Elon Musk: A Frankenstein’s Monster Produced by the System

Elon Musk is today, in 2025, the world’s wealthiest capitalist with a reported wealth of more than $400 billion. Musk has intervened in the social and political life of both the U.S. and the world in increasingly damaging ways while accumulating that wealth. After inserting himself into right-wing politics in the past few years, he has arguably become one of the most influential people on the planet. His life and activities as a businessman, and now a political operator, exemplify all of the problems with the capitalist system in which we live and warrant a basic understanding of how he developed the wealth and power that he now wields, and the views and motives that he espouses.

This brief biographical sketch is not a detailed dive into every aspect of Musk’s life. Some specifics of his life are difficult to pin down, in part because Musk himself has lied or at least he has been disingenuous in telling his own story. Here, we offer only a broad overview of his life and activities, with a critical emphasis on how his actions affect us and our world.

Early Years and Formative Environment

Born in 1971 in South Africa, Elon Musk grew up in an unhappy but prosperous family. His grandfather was openly antisemitic, anti-democracy and a supporter of the South African apartheid regime. It is likely that Musk’s father also felt similarly, and obviously benefited from the regime’s labor and economic policies. Although there is dispute over exactly how wealthy his family was, his father was a businessman who has claimed that they were often flush with cash, and at least for a time owned two homes and an airplane. At least part of that money was made from investments in emerald mining, which was made possible because the apartheid South African state managed the super-exploited Black labor force for the benefit of its white residents. Musk grew up in this environment, and likely took on many of the authoritarian and racist views and behaviors that were completely normal for whites in the apartheid state. While throughout much of his life he obviously hid or at least downplayed these views, it has become obvious in the past year that this worldview shaped during his formative years is still very much with him. It is also worth noting that both Peter Thiel and David Sacks – fellow billionaires who Musk has known for decades and openly support J.D. Vance and Donald Trump – also grew up in South Africa during this same period and with the same influences.

Musk left South Africa in 1989, first matriculating in college in Canada, then after two years transferring to the University of Pennsylvania, where he was awarded two Bachelor of Science degrees in 1997, one in physics and one in economics. He moved to California, originally to attend a Ph.D program at Stanford University, but he never actually graduated. He is not, in other words, an actual engineer or physicist, or a credible practitioner in any of the other fields in which he claims to be an innovator.

Although he was curious and inventive from a young age, and captivated by the possibility of space travel, and although he obviously enjoyed learning about science and technology, he has always been something of an autodidact, focusing on what he wants to learn, and learning even what he chose to learn in a perhaps less than complete way. He was never a focused or systematic student, and never showed any concern for the study of the humanities or social sciences. This lopsided type of learning, which obviously emphasized the great potential of technology, has since led him to either optimistically minimize or simply not care about the effects that technology can have when developed for and put to use for undemocratic or profit-driven purposes.

Musk the Capitalist

At age 24, he and his brother founded his first company called Zip2, a sort of computerized business directory map, and sold it for $307 million only a few years later, netting Musk $22 million. He then began X.com, which later joined with PayPal, owned then by Peter Thiel and David Sacks, or the “PayPal Mafia” as they called themselves. In 2002 Ebay bought that company for $1.5 billion, of which Musk took home $180 million. He then bought into Tesla, an already-existing electric car company, and two years later became its CEO. He then founded SpaceX, a reusable rocket company to pursue Musk’s explicitly stated goal of getting humans to Mars and making humanity “multi-planetary.” As CEO of Tesla he did help develop new engineering advances, and introduced labor-saving technologies that lowered production costs and enabled the company to produce on a larger scale and for a mass market. Those advances, combined with numerous government subsidies, helped Tesla expand and become profitable. Since then he has founded and controlled companies like OpenAI (later of ChatGPT), Neuralink, the Boring Company, x.AI and Starlink, among other, smaller companies.

All of these ventures combined his curiosity about technology with his capitalistic desire for profit. During the early years of these ventures and through his formative experiences as a capitalist, he either developed or increased an already existing addiction to risk, pressure, attention and adulation that obviously still drives at least some of what he does. He was “worth” hundreds of millions by 2010 and became a billionaire no later than 2012.

Throughout, he used many of the typical methods used by capitalists to make a profit and increase his accumulated wealth. Some of it is financial, paper trickery. Some of it is pure hype based on his supposedly visionary leadership. Some of it is an aggressive reliance on government contracts and subsidies to grow his businesses. And much of it comes by super-exploiting the workers who build his electric vehicles, his satellites, his rockets, etc.

