Would Donald Trump have won reelection if not for the backing of the world’s richest man? We’ll never know. But that man, Elon Musk, gave Trump more than $130 million via his recently founded America PAC. Now, as Trump begins to staff his administration, Musk has more influence than anyone. It would be hard to argue that it wasn’t money well spent.
Musk’s influence is already apparent. He has hardly left Trump’s side since Election Day. And on Tuesday evening, he was announced as the head of a new government “department”—the Department of Government Efficiency, or “DOGE,” a reference to a stale internet meme—with a broad, if also vague, remit to cut waste and transform the government.
Musk spent the final month of the campaign appearing constantly with Trump at rallies, where he jumped around onstage, told crowds he was “Dark MAGA” and, later, “Dark Gothic MAGA,” somehow managed to mess up the “USA” chant, and gave away $1 million checks to people who signed a pro-Trump petition. On this last point, Musk may have violated federal campaign finance law; on the others, Musk was—at best—an awkward figure.
“America is not just going to be great,” he announced at Trump’s now-infamous Madison Square Garden rally on October 27. “America is going to reach heights that it has never seen before. The future is gonna be amazing!”
Even before formally endorsing Trump in July 2024, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO purchased Twitter—which he subsequently renamed X—with the express purpose of amplifying right-wing content. He began using his personal account, for which he has over 203 million followers, to share reactionary views about illegal immigration, the declining American birth rate, trans people, and “the woke mind virus,” often dozens of times a day. An April 2024 investigation by NBC News found that, under Musk’s leadership, there were at least 150 “Premium” accounts—i.e., users who were paying a nominal subscription fee to boost their account—making explicitly pro-Nazi posts, many of which racked up millions of views. And a Washington Post analysis in October revealed that Republican-aligned accounts on X were getting far more engagement than Democrat-aligned ones.
Musk was rewarded for his service by spending election night with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, which he has reportedly barely left over the past week. Trump thanked Musk in his victory speech, calling him “a new star”—Musk has been a public figure for more than two decades and is undoubtedly one of the most famous people in the world—and a “super genius.” In the coming months and years, we’re sure to see even more of Musk, as Trump has promised him a possible Cabinet position: “secretary of cost-cutting,” which does not yet exist. Musk says he wants to slash the federal budget by a third and has welcomed as a necessity the economic depression such severe cuts would cause. As we prepare for a second Trump term, every sign suggests that Musk will act as a kind of shadow president, wielding vast power over the many areas of governance that Trump has no interest in. How did we get here?
We have the dot-com bubble to thank for elevating Musk to this position of unprecedented power. In the mid-1990s, after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, Musk moved to Palo Alto and did what many young men were doing then: He became a serial entrepreneur in the brand-new internet sector. The World Wide Web opened to the public in 1991 with a single website. By 1992, there were 10 websites, and by 1994, there were 3,000. In 1995, when Musk burst onto the scene, it became evident that the internet wasn’t just a fun new invention. It could make people very, very rich very, very quickly.
The dot-com bubble began on August 9, 1995, when browser company Netscape Communications had its initial public offering on Nasdaq. By the closing bell, the company was worth $58.25 a share and had a market value of $2.9 billion ($120.51 and $5.9 billion in 2024 dollars, respectively). Overnight, founders Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark became wealthy beyond their wildest dreams. Thus began an unprecedented speculative boom that would last until March 2000.
In 1995, Musk co-founded the company Zip2, an internet city guide. As he tells the story, he was so broke that he slept on the couch at his office because he couldn’t afford an apartment, showered at the YMCA, and shared a single computer with his co-founders.
“The website was up during the day and I was coding it at night, seven days a week, all the time,” Musk has said. “If you do the simple math, and say if somebody else is working 50 hours [a week] and you’re working 100, you’ll get twice [as much] done in the course of a year as the other company.”
In March 1999, at the height of the dot-com bubble, computer company Compaq acquired Zip2 for $307 million in cash, for which Musk received $22 million. He used some of that money to found X.com, an online financial services company. (Yes, his fixation on that letter goes back more than two decades.) In 2000, X.com merged with software company Confinity, which was renamed PayPal in 2001. PayPal had a lucrative IPO in February 2002 and, in July of that year, was acquired by eBay. According to CNN, this deal netted Musk, PayPal’s largest shareholder, $165 million, although the figure may be higher.
Throughout the 2000s, 2010s, and 2020s—long after the dot-com bubble burst in March 2000—Musk continued to leapfrog from tech company to tech company, consolidating his wealth. In 2012, he first made it to the Forbes billionaires list. By 2020, his net worth surpassed that of Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates. While most early dot-com wealth was erased, the bubble also propelled a new class of mega-billionaires to power. If you survived the early-2000s crash, you benefited enormously—and got to live through a long era of low interest rates after the 2008 economic crash that likely made you even richer. In 2024, the dot-com bubble has been largely memory-holed, but Musk, perhaps its biggest beneficiary, remains.
