This Friday, SpaceX will execute its initial public offering. The company has set a share price of $135; that would put its value at $1.77 trillion, making it the largest IPO in history. On Wall Street they are practically vibrating with excitement, as banks and investment firms compete to get in on the action. Demand for the shares is reportedly off the charts. The IPO will likely make CEO Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire.
Some investors consider Musk a genius and a visionary; others just want a piece of the cash grab. But all of them are pretending that this IPO can be separated from the repugnant things about Musk — his promotion of white supremacy and antisemitism, the poison his social media network pours into global debate every day, the damage he has done to the federal government. None of that exists in a separate sphere from his businesses. It is not a hobby or a sidelight. It is the very heart of who he is and the world he is seeking to create. Musk and his IPO are where greed meets hate, and that stain should be on anyone who participates.
Musk has turned the social media network formerly known as Twitter into the most important amplifier of hatred in the world today.
This week, ahead of the IPO, Musk encouraged what became an anti-immigrant pogrom in Belfast. This horrific series of events began when an immigrant in Northern Ireland was charged with attempted murder — an event that was caught on video. Far-right provocateurs in Great Britain and elsewhere immediately called for anti-immigrant protests, which Musk used his X account to amplify to his 240 million followers. When a far-right politician pledged “to prosecute officials and politicians who knowingly placed dangerous third world savages in our communities,” Musk replied on X, “This is the way.” He also shared a post announcing locations for anti-immigrant protests and a post from the far-right Restore Britain party that said, “Do not make peace with evil. Destroy it.”
Later that day, masked men rampaged through a Belfast neighborhood, burning cars and setting fire to houses where they believed immigrants lived. “As a woman from an ethnic minority background looked down from an upstairs window, some of the men rushed the front door and broke it down,” The Guardian reported. “As they stormed the property, some claimed to be ‘liberating’ it. Graffiti nearby demanded ‘local homes for local people.’”
Musk denies that he promotes violence. But he has turned the social media network formerly known as Twitter into the most important amplifier of hatred in the world today. This is hardly the first time the richest man on the planet was an awful human being. Henry Ford, for instance, was a hateful antisemite; Adolf Hitler decorated his office with a picture of Ford, who published and distributed works like “The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem.” But the automaker’s reach pales in comparison to what Musk can do with X.
After Musk bought the platform (and later rolled it into his artificial intelligence company, xAI), he dismantled many of its guardrails against disinformation and hate. In short order, neo-Nazi and other far-right accounts began to flourish on the site. I certainly experienced it. Thanks to writing on the internet for decades, I have thick skin. But when my ordinary comments about politics started being greeted with “Get in the oven, Jew,” I decided I had had enough. I left X, which I haven’t regretted for a moment.
This was a feature of X, not a bug, and it is reflected in Musk’s personal drift to the right. An analysis earlier this year by The Guardian found that Musk “posted about how the white race was under threat, made allusions to race science or promoted anti-immigrant conspiracy content on 26 out of 31 days in January.” A longer examination by The Washington Post in April found that Musk had made “posts about race and his concerns about perceived threats to Whiteness” hundreds of times in recent months, at a dramatically accelerated rate from his previous dabbling in white supremacy. Offline, Musk threw up a stiff-armed salute at Trump’s inauguration, and he has long promoted the Nazi-aligned Alternative für Deutschland party in Germany.
Let’s not forget the wreckage left by Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
Then there’s Grok, xAI’s chatbot. From its beginning, Musk specifically positioned Grok as a rebuttal to “woke nonsense” from other AIs. Last summer, xAI had to roll back a Grok update and delete “inappropriate” posts last summer after the chatbot started spewing antisemitism and dubbing itself “MechaHitler.” People have used Grok to produce millions of sexualized images of real people, including children. (In a statement at the time, xAI said, “We take action against illegal content on X,” such as by suspending accounts and working with authorities.)
Earlier this year, Musk merged xAI into SpaceX, and now Grok is at the heart of the SpaceX IPO. In its propsectus, SpaceX claimed “the largest actionable total addressable market (‘TAM’) in human history. We estimate that our quantifiable TAM is $28.5 trillion.” But $22.7 trillion of that estimate comes not from anything space related, but from “enterprise applications” of AI — in other words, businesses spending money to use Grok.
And let’s not forget the wreckage left by Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency. This assault on the capacity of the federal government left agencies dismantled, sensitive data compromised and thousands of committed civil servants purged. Immense damage has been done by the destruction of the U.S. Agency for International Development, the world’s largest foreign aid agency, which Musk spoke gleefully of “feeding … into the wood chipper.” The toll is mind-boggling. Hundreds of thousands around the globe have already died because of the rapid withdrawal of food and medical aid. The devastation will compound as time goes by. One study published in The Lancet projected that by 2030, more than 14 million people will have died as a result of the shutdown of USAID, including 4.5 million children. A study by the Center for Global Development estimates between 670,000 and 1.6 million lives lost annually due to the cuts.
SpaceX doesn’t have to bring in fantastical profits to work out well for early investors; all that’s necessary is that the hype machine keeps rolling so they can offload the shares — and the risk — to a steady supply of new investors. That machine is wholly dependent on Elon Musk. But buying into Musk means buying into the future he is trying to create, a future in which government’s ability to protect the public interest is crippled, inequality worsens, AI slop drowns the internet and the ideology of hate prevails. If you invest with him, that’s what you’re investing in.
Paul Waldman
Paul Waldman is a journalist and author focused on politics and culture.