Elon Musk’s right-wing cheerleaders are deeply offended by criticism of his trillionaire status
Elon Musk’s new status as the world’s first trillionaire has unsurprisingly generated strong criticism, much to the horror of his loudest fans, who view pretty much any criticism of Musk as an attack on freedom and prosperity.
Some Musk detractors lamented the very existence of a trillionaire as an obscenity, when millions of Americans live one broken bone or illness away from financial ruin. Surely if a rising tide lifts all boats, then one man becoming a trillionaire — roughly tripling his net worth since bankrolling President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign — ought to mean there’s enough wealth to trickle down to provide basic social services for the tens of millions of Americans struggling to make rent every month? Perhaps if one man’s businesses have been subsidized for years by billions of dollars from U.S. taxpayers, and whose net worth exceeds the GDP of all but 19 countries, then maybe there’s enough left over for average Americans to receive the kind of basic health coverage that’s a staple of every Western capitalist democracy but our own?
No! That’s just jealous, parasitic commie talk from people who hate “the accomplishments of great men,” say Musk’s right-wing fans — who are often beneficiaries of billionaires’ largesse themselves.
Among the self-parodic headlines: the National Post’s “Here’s how to properly love Elon Musk, the world’s greatest entrepreneur,” The Spectator’s “Why can’t Elon Musk’s critics just be pleased for him?”, The Federalist’s “Leftist Freak Out Over Elon Musk’s Trillionaire Status Embodies Their Hatred For Success.”
Joel Berry, former managing editor of The Babylon Bee (MAGA’s one-joke answer to The Onion), posted to X, “The government takes over one trillion every year from hardworking taxpayers to fund welfare recipients. Elon has never taken a single cent from me.”
In fact, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, — the cash payments that are commonly referred to as “welfare” — pays out just over $8 billion per year. Families below the poverty line receive anywhere between $162 to $915 per month, depending on the state, according to a 2024 report by the Congressional Research Service. Meanwhile “in 2024 alone, federal and local governments committed at least $6.3 billion to Musk’s companies, the highest total to date,” according to reporting by The Washington Post.
That’s just jealous, parasitic commie talk from people who hate “the accomplishments of great men,” say Musk’s right-wing bootlickers — who are often beneficiaries of billionaires’ largesse themselves.
The reality of one man being roughly three times richer than the next plutocrat is, as Musk is wont to say, “concerning.” That this man’s wealth is inextricably tied to businesses with sweetheart government contracts and miniscule tax rates, even more so. The fact that this same man is a manic poster on social media, where he frequently endorses racist tropes and amplifies right-wing conspiracy theories, is written off by many Musk apologists as just the price of working with a capitalist visionary. But Musk is legitimately dangerous.
After his money helped Trump take back the White House, the president authorized Musk to create the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which recklessly destroyed many legitimate agencies that provided real, tangible value to America and its security — and not just stock holders’ bottom lines. The destruction of the U.S. Agency for International Development (which had a budget of about $34 billion a year) is estimated to have led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, hindered America’s (and the world’s) ability to respond to public health crises (like the recent Ebola outbreak) and created a power vacuum in many parts of the world that was quickly filled by local warlords, religious extremist groups and China.
Musk is attempting to impose his extreme politics outside the U.S. as well. A giddy booster for the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, whose members he implored to get over their guilt for their nation’s not-too-distant Nazi past, Musk has since turned his sights on the U.K., where last year he told a crowd of over 100,000 at a far-right rally, “Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die, that’s the truth, I think.” Just last week, Musk egged on racist, far-right mobs rampaging through Belfast, even using his Nazi-friendly platform X to post locations for the mobs to organize.
The Verge recently published an article by TC Sottek titled, “The world’s first trillionaire is a killer.” This sparked performative outrage from some of Musk’s right-wing influencer pals, who accused the outlet of “hoping to inspire the next Luigi Mangione” and referred to Musk’s critics as “vile soul-sucking wreckers who despise all excellence.”
But Sottek makes a good case to back up the article’s provocative headline. Musk, he notes, called USAID a “criminal organization” that he was “feeding … into the wood chipper” — evoking a gruesome murder in the film, “Fargo.” Musk’s killing of USAID led to what experts estimate is close to a million deaths in a little more than a year, mostly children, due to preventable diseases.
Sottek continues:
The intentional destruction of the ability to save lives and reduce suffering is psychopathic behavior — the kind that would prevent any rational, kind person from giving power to anyone capable of it. But here we are. And while there has always been a class of mega-rich menaces, including horrible racists in power who are indifferent to suffering, we seem to be crossing the Rubicon with Musk. Few people in history, if ever, will have accumulated the same combination of wealth, media power, and government influence.
I’m having trouble spotting a falsehood in that passage. And I cannot take seriously the protestations from groupies of the richest and most powerful people in the world, who claim that strident criticisms of their heroes — including the use of labels like “Nazi” and “fascist” — are tantamount to inciting violence.
On Wednesday, Musk referred to the Federal Trade Commission “as modern day Mengeles, an utterly evil organization.” You see, the MAGA civility cops’ ethos holds that any comparisons between them and Nazis and killers should be criminalized. But at the same time, their enemies — including people just a little weirded out by the fact that the world’s first trillionaire is such an unstable and vicious person — are so dangerous that no softer descriptions will suffice.
That’s how they justify likening Musk’s critics to both Nazis and communists, while simultaneously claiming Musk’s life is threatened because those critics noted the fact that his reckless actions, in fact, did lead to pointless death and unspeakable destruction.
It’s hard to choose what’s more distasteful — treating the world’s richest man, whose wealth is increasingly tied to the fortunes of the U.S. government, as some kind of heroic, revolutionary figure, or whitewashing the consequences that his thoughtless, erratic, grievance-based decision-making has wreaked on some of the world’s most vulnerable people. Either way, Musk’s superfans continue to outdo themselves in the field of caping for power while somehow attempting to pose as “anti-elites.”
Anthony L. Fisher is a senior editor and opinion columnist for MS NOW.
