I recorded an emergency “episode” of The Trillionaire Kill Chain this week because there was too much news in the world of the Trillionaire Kill Chain not to.
What I’ve learned has confirmed my belief that the work that I’m doing is the most important of my life. But the question we’re all obliged to ask in this moment: how much does what I’m doing here, on this particular project, matter?
And while I remain obsessively focused on trying to get Democrats to expunge the Elon Musk and Peter Thiel implants from our brains, the battle has changed.
We’ve been joined by a giant. Embarrassed that I had no idea it was coming! The future keeps working like that. And it features insights from Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors by Bluesky King E.W. Niedermeyer. Hallelujah.
The story people are starving for
So how did we get here, and what does it all mean? I have to go back to last night.
I was moved by an interview Jim Acosta did with Gil Durán, author of The Nerd Reich. Costa wondered if the story of billionaires buying democracy was too dark for people. Gil disagreed. He said the book is a bestseller because people are hungry for this story. They want to understand how the people they used to admire in Silicon Valley became democracy destroyers.
These are people who will send 14 million poor people to their deaths almost as a joke. People who want to mine the entire country, turn the rest of us into AI drones, and live forever as freaky eternal digital spirits while we serve them. You could call Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff have a book called Muskism. Gil’s book could be called Thielism. Together they explain how we got this fucked.
Maybe Musk, the movie, will make enough people care—as Elon douses the nation in the filth, the abomination, of an apartheid deadender spending tens of millions a week to swipe our neighbors’ votes and freedom. We never have to pretend it should be like this.
Just like Tesla: How Elon co-opted the right’s 50-year machinery to remake democracy
I describe the Trillionaire Kill Chain as the story of how Musk co-opted machinery Republicans had been building for fifty or sixty years to destroy democracy. He did it the way he found solar, space travel, EVs, and Neuralink: he found something already sitting around him and decided he could remake it into whatever he wanted.
The plan began right after Nixon was forced to sign the Clean Air Act into law by a vote of 375-to-1 (I get this wrong along with a lot of verbal chaff in the recording; sorry!). Republicans decided that if the courts wouldn’t approve what they wanted to do, it was useless, and courts could move fascism faster than anything. The fastest lever they found was campaign finance law, once protected by real coordination limits between candidates and outside money that a 2024 FEC decision gutted. I think you cannot tell the story of American fascism without telling the story of campaign finance law getting destroyed. I tried. You missed it. You’re busy. I get it.
Tesla Takedown-to-Wisconsin is the model, and elected Democrats are still sitting it out
I spoke with Evan Sutton, who organized the Tesla takedown, and he made one thing clear: elected Democrats would not get anywhere near it. A few exceptions only proved the rule. I call the Tesla Takedown the single most effective step in breaking the chill that had settled over the country in 2025.
It worked because it made non-cooperation the center of the movement, which I consider an extremely advanced resistance tactic. It educated the country about what DOGE was actually doing. It helped defeat Musk in Wisconsin and stopped him from buying a Supreme Court seat that would have handed Republicans the power to protect the worst gerrymander in the country. Democrats won that seat. Musk got too intimidated to try again.
Now he’s trying again anyway. But without showing up with his cheesehead.
Votesafe.org is the new playbook, and it’s already running
Judd Legum reported on votesafe.org, a fake voter registration site I believe Musk is using to funnel new, low-engagement voters into a system built to propagandize them directly. The strategy pulls the best data available from X, runs it through AI to draw connections to whatever issues someone cares about, and generates AI-created messages targeted at each person individually.
I think the biggest problem is that people don’t understand how most people actually learn about politics. Most people actively avoid politics entirely. The only way they absorb it is ambiently, through a health influencer, a podcast, or the sports they watch. That is exactly where Musk is spending money now, and Democrats have nothing running to counter it the way Wisconsin did in 2025.
The one fact-checker Trump can’t tire
I think there is finally a technology that can fact-check Donald Trump in real time. It’s the gas pump. I believe Democrats should win in 2026 because of it. I also warn the House could end up closer than anyone expects, close enough for Republicans to steal a handful of seats.
I want that warning heard now, because 2028 will be far harder to fight if Democrats never practice fighting at all.
Why Democrats won’t do it, and why that’s the whole problem
I lay out the case against taking on Musk directly: he’s so embedded in the Department of Defense, in NASA, in daily American life, that one tweet from him could put a member of Congress under permanent security threat for life. But I hope those fears shrink fast the moment every Democrat with an opponent funded by Musk starts calling him out by name.
My conclusion is blunt. If Democrats don’t take on Elon Musk, he will destroy the Democratic Party, probably just by destroying democracy along the way. Musk is not the only billionaire doing this. He is the one making it the path to power for every other billionaire watching. That is why I call it the trillionaire kill chain in the first place.
The Times They are a Choosing
I point to the anti-data-center backlash spreading through both parties as proof the lines are already being drawn, citing Sherrod Brown tying John Husted to data centers in Ohio while some Republicans start sounding like Democrats on the issue. Democrats have been bought by big tech for twenty or thirty years, back when their agendas lined up more closely. The times are shifting, and we can’t let big tech lose what should be an Iran-sized L for them.
Elon Musk didn’t have a clear radical-right agenda recognizable to most Americans until the early 2020s. He adjusted, the way all of us adjust, based on what he thought he could get away with. He got away with condemning 14 million people to death and was rewarded with a trillion dollars. Nothing about that record dissuades him, or anyone else watching him succeed. Alex Gibney’s new documentary Musk premiered in Venice this week, and the two-word summation from a journalist from the Hollywood Reporter who was at the premiere reveals a key takeaway: “We’re Fucked.”
I’m trying to finish a draft of the Trillionaire Kill Chain documentary before the election. With Gibney telling the story at a scale—and let’s be honest, quality—I could never even aspire to, I’m wondering if I should focus on other projects. Like Next Comes What, the SOURCE! app and project to save journalism/America, and videos from Marcy Wheeler. Most newsletter people just mostly newsletter!
I’ve been working for democracy full time since 2024. If you want to keep me on the job full-time, I just ask for $1 a month. Something sustainable that’s a vote of confidence as much as anything. My work continues regardless, with everything I have to give it.
But more importantly, here’s where I’ve landed: the story isn’t taken care of. Somebody still has to connect Musk to the whole machine built to destroy democracy around him. Gibney’s film is about Musk as an individual.
So I’m not racing to finish a full documentary before the election anymore. That launch moves to the run-up to 2028, after Gibney’s HBO premiere. A small school of dolphins trailing an ocean liner.
Mine picks up where his stops: the fifty-year machinery, the FEC ruling nobody was watching, Wisconsin, votesafe.org, the merger clause Tesla shareholders just approved. That’s a bigger story than one man. It needs an extra year to include what actually happens in the 2026 midterms instead of guessing.
The reporting on the Trillionaire Kill Chain keeps going. A companion piece drops alongside Gibney’s theatrical release, built to run in twenty minutes what his film had three hours and forty-five and still couldn’t cover.
All the incentives point away from making this argument. Nobody with an establishment platform is going to make it for us. Gibney isn’t a partisan trying to prevent or reverse autocracy as his daily practice. I am. That’s the whole reason this project still exists.
Thank you for your support. We’re trying to be part of the movement that forces Democrats to recognize we’re in a horror movie. Musk isn’t giving up, and he and Vance are decades younger than Trump. They get more time to spend our money, our power, and our democracy ruling us, unless we do everything we can now.
