--- title: What Elon Musk Really Believes as He Buys Twitter description: In trying to read his motivations, both left and right seem to be getting Musk wrong. canonical: https://time.com/6170696/elon-musk-politics-twitter/ author: Molly Ball article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2022-04-26T16:36:30.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:44:22.388Z article:section: Ideas og:title: What Elon Musk Really Believes as He Buys Twitter og:description: In trying to read his motivations, both left and right seem to be getting Musk wrong og:url: https://time.com/6170696/elon-musk-politics-twitter/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltb836461027a7d92e/698a3148b21a9c526c505f78/Musk.Cover_.Final_.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2363 og:image:height: 1329 og:image:alt: Elon Musk Twitter Time Magazine cover 220509 og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: What Elon Musk Really Believes as He Buys Twitter twitter:description: In trying to read his motivations, both left and right seem to be getting Musk wrong twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltb836461027a7d92e/698a3148b21a9c526c505f78/Musk.Cover_.Final_.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # What Elon Musk Really Believes > Sponsored content. 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It explains how TIME's journalism is made, from the first pitch through the editorial decisions behind a finished story or cover. #### How can I read about how TIME chooses its covers? Inside TIME is the newsletter where TIME's Editor-in-Chief explains cover selection and the editorial reasoning behind major stories. It is free at time.com/newsletters. #### Who is the editor of TIME? Sam Jacobs is TIME's Editor-in-Chief. He writes Inside TIME, a twice-weekly newsletter about the newsroom's reporting and editorial decisions. #### Is Inside TIME free? Yes. Inside TIME is a free newsletter, available at time.com/newsletters. A paid TIME subscription is separate and available at time.com/subscribe-agent. ## Video: TIME Person of the Year 2021: Elon Musk [Watch (HLS stream): TIME Person of the Year 2021: Elon Musk](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/mYXITUNy.m3u8) (12:42)  _Published 2021-12-13. Person of the Year is a marker of influence, and few individuals have had more influence than Musk on life on Earth, and potentially life off Earth too. In 2021, Musk emerged not just as the world’s richest person but also as perhaps the richest example of a massive shift in our society._  by [Molly Ball](https://time.com/author/molly-ball/)  ## Molly Ball Apr 26, 2022 4:36 PM UTC  Illustration by Tim O'Brien for TIME  by [Molly Ball](https://time.com/author/molly-ball/)  ## Molly Ball Apr 26, 2022 4:36 PM UTC “We have democracy?” Elon Musk interjected, with an impish smile. He’d just been asked how worried he was about the state of the American system of government. “We have a sort of democracy, I guess,” Musk went on, balancing his toddler son on his knee at a party marking his selection as TIME’s Person of the Year last December. “We have a two-party system, which generally means that issues get assigned in a semi-random manner into one bucket or the other, and then you’re forced to pick one bucket. Or like there’s two punchbowls, and they both have turds in it, and which one has the least amount of turds? So I don’t agree with, necessarily, what either party does.” The exchange was a revealing one, both for the answer Musk provided and the question he avoided. His interviewer, TIME editor-in-chief Edward Felsenthal, had hoped to engage him on the concern, widely shared among political experts, that our democracy is in danger—that the rule of law and [free, fair elections are under threat](https://time.com/6130714/global-elections-2022/) from creeping authoritarianism, disinformation and institutional deterioration. But Musk seemed to regard American democracy as merely one of many temporary, inevitably flawed political arrangements undertaken in the course of our ongoing struggle for human progress. **_Read more:_** [_‘My Career is Mars and Cars.’ TIME’s 2021 Person of the Year Elon Musk in Conversation With Editor-in-Chief Edward Felsenthal_](https://time.com/6128235/elon-musk-interview-person-of-the-year/) If he were starting over, Musk volunteered, he might structure things quite differently. “People have asked me, say, a Mars society, what are my recommendations for that,” he mused. He said he would favor a direct democracy where the people voted on issues, with short, simple laws to prevent corruption. Pressed again on the problems facing the current system, such as citizens’ ability to access good information and express their preferences at the ballot box, he again redirected, suggesting such concerns are the gripes of congenital pessimists. “It’s easy to complain, but the fact of the matter is, this is the most prosperous time in human history,” he said. “Is there really some point in history where you’d rather be? And by the way, have you actually read history? Because it wasn’t great.” **_Read more:_** [_Elon Musk—Person of the Year 2021_](https://time.com/person-of-the-year-2021-elon-musk/) This posture—the head-in-the-clouds futurist who is too fixated on his cosmic ambitions to engage with the grimy minutiae