Elon Musk has gotten a taste for power... and helping pick heads of state. After spending an ungodly amount to allow Donald Trump to return to the White House, he now gets to pal around with world leaders.
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After spending $44 billion and change to buy himself a president, Elon Musk seems to have gotten a taste for the job.
He has not only been talking to Russian President Vladimir Putin but also sat in on Donald Trump’s first post-election call with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy for some reason, and, apparently met with Iran’s ambassador to the UN earlier this week.
At Mar-a-Lago, he was also palling around with Argentina’s President Javier Melei and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) Thursday night.
And, of course, Musk was tasked with running the “Department of Government Efficiency” together with Trump fanboy Vivek Ramaswamy… a job this dynamic duo seems to embrace.
“The unelected and unconstitutional Federal bureaucracy currently has more power than the presidency, legislature or judiciary!” Musk tweeted after the election. “This needs to change.”
Of course, nothing says “taking power from unelected bureaucrats” more than creating a new federal department and letting a couple of unelected dudes remake the federal government in Trump’s image… perhaps while also allowing Musk to pocket a hefty sum of taxpayer funds in the form of government contracts (or to control the budget of the regulators meant to oversee his businesses).
While these two DOGEsters have promised to clean up the government, it seems as though they just want to create a new type of MAGA bureaucracy that puts in place rightwing priorities.
But Musk is not only using his high-level contacts to buy himself a seat at the big boys’ table of international politics, he is also trying to get like-minded people in Europe riled up.
On Friday, he wrote that the UK “has become a police state,” and then amplified a tweet saying that the British government “hates its people.”
On Thursday, he also retweeted multiple posts directed against the UK government and law enforcement.
Earlier that day, he had also tweeted that he agreed that “something is broken in Germany” in response to a misleading headline regarding a German lawmaker who had been fined for incitement of hatred.
Both the UK and Germany have center-left governments… and vastly different laws regarding freedom of speech.
The same applies to the European Union as a whole, which has targeted Musk’s social media platform X for not doing enough to stop the spread of misinformation.
Therefore, meddling in the politics of these countries also benefits him personally. It seems possible that he will try to install right-wing leaders in other countries as well.
Of course, when you are a real go-getter like Musk, why limit yourself to Earth politics?
The space-obsessed billionaire also had some thoughts on how the Red Planet should be run.
“Governing Mars should be up to the Martians, but these are some ideas,” he wrote in response to a tweet quoting his support for a set of principles that, paradoxically, includes promoting “direct democracy by the people” while also stipulating that “any rule can be removed by 40% of people to overcome inertia.”
Well, that just doesn’t make sense.
However, it seems as though, until he sets up the Mars government, he’ll still have plenty of time to try the same thing on Earth.
In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
