How Elon Musk Fucked Up History

We knew buying Twitter was bad business, but we had no idea how good it was for fascism, which is now his primary business.

The purchase of Twitter would rank among the worst business decisions in history if the goal were business. I wrote those words three years ago today in a piece called “Elon Musk sucks at Twitter, succeeds at fascism,” which sums up the most prophetic words I’ve ever typed. But the big weakness in the piece was not seeing just how right I was.

What I said then and what every honest person knows now is that Musk wasn’t buying a company in any conventional way. He was trying to buy our democracy. What was obvious, even before his text messages confirmed all our worst suspicions, is that his objective was to elevate fascists and weaken democracy worldwide.

And I said it could help Republicans win in 2024. Nailed it. Yay me, I guess?

But what I didn’t get is how much richer this failed venture, in conventional terms, would make him. In the spring of 2026, as he sits on the phone with Donald Trump and Prime Minister Modi for some G-damn reason, his worth has exceeded $800 billion. That’s more than Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry Ellison combined, even before the SpaceX IPO, which can extend his wealth to over $1 trillion. He did that while destroying some 75% of Twitter’s brand value, wrecking the company’s financials so thoroughly that one of his other companies absorbed the junked asset to conceal the losses.

You could say he essentially wrote off the full $44 billion price of Twitter, as part of the already record amount he spent on electing Donald Trump. But it’s bigger than that. What the purchase of the world’s biggest microblogging site did was change Musk’s business model from the first-mover advantage + fraud of Tesla, combined with the taxpayer-funded recklessness of SpaceX, to fascism.

And fascism turns out to be the most profitable business in the history of the planet, at least for Musk, along with his buddies Trump and Vladimir Putin.

From bad guy to worst guy

The Trump presidency has not only helped the DOGE father live out some of his most sadistic, homicidal dreams. It has helped him unlock power and money beyond any normal human conception, power that first came to him because he bought Twitter, which helped him hijack reality, install Donald Trump, and harvest the chaos.

What Elon Musk has now is so much more than cash, crypto, or meme-stock value.

He sits now at the peak of the world, after a years-long quest for power beyond anything that should exist in a democracy, fueled by a rage that seems to have metastasized during Covid. That’s when he transcended a decade of fraud about self-driving cars, racist, anti-labor working conditions, and the whole “pedo” submarine thing into something awful that history cannot yet comprehend. Having that much time at home, when he might have actually come across his kids, was when we first got a taste of his overwhelming rage at his grown trans daughter, rage that she chose her own life as who she really is. So he chose rage, not against the machine but against everyone who tried to make the world a little better and welcoming to his daughter. And it wasn’t just X.

I’ve repeatedly told you that what Musk ran in 2024 wasn’t a campaign. It was a social engineering operation: Muslim voters in Michigan saw pro-Israel ads praising Harris for marrying a Jewish man. Jewish voters in Pennsylvania, targeted by the same operation, saw ads claiming she wanted to cut off arms to Israel. Every message — totally contradictory, engineered around each target’s specific fears — came from the same organization, routed through a dark-money structure designed to hide that fact. Your IT department sends you fake phishing emails to warn you about exactly this kind of fuckery. Musk did it to the whole country as X flooded the zone with shit and literally shouted “Squirrel!” so no one would have any sense of what the hell was going on.

In about three years, Elon Musk can be said to have broken history.

The scale of what he has done has unmoored us from the future we could have had, the end of America’s ability to claim any moral high ground about *anything*. And in a world where there is no America to at least pretend to care about democracy, everything is permitted.

X and the death of any will to govern the internet

When Musk completed his Twitter acquisition in October 2022, the platform wasn’t just large. It was structurally dominant in American political discourse in a way no other platform has ever matched. In 2022, nearly seven-in-ten journalists (69%) said Twitter was the social media app they used most or second most for reporting. It was where news broke, where politicians spoke, where the press pool gathered. Whoever owned it had a direct neural superhighway to the lobes of some of the most powerful voices on the planet.

He torched the content moderation, the verification system, and the trust and safety infrastructure. He wrecked not through incompetence, though incompetence was abundant, but through intention. Analyses found that verified users produced most of the viral misinformation about the Gaza war in its first week. Musk turned the platform into his own bully pulpit, amplified anti-immigrant rhetoric during the UK riots, spread disinformation about a government spending bill in more than 100 posts, and threatened political retribution against any Republican who didn’t comply with his demands. Some of those threats floundered, but when the largest GOP donor in the history of money, with the largest and most targeted PA system ever built for politics, posts anything, you know every Republican, or their top neo-Nazi staffer, is taking notes.

But the more serious damage isn’t what X became. It’s what X’s transformation made impossible. Especially when those powerful voices continued to use the site, and even Kamala Harris relied on X as a primary node of campaign messaging, as he continually professed that defeating her was a matter of civilizational survival and his freedom.

