Elon Musk Is Putin’s Best Weapon
Elon Musk Is Putin’s Best Weapon
The world’s richest man is coordinating with the world’s most dangerous dictator.
THERE IS PLENTY UNPRECEDENTED about the 2024 presidential election. For the first time in American history, a twice-impeached convicted felon has a good shot of winning the White House. Not only does Donald Trump promise to enact authoritarian policies reminiscent of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary and Recep Erdoğan’s Turkey, but he would bring more foreign financial entanglements than any prior presidency—creating untold opportunities for influencing his administration.
And yet, for all of these unprecedented elements, there’s one other figure whose involvement in the 2024 presidential race is just as unprecedented—and, arguably, even more concerning: Elon Musk.
Musk’s sudden embrace of Trump raises a host of concerns about the health of American democracy and about American policy writ large. Whether calling for the purposeful crash of the American economy, or taking the lead on stripping the federal government of both talent and funding, Musk’s meteoric ascent in Trump’s circles and his troubling antics have drawn attention away from an increasingly addled—and even, at times, increasingly boring—Trump.
Musk’s rank partisanship is, in a certain sense, unsurprising. The business magnate has been steadily circling the fever swamps of Trumpism, descending further into the muck of conspiracy and paranoia that has propelled Trump and his followers for years. Where Musk once stood aloof from politics, and from the kind of rancid nativism that undergirds Trumpism, he’s now embraced the xenophobia and outright racism around which Trump has built his political career. Musk may not be a fascist, per se—but he’s certainly been willing to back, with all of the tools at his disposal, the most fascistic leader the United States has ever seen.
Yet even amid all of that—and even amid Musk’s transformation of X (formerly Twitter) into a fetid sewer of disgust and disinformation—the most concerning elements of Musk’s role in Trump’s campaign, and in Trump’s potential second administration, have arguably nothing to do with Musk tanking the American economy or causing what he calls “hardship” by gutting the federal government. They have instead to do with underremarked revelations from last week: As the Wall Street Journal reported, Musk is in “regular contact” with Russian despot Vladimir Putin, acting as a back-channel with Moscow.
None of this will shock those following Musk’s trajectory. For years, he has increasingly regurgitated Kremlin talking points, especially regarding Ukraine. In late 2022, with Russian troops starting to be pushed out of much of eastern Ukraine, Musk began broadcasting Kremlin talking points to halt Ukrainian advances. He started peddling Russian propaganda claims that Ukrainian territories like Crimea are “absolutely seen as a core part of Russia by Russia”—and that Russia would resort to nuclear war if Crimea was threatened by Kyiv. He further peddled a supposed “peace plan” that would not only return Ukraine to neutrality—the same neutrality Ukraine enjoyed when Russia first invaded in 2014—but further force Ukraine to give up its claims to Crimea.
All of it added up to a sudden pro-Kremlin shift in Musk’s public rhetoric—and a complete shift away from the backing for Ukraine he’d initially exhibited. For those familiar with the region and Russian politics, Musk’s additional calls to have Ukrainian water flow to the peninsula, while also dubbing Ukraine’s claims to Crimea as “Khruschev’s mistake,” were immediate red flags, directly parroting Kremlin rhetoric. “It’s very clear that Elon Musk is transmitting a message for Putin,” Russia expert Fiona Hill said at the time. Soon thereafter, we learned that Musk had specifically blocked a Ukrainian military mission from targeting the peninsula, with Musk waffling in the face of Russian nuclear threats—arguably the only time Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling has actually worked.
Now we know how, and why, Musk suddenly lurched toward supporting Putin—and why he’s continued down that path since. As the Journal reported, Musk has spoken multiple times, including this year, with high-level Russian officials—including Putin. In addition to pushing the kinds of talking points Musk then regurgitated, the Kremlin further encouraged Musk to block his Starlink satellites from operating over Taiwan, “as a favor to Chinese leader Xi Jinping.”
Precisely what all of Musk’s conversations with Moscow entailed remains unclear, or whether the American government was even aware that these conversations were taking place. (“Several White House officials said they weren’t aware of” the conversations, the Journal reported.) It’s also unclear what, if any, classified secrets Musk may have shared with Moscow.
What is clear, however, is that all of this—the back-channel phone calls, the verbatim talking points, the enmeshing of Musk and Trump as the latter barrels toward the presidency—is all entirely without precedent. In the entire sweep of foreign influence and foreign interference efforts in American history, we’ve never seen a foreign government cultivating a figure like Musk—if only because, in many ways, we’ve never seen a figure like Musk previously, with this much wealth and this much sway over a prospective president.
I should know; as the recent author of a book on the history of foreign lobbying and foreign influence campaigns in the United States, there’s never been anything—and certainly nothing as successful—like what we’ve seen with Moscow and Musk. Yes, we’ve seen the Kremlin cultivate plenty of Americans in the past, going all the way back to the Alaska Purchase. And the past decade has seen a deluge of Kremlin recruitment of Americans across the board, from evangelical groups to the National Rifle Association to conservative podcasters. Elsewhere, we’ve seen foreign dictatorships like the United Arab Emirates and China increasingly target American billionaires in their influence networks—some of which have succeeded, in terms of policy outcomes, far beyond what Moscow ever saw.
But the Kremlin-Musk nexus is sui generis. The magnitude of Musk’s wealth, the key economic and American national security vectors his companies represent, the fact that he’s set to puppeteer a potential President Trump—all of it adds up to “something that we’ve never really seen before,” as Hill added this week.
It is, in many ways, an oligarchy gestating in real time, especially if Trump wins next week. It is an opening to influence American policy beyond the Kremlin’s wildest dreams. And it is what an implosion of democracy—this marriage of political power and corporate heft, ensconcing and entrenching illiberal forces in Washington and around the world—looks like. Small wonder that the regime in Moscow is frothing in excitement at the prospects of another Trump presidency, and of having their man—or men—in the White House once more.
 | A guest post by
|