What The Hell America!

In the wake of the catty social media meltdown between President Donald Trump and former “First Buddy” and possibly drug-addled Elon Musk last week, some Democrats are seeing an opportunity to bring the world’s richest and most deranged man back into their tent.

On Friday night’s episode of Real Time With Bill Maher, for instance, Maher argued that Democrats should aim to “win [Musk] back.” He claimed that, though Musk had previously supported Barack Obama and backed Joe Biden’s campaign in 2020, Musk had been “driven into the other camp by bad attitudes and bad ideas.” Now, Maher suggested, was a moment to persuade the “gettable voter” Musk to return to Team Blue.

In a similar vein, influential Democratic commentator Matt Yglesias tweeted on Thursday, “I feel like Jeffies [sic] and Schumer should give Elon Musk a call and tell him about the Democratic Party’s longstanding interest in electric cars, solar panels, space exploration, and balanced deficit reduction.”

But it’s not just center-left media provocateurs who are urging a rapprochement between the Tesla/SpaceX CEO and the Democratic Party. According to reporting from Semafor, progressive Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), whose congressional district includes Silicon Valley, is trying to convince Musk to back Democrats in the 2026 midterm elections:

“Having Elon speak out against the irrational tariff policy, against the deficit exploding Trump bill, and the anti-science and anti-immigrant agenda can help check Trump’s unconstitutional administration,” Khanna told Semafor on Friday. “I look forward to Elon turning his fire against MAGA Republicans instead of Democrats in 2026.

Khanna isn’t the only Democratic congressperson hoping for some kind of reconciliation. On Sunday, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) told NBC’s Meet the Press that he would not personally take any campaign donations from Musk, but nonetheless welcomed the billionaire’s help in opposing Trump’s budget bill.

Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, disagreed. When CNN asked him about the potential for an alliance with Musk, Sanders called the billionaire a “right-wing extremist” and argued that the real problem was that Musk’s wealth had allowed him to buy so much influence in the Trump administration to begin with.

There is a certain logic to the argument that Democrats should try to team up with Musk. In the not-too-distant past, Musk backed Democratic candidates because his interests were aligned with certain Democratic policy priorities: in particular, as Yglesias suggests, strong support for the high-tech sectors in which Musk’s businesses operate.

That support has translated to billions of dollars in federal subsidies and government contracts for those companies under the Obama and Biden administrations. Tesla was supercharged by $465 million in subsidies from Obama. And in fall 2024, Politico reported that Tesla and SpaceX together had received more than $15 billion in federal contracts. That included contracts worth billions for SpaceX from the Pentagon and NASA just under Joe Biden.

Musk’s financial success has been powered in large part by public largesse, forked over by Democratic politicians. The long-term consequences of this erstwhile alliance with Musk, however, have been disastrous for the Democratic Party — and, more importantly, for the country. In subsidizing Tesla and handing the US space program over to SpaceX, Democrats were clearly not thinking about the dangers of allowing one man to concentrate so much wealth and power. As Matt Bruenig recently observed:

We have now seen what it looks like when the government supports and subsidizes technological innovation and implementation without concerning itself with the inegalitarianism of the system. His name is Elon Musk. In its desire to promote electrical vehicles and rocketry innovations, the US government made him the richest man in the world and then he used his riches to take over a major political communications platform and then the government.

Now that Trump and Musk have fallen out, it’s natural that Democrats would see a chance to bring Musk back into the fold. After all, he is, in many ways, a creature of their own making.

But this is evidence of the rotten core at the heart of the party and American politics in general. The fundamental problem with Musk is not that he went from being a “good billionaire” to being a “bad billionaire.” The problem is that we have a political system that enables the existence of billionaires and that facilitates their subversion of democracy — a system propped up by both major parties.

That some Democrats are now seriously discussing whether and how they might woo Musk — an erratic, union-hating, austerity-crazed billionaire who promulgates fascist conspiracy theories about “the great replacement” and the genocide of white South Africans — back to their side is a consequence of this warped system.

In a saner world, an opposition party would be having very different conversations. It would be talking about reining in and regulating giant tech companies (that Democrats have, in fact, spent years boosting). It would be considering nationalization of SpaceX and Starlink, to wrest essential government programs from the autocratic control of the world’s richest man. It would be discussing taxing the rich to address the extreme inequality of which Musk is a stupidly grotesque symptom. It would be proposing bold, popular ideas like a federal green jobs guarantee instead of treating climate policy as an opportunity to funnel public funds to companies like Tesla.

In a saner world, such an opposition party might have a real shot at stopping right-wing attacks on our democracy and cohering a political alternative to Trumpism. But we don’t live in that world. We live in this one, where neither Democrats nor Republicans can imagine a politics where they’re not trying to out-compete one another to best kiss the ass of disgustingly self-obsessed, destructive, reactionary plutocrats like Elon Musk.