Elon Musk and his government efficiency department have been spreading through the federal government. But before he left his team DOGE accidentally ignited nuclear security workers and declare that he loved Donald Trump “so much that a righteous man can love another man,” he supported Barack Obama.
That is to say, Musk is a complicated, mercury man. To better understand it, seven Vox writers tell us what they have learned that helps them understand the billionaire.
A man with extraordinary danger tolerance
According to his biographer Ashlee Vance, Musk earned about $ 250 million, or $ 180 million after taxes, selling Paypal to Ebay. He then returned and threw money into new companies: $ 100m for Spacex, $ 70 million per Tesla, $ 10 million for Solarcity. “In short in building a current machine that destroys money, Musk could not have chosen a faster way to destroy its wealth,” Vance writes. Elaborate gambling, of course, but could easily have gone bankrupt. The appetite for danger extends to his personal life. In one of his birthday holidays, Musm two had a knife knife knife while he was blind, and made himself face against a 350 pound Sumo Wrestler.
—Dylan Matthews
In Hindsight, Musk’s quarrel for 2018 with a British cave explorer may have predicted the darkening of his politics.
That year, 12 boys and their football coach were trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand. Elon Musk offered to help the Thai government rescue attempt by contributing a mini-submarine. But the authorities considered Musk’s offer impractical and rejected it.
An international team ultimately rescued the boys. And in a later interview, a British cave explorer who would help in that effort, Vern Urnsworth, said that Musk’s offer “had absolutely no chance of working” and that Mogul had no conception of how the cave fragment was. “
Musk responded by calling Unsworth a “pedo” and saying he would concrete before the British diver was a predator, a claim for which the billionaire had no evidence.
This incident found that Musk is extremely sensitive to personal attacks and willing to show defamatory lies to those who concern it. If you are willing to declare a children’s savior a pedophile because he depreciated your mini-health, then how can you respond to a democratic president who prohibits your company from a summit of electric vehicles?
In any case, now that he is a political crusader, Musk has reduced his production of ardent and unfounded accusations. He has accused British politicians of strengthening the “genocide of rape” simply because they favored the investigation of children’s sex abuse rings at a local level than a national. He has absurdly argued that the Democratic Party imported illegal immigrants in 2024 into a plot to steal US elections. And he has claimed that the US government has paid the reuters media millions of dollars to be involved in “large -scale social fraud” – though in reality, Trump’s first administration had contracted with Thomson Reuters special services to combat internet attacks using “deceiving social” tactics.
Musk has long been a liar with thin skin. This was once a problem for British cave divers; Now, it’s a problem for the world.
– Levitz iRik
Do not underestimate the obsession with the “smart mind virus”
There has been a lot of speculation about what Musk pushed to cast himself into politics to such an extent – his wealth, go to March, etc. – but I think his obsession to overcome what he calls “the virus of the mind” is really important. Like many, he was quite recently radicalized by the country’s left change in identity matters (he has quoted the distrust of doctors describing the care of gender affirmation for his trans daughter, whom he has since fallen out) and his behavior suggests that he really believed that changing that change is one of the main causes of life.
This is what he tried to do on his Twitter and, in some sense, is what he is trying to do in Doge by attacking progressive institutions such as nonprofits, universities, media and “deep state”. And unlike many of Trump’s first advisers, Musk has both the courage to refuse legal care and the ability to understand how to make things really happen-no one would expect him to effectively capture the levers of power within the government that allowed his engineer of the massive vacation team of civil servants and block him. He is a devastating ball against those standing on Trump’s path.
—Andrew prokop
Elon i got the blinders in the bad
In the half decade I have been covering Elon Musk and his companies, it has been extraordinary to see how much this man’s worldview has become in an echo room. Things worsened when he bought it. I’m talking about Twitter, now X, and I’ve been asked every day if Musk is looking for information beyond what he sees in his food or reactions beyond what appears in his mention.
This is the deep territory of the brain, and what is happening at X seems to be, to some extent, informing Musk’s plan to disassemble the federal government’s workforce. Of all the accounts, Musk’s behavior is a realization of the wing -wing mentality that he has been cultivated on his social media platform, a feedback loop that is increasingly out of contact with what is happening with the lives of daily Americans. People used to say what happens on Twitter only to other people on Twitter. Now, thanks to Musk and his crowd, it is forming the future of the United States.
—Adam Clark Estes
A “male energy” sample
Musk and his allies are turning Dei’s criticism into a traditional masculine protection, where care and consideration are reassessing as weaknesses and signs of losers. According to this framework, the priority of diversity is adapted as guilty why we are failing today.
When Mark Zuckerberg Meta said companies need more “masculine energy” because corporate culture has become “neutral cultural”, he was expressing a growing Republican feeling. The latest survey data show that 79 percent of Republican men and a 67 percent of Republican women now believe that “society has become very soft and feminine” – a massive blow since 2011. What began in response to specific diversity initiatives is evolving in a broader ideology in which questioning the risk of muscle style is not just bureaucratic-is feminized. While this attitude is increasingly traversing businesses and the government, prudence is becoming the fastest way to firing.
–Rachel Cohen
Is looking to take advantage of its last end
While Doge receives an electric saw in the federal workforce, Musk is using his power to intervene in investigations and regulatory battles affecting his companies while leading billions in lucrative contracts towards his business.
His Social Media Page X pressured Ad Giant Interpublic in buying more X -advertising, while warning of federal intervention in a planned $ 13 billion union with its Rival omnicom group, according to Wall Street Journal reports. The Rocket Rocket Spacex company wants to lower lucrative grants for Mars missions, while its Starlink subsidiary is aiming to undertake the contract to adjust the FAA communication systems.
A probe in the company of the muscles of the Musk’s brain computer, the neuralralink is raised in the air after those FDA investigators were fired (some were asked to return). New emissions rules and tariffs can benefit Tesla on its competitors. And while the sales of the car company in Europe have fallen among the growing protests, a customer financial protection office can no longer investigate hundreds of complaints in Tesla.
Similarly, fires on the National Labor Relations Board have prevented the agency from deciding on investigations in Musk’s companies. The list of muscle conflicts of Musk continues to increase.
—Avishay Artsy
The shares are different now
A repeated theme in history about Elon Musk: People tell him that something is impossible or very dangerous, and then he does it anyway. Sometimes it is an embarrassing, safe failure, but about half of the time he seems to manage to withdraw it, and in the private sector more successes than pay for failures. Spacex’s story in particular is full of days that stayed close to fear while Rockets, against their expectations, really worked.
The problem is that in government, Musk has moved from a world where making half the time impossible is a tremendous achievement for a world where failure to do the other half of the time means that the catastrophic number of people dies. If Pepfar grant cancellations, malaria programs and childhood vaccinations around the world are not returned, Musk’s last gambling will appear on global mortality charts as one million additional deaths each year.
—Kelsey pepper
This story originally appeared in Today, explainedDaily Vox flag bulletin. Sign up here for future publications.