Here is just a sampling:

In 2008, NASA awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract for future space flights, even though they had only launched one rocket successfully. In 2010 a federal government subsidy gave Tesla $465 million to build its flagship assembly plant in Fremont. From about 2000 to the present, Tesla alone has received about $2.5 billion in subsidies from both state and local governments in the U.S. In New York State alone, between 2014 and 2017, Musk’s Solar City company and its factory received $958 million to help build the facility. Federal government subsidies for the purchase of solar panels have also funneled yet more money into his bank accounts. Federal tax credits to encourage electric car production equal about $7,500 for every Tesla sold, handing Musk another $3.2 billion in profits directly through the influence of government tax policy.

Because of federal government attempts to discourage production of fossil fuel vehicles through the selling of “carbon credits,” Tesla has been paid at least $11 billion by other U.S. auto companies over approximately a decade. He may soon also make billions more in carbon credit payments from European companies if the European Union enacts new and tougher emissions standards, which it is expected to do in 2025.

In other words, billions of dollars have been given to Musk directly either through government subsidies or government contracts. Those profits in turn boost the value of his companies further, driving up stock prices for his many ventures.

On top of all those direct forms of government assistance, already-existing and perhaps soon-to-be-enacted tariffs protect his businesses from foreign competitors, particularly those in China who are already producing electric vehicles with much longer charging ranges and far lower price tags than Tesla’s. In other words, if not for tariffs Tesla would be driven out of business.

Musk claims to have slept on the floor of Tesla factories, which meant that he was on hand to make his workers lives miserable 24 hours a day. During those years, some workers did actually sleep in the factory after working 12 hour shifts. In 2017 he described that period as “production hell,” but it’s clearly not a thing of the past. He recently told investors that in the push for a new product line this year, “we’ll be sleeping on the line practically. Not practically, we will be.” Tesla was also found guilty by a jury of allowing a racist culture to thrive at its Fremont, California factory. He often called workers “idiots.” He also regularly fired workers in batches, sometimes in response to actual financial difficulties, sometimes with little to no warning and for little to no apparent reason.

Musk was fined for violating securities and exchange laws by publicly creating a rumor that he was going to buy a large batch of Tesla shares, specifically to inflate their market value.

In order to avoid California regulations, and also to capture more numerous corporate subsidies offered by Texas and to pay significantly lower taxes, Musk moved some of his corporate operations and much of their U.S. production infrastructure to Texas.

He has started numerous businesses that simply don’t even build functioning products. Whether self-driving cars that are not fully under control, his tunnel loop for cars (probably the most absolutely idiotic of his ideas), cars that unexpectedly accelerate, and more, some of his ideas simply never come to fruition or don’t even function. But he hypes the ideas as if he’s a great inventor and innovator, and says they will be great in the future. His greatest talent is probably promoting the idea that he is a talented engineer and visionary, which then leads people to support and hype his ventures even further.

All of this, of course, doesn’t even mention the key point: the value of the commodities that Musk produces are made on the exploitation of his workers, none of whom are unionized or in any way protected from his whims. They are the highly trained engineers and physicists, custodians and janitors, accountants and programmers, and the assembly line workers who actually make his commodities on a daily basis. This means that along with being paid far less than the actual value they generate for Musk, the workers can be treated egregiously and be fired at any time and for any reason. Even the highly paid ones are subject to his whims. He, like most capitalists, has fought vigorously against any form of worker organizing. And of course, if they do even attempt to organize, they become victims of one of his many firing sprees.

The Personal

In their drive to compete and pursue profits through the production of commodities, capitalists often take courses of action that hurt other humans. That means harshly exploiting their workers, or producing products that are harmful for people who purchase the commodity, or selling a product that consciously divides people from one another, or building a commodity that the company knows is destroying the environment. But even in doing those things, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the capitalists themselves are bad, or evil people. It means they are doing what they have to do as a capitalist to stay in business and produce a profit. It’s not necessarily a reflection on the personal flaws or any sociopathy on the part of the capitalist.

But Musk clearly does have some serious personal flaws that clearly do intersect with his actions as a capitalist and now a political actor.

Most frivolously, although it should be obvious that he doesn’t even have time to play video games, much less actually become good at them, he claims to be a world class gamer. Despite portraying himself as a top ranked player, recent public displays of his so-called skills apparently left competitors surprised by his amateurish gamesmanship. There are rumors that he has either paid other expert gamers to play on his behalf or boosted his scores by paying for upgrades on third-party websites. He wants to be considered great at everything, and wants the adulation that comes along with that perception. And he’s willing to lie and cheat to get even this silly sort of recognition.

