The time to call out Elon Musk is now, and always
Elon Musk made the biggest bet in the history of politics. Literally.
He spent more money than anyone has ever spent trying to save the Republican trifecta that had granted him powers no oligarch had ever enjoyed in American history. In addition to giving him temporary control of the presidency for a few months, the Republican regime canceled vast investigations into his wrongdoings and cleared his glide path to becoming the first trillionaire in human history.
Hoping to pay them back and to continue reaping spoils unlike anyone has ever reaped before, he tried to buy the election the way he did for Donald Trump in 2024. But this time, instead of riding the winds of inflation and Trump’s unconscionable skill at tearing incumbents apart for things he is far more guilty of, he had to run on Trump’s record. And for most Americans, Donald Trump’s record was losing a war that drove gas and energy prices up to levels they couldn’t ignore and then demanding monuments in return.
Musk made this bet because he understood his behavior could have consequences. And the only thing standing in the way of those consequences is the Democratic Party.
Let’s take a quick detour to think a little bit about what’s going on with Jensen Huang. A tech CEO of one of the most vital companies to the American economy has been caught in both infidelity and scandals that suggest possible disloyalty, or at least foolishness that benefited one of our rivals. Any honest adult would admit that what Jensen Huang did was vile to his wife and potentially disastrous for his country. And so he was effectively forced to resign. And any honest person would be forced to admit that whatever Huang did, Elon Musk does worse on a pretty much daily basis, often before breakfast.
A recent example of this would be how he throttled Ukraine’s access to the satellite servicesthat taxpayers are funding while taxpayers are engaged in the effort of not letting Vladimir Putin conquer Ukraine. While taxpayers are engaged in that effort, clearly, Donald Trump and Elon Musk are not. Zelensky said on November 12 that the restrictions had returned, which SpaceX denies.
Just look at Phillips O’Brien’s recent piece describing the negotiations taking place right now between Donald Trump’s bumbling cronies Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, Ukraine, and Russia. We see Putin making demands that are as bad as, or worse than, what he made in 2022, when he thought he would conquer Kyiv in three days.
You may not have even come across the outrage that Europe and anyone paying attention to this debacle is experiencing while watching the Trump team try to pay off Putin. Obviously, this is for the help in the 2016 election, the quo to the quid pro quo offered then. Clearly, the Trumps and their business associates sense they have a limited time in which they can be paid off.
They refuse to let the massive rejection by the American people, the greatest rejection since Watergate, get in the way of collecting their treasure. And Musk just seems to be on Putin’s side, the way he’s on Trump’s side, not out of any loyalty but out of a shared agenda to replace democracy with domination by an untethered elite.
That domination by an untethered elite is exactly what voters rejected in Texas earlier this month.
The biggest chunk of Musk’s bet was spent trying to keep James Talarico from heading to the US Senate. This effort failed so massively that Democrats not only won the Senate seat but also every statewide office. This looks less like a casual midterm rejection of a party and more like what Republicans have feared most: the possible beginning of Texas resembling California far more than Florida.
And what James Talarico did is what Democrats in Wisconsin did in 2025 during the peak of DOGE’s insanity and the Tesla Takedown backlash to it. He took the money Musk spent and turned it against the oligarch. I’d forgotten that, just days before the election, Marcy Wheeler told me she thought Talarico had done an even better job than the Wisconsin Dems, who I felt set the standard with their People v. Musk campaign.
Talarico not only called out the atrocity of one person being able to spend this much money to influence democracy, something voters despise whenever asked directly about it. He also connected Musk’s migration to Texas, to avoid California’s attempts to hold him to any sort of societal obligations, to Ken Paxton’s similar path to becoming a Texan.
"Ken Paxton is not one of us,” he said. “He's not even from here. He moved here from California just like Elon Musk."
