Know Your Unelected Officials: Explaining Elon Musk
This guy sucks
TDLR
Here are some things you’ve probably heard about Elon Musk:
- He’s the founder of Tesla
- He bought Twitter;
- Gave a Nazi salute
- Is the richest man in the world1
Here are some things you might not have heard:
- He didn’t found or create Tesla2
- He bought Twitter a media outlet; a rite of passage for all billionaires34
- Gave a Nazi salute5
- Is the richest man in the world?6
Tesla’s Founder
Although popular belief is that Musk founded Tesla, the reality is that Martin Eberhard cofounded Tesla with Marc Tarpenning in 2003. Elon was just a Series A investor (a true title he despises7). By 2007 Musk forced Eberhard out of Tesla. After which, Eberhard filed a lawsuit against Musk which was settled by both parties, and legally gave Elon the right to call himself the founder. This is particularlly vindicating of Eberhard’s story given that in the suit, one of Eberhard’s complaints is that “Musk has set out to re-write history by falsely claiming that he was the founder or the creator of Tesla Motors….” Which, ultimately, Musk asked for and got in the settlement.
Musk wrote that he would "like to talk with every major publication within reason." / "The way that my role as been portrayed to date, where I am referred to merely as 'an early investor' is outrageous. That would be like Martin [Eberhard] being called an 'early employee." - Reported by Neetha K
Twitter Purchase
The next bit of common knowledge is that Musk bought Twitter. Then, in true Elon fashion, renamed it X to center the company around him and distance his new regime from the former (this pattern of tethering his persona to his companies will resurface later on as we discuss his net worth).
Shortly after, “X reinstated previously suspended accounts, including those of white nationalists, stopped enforcing its policy against COVID-19 misinformation and abruptly disbanded its Trust and Safety Council, an advisory group that included human rights activists, child safety organizations and other experts.” reports Queenie Wong8.
But he didn’t stop there, Musk uses the deregulated site as a supercharged megaphone for his personal commentary, as well as boosting the people he interacts with. There is not just one, but three amazing data analyses regarding Elon’s X usage on the site Stats with Sasa9. I’ll pull excerpts from it here, but go read the entirety when you can!
Basically, Sasa pulled a bunch of data from Elon’s tweets over a period of time. The following conclusions result form Musk’s tweets between Jan.1st 2025 to Feb. 10th 2025. Results show that Elon tweets almost 100 times a day, averaging at 93.8 tweets a day at over 5 tweets per hour (across non sleep hours). This is an increase in frequency of 645% since he took over Twitter. Assuming 2 minutes per post, and not counting any scrolling or other use of the site other than posting, that’s equivalent to spending tweeting continuously, back to back for 3.2 hours every day. He’s trying to get his money’s worth, I suppose.
Nazi Support
Elon Musk did a Nazi salute the day Trump was inaugurated into office. Conservative media sources tried to play this off as a misconstrued, or socially awkward, “straight armed gesture.” Personally, not having seen the footage, I was honestly ready to believe that upon hearing the news. I was no fan of Elon then, but even I couldn’t conceptualize an intentional nazi salute being performed on stage in 2025. “There was just no way he did a f***ing Nazi salute on television” I thought, “Surely he was just being awkward in his body. Let’s consider his neuro-divergency”. Well, upon watching the clip and exploring his history, the evidence strongly points towards the gesture being a Nazi salute.
On X, Elon regularly supports content from known racist and misinformation spreading accounts like Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray), EndWokeness (@endwokeness), and more10. He somehow manages to walk the line of plausible deniability, while concretely benefiting these accounts. He will often retweet a post with his own ambiguous comment that could be read as either enthusiastic support or utter shock. However, Elon’s act of retweeting has the knock-on effects of boosting followers of the retweeted account to stratospheric levels. This effect has been recorded and reported 11.
I could wax on for pages about Elon’s consistently aligned actions that have lead to increased hate speech posts, as well as its prominency in newsfeeds on X/twitter. However, lets turn our attention to some real world actions. This article is getting quite long, so let’s speedrun this.
Active dismantling of DEI programs (programs meant to level economic opportunity among people with differing cultural, ethnic, and economic backgrounds. A purely “merit” based system does not provide opprotunity to people who have been systematically denied the accumulation of generational advantages such as; high wealth, education, stable housing, social status and connections, and so on. The denied group is overwhelmingly, people of color and immigrants.)
Hiring speech writer Darren J. Beattie. Beattie was involved in the first trump administration and now in the second. He continues to share opinions such as: "Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.“
Defending racists like his 25-year-old DOGE staffer, named Marko Elez, who was posted racist comments like “Normalize Indian hate,”
Supports Germany’s AfD party12, which:
Björn Höcke, leader of the AfD party, has twice been fined by a German court for using a banned Nazi slogan, “Everything for Germany”. A slogan engraved on stormtroopers daggers.
Threatened to deport German citizens of non-ethnic-German heritage
AfD members participated in a November 2023 secret meeting of far-right extremists, including Austrian neo-Nazi Martin Sellner
and more, frankly. Search it up sometime.
Believes in antisemitic conspiracies
So yeah, I’m of the belief Elon’s “gesture” on stage was a Nazi salute.
The End
OK, so honestly, I’ve been writing this for a week and I’m tired of Elon. The research has been a ton of work, and I just want to get this aggregated information out into the world.
I inteneded a whole other section devoted to Elon’s wealth or lack thereof, but I’m now thinking it will become its own stand alone article later on. Finance is complicated and worth being explained in step by step details
Estimated net worth of US$343 billion as of February 25, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_of_Elon_Musk
List of 15 billionaires who own media outlets.
https://www.investopedia.com/billionaires-who-bought-publishers-5270187
A surprise 16th billionaire (4th richest person Larry Ellison)
https://www.benzinga.com/general/entertainment/24/09/40754610/paramount-to-be-controlled-by-worlds-sixth-richest-man-larry-ellison-how-helping-his-son-la