How Elon Musk Rebranded Trump

By the end of Donald Trump’s campaign for a second Presidency, he was part of a package deal. The Trump ticket represented not only Trump and his running mate, J. D. Vance, or not just them, but also the suddenly inseparable duo of Trump and the tech billionaire Elon Musk. Musk, the world’s richest man, was once a self-described moderate and an Obama supporter, but since the pandemic (during which his businesses tried to skirt quarantine orders) he has undergone an ostentatious rightward shift. In the months before Election Day, having previously had little public relationship with Trump, he began bankrolling Trump’s campaign to the tune of around two hundred million dollars. His American super PAC ran much of Trump’s ground game in swing states. Musk spoke onstage repeatedly at Trump’s rallies, resulting in one much memed photo of the entrepreneur leaping into the air with his arms ecstatically outstretched. Musk spent Election Night at Mar-a-Lago, within murmuring distance of the soon-to-be President-elect.

Their new closeness has only intensified since Trump’s win. Musk has already come to occupy a para-governmental position in American society, because his multiple technology companies have increasingly wormed their way into international affairs. The Pentagon has paid for his Starlink satellites to provide Internet in war-torn Ukraine. NASA hires his SpaceX crafts for missions. Cities including Las Vegas have contracted his Boring Company to dig infrastructure projects. Now, rather than holding disconcerting sway over government endeavors from the outside, Musk is shaping the government from within. When Trump took a congratulatory phone call with the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump reportedly put Musk on the line. In October, Trump said that he was considering Musk for a role as “Secretary of Cost Cutting”; on Tuesday, Trump officially announced that Musk and the right-wing entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy would jointly lead a new Department of Government Efficiency (a.k.a. D.O.G.E., surely the first time that a government agency has been named after a meme). Musk’s bio on X, the social-media platform formerly known as Twitter, which he bought in 2022 and has since transformed into his bully pulpit, now reads “The people voted for major government reform.” According to the Times, Musk in the past week has been constantly at Trump’s side at Mar-a-Lago, advising on cabinet appointments, bringing tech investors into the fold, and being greeted in the resort’s dining room with the same reverence as Trump. Kai Trump, one of the President-elect’s grandchildren, posted online that Musk was “achieving uncle status.” Musk seems to have embraced the deceptively quaint term “first buddy.” The Times called him “indisputably America’s most powerful private citizen.”

For fans of Musk’s techno-accelerationist vision, the Trumpian alliance amounts to the dawning of a bold new political era. Rachael Horwitz, the chief marketing officer of the San Francisco venture-capital firm Haun Ventures, has observed Trump’s newly tech-heavy fan base in her roles at the V.C. firm Andreessen Horowitz and the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase. She told me that she understands the appeal of a Trump-Musk partnership. “Elon has given a new shape to how some people view not just Trump but maybe even conservatism,” she said, adding, “I think there is optimism at this moment. There’s hope.” Even before Musk’s involvement, there were signals that the Trump Administration would throw in its lot with Silicon Valley. Vance is a creature of online inclinations—including posting about digital dolphin porn and spreading his disproved claims about immigrants eating pets—and a onetime protégé of the tech magnate Peter Thiel. Whereas Kamala Harris was subtle in her courting of the crypto crowd, Trump explicitly said that he would support blockchain technology. (Since the election, Bitcoin has reached all-time highs.) Later in the campaign, Trump’s embrace of hit podcasters such as Joe Rogan, Theo Von, and Lex Fridman helped spread his message on digital channels among the young male demographic that proved key to his victory. In the company of Musk—redolent of angular Cybertrucks, reusable rockets, and humanity living on Mars—Trump appears not as an elderly, increasingly incoherent, legally embattled former President who failed to get reëlected once but as the leader of an energized, risktaking, unorthodox, tech-forward regime.

To those who haven’t delved into Musk’s bigoted anxieties about population replacement or transgender rights, he might seem like a kind of real-life superhero—like Tony Stark of “Iron Man” joining the Administration. He has achieved miraculous things in the realms of electric vehicles and space travel; perhaps he can do so for the government as well. One parody account on X suggested that Musk could build a “bulletproof golf cart” for Trump. Yet there’s a gulf between the promise of innovation that Musk represents and the reality of how he operates as a businessman. Musk’s companies, like Trump’s, are kept afloat less by their ground-level progress than by the cult of personality around their founder. Tesla reportedly laid off more than fourteen per cent of its workforce in 2024; the team in charge of one of its most prominent infrastructure products, the Tesla Supercharger network, was eliminated. Once Musk took possession of X, he quickly laid off the vast majority of the staff, including most of the workers responsible for content moderation. (Cost cutting, indeed.) At the same time, Musk has succeeded at making X the communication platform of choice for those on the right, in part by remaking the site in his own image.