of governance—is a common affectation for Musk. But his stunning move to buy Twitter and take it private has made his views on politics, society and human discourse a matter of urgent concern. The world’s richest man stands soon to control the world’s most influential media platform, a venture he claims to have undertaken not for profit but for the good of society. His non-answer to the question about the state of American democracy shows why his politics are so hard to pin down and his [goals so widely misunderstood](https://time.com/6165449/elon-musk-twitter-role-board/). It also helps explain why he wanted to buy Twitter. --- **Many people loathe** Musk, who has cultivated a public persona of roguish obnoxiousness. On Twitter, where he has more than 80 million followers, he alternates in-joke memes about sci-fi or computer chips with silly or provocative utterances, as if he were a random shitposter. His friend Bill Lee, who claims to have convinced Musk to join Twitter in the first place, told me that Musk became “probably the most viral social influencer ever” by accident, not design, and that he viewed it as a way to let off steam and connect with people directly. Musk has often used his platform in toxic fashion: sliming a heroic cave diver as a “pedo guy,” grossly mocking a Senator’s Twitter photo. His tweets have gotten him in trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which sued him for [misleading investors in 2018](https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2018-226). But Musk generally does not concern himself much with other people’s feelings, as his own brother, Kimbal, told me: “He is a savant when it comes to business, but his gift is not empathy with people.” > [](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1518623997054918657) Yet what matters isn’t whether Musk is a nice person so much as what he wants with [his $44 billion platform](https://time.com/6170319/elon-musk-buys-twitter/). And it is in trying to read his motivations that both left and right seem to be getting Musk wrong. Many liberals see Musk as a rapacious profiteer whose dealings with government are aimed at maximizing his income and evading responsibility. But Musk’s billions are mostly on paper, not hoarded offshore, a reflection of the value investors have [assigned to Tesla](https://time.com/5830811/elon-musk-tesla-stock-price/). If he has sometimes paid little or no federal tax, that’s mostly because our system taxes income, not wealth. Those who think Musk ought to be paying more taxes should blame the tax code, not him, as the liberal senators who are trying to change the system acknowledge. “The scam is what’s legal here,” Senator Ron Wyden told me of the proposal he backs to tax billionaires’ wealth. Musk seems somewhat uninterested in being rich except as a means to realizing his ambitions for humanity. He has repeatedly driven himself [to near-bankruptcy](https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/04/tech/elon-musk-tesla-once-got-near-bankruptcy/index.html), as when in 2008 he put up his own money to help Tesla make payroll through a tough stretch. He sees himself as an engineer and bristles at being described as an “investor.” Prior to his Twitter bid, Tesla was said to be the only publicly traded stock he owned. Another misconception about Musk is that his companies are bilking the government. In 2010, [Tesla received a $465 million](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2017/03/16/this-government-loan-program-helped-tesla-at-a-critical-time-trump-wants-to-cut-it/) federal loan, but that was years after Musk had poured millions into getting the company launched. [Tax credits for electric vehicles also contributed to Tesla’s bottom](https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-tax-credit-price-cut/) line for many years. But even if it were true that Tesla couldn’t have made it without government help, it’s odd to hear liberals criticize the deployment of public funds to encourage environmental innovation. (Such spending was a hallmark of Obama Administration policy; back in 2012, it was Republicans who painted Tesla as a Solyndra-like boondoggle.) [SpaceX has also received billions](https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-list-government-subsidies-tesla-billions-spacex-solarcity-2021-12) of government funding in the form of NASA contracts, though the company similarly first had to get off the ground (so to speak) on the strength of Musk’s will and wallet. And Musk’s innovations in rocket design have arguably saved taxpayers billions, enabling, for example, astronauts to be ferried to the international space station for a fraction of the exorbitant price the U.S. previously paid Russia to do it. **_Read more:_** [_‘The Idea Exposes His Naiveté.’ Twitter Employees On Why Elon Musk Is Wrong About Free Speech_](https://time.com/6167099/twitter-employees-elon-musk-free-speech/) Liberals also take issue with Musk’s corporate leadership, and critics who assail his reckless disregard for public health and safety have a point. In 2020, Musk defied local public-health authorities to keep his factories open as the pandemic raged, putting workers at risk. Musk’s companies have faced lawsuits over working conditions, including allegations of sexual harassment and racial abuse. In February, California’s Agency for Fair Employment Claims alleged that [Tesla tolerated “rampant racism” for years](https://time.com/6148510/tesla-lawsuits-recalls/), allowing pervasive discrimination, which Tesla denies. Musk isn’t personally accused of harassing workers, but he can certainly be blamed for the workplace climate at his companies.  