Elon Musk is suffering from know-it-all syndrome

Elon Musk is trying to buy this election for Donald Trump, and everyone who loves our country should be alarmed. I realize, of course, that rich people try to buy elections all the time. But never quite like this.

The difference goes far beyond Musk’s shady — and possibly unlawful — attempt to register and track new potential Trump voters through a daily lottery that pays each winner $1 million. And it goes beyond the estimated $75 million Musk has given to his Trump-supporting America PAC. More important, and unprecedented, are other factors: the immensity of Musk’s wealth, the scale of his power, the reach of his voice, the incoherence of his politics, the mercurial nature of his decision-making, the porcelain fragility of his ego. And if Trump wins, heaven forbid, Musk expects to play a major role in the next administration.

In the name of “free speech,” Musk paid $44 billion to buy Twitter and then squander three-quarters of its value turning it into X, a cesspool of far-right anger, grievance, misogyny, conspiracy theory, eighth-grade humor and Trump worship. In the name of “efficiency” — the task he wants to perform for Trump — Musk would be in a position to wreak similar havoc on our professional civil service, our best-in-the-world military, our majestic national parks and who knows what else.

Musk is an immigrant from South Africa who uses the megaphone of X to attack a daughter of immigrants — Vice President Kamala Harris — and to applaud Trump’s racism and xenophobia. Musk never hesitates to fuel the MAGA world’s raging transgender panic and has dismissed his own transgender daughter as “dead — killed by the woke mind virus.” He is the father of 12 children in all, and he proselytizes for procreation, saying on Saturday at a Trump rally that “I don’t think it’s cool to deliberately not have kids. It’s anti-human.”

https://wapo.st/4eThQPk