Musk has disowned his transgender daughter, who, in 2022, transitioned and changed her legal name with the goal of distancing herself from him. In a recent interview, Musk not only refused to acknowledge her gender and her new name, he actually said that his “son” was “dead, killed by the woke mind virus.” They have not been in contact for approximately four years. She has been critical of his harassment of her in response to her feminine traits, and has recently used a number of specific adjectives to describe him: cruel, uncaring, cold, very quick to anger, and narcissistic.

Aside from this one daughter who Musk has shamed and severed ties with, he has at least 10 other children, conceived with three separate women. They all currently live together in a compound in Austin, Texas which contains three mansions. Between running dozens of businesses, sleeping on the factory floor at Tesla, supposedly playing video games at 2 a.m., running Presidential campaigns from Pennsylvania, watching his rockets blast off in Brownsville, Texas, slashing government budgets, firing workers, giving speeches to fascistic crowds and at German right-wing political conventions, having leisurely chats with fawning fans like Joe Rogan, and pressing send on dozens of trolling texts daily, it is likely that he spends very little time with most of these children and women, if he cares about them at all.

Musk’s passion for bringing children into the world isn’t just a thoughtless impulse. It would be bad enough if it was. But it’s part of a larger belief that not only does the earth need more humans, but that “America” needs more children in order to maintain its place of economic, technological, and military dominance in the world. In these ways his beliefs and his actions correlate with the many Christian nationalists, the many right-wing reactionaries, the many political demagogues who claim that the United States is in danger of being destroyed through declining population and too much immigration. They are terrified of being any type of minority in their own nation, and are desperate to grow their population. This is one of the reasons they so violently oppose not only abortion but almost any form of family planning. It is also one of the reasons they are so desperate to stop immigration and to actually reverse the flow of immigrants through large scale forcible deportations. Racism obviously plays a primary role in much of this thinking. It is also again worth noting that Musk’s particular background, as part of the white minority in South Africa, likely introduced him to racist ideas like these, and prepared him well to espouse these views in today’s United States.

Musk “Comes Out” as Right Wing

Although he had previously supported Democratic politicians, and has, as pointed out above, received generous government subsidies from both the Obama and Biden administrations, Musk turned hard right in 2020 and after.

He started building a following on Twitter, the same social media outlet that Trump and other right wing forces used for years to lie, manipulate, spread misinformation and build a following. He began to spread dismissive and confusing messages about Covid-19, and the vaccines developed to fight it. When he and others like him were challenged about spreading misinformation, they claimed to feel aggrieved, as if being asked to be truthful, or being asked not to lie to or mislead people, somehow infringed upon their rights. He began to portray himself, and others like him, as being victims of “wokeness” and government censorship.

Although it had been obvious much earlier, it has become clear that by 2020 Twitter and other social media outlets had actually become conduits for uncontrolled right-wing propaganda. When public pressure and pressure from the government finally forced Twitter and Facebook to ban Donald Trump after the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and to begin to conduct even limited and non-punitive fact checking, Musk and others like him spread the narrative that free speech was under attack, and that the U.S. was on the road to tyranny. His personal concern was now meshing with the reactionary right, MAGA movement, and he began to see new opportunities, not only to make money, but to become more influential than ever before.

In order to protect what he considers to be free speech, Musk bought Twitter, renaming it X. He fired thousands of workers and put thousands of others under close watch and made them all work harder and longer. He got rid of the blue-checks that verified accounts actually belonged to or were the people they said they were. He reinstated people like Donald Trump and Alex Jones. He got rid of any and all controls on what is said. He even enlisted 80 of X’s engineers to develop an algorithm that artificially boosted his tweets by a factor of 1,000. He uses his boosted account to amplify the most heinous of views, often raw misinformation. He then began to ban substack links of independent journalists, then he banned some journalists who criticized him, then he sued actual free speech groups for calling attention to his anti-free speech actions. He even declared the word cisgender to be a slur! In other words, he has actually worked to limit free speech and sow ever greater confusion.

Amazingly, on a larger, global political level there is an even more dangerous problem with his takeover. Before he owned it, Musk accused Twitter of working with governments to crack down on free speech in the U.S. and worldwide. There was some truth to this accusation. Prior to Musk taking over, when a government asked Twitter to take down an account, Twitter evaluated the claim and then complied in about half of the cases requested by governments. In the other half of those cases, however, Twitter defended their practices and actually refused to block or suppress the target of attempted repression. But, since Musk took over, X has complied with about 80 percent of government requests to censor journalists and opposition groups that were critical of the governments requesting their suppression! In other words, although Musk said he bought Twitter to stop the ability of governments to shut down free speech, his X is now actively helping governments to shut down free speech at a much greater rate than Twitter! And recently X has stopped sharing or reporting data on their take downs, making it impossible to tell what the company is doing at all as it regards free speech and government censorship!