Elon Musk speaks at the Tesla Giga Texas manufacturing "Cyber Rodeo" grand opening party in Austin on April 7, 2022. Suzanne Cordeiro—AFP/Getty Images [Tesla has resisted union organizing](https://time.com/5688859/tesla-elon-musk-tweet-violated-labor-laws/), which appears to be the reason the Biden Administration has lavished praise on the belated foray into electric vehicles of companies like General Motors while ignoring Musk’s contributions. Such slights rankle Musk, for good reason: an American company has become the world leader in an industry vital to the future of the climate, yet the President appears too beholden to his political allies to even acknowledge, much less celebrate, its success. Musk is not a fan of government regulation, seeing it as bureaucratic squelching of innovation, and has said he believes budget deficits are out of control and worrisome. He has also signaled opposition to the censorious “woke” culture that has come to dominate liberal discourse. His explanations for the Twitter purchase have centered on concern for free speech, which resonates with conservatives who believe they’ve been [censored by the platform](https://time.com/6139988/countries-where-twitter-facebook-tiktok-banned/)—none more so than Trump. All this has led many on the right to side with Musk. Before the deal closed, a group of Republican members of Congress sent a letter to the company’s board, seeming to threaten a congressional investigation should it reject Musk’s bid. --- **But the conservatives** now celebrating his Twitter acquisition are likely mistaken to see him as an ally. Musk was such a strong supporter of Obama that he once stood in line for six hours to shake the former President’s hand. After Trump was elected, Musk agreed to serve on two presidential advisory councils—the Strategic and Policy Forum and the Manufacturing Jobs Initiative—but [he lasted less than six months](https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-usa-climatechange-musk/musk-iger-to-quit-trump-advisory-councils-after-paris-accord-decision-idUKKBN18S6FA), resigning from both in June 2017 in protest of the Administration’s decision to pull out of the Paris Climate Accord. (In this, he showed less patience for Trump’s antics than other CEOs: the councils were disbanded a few months later, after Charlottesville.) Musk’s careful neutrality on everything from Chinese human-rights abuses to Texas abortion law is an outrage to those who believe he’s morally obligated to take a stand, but his orientation on many key public-policy issues appears broadly progressive. **_Read more:_** [_What Elon Musk’s Purchase of Twitter Could Mean for Donald Trump’s Account_](https://time.com/6170560/elon-musk-twitter-trump-future/) As his answer to the democracy question showed, Musk sees himself transcending the left-right political divide. It’s a view that has fueled his career: a rejection of assumptions and stale binaries and an ability to think through problems in new ways. The thing about Musk that critics miss is that he’s not another businessman moving money across ledgers. When he took over Tesla, engineers and investors had been trying for decades to [make electric cars viable](https://time.com/6169475/elon-wants-more-materials-evs/); Musk had the vision to champion a new type of battery design and the guts to go all-in when many doubted it could work. When he started SpaceX, America had virtually abandoned the space race it once dominated; Musk taught himself rocketry and invented [a spacecraft from scratch](https://time.com/6083975/inside-spacex-crew-dragon-spacecraft/). Liberals and conservatives may not agree on much, but virtually everyone sees the digital public square is badly broken. It’s not clear what ideas Musk will bring to the challenge—[in a statement](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/elon-musk-to-acquire-twitter-301532245.html) announcing the purchase, he proposed “enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans.” If fixing social media were easy, someone would have done it already. But the lesson of Musk’s career is to take his ambitions seriously. He’s rich not because he gamed the system but because he’s a genius who uses the incredible force of his will to mobilize resources to pursue his ideas. He’s devoted himself to tackling what he views as humanity’s biggest problems, and he has decided, as he put it recently, that “having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization.” Elon Musk has picked the next hard problem he wants to solve. Democracycould depend on whether he succeeds. —With reporting by Mariah Espada [_Buy_ _a_ _print_ _of the Elon Musk cover here_](https://timecoverstore.com/featured/time-100-companies-sara-menker-photograph-by-joshua-kissi-for-time.html) ## Transcript Okay, all right, all good. So, which living person do you most admire? I admire anyone who is making a positive contribution to humanity. Whether that is an entertainment or technology or, you know, I think anyone who's sort