It’s arguably a sad commentary on an increasingly politicized United States, but as the public and financial profile of its citizens grow, so grows the interest in their politics. What’s true for the rest of us is certainly true for Elon Musk, the world’s richest man.

Musk ascended to the top of the world’s financial pyramid by routinely going where even the most intrepid entrepreneurs hadn’t gone before. As a general rule, and as evidenced by the high, 90%+ startup failure rate in Silicon Valley, people like Musk are pursuing what’s dismissed as outlandish, and yes, impossible. Keep this in mind with his numerous successful startups prominent within. Musk is a pioneer for the ages. There’s an argument to be made that a focus on his presumed politics, and a desire among partisans to adopt him, thoroughly insults what he’s accomplished. Still, what’s personal is more and more expected to be public.

About Musk’s ideological leanings, some will respond that the answer is an obvious one. With his proposed purchase of Twitter occurring in concert with assertions about his “absolutist” approach to free speech, Musk must be a Republican. Figure that it’s the Republican leaning who’ve had the most difficulty conveying their thoughts on Twitter without censor, not to mention that Musk has said he’ll allow Donald Trump back to the platform; Trump a certifiable hero to all manner of Republican-registered Americans. All that, plus Musk has recently confirmed his Republican status given his belief that the “Democratic party has been hijacked by extremists.”

The answer seems so clear, yet with all things Musk, there are substantial shades of gray. Musk has said on Twitter that he “strongly supported [Barack] Obama for President.” It’s also difficult to forget why he perhaps supported Obama: the 44th president’s agenda leaned more “green” as it were.

Lest readers forget, the electric vehicle (EV) tax credit that some say bolstered an always on the edge of bankruptcy Tesla was passed during the first year of Obama’s presidency. In 2010, Musk biographer Ashlee Vance reports that Obama’s Department of Energy “struck a $465 million loan agreement with Tesla.” Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins, a hero to conservatives, regularly came after Muskin his columns, and Musk hit back with Tweets like “Jenkins & WSJ in general are sock puppets of Big Oil.” Translated for readers, this seeming romance between Musk and Republicans is rather modern. Not too long ago they viewed him as a “crony capitalist,” and Musk viewed them as hopelessly beholden to the past.

It’s a long or short way of saying that in contemplating the politics of arguably the world’s most famous person (Musk is even a prominent player in the tragedy underway in Ukraine as his Starlink communications enterprise provides crucial internet access to the Ukrainian people in the middle of quite the fight), doing so in many ways is a parallel study of the shifting politics of the American people. Consider immigration. Musk, as is well known, immigrated to the U.S. from South Africa, with a stop in Canada along the way. Vance writes that Musk “saw America in its most clichéd form, as the land of opportunity and the most likely stage for making the realization of his dreams possible.” Ok, if the latter is not the embodiment of Republican hero Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill” view of the United States, it’s hard to know what is.

Except that the Republicans of the Reagan era arguably no longer exist, or at least don’t look favorably on immigration in the way that Reagan did. While the Democrat in Obama was in some ways mining the Reagan imagery with his DREAM Act meant to grant work and residential rights to non-U.S. citizens who entered the country as minors, Republicans were stalling the legislation while promising to build walls to keep immigrants out.

Considering trade, absent Republican support it’s hard to imagine that Democratic president Bill Clinton could have signed NAFTA into law. A free trade agreement that facilitated greater interconnectedness among producers in Canada, Mexico and the U.S., its passage spoke to the once muscular view inside the GOP that global trade is undeniably good, and it’s particularly good for the myriad major corporations headquartered in the U.S., but that nonetheless have operations (and growing customer bases) around the world. Notable here is that Tesla is one of those corporations. It has a factory in Shanghai, and plans more. Yet when Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, his rhetoric was decidedly anti-NAFTA and China more broadly. Musk the Republican? Not so fast, it seems. Just the same, Democrats shouldn’t necessarily be counting on him bringing his billions (and eventually trillions?) back to them.

Indeed, while there’s so much about the Republican Party that would logically turn Musk off, the Democrats seem to be falling over themselves to be inhospitable to this innovator, and someone who is the picture definition of the genius of a globalist, open-to-immigration stance. Enter Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Rather than embracing Musk, Warren has gone out of her way to point out that “one of the richest people in the world” allegedly paid “Zero” taxes in 2018. Musk quickly hit back with “I paid the most taxes ever in history for an individual last year.” Musk was alluding to his 2021 federal tax bill that exceeded $10 billion.

All of which speaks to a bigger truth about Musk. Or it raises a basic question. Is he really even political at all? Ask yourself how he could be while running so many different companies.

This question calls for further thought with his history as an entrepreneur top of mind. After selling his first startup (Zip2) to Compaq Computer in 1999, Musk pocketed $22 million only to direct $12.5 million of his untaxed gains into X.com. The latter eventually merged with Confinity in 2000, and the combination became PayPal. eBay purchased it for $1.5 billion in 2002. Vance writes that Musk rejected the logic of taking a “deep breath” after the sale, and instead threw “$100 million into SpaceX, $70 million into Tesla, and $10 million into Solar City.” Please think about this for a second.

In thinking about it, consider what Jimmy Soni, author of The Founders (a history of PayPal), wrote about the years leading up to the company’s sale to eBay: it was “a four-year odyssey of near-failure followed by near-failure.” Yet despite this, Musk risked the highly unlikely proceeds on three companies that, as their massive valuations indicate (Tesla - $687B), SpaceX ($100B), and Solar City ($2B), had even lower odds of success. Put plainly, the higher a company is valued, the lower the expected chances of success at inception. Markets are efficient.

Musk risked everything he’d worked for on what was expected to die. It points to something about his politics that will perhaps lead to disappointment for both sides: Musk doesn’t have time for them. What he has time for is to create. And he wants to be left alone to create. That’s his ideology. When Democratic authorities in California shut down Tesla’s Fremont factory as the coronavirus spread, Musk ultimately defied them. The Right, including former nemesis Holman Jenkins, cheered his line “if anyone is arrested, let it be me.” Musk shunned the Democrats and their alarmism to the cheers of Republicans, but much of his wealth was made with them in lefty California.

Perhaps the best way of analyzing Musk’s politics is contemplate what Soni wrote about PayPal. He indicates that the company that in so many ways launched Musk’s remarkable run was full of “techno-utopian libertarians.” Yes, sounds like him. Musk, like libertarians, just wants to be left alone, and his goal with his businesses is to fund bigger and bigger leaps.

It should make readers think: Musk will spend tens of billions to purchase Twitter? He’s not doing this to just to give Trump and Republicans more freedom of speech. The bet here is that his vision is of the kind that neither Party can imagine, which sounds just about right. Musk is neither a Democrat nor a Republican as much as he’s an American bursting with ideas that he wants to bring to life. The speculation here is that from Twitter will emerge, among other things, a cryptocurrency that will be used globally, and that will replace the dollar and other fiat currencies. How very libertarian.

 

John Tamny is Vice President of FreedomWorks, editor of RealClearMarkets, and author of When Politicians Panicked.