles in nations the world-over. All this invites the question: What motivates Musk’s pursuit of personal power, and his apparent contempt for constitutional constraints upon it? On some level, this query is unanswerable (no one can know with certainty what motivates Musk, not even Musk). On another, the answer may seem straightforward (Musk is not shy about broadcasting his grandiose ambitions to colonize Mars, save America from the “woke mind virus” etc.). But as I’ve been forced to contemplate Musk’s worldview in recent weeks, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about another man who despised social justice movements, evinced disdain for liberal democracy, and dreamed of reorganizing government with a cabal of likeminded, tech-savvy elites: Joshua N. Haldeman, a prominent 20th-century chiropractor, aviator, politician, conspiracy theorist and anti-Semite — who was also Musk’s maternal grandfather. Haldeman’s belief system shifted markedly over the course of his life. But throughout his political evolution, he gravitated toward a few core premises — a set of hateful and anti-democratic ideas that bear a striking (and disconcerting) resemblance to those of his grandson. In saying this, I do not mean to assert that Musk’s views are identical to Haldeman’s, nor even that the billionaire’s ideology was necessarily influenced by that of his grandfather. Such influence is conceivable: Although Haldeman died when Musk was a child, he has spoken reverentially of his grandfather and was close with his maternal grandmother, Winnifred Haldeman. And Musk’s father has suggested that she shared some of her husband’s extremist views. This said, there’s no direct evidence that Musk ever took an interest in his grandfather’s politics. Nevertheless, I think the similarities between Musk’s political ideas and his grandfather’s are worth noting, if only because they illustrate the timeless appeal — an enduring dangers — of their peculiar brand of conspiratorial elitism. Musk’s grandfather once wanted to replace democratic government with a benevolent dictatorship of engineers Toward the tail end of the Great Depression, Haldeman joined a radical — and radically strange — political movement called Technocracy Incorporated. The brainchild of the eminent engineer Howard Scott, Technocracy Incorporated argued that both democracy and market capitalism has grown obsolete. As the group explained in its 1939 pamphlet, “Technocracy in Plain Terms,” a citizen’s vote “has positively no effect on the actual operation of the country, for the country is not run by politicians anyway.” Yet in the name of this fraudulent democracy, society was allowing incompetent politicians to grossly mismanage the economy. Meanwhile, capitalism had been rendered inoperative by its own development. Technology was rapidly condemning workers to permanent unemployment — and rendering businesses unprofitable — by exponentially increasing productivity and output. At one point, Scott warned that “computers” were soon “going to do away with your accountants and your engineers, and it is also going to do away with your executives, as well as the blue collar and the white collar.” Neither the electorate nor the price system was fit to govern economic life in this new world. Together, they were propelling humanity toward catastrophe. And yet, the Technocrats argued, if we simply entrusted governance to a small group of tech-savvy elites — led by “the Great Engineer” — the people of North America could immediately know untold abundance, while working only part-time and retiring by age 46. Scott’s organization married this utopian economic vision to bizarre internal aesthetics and practices, reminiscent of both futuristic fiction and contemporary fascism. Members of Technocracy Incorporated wore identical gray uniforms, drove gray cars, and saluted each other as though fellow soldiers. They also referred to one another by number instead of name (one went by “1x1809x56”). Haldeman, a man of science fascinated by novel technologies, took to Technocracy enthusiastically, adopting the moniker “10450-1,” and quickly becoming the leader of the organization’s Canadian branch (Musk’s decision to name one of his children “X Æ A-12” is reminiscent of Technocracy’s practices). In 1940, he warned his fellow technocrats that the “smashup” of society was imminent and that all must prepare for the “New Social Order.” As World War II drew to a close, however, Haldeman abandoned Technocracy for a similar but distinct — and decidedly more hateful — political party. In the 1940s, Haldeman embraced a more anti-Semitic brand of technocracy The Social Credit Party shared many of Technocracy Incorporated’s defining characteristics. Both were founded by engineers who wished to revolutionize government amid the ravages of the Great Depression. Both argued that technological progress had made shared prosperity possible, if only experts were given more sovereignty over the economy. And both contended that representative democracy was hopelessly corrupt and dysfunctional. In the estimation of Social Credit’s founder, C.H. Douglas, voters weren’t competent to make judgments about economic policy, and so authority over such matters needed to be transferred to the experts who actually ran productive enterprises, whether government agencies or private businesses. Elected officials would hold these experts accountable for delivering results, but only after giving them free reign to maximize output as they saw fit. This made Social Credit’s brand of expert-rule a bit less authoritarian than Technocracy Incorporated’s. Yet the former party’s indictment of conventional democracy was markedly more fascistic. To Social Credit, the problem with traditional republican government wasn’t merely that voters lacked elite engineers and managers’ tech savvy and expertise, but rather, that the public’s ignorance enabled “international