Once upon a time, an immigrant named Elon Musk came to the US with a burning desire to do good, and he did right well. After making a small fortune at PayPal, he bought a startup called Tesla Motors and a defunct manufacturing facility in Fremont, California, then proceeded to shock the world by making compelling electric cars at a time when EVs were generally thought of as glorified golf carts. Then he shocked the world again by building a new production facility in the desert outside of Reno, Nevada, which he rather grandly called a Gigafactory. Longtime Musk watchers will recall how Elon bragged that his new factory would be powered by solar panels on the roof and wind turbines in the surrounding hills. He made it a point to tell anyone who would listen that the Gigafactory would not even have a connection to a methane distribution system! A Change Occurs Turn the clock ahead 15 years and you will find Musk is the proud owner of a mammoth data center in Memphis, Tennessee, that has expanded across state lines into northern Mississippi. It is the place where most of the computing power for xAI is located, and the combined campuses have a voracious appetite for electricity. The local utilities cannot provide enough electrons themselves, so Elon is relying on several dozen portable methane-fired generators. Those portable units emit far more pollution into the air than a modern combined cycle generating station, but Elon is in a rush to make xAI one of the dominant AI companies. He has no time to wait for permitting or construction of new generating facilities and transmission lines. As a result, he has transitioned from a clean energy advocate to one of the biggest emitters in the US — and is proud of himself for doing so! Some may ask what happened to the proto-environmentalist we all knew and loved who has now become a giga-polluter? The answer is not easy to find, but there may be parallels between Musk and the legendary King Henry VIII of England, who was a grand fellow in his youth by all accounts but became a bloated psychopath later in life. He even had one of his wives beheaded because she did not give him a male heir. Following the release of a film entitled The Madness Of King Henry VIII, NBC News published a fascinating piece by Emily Sohn that speculated Henry may have belonged to a rare blood group called Kell positive that affects about 9 percent of white males. When a Kell positive man impregnates a Kell negative woman, there is a 50 percent chance of provoking an immune response in the woman’s body that attacks her developing fetus, leading to the death of the fetus in the 5th or 6th month of a pregnancy. If the topic is madness, Musk is an interesting case study. New York Times contributor Jamelle Bouie this week published a searing analysis of Elon entitled “Why Do We Tolerate Elon Musk’s Racist Commentary?” He begins by discussing The Turner Diaries, a novel that looked to South Africa — Musk’s ancestral home — and its apartheid political system for inspiration. Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, carried passages from the book on his person and once sold the book at gun shows. Bouie wrote: Today, you don’t have to look far or dig deep to see the ambient influence of The Turner Diaries on the far right. You need just to spend a little time in the online world of the richest man on the planet, Elon Musk (although to be clear there is no direct evidence that Musk has read the book). The Musk of the mainstream media is an enthusiastic, if awkward, technologist, industrialist and would-be government reformer, as seen in his now-defunct Department of Government Efficiency. But Musk spends much of his time on X, his social media website, where he amplifies far-right accounts and shares his own white nationalist, anti-immigrant politics for all the world to see. Over the past month in particular, he has adopted the imagery of a recent film, Citizen Vigilante, in which the actor Armie Hammer spends the run time playing a Charles Bronson-esque character who targets alleged criminals, framed mostly as Arab and African migrants. Musk uses that imagery to state his views about what must be done to save Western civilization. “Yes,” replied Musk to an image of a gun-toting Hammer clad in black with the caption, “First the traitors then the invaders.” He also shared a post from a different user who explained that the point of Citizen Vigilante, in which the Hammer character “spends the first half of the movie murdering white people not migrants,” is that you must “always hang a traitor before you hang an enemy.” Musk repeated this several times, including in a post that simply said, “Traitors before invaders.” Last week, Musk again posted that we must “Deal with traitors before invaders” and then said a few days later that “Anyone who opposes remigration is a traitor.” Remigration “Remigration” is the call from far-right European political parties to forcibly remove nonwhite citizens to their supposed countries of origin, regardless of whether they are immigrants or native-born. It is essentially a form of ethnic cleansing and it is envisioned as a response to the supposed “Great Replacement” of white Europeans with nonwhites, an idea originating from a different work of far-right fiction, The Camp of the Saints, published in 1973. As Musk sees it, opponents of remigration are traitors to “the West.” And as “traitors” their proper fate, according to the logic of his posts, is to be killed as punishment for their role in the demographic transformation of majority-white nations and, presumably, as a warning to those who might pollute the national bloodstream by welcoming nonwhites into their lives and into the country. Musk’s preoccupation with demographic “traitors” flows directly from his obsession with population collapse, which he frames in terms of shrinking European and white American birthrates. “White people are a rapidly diminishing minority of the global population,” Musk wrote in September 2025. “Low birth rate,” he later said, “is the number one threat to the West followed closely by migration. There will be no West if this continues.” One might even see his destruction of the United States Agency for International Development — responsible, so far, for an estimated 700,000 deaths worldwide — as consistent with his concern with falling white birthrates relative to those in places such as sub-Saharan Africa, where U.S.A.I.D. was active. After all, one way to secure a future for Western children, in this zero-sum view of the world, would be to starve African ones. Musk, it should be said, insists that no one has died because of his cuts. In a recent interview with The Economist, Musk denied that he was a racist, even as he defended his far-right views of immigration. … Musk’s War On People Of Color Well, Jamelle Bouie certainly doesn’t sugarcoat his views. He makes Elon Musk out to be a monster who is dedicated to expunging people of color from society. It is a view reminiscent of the Spanish conquistadors, who gladly slaughtered the Indigenous people they encountered in Central and South America because they believed they were better off dead than being non-Christians. How Jesus Christ would have felt about such behavior was never part of their thinking. From my early indoctrination in the world of religion at Sunday school, I tend to think Jesus would not look favorably upon the campaign to disappear people of color from the US and the UK and other nations either — especially since he himself was a person of color. Oddly enough, I know someone who emphatically proclaims Elon Musk will be known as the second most important man in human history, second only to Jesus himself. Yesterday, I had a conversation with a man who is interested in buying an electric car. I told him I thought the Tesla Model Y was the best electric car available in America. He said that was probably true but he refused to do business with Elon. Personally, I don’t blame him. My wife and I bought our Model Y in the fall of 2021, before the whole DOGE fiasco and his embrace of far-right lunatics in Germany and the UK. If we were in the market for a new car today, Tesla would not be on our shopping list either. Musk, of course, is not alone. Stephen Miller and JD Vance are fully onboard with the “scary dark skinned people” madness, but Musk controls the narrative with his iron grip on X, his personal anti-social media platform. Has his meteoric rise to become the wealthiest person in human history reached its peak? The share price of Tesla is down by about 30 percent this year, and the much ballyhooed SpaceX IPO is also down 29 percent from its opening price. Does Musk suffer from a weird genetic defect like Henry VIII that makes it impossible for him to feel compassion for others? Or is he just a loser who has blustered his way to the top by hitching his wagon to the forces of hate? Either way, there is no one I would rather see flame out and fall back to Earth in spectacular fashion. Does that make me a bad person? I don’t think so, and I strongly suspect I am not alone.
