The estimated net worth of Elon Musk is more than $400 billion, which makes him the richest man in the world. But Musk’s power is no longer just tied to his financial wealth or his control over businesses like Tesla, X, or SpaceX. Musk, by virtue of his close relationship with President Donald Trump, has now entered the U.S. government, where he is leading a spending-cuts effort called the Department of Government Efficiency.
How does physics inform Musk’s political worldview? How could he be personally benefiting from his work in the Trump administration? And what informs Musk’s support for far-right politics abroad?
Those are just a few of the questions that came up in my recent conversation with FP economics columnist Adam Tooze on the podcast we co-host, Ones and Tooze. What follows is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, look for Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Adam’s Substack newsletter.
Cameron Abadi: Musk often claims physics is at the very center of his worldview: He talks about the search for natural first principles as a motivation for his actions in business and life more generally. But can physics inspire anything that we would properly call political action or ethical action—or is the kind of first-principled curiosity that helps produce innovation inherently narcissistic in some way?
Adam Tooze: Yeah, this thing about first principles is a bit of a mantra in Musk world, and it definitely has got something to do with this almost childlike approach. Like, this goes to your point, Cam, about narcissism—this idea that you basically are going to break down any problem, be it, you know, automobiles or rockets, like big technological problems, and you’re going to start from scratch. That’s the first element. And you’re then going to derive whatever solution you come up with from very fundamental principles. And nothing anyone else has done up to that point, no inherited tradition, you know, should be your reference point. In fact, the underlying premise is clearly that all of that is bad, old, dusty baggage that we’re better off doing without and moving on from. And this does seem to be an absolutely kind of fundamental M.O. in Musk world. And there is, I think, in his increasingly self-indulgent environment, a tendency to do what the boss likes.
In principle, it’s of course true that you could derive politics, indeed ethics, from physical—well, analogies to physics. If you think about the impact of Newton on modern political thought, if you think of, like, cybernetics in the current moment, notions of equilibrium in economics, the stability of equilibria, the uniqueness of equilibrium, all of these are ideas that are derived from physics analogs, mechanics more often than not. This is even more stark when you think about engineering, which after all is a close cousin of physics, with Lenin defining communism as Soviets plus electrification, right? And then the technocracy movement, which at least one member of Musk’s family actually was quite closely associated with. I think it’s his maternal grandfather who comes from Canada to South Africa.
So there is an old tradition of engineering, physics-driven visions of technocratic government. I think the standard knock on them would be, well, yes, you can derive an ideology from that, but is it really a politics? I mean, if politics is about agonism, if politics is about argument, disagreement, the play of forces, you know, does deriving your own politics from what you claim to be at the appropriate physical analog, does that really allow for the essence of politics, which would be debate and open-endedness, and—I mean, this is perhaps a liberal conception of what politics is, but I think really any serious notion of the difference between, say, politics and other types of human activity involves some element of undecidedness. And that’s, I think, probably where most people’s skepticism would come in, which is that physics and engineering are good for very many things, but that’s precisely not where you would think they would be useful. And so I think there’s a real ambiguity here. And I think in a sense there’s an ambiguity about whether Musk is really, in a fundamental sense, a political actor at all.
CA: What would it mean for Musk to apply his business principles of disruption to the government? And how could Musk be personally benefiting from access to, say, privileged government data?
AT: Well, I mean, Musk has found a role. He’s a man of action. He has to have a role; he can’t just be the best buddy of Trump. And so he’s doing this DOGE thing. And you can see how that would work, right? If you treat government as the ultimate fuddy-duddy encrusted status-quo institution, which is how libertarians like to think about it, then obviously shaking it up and disrupting it is the way that you should be going. But I think that accompanies Musk’s strategy; it isn’t the core of it. I mean, the core of the strategy is presumably you have to express a preference within the American political system or the political system opens you up to that possibility. Trump comes along, who of all American politicians is the least professionalized, the most open and the most susceptible to precisely the kind of charm, precisely the kind of seduction that somebody like Musk is clearly very accomplished at.
And from Musk’s point of view, not to put too fine a point on it, it is a remarkably successful strategy. His current wealth is in the $430 billion, $440 billion range. But as recently as the summer of 2023 his net worth was $130 billion. In the summer of 2024, it was $170 billion. Financial markets for a long time have been sucked along by the vibe of Musk’s businesses as much as anything else—if you think about all of the hype around Tesla, which for a long time now has been valued at higher levels than all of the other car manufacturers put together, and we’re talking about mammoths like Toyota or VW, not like, you know, Ford and GM. So if you understand your business as a vibes-based business with certain things you really want to get done, then I think the question is, “Why hasn’t anyone done this before?”
