By James McCabe
The year began with numerous grim reminders that the normalisation of the far right is accelerating. On 2 January, Elon Musk, 59% of space satellites, called for the King of England to dissolve the Westminster parliament. The same day, when many of us were either working or seeking some respite from the chaos of 2024, Musk was Tweeting “Free Tommy Robinson”.
Imagine if someone had told you in the 2010s that by 2025 the world’s richest man would be publicly extolling the virtues of English Defence League, fascist thug Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon), and calling for his immediate release from prison.
Corporate welfare safety net
You could be forgiven for harking back to a simpler time when Musk was just another nepo baby who generally shunned the limelight, despite the odd cameo in nerdy sitcoms and Hollywood films. He made an appearance in Iron Man 2 in 2010, for example. Back then, he was focused on presenting an inoffensive, clean-cut image to help him attain lucrative contracts from the US federal government to fund his prestige projects.
He now has at least 100 different contracts with the federal government, including tens of billions of dollars of state funding for his SpaceX rocket company. The financial security he experienced as the son of an emerald mine owner in his youth in apartheid South Africa has been superseded by the security the US government provides to his profiteering today. And behind the glamour of electric Cybertrucks and Mars exploration, he’s a racist, misogynistic, narrow-minded oligarch.
A master of disinformation
In July 2020, when many Twitter users called out the role of the US in an attempted coup in Bolivia, (home to some of the world’s largest reserves of lithium, used in electric car batteries), Musk’s response was: “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.” When racist riots erupted in Southport last year, Musk Tweeted that civil war in Britain was now “inevitable”. His propensity for alarmism was also on display at a hard-right festival in Rome where he claimed that the world’s population will be one-tenth of its size within three generations. In fact, the population is due to rise to ten billion by the year 2058.
However, he reached a new low with his fawning interview with German far-right AfD leader, Alice Weidel. He repeatedly underlined his recommendation for Germans to vote for the AfD, stating: “Only the AfD can save Germany, end of story!”. The two agreed on all major political issues: tax cuts for the rich, deportation of migrants, support for the Israeli state’s genocide in Gaza and so on.
Musk also agreed with Weidel’s outrageous claim that: “Hitler was a communist and he considered himself as a socialist.” The Nazis were rabidly and violently anti-communist in both actions and words. And like the far right today, they were funded by big business. US car manufacturer Henry Ford admired Hitler because his regime safeguarded and boosted the profits of German capitalism. The fortunes of many German billionaire families today can be traced back to the Nazis – some of whom have donated to the AfD.
Tesla’s an anti-union shop
For his part, Musk spent $277 million bankrolling Trump and other Republican candidates in the 2024 elections – a fraction of his obscene fortune of $437 billion. As a reward for his support, Trump has allowed him to sit in on meetings with many world leaders and he’s been living in a cottage in Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence for the past couple of months.
Like Trump, he’s anti-worker and anti-union to his core. In conversation with Musk before the election, Trump praised him for firing workers who threaten strike action: “You’re the greatest cutter… I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say: ‘that’s OK. You’re all gone.’”
Musk fired 75% of Twitter’s staff after his takeover, many after searching through the messages of workers to see who badmouthed him. Tesla is a non-unionised workplace and workers there are even banned from wearing union t-shirts. Trump and Musk are aspiring to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget. Anything close to this level of cuts would require the loss of hundreds of thousands of public sector jobs. These billionaires could be in for a surprise when public sector workers resist through strike action.
Corporate America goes MAGA
It’s scary to see how several white South African far-right billionaires like Musk, Peter Thiel and David Sachs have so much influence in the White House now. But what’s more worrying is that they are no longer fringe figures. The CEOs of Google, Amazon, Meta and Apple have each donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. Never have the words of James Connolly rang more true: “The day has passed for patching up the capitalist system; it must go.”