Jewish finance” to dominate government through its control of the bureaucracy. “The Jew has no native culture and always aims at power without responsibility,” Douglas explained in Social Credit’s magazine in 1939. “He is the parasite upon, and corrupter of, every civilisation in which he has attained power.” Only Social Credit’s novel system of government could save Christian civilization from the Jewish bankers’ plot and deliver economic utopia. For Musk’s grandfather, Social Credit’s virulent anti-Semitism seems to have been a feature not a bug. Haldeman became the head of Saskatchewan’s Social Credit Party in 1945, and ascended to its national chair a year later. In 1946, the party’s Quebec branch received widespread criticism for publishing excerpts of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a forged document purporting to detail a Jewish conspiracy for world domination. As Joshua Benton reported in The Atlantic, Haldeman swiftly rallied to his party’s defense. In a series of letters to a Saskatchewan newspaper, Musk’s grandfather argued that whether The Protocols were a forgery was beside the point since “the plan as outlined in these protocols has been rapidly unfolding in the period of observation of this generation.” Haldeman ran for both provincial and federal offices under the Social Credit banner and lost every election in a landslide. By 1949, he resigned from the party’s leadership. Within a year, he would fall in love with a different utopian political project, one that had just managed to actually secure state power — South African apartheid. How Elon Musk’s Canadian grandfather fell in love with South African white supremacy In 1949, Haldeman had a conversation with an Anglican minister in Toronto that would change the course of his life. In Haldeman’s own account, that holy man persuaded him that South Africa would “become the leader of white civilization in the World.” Musk’s grandfather evidently decided that he wished to be a part of that glorious project. Haldeman moved his family to Pretoria in 1950, the same year that South Africa’s government required all residents to register their race with the state and segregated urban housing. Shortly thereafter, in a letter to a Canadian newspaper, Haldeman made his enthusiasm for apartheid plain. He wrote that Black South Africans were “quite clever in a routine job, but the best of them cannot assume responsibility and will abuse authority,” and “The present government of South Africa knows how to handle the native question. They are endeavoring to make the natives as independent and self-supporting as possible.” In Haldeman’s assessment, “talk of a native uprising in Africa is purely Communist wishful thinking.” A decade later, in the face of just such an uprising, Haldeman’s defense of apartheid grew more conspiratorial. In response to growing international condemnation of the apartheid regime, he penned a short tract entitled, The International Conspiracy to Establish a World Dictatorship and the Menace to South Africa. As the New Yorker’s Jill Lepore has documented, that booklet read in part, “Every day the brain-washers repeat and emphasize the things they want us to believe. As examples ‘The Natives are ill-treated,’ ‘underpaid,’ ‘underprivileged,’ ‘separate development is wrong,’ ‘apartheid is un-Christian.” For Haldeman, the brainwashers consisted of a cabal of Jewish bankers, intellectuals, and philanthropies, which were puppet-mastering the uprisings in South Africa and plotting “an outside invasion by hordes of Coloured people.” Absent the agitations of this “international conspiracy,” Black South Africans would be well-reconciled to apartheid, Haldeman argued, because they had heretofore recognized that the white minority was more competent at managing the economy and facilitating innovation. “The facts of history show that the White man has always developed the country he inhabits to the benefit of all concerned,” he wrote, while the “Black people of Africa have been in close contact with civilization from the earliest times but, on their own, built nothing and discovered nothing, not even the wheel.” How Elon Musk’s political ideas resemble his grandfather’s Haldeman’s politics clearly evolved over time. But there are a few core premises that Technocracy Incorporated, The Social Credit Party, and his brand of pro-Apartheid evangelism held in common. All three: * deemed conventional democracy hopelessly corrupt and defective (Social Credit and Haldeman’s pro-apartheid tracts both attributed democracy’s woes specifically to the ignorance of the masses and malevolence of the Jewish financers who manipulated them); * insisted that power should be concentrated in the hands of an intellectually superior minority (master engineers, scientific experts, and businessmen in the case of Technocracy and Social Credit, white South Africans in the case of Apartheid evangelists), on the grounds that this elite was best qualified to deliver economic progress; * and believed that the stakes of allowing this elite to rule were extraordinarily high: If governance were entrusted to conventional democracy, then either economic ruin (in the vision of Technocracy Incorporated and Social Credit) or the collapse of “white Christian civilization” and establishment of a “world dictatorship” (in the view of Haldeman’s pro-apartheid tract) would follow. By contrast, in all three belief systems, the sustained leadership of the intellectual elite promised to deliver awe-inspiring economic progress, if not utopia. I believe that Musk’s recent words and deeds reflect all three of these thought patterns. To be sure, now that Musk has assumed extraordinary authority over government through the electoral process, he regularly proclaims his commitment to democracy. But before the 2024 election’s outcome was certain, he repeatedly suggested that the machinations of Jewish financiers — and the