Elon Musk’s Self-Contradictory Military Policy
Key takeaways
- One of the most stubborn misunderstandings about Elon Musk—who has just become the world’s first trillionaire —is that he is a libertarian.
- Indeed, from Musk’s earliest ventures onward, he has relied on the state for support, subsidies, and demand.
- But the most overt connection between Musk and the U.S. government has always been SpaceX, the company he founded in 2002, which went public today as the largest initial public offering (IPO) in history.
One of the most stubborn misunderstandings about Elon Musk—who has just become the world’s first trillionaire —is that he is a libertarian. In fact, despite the occasional ornamental Milton Friedman or Thomas Sowell meme, Musk has never subscribed to the primary principles of libertarianism. His primary focus is not on individual liberty. It is on the achievement of civilizational goals, to which everyone’s energies and wealth need to be deployed. His attitude toward the state has never been one of rejection, but rather—as we saw at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—a will to drastically reformat it to align better with his goals and make his own services indispensable.
Indeed, from Musk’s earliest ventures onward, he has relied on the state for support, subsidies, and demand. This was clear from his very first enterprise Zip2, a city directory service that relied on free data from the GPS constellation that had just been completed by the military. PayPal, the source of his first fortune, was only viable because it zapped money between consumer accounts covered by federal deposit insurance. Even as an intern at the Bank of Nova Scotia, Musk encouraged his superior to invest in Brady bonds —Latin American debt securitized by U.S. Treasury bonds—reminding him that they were “backed by Uncle Sam.”
One of the most stubborn misunderstandings about Elon Musk—who has just become the world’s first trillionaire —is that he is a libertarian. In fact, despite the occasional ornamental Milton Friedman or Thomas Sowell meme, Musk has never subscribed to the primary principles of libertarianism. His primary focus is not on individual liberty. It is on the achievement of civilizational goals, to which everyone’s energies and wealth need to be deployed. His attitude toward the state has never been one of rejection, but rather—as we saw at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—a will to drastically reformat it to align better with his goals and make his own services indispensable.