Seven ways of looking at Elon Musk

Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency have been rampaging through the federal government. But before he was letting his DOGE team accidentally fire nuclear safety workers and declaring that he loved Donald Trump “as much as a straight man can love another man,” he supported Barack Obama. That is, Musk is a complicated, mercurial man. To better understand him, seven Vox writers tell us what they’ve learned that helps them make sense of the billionaire. A man with an extraordinary risk tolerance Per his biographer Ashlee Vance, Musk earned about $250 million, or $180 million after taxes, selling PayPal to eBay. He then turned around and threw the money into new ventures: $100 million to SpaceX, $70 million to Tesla, $10 million to SolarCity. “Short of building an actual money-crushing machine, Musk could not have picked a faster way to destroy his fortune,” Vance writes. The gambles worked out, of course, but easily could have bankrupted him. The appetite for danger extends to his personal life. At one of his birthday parties, Musk both had a knife thrower hurl blades at him as he was blindfolded, and made himself face off against a 350-pound champion sumo wrestler. —Dylan Matthews A hint from 2018 In hindsight, Musk’s 2018 feud with a British cave explorer might have foreshadowed the darkening of his politics. That year, 12 boys and their soccer coach became trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand. Elon Musk offered to aid the Thai government’s rescue effort by contributing a mini-submarine. But authorities deemed Musk’s offer impractical and turned it down. An international team ultimately rescued the boys. And in a subsequent interview, a British cave explorer who’d assisted in that effort, Vern Urnsworth, said that Musk’s offer “had absolutely no chance of working” and that mogul “had no conception of what the cave passage was like.” Musk replied by calling Unsworth a “pedo” and saying he would bet money that the British diver was a predator, a claim for which the billionaire had no evidence whatsoever. This incident revealed that Musk is exceptionally sensitive to personal slights and willing to tell defamatory lies about those who affront him. If you are willing to declare a rescuer of children a pedophile because he disparaged your mini-submarine, then how might you respond to a Democratic president barring your company from an electric vehicle summit? In any case, now that he is a political crusader, Musk has scaled up his production of incendiary and baseless accusations. He has accused British politicians of abetting “rape genocide,” merely because they favored investigating child sex abuse rings on a local level rather than a national one. He has absurdly argued that the Democratic Party imported illegal immigrants in 2024 in a plot to steal the US election. And he has alleged that the US government paid the media outlet Reuters millions of dollars to engage in “large scale social deception” —though in reality, the first Trump administration had contracted with the data company Thomson Reuters Special Services to combat cyber attacks that use “social deception” tactics. Musk has long been a thin-skinned liar. That was once a problem for British cave divers; now, it’s a problem for the world. —Eric Levitz Don’t underestimate the obsession with the “woke mind virus” There has been much speculation about what drove Musk to throw himself into politics to such an extent — his wealth, going to Mars, etc. — but I think his obsession with defeating what he calls the “woke mind virus” really is quite important. Like many, he was radicalized fairly recently by the country’s leftward shift on identity issues (he has cited distrust of doctors prescribing gender-affirming care for his trans daughter, who he has since fallen out with) and his behavior suggests he truly came to believe reversing that shift is one of the major causes of his life. This is what he tried to do in his Twitter takeover and, in a sense, it’s what he’s trying to do at DOGE by attacking progressive institutions like nonprofit groups, universities, the media, and the “deep state.” And unlike many of Trump’s first-term advisers, Musk has both the boldness to disregard legal caution and the ability to figure out how to actually make things happen — nobody expected him to effectively seize levers of power inside government that let his team engineer mass layoffs of civil servants and block spending, but he did it. He is a wrecking ball against those who stand in Trump’s way. —Andrew Prokop Elon’s got the blinders on bad In the decade and a half that I’ve been covering Elon Musk and his companies, it’s been remarkable to see just how much this man’s worldview has become trapped in an echo chamber. Things got much worse when he bought it. I’m talking about Twitter, now X, and I’m left wondering on a daily basis if Musk seeks out information beyond what he sees in his feed or feedback beyond what shows up in his mentions. This is deep brain rot territory, and what’s happening on X seems to be, to some degree, informing Musk’s plan to dismantle the federal government workforce. By all accounts, Musk’s behavior is a realization of the right-wing mob mentality he’s cultivated on his social media platform, a feedback loop that’s increasingly out of touch with what’s happening to the lives of everyday Americans. People used to say what happens on Twitter only matters to other people on Twitter. Now, thanks to Musk and his mob, it’s shaping the future of the United States. —Adam Clark Estes A champion of “masculine energy” Musk and his allies are transforming DEI critiques into a defense of traditional masculinity where caution and consideration are being recast as weakness and the mark of losers. Under this framework, prioritizing diversity is framed as the culprit for why we are failing today. When Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg said companies need more “masculine energy” because corporate culture has become “culturally neutered,” he was voicing a growing Republican sentiment. Recent survey data shows that 79 percent of Republican men and a striking 67 percent of Republican women now believe “society has become too soft and feminine” — a massive spike since 2011. This new rhetoric isn’t about improving equality efforts — it’s about reframing caution as timidity. What began as pushback on specific diversity initiatives is evolving into a broader ideology in which questioning Musk-style risk-taking isn’t just bureaucratic — it’s feminized. As this attitude increasingly permeates businesses and government, prudence is becoming the fastest route to dismissal. —Rachel Cohen Looking to benefit his own bottom line While DOGE takes a chainsaw to the federal workforce, Musk is using his power to interfere with investigations and regulatory battles affecting his companies, while directing billions in lucrative contracts toward his businesses. His social media site X pressured ad giant Interpublic into buying more ads on X, while warning of federal interference in a planned $13 billion merger with its rival Omnicom Group, according to reporting from the Wall Street Journal. Musk’s rocket company SpaceX wants to land lucrative grants for Mars missions, while its subsidiary Starlink is aiming to take over Verizon’s contract to overhaul the FAA’s communications systems. A probe into Musk’s brain-computer interface company Neuralink is up in the air after those FDA investigators were fired (some have been asked to return). New emissions rules and tariffs could benefit Tesla over its competitors. And while the car company’s sales in Europe have plummeted amid growing protests, a kneecapped Consumer Financial Protection Bureau can no longer investigate hundreds of complaints into Tesla. Similarly, firings at the National Labor Relations Board have prevented that agency from ruling on investigations into Musk’s companies. The list of Musk’s conflicts of interest only continues to grow. —Avishay Artsy The stakes are different now A recurring theme in stories about Elon Musk: people tell him that something is impossible or too dangerous, and then he does it anyway. Sometimes it’s an embarrassing failure, sure, but about half the time he seems to manage to pull it off, and in the private sector the successes more than pay for the failures. The story of SpaceX in particular is full of naysayers who stood by in awe as the rockets, against their expectations, really worked. The problem is that in government, Musk has moved from a world where doing the impossible half the time is an incredible achievement to a world where failing to do the impossible the other half of the time will mean catastrophic numbers of people die. If the cancellations of PEPFAR grants, malaria programs, and childhood vaccinations worldwide aren’t reversed, Musk’s latest gamble will show up on global mortality charts as a million extra deaths every year. —Kelsey Piper This story originally appeared in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

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Seven ways of looking at Elon Musk