mass immigration of credulous “illegals” — were on the cusp of rendering American democracy irrevocably corrupt and dysfunctional. “The Dems have imported massive numbers of illegals to swing states,” Musk posted on X in October. “Their STATED plan is to give them citizenship as soon as possible, turning all swing states Dem. America would then become a one-party, deep blue socialist state.” In other remarks, Musk has described the conspiracy against America in terms evocative of his grandfather’s warnings about the plot against South Africa. In November 2023, an X user lamented that “Jewish communities” had been pushing “hatred against whites,” and flooding Western countries with “hordes of minorities.” Musk replied, “You have said the actual truth.” Musk described this post as a “mistake.” Yet it is of a piece with other statements that he has refused to disavow. Earlier in 2023, Musk likened the Jewish financier and Democratic donor George Soros to the X-Men supervillain Magneto, declaring that Soros “hates humanity.” Musk proceeded to justify this claim by asking, “Does the public realize that Soros wants open borders?” an apparent reference to the far-right conspiracy theory that Soros seeks to “replace” America’s white majority with masses of easily manipulated nonwhite immigrants. It seems clear then that Musk’s anxieties about democracy’s vulnerabilities to conniving financiers and credulous, nonwhite hordes resemble those of his grandfather. Whether he shares the younger Haldeman’s enthusiasm for technocracy is less obvious. Certainly, in his present role, Musk portrays himself as fighting to take power away from the administrative elite, and return it to the people. Yet in actual practice, Musk has claimed for himself and his small-team of expert coders the authority to override or subvert laws duly passed by the people’s representatives. Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has sought to fire civil servants, block spending, dissolve government agencies, and bribe federal workers into resigning, all in defiance of Congress’s will. Further, Musk’s downsizing of federal agencies threatens to transfer power away from a democratically accountable government and toward private sector firms run by tech-savvy elites, on an autocratic basis. After the Federal Aviation Administration laid off workers responsible for air safety this month, the government announced that Musk’s SpaceX rocket company would be helping the administration “envision” a new and improved air traffic control system. And Musk is emphatic that increasing the authority of both DOGE and his personal companies would bring extraordinary technological progress — while limiting the power of his genius engineers, or allowing his political opponents to win democratic elections would mean national bankruptcy and the end of civilization, if not of humanity itself. As Musk put the point in September, “The Department of Government Efficiency is the only path to extending life beyond Earth.” It is not hard to get from these premises to the conclusion that ensuring the power of Musk and similarly brilliant elites is more important than democracy or the rule of law. Judging by Musk’s actions, he may have already reached that determination. Musk’s ideas aren’t the same as his grandfather’s, but they present similar dangers None of this is to say that Musk shares all of his grandfather’s beliefs. For all of his outbursts and illiberal actions, he has never forthrightly endorsed white supremacy or authoritarian rule, as Haldeman did. One reason for doubting that Musk inherited his penchant for right-wing authoritarianism is that he came by his extremism only recently. A decade ago, Musk was, by his own account, a moderate Democrat. It’s plausible that, like so many other Americans, he was simply radicalized by the combination of Covid, culture wars, and social media addiction. Yet the overlap between Musk’s current outlook and his grandfather’s is notable, even if the latter did not shape the former. Either way, the similarities indicate that, across generations, a certain kind of man —- intellectually gifted, tech-savvy, and maniacally ambitious — can be vulnerable to hateful and authoritarian ideas. Democracy’s flaws are real. And it is easy for self-assured, technically proficient elites to look at those flaws — and then at humanity’s unrealized technological potential — and conclude that their society could achieve utopia, if only people like themselves were liberated from the tyranny of the credulous masses (and the bad elites who manipulate them). But Haldeman’s example illustrates the folly of such thinking. In reality, elites who seek authoritarian power are rarely as competent as they claim, or believe themselves to be. Scott, the genius engineer who wished to bring Technocracy to America, was in actuality not a brilliant scientist, so much as a serial fabulist. Douglas, the founder of Social Credit, also seems to have fabricated his sterling professional credentials. Meanwhile, the apartheid government’s claim that it governed in the interests of all residents — and that Black South Africans welcomed their subjugation — is now almost universally recognized as an abominable lie. Musk is doubtlessly a gifted business executive. But his purported expertise about the federal bureaucracy, and how to increase its efficiency, is utterly fraudulent. And the hazards of concentrating power in the hands of an arrogant pseudo-expert are increasingly apparent; in recent days, DOGE has accidentally fired (and then hastily attempted to rehire) workers responsible for ensuring the safety of America’s skies, nuclear weapons, and food. Few would defend Joshua Haldeman’s political ideas today. With any luck, his grandson’s will be similarly disdained in the future.

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Elon Musk’s worldview is eerily similar to his authoritarian granddad’s