Needless to say, hate-filled and reactionary views became more prominent on X. What had previously been a cesspool became an even dirtier cesspool. So much for free and fair speech! What this episode with Twitter shows is Musk’s pure hypocrisy, and his total willingness to silence free speech that is either critical of him or that might threaten his profits.

Whether he actually agrees with the hate-inspiring and factually-inaccurate trash that he spreads should not concern us. That he does it, and that the divisive and dishonest propaganda he spreads cause harm, is all we need to know.

Since his X purchase he has gone publicly hard right. The reader of this piece who has been paying attention for the past two or three years has seen his imprint and his dishonesty and his quest for profit and his quest for attention and adulation. His support for the reactionary authoritarian Trump was only the final step in this obvious coming out.

Most recently, he spoke at the Trump inauguration rally where, twice, he vigorously threw up his arm in a gesture unmistakably similar to a Nazi salute. Last week, he spoke at the convention of the AfD party of Germany (a neo-fascist party), where he told them not to feel guilty about Germany’s Nazi past, and not to lose their culture in a “multiculturalism that dilutes everything.”

He is now a key advisor to Trump, and is working directly in the White House. His goal in the coming months will be to drive away, force out, or fire as many government workers as possible and to slash budgets for anything that the non-billionaires might need. When asked recently about the effects of his proposed plans for cuts and downsizing, he admitted that the policies would cause “temporary hardship.” That’s a euphemism if there ever was one.

Musk: a Symptom of the System

Our assessment of Musk is that he clearly does exhibit most of the behaviors used to describe him by his daughter: cruel, uncaring, cold, very quick to anger, and narcissistic. Based on knowledge of his early upbringing and his current behavior, he is very likely racist, anti-LGBTQ+, xenophobic, and perhaps other hateful things.

The bigger problem, though, isn’t with him alone, or just about whether he is a capitalist or a racist or an egotistical maniac or an infantile idiot who doesn’t understand the potential meaning of an arm gesture.

The problem is that he is the world’s largest capitalist, in a position to immediately influence the most powerful state on earth, and that he is trying to use his position to increase the rate and accumulation of profits taken in by his dozens of companies. He is compelled to compete, as are all the other capitalists, even the biggest and most powerful of them.

In order to compete and continue to profit, he pushes initiatives and ideas that affect all of humanity, but without ever asking if the rest of humanity wants, or needs, or thinks it smart to prioritize these things. He exemplifies the complete lack of democracy in our world, and how the whims and profit drives of a few thousand major capitalists shape our future without ever getting our okay. His goal of having humans visit and colonize Mars is maybe the best example of this massive disconnect.

He’s now playing a balancing act, trying to influence not only his own and foreign governments, but also stoking nationalist sentiments worldwide that will lead to obvious conflicts. Potential conflicts with China or other nations could help Musk financially. Some tariffs might benefit Musk, and war could help him in some ways. But some conflicts could also hurt his production and profitability. Trade wars could hurt international sales, wars could destroy supply chains or even factories and sales. How he navigates these currents will affect all of us in the next months and probably years.

Yet at the same time, he is also driven by an infantile need for attention and adulation. Without psychoanalyzing him, it’s obvious that he, like Trump, seems like a child crying out for attention and then becoming enraged when they don’t get it, or when people don’t give them the adulation they so desire. Although driven by profit, Musk is also searching for attention and glorification, which he gets from his millions of followers on X and the thousands who clap as he jumps around like a child at Trump rallies. So despite his need to profit and compete, he also needs to shock and troll and seem like he’s the best.

Elon Musk’s life and activities as a businessman and now a political demagogue exemplify all of the problems with the capitalist world in which we live. This system has allowed him to develop, to gain never-ending wealth, to indulge his needy ego, to gain never-ending power, to gain control over media that influences millions of people, to treat people like dirt and get away with it.

His existence as the person he is today screams out for us to put an end to the conditions that allowed someone like him to gain the power and influence that he now wields. Elon Musk and the tens of thousands of lesser Elon Musks in the world need to be removed from their egotistic perches of wealth and power and influence. They do not care about us, nor do they care about what we need. Musk himself is clear proof of this.

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