of doing things that are really useful to the rest of humanity is, I admire them greatly. You know, it's really hard to escape Elon Musk's dominance over so many things in American life, right now. He's got this rocket company that is completely dominating the space launch business. He's got a car company that is completely dominating the electric vehicle market. He's got 65 million Twitter followers, and he likes to make weird jokes and set people off. And sometimes with a single tweet, he can control the stock market or the value of various different cryptocurrencies. So this is a man who's just sort of become ever present across a lot of different sectors. And this was really the year that he came into his own. His goal is to make humanity a multi-planet species. And in a time in which NASA has abdicated its operations to put people in low Earth orbit. And for the time being, at least, put people on the other worlds, SpaceX has stepped in like no other private company before it around the world. So Elon Musk's wealth is largely tied up in Tesla stock. He is the not only the CEO, he is its largest shareholder. And Tesla is one of the most valuable companies in the country, its market value is more than $1 trillion dollars. And his wealth is sort of tied up in that company. Tesla has dragged the legacy automators into the electric vehicle market. Yeah. Do companies like Ford, GM, Rivian, Lucid, pose a threat to Tesla's dominance? Or do you think you guys have so grasp the market at this point that you are going to own it? Well, if somebody makes better cars than we do, then, and they then sell more cars than we do, I think that's totally fine. Our intent with Tesla was always that we would serve as an example, to the car industry and that, and hope that they also make electric cars so that we can accelerate the transition to sustainable energy. I'm confident in the future in Tesla that will do well. And I hope some of these other companies do well, too. Earlier this year, this Tesla crashed into a highway divider in California killing the driver, another slammed into a parked fire truck in Utah, both had the autopilot feature on. There is a federal investigation underway into the autopilot software that Tesla has, which despite the name is not autopilot software, it does not drive the car for you. And people inside Tesla have expressed a lot of skepticism about whether the company's technology is eventually going to be able to get there. Are the cars safe? I mean, should I feel comfortable getting behind the wheel of a Tesla and saying, drive me where I need to go? Well, the statistics that I think are at this point unequivocal, that you know far more accidents off autopilot than on autopilot. So this is not to say that autopilot is perfect. Now to get to full self driving where you don't need to pay attention, we still obviously have a lot of work to do. So as we get to the point where interventions are extremely rare even in complex traffic situations, and get to the point where the probability of injury with full self driving is much lower than whether human driving. Right. Then obviously at that point, it would make sense to allow the car to drive itself and not have to pay attention. So this year, Elon Musk became the world's richest man ever. So we asked him about another pressing global problem, and that is income and wealth inequality. When it's time to pay taxes, new reporting from ProPublica says the nation's top 25 richest people pay little to nothing at all, including Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. One of the main criticisms of him is just that he's so rich, should any human being be worth $300 billion dollars? Yeah, a lot of the push for higher government involvements, and expropriation of assets by the government is really pushed by a bunch of politicians who are actually saying that resources shouldn't be in control of people—of private individuals, they should be in control of the government. They're basically saying they want control of the assets. I mean, I think in terms of things that people should perhaps get upset about is like, I think getting upset about excess consumption is a thing to get upset about. But, you know, somebody is just wasting money on personal luxuries in a crazy way. You know, I'm like, I'm not, I'm not Warren Buffett's biggest fan, frankly. But, you know, he sits there. And he reads all these annual reports, which are super boring. Does anybody want that job? I think most people do. No, I don't want that job. But like, he's not, he's not like, engaged in like, insane, conspicuous consumption. So you have say, like, okay, sure he's got a high net worth, but doesn't— he's doing a useful job for the economy, you know, and he's very skilled at it, and should probably keep doing it. Elon Musk definitely uses Twitter in a way that no other business leader does. And it's gotten him into a lot of trouble in recent years. His twitter feed is juvenile, to say the least he has insulted some important people in really immature ways. But when a person with 65 million followers and $300 billion dollars, is just having fun, that tends to create ripples in the larger pond. You are not to put too fine a point on it, the richest man in the history of the world, and arguably the most influential. And yet you tweet freely and playfully