Elon Musk's White Nationalist Roots and Aspirations

In the mid-1990s, when I was on a Georgetown University History Department committee to hire an Early American historian, we drew some very strong candidates. One of them was Jill Lapore, then finishing her doctoral studies at Yale University. When Lapore gave a presentation that was unmistakably brilliant, some of us lobbied hard for her. Too many of our colleagues, however, could not see past her American Studies degree, and so we chose another candidate. That candidate proved to be a very fine hire, one who has distinguished herself in her own right in the field. Lapore ended up at Boston University, from where Harvard eventually brought her to Cambridge. She has become one of our most influential public intellectuals through her prolific histories, her columns in The New Yorker, and a podcast on the BBC. If we had hired her, we might well have fared no better than BU did. Still, I have often wondered what she would have meant to Georgetown, had we been able to bring her aboard. This is a long intro to noting that Jill Lapore, whom we spurned back in the Nineties at Georgetown, had an essay in the New York Times last week in which she proved anew why she is such an exceptional historian.

I mentioned that Professor Lapore has a podcast on the BBC. Its title is: “X Man: Elon Musk’s Origin Story.” Her essay in the Times capsulated for its readers Musk’s ideological roots, which provided some much-needed insight into the man who has by far been the most destructive of those waging unrestricted warfare on Trump’s behalf, not only against the law and institutions which have been the lifeblood of our democracy, but also against the global moral and economic order. And one needs to remind oneself, all this in less than three months.

To grasp Musk’s ideological roots, Lapore writes, one has to appreciate the career of his Canadian grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, in the early 1930s. Haldeman, “cowboy, chiropractor, conspiracy theorist and amateur aviator,” was, she tells us, a “flamboyant leader of the political movement known as technocracy.” The movement arose at a time when democracy, under the weight of the Depression, seemed to be on its last legs. Haldeman made no effort to save it. Instead he put his trust in technocratic autocracy. This variant of technocracy rejected the central tenet of democracy that all people are created equal. In democracy’s stead, technocrats called for nothing less than the demolition of government at the national level. They called for the political class to be replaced by one composed of scientists and engineers, particularly the latter, who alone had the training to deal with the modern forces disrupting the old order.

At the heart of technocratic ideology is a virulent inhumanity. It scorns those who care too much about others in need, those who marshal their resources to meet those needs, especially for those whom technocrats consider to be inferiors. And nothing is worse than a foreign inferior. It is also an ideology promoting a politics of intellectual conformity which calls for bannings of books and other media which dare to contradict its narrowly racist, misogynistic vision. Even to try to advance social justice, not only in regard to racial minorities, but to marginal gender groups Is to be an enemy to the order which technocrats are laboring to establish.

One of technocracy’s avatars was Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. In 1909 Marinetti wrote “The Futurist Manifesto” glorifying violence and masculine virility in opposition to feminist democracy and liberalism As his credo proclaimed in a proto-authoritarian apologia: “We want to sing the man at the wheel. . . . We want to demolish museums and libraries.” If you truly believe that you are starting a new order, you need to wipe out the past one; and these institutions are the irreplaceable repositories of the past. As Marinetti and many who followed the allure of technology could conclude: “we launch again our insolent challenge to the stars!” In mounting that challenge, no means is too extreme to bring down whatever establishment you have declared war upon.

Lapore, from her lengthy study of Joshua Haldeman, has concluded that his grandson, Elon Musk, has become a modern-day disciple. Musk, she reports, has revived “ideas about politics, governance and economics” which his grandfather pushed nearly a century ago. Rather than being the future-oriented savant that Musk presents himself to be, Lapore finds him a reactionary figure, clinging to a long discredited ideology. So Musk, like fellow veteran of Silicon Valley, Peter Thiel and his star pupil, JD Vance, believe that America’s current state cannot survive under democracy. So too, he readily declares, as the truest of technocrats, that the fatal flaw in western civilization is its empathy. There is ample evidence of his antipathy to “wokism,” which, in Musk’s case, largely revolves around transgender rights. A topic made all too real for Musk in the person of his trans daughter. While Musk has made no effort to hide his trans phobia, his racism has not gotten wide recognition. But, as Lapore shows, white supremacy, which was such a powerful motivator in his grandfather’s life, has had an important place in Musk’s as well. It was South Africa’s adoption of apartheid in 1948 as its best means for keeping its Black majority in check, that determined Haldeman to move from Canada to South Africa two years later. Completing the circle a half century later, Haldeman’s grandson left South Africa as apartheid was collapsing to seek a new life in the North America which his grandfather had abandoned to seek the white-dominant racial order that South Africa was offering. Now the grandson is playing a major role in bringing to life in North America the same kind of society that drew his grandfather halfway around the world to be part of.

Musk’s ideal society is a technocratic autocracy, which is anti-intellectual, anti-social, inhumane. It is America’s manifestation of neofascism. It breeds an inhumanity that can instantly stop life-saving aid from reaching famine areas, knowing that such terminations will bring disease and death on enormous scales and then justify it on the grounds that USAID, which is the supplier to a sea of NGOs, many of them religious, is “a criminal organization.” Or airily dismiss Social Security, which is the very lifeline of millions of America’s elderly, as “a Ponzi scheme.” Only a desouled creature could make such monstrous statements. And yet there is no accounting for Musk or anyone else willing to kowtow to Trump to stay in his good graces. Neither from the president who simply turned him lose into the bowels of the government to carry out there the bloodfest he had instituted at Twitter. In his malevolent recklessness, Musk eliminated no less that 75% of Twitter’s workforce. Now he has embarked on this cruel, campaign to reduce the federal bureaucracy to the state that Grover Norville could only dream about: to shrink it to the size it could be put into a bath tub and down the drain. Nor would Musk receive any check from the Republicans in Congress who cannot shake themselves loose from Donald Trump, the man who has staged a hostile takeover of their party.

Of the three branches, only the courts have been a considerable deterrent. In large part, however, the Trump administration has ignored the courts, just as Musk’s insidious DOGE gang has disregarded contracts, agreements, performance and so many other factors in chainsawing the agencies and departments to which they have been allowed access. The man for whom Elon Musk bought the presidency proclaims him “a great patriot.” This is the same man who declares Miles Taylor a traitor for having exposed him as an autocrat-in-the-making. Because a plurality of the American electorate chose not to heed the dire warning of Taylor and other real patriots, Trump’s mad drive for power and revenge becomes, by the day, more of a threat to all the rights we have taken for granted and a grave danger to destroy the very marrow of our democracy. All this would have greatly pleased Elon Musk’s grandfather, as it does his grandson. Thanks to Jill Lapore, we now have a better understanding of what drives Musk on his cruel, remorseless path to realize Trump’s malevolent aspirations.

April 11, 2025