Elon Musk
Story Stream
How Elon Musk Changed Mexico’s Most Famous Nude Beach July 17, 2025
Six months into the pandemic, Trai Morrison and his husband, Andy Dvorak, did what so many of us dreamed of doing: They bought a place in Mexico. While everyone else was still bleach-wiping their groceries, Morrison and Dvorak—who run Two Gay Expats,...
Linda Yaccarino’s X-It July 11, 2025
When Linda Yaccarino joined Elon Musk’s Twitter two years ago, she left a comfortable job as one of the advertising indutry’s most powerful players to bet that she could help Musk grow Twitter into a digital behemoth....
Right Wing Civil War June 09, 2025
And so, as it was foretold, the great tech right / populist right wing schism of 2025 begins.Yesterday, following several days of increasingly furious posting over President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” Elon Musk’s relationship with the White Ho...
The Tragedy of Elon Musk June 05, 2025
So it’s now official: Elon Musk is leaving Washington and returning to his businesses, running Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, and the other technology companies he founded. The parting was not, evidently, entirely amicable. Predictably, Donald Trump used M...
Competing Moral Visions June 04, 2025
At this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, held just one month into Trump’s second term, Attorney General Pam Bondi took the stage to inform the audience that Trump’s cabinet officials were the best of friends. “We’re all on the phone t...
The Californian Ideology in Ruins June 02, 2025
Richard Barbrook is a British media scholar best known for co-authoring “The Californian Ideology,” a seminal and highly prescient 1995 study of what they described as the “bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech ...
Elon Musk’s Bleak House-Cleaning March 13, 2025
Near the beginning of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, a novel I am reading for the first time, we meet Mrs. Jellyby—a Victorian era philanthropist obsessed with bringing education, colonizers, and the coffee trade to a remote region of Africa, Borriob...
What Ketamine Does to the Human Brain March 06, 2025
Last month, during Elon Musk’s appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference, as he hoisted a chain saw in the air, stumbled over some of his words, and questioned whether there was really gold stored in Fort Knox, people on his social-m...
DOGE Gets Serious March 05, 2025
I have argued for over a decade that America has a fourth, largely unaccountable branch of government in the administrative state. My 2012 book, Stealing You Blind, describes how federal bureaucrats were making bank while ruining people’s lives and c...
On Mending Over Ending March 03, 2025
As someone deeply concerned about institutional corruption, much has been refreshing about Elon Musk’s merry band of DOGE barbarians laying waste to dubious federal programs and expenditures. Sure, the cuts are mainly symbolic window dressing that do...
DOGE as Class War February 17, 2025
t might strike some as odd: The new president of the United States won the election by rallying the working class against the establishment swamp, yet he has placed at the helm of his assault on the elite-controlled Deep State none other than the ric...
Has Cancel Culture Been Canceled? February 14, 2025
Marko Elez, a software engineer working in Elon Musk’s DOGE, was recently “canceled” due to some offensive remarks . . . and then uncanceled the next day. Elez had posted some very obnoxious things, such as “Normalize Indian hate,” and “Just for the ...
DOGE and the Backlash to the Backlash February 12, 2025
Late last week, Elon Musk announced that the initiative he’s heading up, the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, would rehire Marko Elez, the 25-year-old staffer who was fired after a Wall Street Journal story unearthed several offensive X ...
How to Defeat DEI February 06, 2025
Many conservatives have objected strongly to the spate of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives undertaken by many schools, corporations, and government agencies over the last decade. Elon Musk recently claimed that “DEI means people DIE...
An Unusual Cultural Artifact of Religious Revival February 04, 2025
Religiosity in America, measured in denominational affiliation and church attendance, has never been lower. Over the past decades, a growing culture of atheism (and non-denominationalism) has spread across the country and permeated into our art, trad...
Stop Blaming Misinformation for Cynicism and Mistrust February 03, 2025
Meta is ending fact-checking and removing restrictions on speech across Facebook and Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg, its CEO, recently announced, calling the move an attempt to restore free expression on its platforms. Fact-checkers will be replaced with...
Emperor Elon January 10, 2025
It is very strange, the ever-expanding realm of Elon Musk. He is a man whose power crosses vast industries, who now sets the total political agenda for nations around the world, and whose followers are so devoted, they would put his face on a coin th...
It Can’t Just Be DOGE January 10, 2025
President-elect Donald Trump’s return to Washington will surely bring with it a renewed focus on the administrative state and its excesses. Exemplifying that effort is the much–media–maligned Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, headed by El...
Why Is the Right Obsessed With Epic Poetry? January 07, 2025
In September 2023, the richest man in the world was daydreaming about the Trojan War. “I sometimes wonder if perhaps Rome was started by exiles from Troy,” Elon Musk wrote on X, the social media platform he had bought and swiftly renamed. His thought...
America Should Not Become a Nation of Tiger Moms January 01, 2025
A rift in the MAGA coalition emerged last week as Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk—co-chairs of DOGE, a Trump advisory committee—advocated for more H-1B visas, angering immigration hard-liners in the GOP base. Generally, the debate over H-1B is an econo...
The Guardian’s Retreat from the Battlefield of Ideas November 21, 2024
It was quite the flounce. “This is something we have been considering for a while,” The Guardian intoned with the gravity of an Old Testament prophet as it declared in an editorial that the organization would no longer post on X. “The U.S. presidenti...
Our Countercultural Revolution November 20, 2024
Some presidential elections are decided by tactical moves: a stronger ground game to get out the vote, for example, or by superior media messaging. Donald Trump’s sweeping victory over Kamala Harris was none of those things. It was strategic and epoc...
The Real Problem with X November 15, 2024
Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election, particularly in light of Elon Musk’s highly visible support for his campaign, has again raised the question of the political significance of X (formerly Twitter). Since Musk acquired the platf...
Total Victory November 08, 2024
Madness, memes, and media malfeasance (must be Tuesday). It’s embarrassing to admit, but just a little earlier this year I thought the election would be boring. Sure, the Democrats were calling Donald Trump a fascist, but they do that every four year...