The dot-com bubble was a cultural event as much as an economic one. The press offered up glowing profiles of young start-up founders like Musk. It was this press coverage that helped create the trope of the start-up founder in the popular imagination: a young, ambitious, Bay Area nerd whose pure love of science and technology is justly rewarded with enormous wealth. The founder was surrounded by a utopian glow. He promised that the technology he was harnessing would do remarkable, transformative things (that it could also do horrible things was rarely mentioned). The way the media talked about the internet was giddy—giddy about the technology and, above all, giddy about the wealth it was creating.
A 1999 CNN segment shows a young Elon Musk receiving a McLaren he ordered to celebrate the Zip2 acquisition. “Back in ’95, there weren’t very many people on the internet,” Musk says, summarizing how he went from showering at the Y to buying a $1 million limited-edition car. “And certainly nobody was making any money at all. Most people thought the internet was going to be a fad.”
As the car is unloaded from a delivery truck, Musk, in his ill-fitting blazer, watches. He appears boyish, dumbstruck. “Wow,” he says to his then-girlfriend. “I can’t believe it’s actually here. Pretty wild, man.”
There is a photo—widely circulated on social media—that shows Elon Musk and Peter Thiel in 2000. They each lean on one side of a boxy desktop computer, smiling sheepishly. Thiel wears a red and blue striped rugby shirt, and Musk wears a blue button-up. Musk, not yet 30, has a receding hairline and chipmunk cheeks. The two men look harmless, even cute. They do not look like they want to platform white nationalists, gut the federal government, or bring indentured servitude to Mars.
The media lovefest extended long after the dot-com bubble burst—indeed, it outlasted many of the companies lauded by the press during that first online boom. Musk routinely made guest appearances on TV shows aimed at nerdy, vaguely liberal viewers. He had a cameo on The Simpsons in January 2015, on The Big Bang Theory in November 2015, and on the Big Bang Theory spin-off Young Sheldon in November 2017. As late as 2019, he appeared on Rick and Morty. Last fall, Walter Isaacson—hagiographic biographer of Steve Jobs, among others—released a largely laudatory biography of Musk that hailed him as a new titan of industry.
This type of media coverage—both of Musk specifically and of Big Tech more generally—papered over the fact that Silicon Valley has, for decades, been a hotbed of right-wing ideology, eugenics, and antidemocratic sentiment. It’s no coincidence that Elon Musk is obsessed with IQ and human reproduction: Stanford University, located in the heart of Silicon Valley, was a hotbed of early eugenics research and activity in the early twentieth century, as Malcolm Harris described in his book Palo Alto.
Recently, The New York Times reported that Musk has offered his semen to acquaintances in an effort to improve the national birth rate (a claim Musk has denied). Again, there is a real through line here. Starting in the late 1970s, optometrist Robert Graham started a sperm bank for Nobel laureates and people with high IQs, chock-full of emissions from Silicon Valley luminaries. Among them was Silicon Valley godfather William Shockley, who believed that Black people were less intelligent than white people.
The conservative Hoover Institution was founded at Stanford in 1919 by alumnus Herbert Hoover, who is most famous for his presidential administration’s libertarian nonresponse to the Great Depression. Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the Hoover Institution has played a key role in staffing Republican presidential administrations and in incubating conservative policies that concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a tiny minority. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley has long been deeply entwined with the United States military.
Today, some of Musk’s liberal fans have felt betrayed by what feels, to them, like a heel turn.
“I thought you were rational, Elon,” wrote my own grandmother in a recent Facebook post denouncing him. It’s a common enough sentiment. Musk’s association with technology and his media-created public image as a kind of real-life Tony Stark—a brilliant, edgy inventor who was nevertheless focused on the public good—caused many to see him as an ally, or at least as someone interested in building a better world.
My grandmother is a straight-ticket Democratic voter who had a successful career as a computer coder in Palo Alto and D.C. before retiring in the early 2000s. She was also, until just recently, an Elon Musk superfan, believing him (and Silicon Valley more generally) to be synonymous with the cause of science and technology, which, to her and many other liberals, are also synonymous with progressive values. My grandmother hates Trump and now struggles to make sense of the fact that her favorite public figure just helped her least favorite public figure get reelected.
But “Dark MAGA Elon” isn’t a new identity. It’s not even a change of direction. Musk is simply revealing his true nature. And it’s not just him. Peter Thiel has long criticized democracy, funded right-wing causes, and even complained about women’s suffrage. And original dot-com poster boy Marc Andreessen, who now runs one of the most influential venture capital firms in the industry, released what is basically a techno-authoritarian-futurist manifesto in 2023. Then, this past summer, Andreessen announced he would endorse Trump. Twenty-five years after the dot-com bubble, the mask is finally off of Silicon Valley. What we’re seeing now from Elon and others is its true face.