There is an open question, I think, as to why the effort by the billionaire class—not maybe the single-digit billionaire but multi-$10 billion folks—to suborn the American political system and exercise influence over it has not been larger and more ambitious in its scale earlier. Like, why is this only happening now? I mean, to attain the status that Musk has with Trump, you have to have the Musk guy’s persona and his wealth. But you contribute $250 million to the campaign, and that makes you the largest donor. That’s peanuts for him, right? That’s chump change. You buy Twitter, you eliminate it as a threat to Trump, you position the platform toward your interests, you do your very best, you throw your weight into the scale to try to get your guy elected, and once you succeed, presto, your personal wealth accelerates on a gigantic scale because, not unreasonably, investors regard Musk as, in general if you like, a beneficiary. He doesn’t have to be concretely, let alone engaged, in any kind of malfeasance. That doesn’t have to be any kind of suggestion of that or even conflict of interest. It’s just that he’s on the right side of history.
And with what from his point of view is a relatively trivial investment, he’s demonstrated that fact and created facts on the ground. And that seems to me the core of the strategy here. I think, you know, discussing minor points of conflict of interest and so on is kind of trivializing what’s happened here, which is much more like the sort of alliance that we’ve seen in India, for instance, between [Indian Prime Minister Narendra] Modi and [businessman Mukesh] Ambani and people like that, where there really is a symbiotic relationship between a business project and a political project going side by side and mutually reinforcing each other. And we discussed corruption in the Trump clan. And my point there was, the scale is tiny, right? And with Musk, the scale isn’t tiny anymore, let alone the technological ambition.
CA: Musk has been supporting far-right politics in various European countries, which strikes me as curious given that Musk is a capitalist whose various innovations would seem to depend on globalization for their business success. Is there some benefit that’s not immediately apparent to me, then, in supporting the anti-EU AfD party in Germany, where Musk has major business interests that depend on access to the EU? Or is there some principled prejudice that informs Musk’s politics, maybe something that traces back to his upbringing in apartheid South Africa?
AT: I think this South African connection is interesting, but I think it’s a mistake and trivializing really to sort of draw the link from apartheid racism to Musk’s political positions now. What I think is interesting is to think about the way in which growing up in the truly protean environment of South African politics in the ’70s and ’80s might have shaped his understanding of the fungibility of the world and of history and of constitutions. At an absolutely essential element in his formation, he was in an open situation politically, where the future was very undetermined and there were apocalyptic scenarios and there were scenarios of radical change. And at the crucial moment, he actually left. In part to avoid conscription, presumably. And he used the option of taking Canadian citizenship to avoid that. Which makes perfect sense. I’m sure most of us would sympathize with that. But in a sense, a little bit like, you know, a figure like [former German Chancellor Angela] Merkel perhaps, or many other people who went through the huge changes in Eastern Europe in the late ’80s and the early ’90s, it leaves you with this deep existential uncertainty about what the proper order of things should be.
And for a while you might go along with, you know, liberal nostrums about, “Well, one best way, end of history, and so on.” But if you’re in the tech space that Musk has preeminently been in and moving in and out of that kind of scene and around people like, you know, some of his milieu, the PayPal milieu includes people like, you know, Peter Thiel and so on, who also has a South African connection, like all of them have in common that they are willing to think the unacceptable about all sorts of things. And I think that that goes back to the first principles point. And in a sense, in a situation like that of late apartheid South Africa, what else do you do? You have to kind of recur to first principles.
You know, I think that basically animates his other political affiliations in the current moment. When you see him in the conversation with [AfD leader] Alice Weidel, Musk comes across as kind of naive, to be honest. He’s kind of just messing around in politics. He presumably has had some tough entanglements with German politics and German political economy, with the factory that he’s built outside Berlin. He quite likes the idea of disrupting Germany at this point. And in fairness, like, I don’t mean this, like take this in inverted commas, but like AfD, at least the vital part of the AfD, is really no more right-wing than the GOP in the United States, than the Republican Party in the United States. It’s like if, you know, backing the incumbent party in the U.S. is a legitimate political activity, how can it be not legitimate to back the AfD? It just doesn’t make any sense, in his mind. And so he’ll cross that, he’ll transgress that boundary.
As to the substantial fundamental conflicts that are involved, on the one hand, in running a global business with a huge stake in China, and on the other hand, you know, being deeply involved with the American politics right now of either of the Democratic or the Republican stripe, I mean, presumably his idea is you’re in a mess anyway, and the more influence you have, the more you’re at the table, the higher your chances of being able to sort things out, and you’re going to count on the sheer weight of your presence in the way that, for instance, Apple was able to do in the first Trump administration. And, you know, Musk has formidable contacts up and down the Chinese hierarchy. But somehow, you’re going to be able to square the circle. But sitting back and waiting for history to happen to you is a higher-risk strategy than mucking in and trying to somehow manage this conflict.
And that’s presumably, I imagine, how he rationalizes this. It isn’t programmatic. It’s, “Well, what are my options here and where is it that I might have most clout?” And clearly, he has more clout in the far-right camp than he does in the, you know, more mainstream, professionalized policy circles.