The moment the world’s richest man bought a major social platform and ran it as a personal fascism amplifier, the regulatory conversation died. Not because regulators gave up but because Musk demonstrated conclusively that the price of regulating tech is a war with the man who can spend $290 million on an election. Crypto, prediction markets, and every web3 scam product needed a permissive information environment to survive. They all got their regulatory holiday alongside him, leaving the rest of the world to check him and the lawlessness that led him to turn his AI into a machine that fabricated child sexual abuse material at scale.

The plan works because 61% of journalists still use X daily, often to harangue those who don’t use the app for being “out of it,” when the opposite is true. The platform warps what they see: its algorithm buries accurate information, surfaces Musk’s own posts first, and feeds journalists a version of public opinion engineered by the man who owns the feed.

They are simultaneously sucking in the water that Elon’s algorithms, which we know are rigged for his pleasure, pick for them, and vouching for the way X has laundered Musk into the de facto fash king of the world.

He’s not done “enough.”

On the books, Musk spent more than $290 million on the 2024 election — the largest individual political contribution in American history. Trump won Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona by a combined margin of roughly 200,000 votes. The question of whether Musk’s operation supplied the margin in a race that close is not answerable with certainty. The question of whether any campaign finance system that permits this is functioning as a democracy is.

He said afterward, “I think I’ve done enough.” He had not. He cut $10 million each to the Congressional Leadership Fund and the Senate Leadership Fund, dropped another $10 million into the Kentucky Senate race after a single dinner conversation, and was strategizing with JD Vance and the White House Chief of Staff over an evening at the Naval Observatory before his public reconciliation with Trump was even official. The machinery never stopped. It just got quieter.

Musk didn’t just buy an election. He demonstrated that elections are buyable at this scale regardless of how little you try to hew towards the law, and the worst that will happen is that Georgia’s election board will send you a strongly worded letter about it.

DOGE and the death of decency

By February 2026, DOGE cuts to foreign aid programs had led to an estimated 781,343 deaths. That number was retired then — a counter stopped, not because the dying stopped but because the count became too unwieldy to maintain in real time. USAID’s flagship HIV program, PEPFAR, has saved an estimated 26 million lives. Its collapse meant that in just three months, nearly 136,000 babies — about 1,500 each day — would be born with HIV as pregnant women lost access to transmission-prevention medication.

One million children would not be treated for severe acute malnutrition. Up to 166,000 people would die from malaria. New tuberculosis cases would rise by 30 percent. Two hundred thousand more children would be paralyzed by polio over the next decade.

Russian state media declared, “USAID is dead.” Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev publicly endorsed Musk’s dismantling of the agency. “Smart move by Elon Musk,” Medvedev said.

American taxpayers paid at least $475 billion for 100 work days of this. Not including Musk’s tax cuts. Not including new no-bid contracts for his companies. Not including the trillions that could be lost because this regime gutted the IRS.

And meanwhile, he has Donald Trump up on stage, saying now that America can’t afford daycare, Medicare, or Medicaid? Why? Because of his unwinnable war, and because we need to give Elon Musk even more tax cuts.

This is sadism as a service.

The multifarious federal investigations into Musk and the companies’ wrongdoings have essentially been erased for as long as this regime is in power, with Musk’s team doing some of the erasing themselves. DOGE carries on in spirit even after the brief spat between Trump and Musk, gutting anything it can that does good for the kids Musk claims he wants everyone to have.

The benefits of this kind of exploitation of our campaign finance system, rotted by the Republicans on the Supreme Court, to erase the consequences of corruption have been so vast for Musk that we cannot just expect him to spend even more, in worse ways, to win more elections in 2026 and beyond. We have to assume every evil billionaire in the country will do the same or far worse from now on. There’s no going back, not unless the people reject what has been done to them by one man with an agenda, born out of his hatred for his own child.

Henry Ford wishes

Three years ago, I compared Elon Musk to Henry Ford buying the Dearborn Independent to spread antisemitism — a rich man using purchased media as an ideological weapon. Ford used his press to distribute antisemitic pamphlets in all his dealerships. Musk bought the thought balloon of democracy. He then spent a quarter billion dollars on a presidential election so he could spend 100 days starving the programs that kept millions of brown and Black children alive. He did this while inviting white Afrikaners to come to America out of racist fantasies of “white genocide,” as brown refugees were rejected and brown skin was hunted across the US.

Henry Ford could only dream. (Though Ford did get to see the Holocaust in his lifetime, I remind myself as a note for how bad this can still get.)

What Musk has over Ford and the fascists of the past is a business model on American soil, one that exists beyond one regime, one that proves to every billionaire watching that the ROI on buying a democracy is infinite.

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