X happens to be cratering financially—Fidelity, one of its stakeholders, recently estimated its value at around nine billion dollars, a far cry from the forty-four billion dollars Musk paid for it—yet it is poised to become a fulcrum of the second Trump Administration. For one thing, as Eric Newcomer, the proprietor of a Silicon Valley venture-capital newsletter, told me, “Tech is still addicted to X.” This election has been called the “podcast election,” for the influence of Rogan and his ilk, but it should perhaps more specifically be thought of as the digital-multimedia election, a race waged via podcasts on YouTube, talking heads on TikTok, and audio live streams on X (where Trump appeared with Musk in August). Whereas platforms such as YouTube and TikTok take pains to appear neutral, X under Musk has become a partisan, ideological arena. Despite his professed obsession with free speech and his protestations that X is a “public square,” the platform is now more weighted toward Republicans than Democrats. New users are recommended politicized accounts to follow, and Musk’s own torrent of posts is unavoidable, including plenty of boosterish Donald Trump memes. Noting how Facebook was blamed for misinformation in elections past, including in Trump’s victory in 2016, Newcomer told me, “X is so much more overt.” It is as if Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News was not only brazenly biased toward Trump’s campaign but was also publicly strategizing with it. Trump, who relentlessly threatens and smears the mainstream media, created his own social-media platform, Truth Social. It failed to achieve much traction, but no matter: X is the new hub for his true believers. The day after the election, Musk posted, “You are the media now.”

For Musk, as for Trump, the stakes of Trump’s victory are legally and financially existential. Nearly all of Musk’s companies face proliferating lawsuits alleging everything from labor violations to illicit stock sales, and gender discrimination. (A suit over a death linked to self-driving technology was settled earlier this year.) A friendlier government might delay or perhaps eliminate those threats to Musk’s empire, not to mention double down on the government contracts that Musk has secured for his businesses. Time will tell how influential Musk will be in a second Trump term. In the chaotic, infighting-filled first Trump Administration, plenty of figures who seemed to have Trump’s ear one day were estranged the next, including Peter Thiel, who was part of Trump’s 2016 transition team. Still, it’s hard to overstate the success that a Trump-Musk axis has already had in rebranding Trump’s image. As if to reaffirm a new closeness between the executive branch and Silicon Valley, a parade of other tech billionaires came forward online in the wake of Trump’s victory to kiss the ring. On Threads, Mark Zuckerberg posted, “We have great opportunities ahead of us as a country.” Jeff Bezos, having quashed a Kamala Harris endorsement at the Washington Post, now spoke up to congratulate Trump on his “extraordinary political comeback.” Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, posted on X, “i wish for his huge success in the job.” These tech barons are presumably hoping for Trump to aggressively pursue deregulation, including by reversing Biden’s antitrust efforts, making way for the mergers and monopoly consolidation that tech giants continue to thrive on. Silicon Valley has long believed that its companies can achieve more than the state; now may be their chance to experiment, with backing from the state itself. As Musk put it on X, “America is a nation of builders / Soon, you will be free to build.”

At the same time, there are likely to be many policies in a second Trump Administration that sit poorly in Silicon Valley. Many founders and employees in the tech industry are immigrants (including, it’s worth noting, Musk himself), and workers are anxious about how Trump’s plans for mass deportation might affect programs such as H-1B visas. The safety of children on social media, another of Trump’s concerns, is a problem that Meta has come to represent; if Musk wanted to mount an opposition to Meta, he could pressure Trump to act on that issue—not out of a desire to protect American citizens but in pursuit of personal advantage. If Musk gets to dictate the terms of the White House’s relationship to Silicon Valley, what incentive would he have to smooth the path for his rivals? Ultimately, Musk’s alliance with Trump seems based on a shared set of temperamental traits and personal fixations. Both men are impulsive and implacable, with a shared habit of spreading disinformation, amplifying toxic strains of the national discourse, and lashing out at their perceived enemies. They are two business titans best known not for all they’ve built but for all they want to tear down. If their stated priorities become policy, their bromance will involve the reckless dismantling of government agencies and the trampling of vulnerable citizens. Conflicts of interest will abound and corporate interests will always win out, especially Uncle Elon’s—at least until one of the famously mercurial men goes too far and the relationship inevitably implodes. As the past decade has proved, over and over, there can only be one Trump. ♦