This slight turn toward nativism activated a new sort of pride in the Lone Star State, which has been reliably red since Karl Rove built the foundations of the current chokehold in the 1990s. Of course there were many other factors in voters’ rejection: the GOP’s stands on issues ranging from data centers to vouchers to randomly saying racist things about South Asian students. That infraction even led Karl Rove himself to say he would vote for a Democrat for statewide office, the first time in more than 30 years.
Talarico's success in using aikido to make Musk’s hundreds of millions of dollars a millstone around the GOP should not be seen as a freak occurrence. Musk is attached to every Republican on every ballot in America, as the largest single sponsor of the party in the party’s history.
And Jon Ossoff in Georgia has shown us how you can use that weight to drag your opponent into infamy.
To be fair, Ossoff was gifted with a particularly horrible opponent chosen personally by Donald Trump. Mike Collins, with a son-in-law who promoted white nationalist posts and a former staffer who messaged with avowed white supremacist Nick Fuentes, became the perfect piñata for Ossoff to bash relentlessly. Ossoff did it without any of the tentativeness that, in many people’s minds, marks the modern Democratic Party.
But verily, I tell you that every Republican has connections so vile they could be used to destroy them in their campaigns. You could point to Elon Musk throwing out two Sieg Heils to celebrate installing Donald Trump as president. Days later, he spoke to a group of German fascists about the need to be proud to be German, with obvious overtones of embracing the country’s Nazi legacy. You can point to the effort, designed seemingly to please just Elon Musk, of importing almost exclusively white South African Afrikaners as refugees. Meanwhile, researchers estimate millions of Black and brown people will die due to cuts made possible by Musk himself. Then there are the various white nationalist pleas toward violence Musk makes on a regular basis on his personal website, which he has engineered to be one of the largest vectors for spreading Nazism since the end of World War II. It is the only major platform that invited Nazis it had banned to come back.
These are disgusting things, more disgusting than even Mike Collins himself could be accused of.
Yet we don’t really hear Democrats calling out Musk, not for his hate, not for his betrayal of Ukraine and enabling of Putin.
Even Talarico has been careful to make it known that he supports Musk as a businessman.
And it’s true that as a businessman, Musk has been more successful than any human who has ever lived. And he’s done it on the backs of taxpayers and, as E.W. Niedermeyer has been chronicling for more than a decade, fraud. That leaves us in a situation where America itself is now invested in that fraud. Our space program essentially cannot function without a company that includes not just SpaceX but also X, formerly Twitter, a right-wing propaganda machine whose Grok chatbot generated sexualized images of minors.
These are horrible things. These are things that every Democrat should be calling out, and every Democrat should be recognizing that if we don’t destroy Musk and his power and willingness to destroy the Democratic Party, he will eventually win.
We cannot expect every election to take place in the wake of Donald Trump, figuratively and almost literally pooping in the Washington Mall’s reflecting pond.
Musk, based on typical life expectancy, will be at this for decades. And he will only get better at polluting minds and buying votes. His shamelessness will only harden with his vices and resentments.
The risks to this are immense. In the short term, his sabotage of Ukraine could force a Russian victory of sorts, enforced by Trump, designed effectively to end NATO. In the long term, we know Musk despises both regulation of his businesses and multiracial democracy. He will never tolerate either. That will mean both capturing the economy and causing unnecessary deaths. And it means any hopes of pulling America out of the authoritarian slide we’ve been in for decades will be crushed by a man who has unlimited money and no limits on how he uses his resources and propaganda.
Calling out Elon Musk is the opportunity of the century. It helped lead Wisconsin to a genuine democracy and the first Democratic Party trifecta in a decade and a half. It helped end one-party rule in Texas. But like voting or anything related to politics, it can’t be something we do once a year, every two years, or every four years. It has to be an organizing principle of our party.
There has to be one party against all oligarchy, and Elon Musk in particular. And Democrats must be that party, not because they volunteered for that role, but because the oligarchs will not let government of, by, and for the people survive otherwise.
In conclusion, investigate DOGE, investigate SpaceX, and begin to create a future free of Musk's perversity.
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