and mischievously. I guess that's—that's accurate. So are feuds with policymakers? Or poking Jeff Bezos? Is that good for the overall brand? Yeah, I don't really think about brand optimization to be frank, as lobbyists for my tweets, which are often self inflicted wounds, or humor that I find funny, but not necessarily that other many other people find funny, right? You know, when you say take the red pill, do you worry about sending none to— I say take both pills. But do you worry at all about activating motivating the, you know, political fringe? Yeah, actually, when I said take the red pill, I didn't realize that was some like, politically charged phrase— Right. I'm just referring to "The Matrix". Yeah. You know, yeah. Like, you know, make sure you accept reality for what it is right? And it turns out, it's like, also like some, like, accept right wing dogma thing, or something? I don't, I didn't realize that at the time. You do have the ability to move markets with a tweet, should any one man have that power? Well, um, you know, the markets move themselves all the time. And so, you know, especially Tesla stock has seen some very big changes in value from one day to the next based on nothing, as far as I can tell. So just statements that I make_ are they materially different from random movements of the stock that might happen anyway? I don't think so. It's not like, you know, stock drops in half or something like that, you know, Elon Musk is someone who pursues his goals relentlessly. And I think that does sometimes make him blind to the potential human toll, the potential human cost that, that can create for some of the people who gets sort of ground up in the gears of the things he's trying to do. You've made statements, downplaying COVID-19, you kept your factories open, running at the height of the pandemic. Well, actually, technically, I think there's a misunderstanding there on the on the factories front, Tell me about that. So other car factories in the United States had started—had restarted. Right. And we were blocked, only because our car factories in the Bay Area in California. So California had actually said, manufacturing can restart. And then Alameda County sided off their own accord that the Tesla could not restart. Reopening the factory in Alameda was arguably a poor management choice. I think he was aware of the risks that his employees were taking. I don't think it was necessarily a fair choice to pressure or invite or ask or instruct employees to come back to work. Are you vaccinated? If I may ask. Yeah. I'm very pro-vaccination. We've it's the science is unequivocal. I treat it to that effect. But by the same token, I am against forcing people to be vaccinated. You know, I think this is just not something we should do in America. I think we should encourage people to be vaccinated, strongly try to convince them to be vaccinated, but not force them to be vaccinated or for example, force them to get vaccinated or get fired. Elon Musk is incredibly influential in the, in the cryptocurrency world. He's constantly tweeting about his opinions about certain cryptocurrencies versus others. He is known as a big proponent of Dogecoin. And someone who has in the past taken Tesla's assets and invested those into Bitcoin and then sold that Bitcoin at a profit. Well, I mean, I could really sort of wax on about the nature of money for hours because I played a significant role in creating PayPal. And so my understanding of the money system at a fundamental level of how it actually works, the detailed mechanics of it is I think there's there very few people that understand it better than me. Bitcoin is an interesting example obviously, the prime mover on this, but the transaction volume of Bitcoin is low, and the cost per transaction is high, it is at least at its base level, suitable for maybe an exchange a store of value, but fundamentally, Bitcoin is not a good substitute for transactional currency. And even though it was created as a silly joke, Dogecoin is better suited for transactions. Why is that? The total transaction flow that you can do with Dogecoin is substantially more than, like transactions per day, is much higher than—has much higher potential than Bitcoin. It is a slightly inflationary but that inflationary number is a fixed number as opposed to a percentage. Right. So that means over time, its percentage inflation actually decreases. And that's actually good because it encourages people to spend and rather than sort of hoard it as a store of value. I'm going to switch to a personal question a little bit if you're okay with that. Yeah, sure. So what happened with Grimes and do you have a new girlfriend? Oh, man. Are you seeing someone new? I know here we are with our somewhat different approach. Grimes as I said, like 70 separated, you know, like, it's just that her work, has her just being in different places a lot versus my work. So we, you know, weren't seeing each other that much. We're still—we're still good friends. And I do not have a new girlfriend or anything. Okay, yeah. I mean, this place is basically like a technology monastery, you know. Technology monastery? Yeah. There's hardly any. I mean, there's someone here, but not many. And it's remote. Yeah. And we deal to do technology. Yes. 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