Elon Musk’s ascendancy exposes democracy’s frailties

The listing of SpaceX last week will almost certainly be remembered as one of the seminal market events of this crazed business cycle. Shares in Elon Musk’s rocket and artificial intelligence group soared nearly 20% on their Nasdaq debut, giving the company a total valuation of more than $2-trillion, and making it the sixth-largest public company on Earth by market capitalisation. After a week of volatility and doubt, the bulls are roaring back.

The fundraising haul, at $75-billion — potentially $86-billion, if underwriters exercise their “greenshoe” option — was the largest initial public offering in history. “It’s hard to believe that a little company that started in a warehouse in El Segundo is now going public [in] the largest IPO ever,” Musk said at SpaceX’s Starbase facility in Texas, as he rang the Nasdaq’s opening bell.

“If people had told me this was going to happen, I was, like, man, you must be smoking some really good crack, because I think this company is going to fail.” Wall Street and his legion of millions of retail investor fans clearly disagreed.

The immediate implications for markets are profound. SpaceX’s triumphant debut clears the path for Anthropic and OpenAI, both of which are preparing trillion-dollar-plus listings later this year. The AI bull run, far from running out of momentum, just seems to be getting going.

Musk himself is now worth more than $1-trillion, his SpaceX stake alone exceeding $800-billion. To put that in context, he could buy a middle-sized country. Or fund the Pentagon for a year. He is now worth roughly twice the entire GDP of South Africa. Maybe he will exact revenge on whoever bullied him at school by purchasing the place. He is, by any measure, the most consequential private citizen on the planet.

Musk v multiculturalism and liberal democracy

Which makes what he has chosen to do with his platform — and spare time — even more striking. With such an IPO on the go one might have expected Musk to be focused on getting this deal across the line. Yet, over the last week he seems to have been somewhat distracted. Instead of poring over IPO documentation, he has devoted many of his waking hours to stoking up racial hatred in Britain on his own social media site, X.

In the 10 days bracketing the listing, Musk has posted or reposted, to his 240 million-odd followers, more than 100 attacks on British multiculturalism. Among them, he has backed the extreme right Restore Britain party and its leader Rupert Lowe, supported the extremist Tommy Robinson, and endorsed calls for mass deportations of UK citizens.

The trigger was the death of Henry Nowak, an 18-year-old fatally stabbed in Southampton last December by a British Sikh, in circumstances where police initially believed a false account and handcuffed Nowak as he lay dying. The footage of his death is unbearably tragic. Police negligence — and the allegations of two-tier policing — should be investigated and fixed. The police must be held to account.

Nowak’s parents asked the public not to politicise their grief. Musk ignored them, wanting to turn Nowak into a kind of white George Floyd, the black American killed by police in 2020. There have been racially motivated murders of non-whites by whites in Britain, but Musk and the thugs he supports care about only one kind of victim, just as idiotic parts of the left care only about another.

Beneath a post calling for protests in Southampton, he wrote “RAGE” in capital letters. When a far-right account invoked the medieval Reconquista — the Christian expulsion of Muslims and Jews from Spain — in the context of a separate attack in Belfast, Musk responded with “Same” and two fire emojis. To a post demanding that “a vast number of people” be removed from Britain, he added his endorsement.

Regarding Restore Britain — a party that aims to ban halal and kosher, restore the death penalty and defund the BBC — he wrote: “Only Restore Britain can save Britain. It is the only way.” Non-existent a year ago, Restore Britain’s debut has been rocket-boosted by Musk on X to become a viable political force with nearly 100,000 members. Restore’s ideology is straight-up authoritarian. Musk wants it to run Britain, a country in which he has never lived and of which he is almost entirely ignorant.

Of course this is not confined to Britain, and these rants are only the latest in countless tirades on such topics. On South Africa, Musk has been a persistent amplifier of claims that white genocide is under way. He has boosted posts alleging that major political parties promote the extermination of whites, reacted to farm-murder memorials with language designed to evoke atrocity, and signed petitions against President Cyril Ramaphosa on the genocide claim.

His actions have spoken as loudly as his words. When at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, he dismantled USAID, the US development and emergency relief organisation, among countless other governmental bodies. As Bill Gates said to the Financial Times: “The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one.”

The target is democracy

None of this is incidental. It reflects a coherent, if alarming, vision; the deployment of unprecedented financial power and influence to promote an ethno-nationalist vision of politics that is simply incompatible with liberal democratic norms. Whether Musk holds these views from conviction or calculation is, in one sense, beside the point. The effect is the same. A man whose fortune was built off international capital markets and US taxpayer subsidies, and whose companies are staffed by engineers from every corner of the world, is now the single most influential voice promoting the idea that multiracial and multicultural democracies are failed experiments.

Markets, for now, are content to separate the businessman from the provocateur. SpaceX’s valuation suggests investors believe the rockets will fly regardless of what their owner rants about or dubious characters he endorses. That may be right. I have no idea whether Musk is an engineering genius, or just an outstandingly shrewd and lucky venture capitalist. The jury of scientific experts is divided on that question. What is clear is that he is a grotesque human being.

Rather, the question must be — beyond the stratospheric hype and stock market valuations — whether societies have any mechanism to hold a private individual of such wealth and reach to account. Thus far, the answer appears to be: not really. That, more than the SpaceX share price, is the reality we are forced to confront. DM