Plenty of voters have let themselves be persuaded that eccentric billionaires are the last substitute for causality in our world. This is the pinnacle of their political hopes: counting on some CEO to revolutionize their company-state.
This text has been auto-translated from Polish.
"Greed, for lack of a better word, is good." Gordon Gekko's words from the film Wall Street are one of the most recognizable quotes in cinema history, often taken as a synthesis of modern capitalism. However, this is not at all the most interesting part of his famous monologue.
As Peter Bloom and Carl Rhodes rightly point out in their book The World According to CEOs, more interesting are Gekko's words spoken moments later: "Greed - mark my words - will not only save Teldar Paper, but also another malfunctioning corporation called the United States."
The state is basically such a bigger company - this idea dominates the modern political imagination. And it has disastrous consequences for our societies.
The first such president
The metaphor of the state as a company results, among other things, in the belief that if someone is successful in business, he or she is perfectly suited to govern a country. When Bloom and Rhodes wrote their book, the US election was being won for the first time by Donald Trump. Not surprisingly, he became the symbol of this transition for them.
Much has been written about Trump in recent years: that he is a populist, a narcissist, a proponent of conspiracy theories. One thing escapes most analyses - the fact that Trump is the first US president who never held any political office before taking office.
In the history of the United States, there have already been presidents who began their careers in professions unrelated to politics. Ronald Reagan, after all, was an actor known for his westerns. But even he, by the time he got to the White House, had served as governor of California for eight years. Trump, meanwhile, jumped directly from the world of business and cheap entertainment to the highest political office in the country.
One of Trump's key strengths was his business successes - real or perceived. During the election campaign, he repeatedly emphasized his wealth as proof of his suitability for the presidency. This argument proved so convincing that to this day poll after poll shows that "economic competence" is Trump's strongest asset according to voters.
It is telling how Hillary Clinton tried to undermine Trump's narrative in 2016, mocking that his business successes were greatly exaggerated. Bloom and Rhodes rightly point out that Clinton should have pointed out something quite different: success in business is irrelevant when it comes to governing the country. Governing a country is more than making money for yourself and shareholders. It is a responsibility for the safety and well-being of hundreds of millions of people.
The dot over the "i"
Today, eight years after Trump's first victory, we have an even better example illustrating that the metaphor of the state as a corporation has taken root in our consciousness: it is Elon Musk. Trump nevertheless had to go through the traditional electoral process: first winning in the Republican Party primaries, and then the main electoral clash with the Democratic Party.
Musk has shown that it is possible to skip this stage.
First, he purchased the communications platform that is Twitter for huge sums of money, gaining influence over the global public debate. Then he invested $130 million in Donald Trump's campaign, giving him access to one of the world's most influential politicians. After Trump's win, it quickly became apparent that Musk was one of the highest-ranking people around him. He is helping to staff the cabinet, is involved in international negotiations, is expected to get his own department and is setting the goals of the new administration.
Musk's political success would not have been possible if the public had not uncritically embraced the narrative of corporate-style state management. The controversial billionaire is even a logical consequence of this cultural trend - a dot over the "i". At the same time, he is the best evidence of how - for lack of a better word - idiotic this trend is.
What distinguishes him from previous billionaires influencing politics is not only the scale, but also the manner of his involvement. "The difference is that Musk is doing it in the full light of public attention, and additionally assumes something along the lines of democratic legitimacy for his actions." - says historian Benjamin Soskis.
That's exactly right! The thing is not only what influence Musk has bought for himself, but also how many people accept this and even treat it as a desirable development. It's as if they want to say "Let Musk save the malfunctioning corporation called the United States."
Not so stupid this Musk
A trend needs to know how to capitalize.
Musk's critics often make a serious mistake: they downplay his achievements, treating them as a coincidence or a fluke effect. You probably know the story. Musk didn't invent Tesla, he just bought it from the two engineers who founded it (in addition, dangerous fires suspiciously often break out in the brand's vehicles). SpaceX relies on skyrocketing subsidies from the state, as the U.S. government entrusts Musk's company with tasks previously performed by NASA. The investment in Twitter, on the other hand, turned out to be a financial fiasco - Musk sunk more than $40 billion into a platform that today is probably worth half that amount.
But.
Tesla and SpaceX are some of the most important companies in the world today, and Musk dominates space exploration. Even if Twitter, renamed X, is not a business success, it has undoubtedly become an effective political tool. The platform played a key role in Donald Trump's campaign and has clearly served its purpose.
Musk managed to use his business activities to gain a position that, even before Trump was elected, made him one of the most important figures in American politics. As noted by Ronan Farrow in a report for the New Yorker, some employees of the Pentagon and other government agencies treated Musk as an unofficial government official!
Perhaps it's time to admit it: Musk has the rare ability to "get things done." And that makes him particularly dangerous.
The owner of X has perfectly grasped that idealizing business leaders can be exploited politically. It's no coincidence that he was the one who proposed to Trump the creation of the Department for Government Efficiency, which he headed with entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. And it's probably no coincidence that there's a second bottom to the derision underneath the name: Department of Government Efficiency is DOGE, which is the meme "dog," but also the cryptocurrency in which Musk invests.
Musk's supporters are already enthusing about a vision in which he will show that it's possible to manage the state the way he managed Twitter after he bought it - by laying off most of his employees and cutting costs at a monstrous rate. Likewise, we should add, how Trump "managed" an imaginary business on the TV reality show The Apprentice, gaining enormous recognition over the dozen years of broadcasting.
If we weren't wrapped up in the metaphor of the state as a company, we would more easily see the absurdities of this narrative. Managing a digital platform that employs several thousand people and governing a state of several hundred million people are very different challenges. If we ...
Musk also learned another lesson from Trump's success: people hate the elites, so it's best to pretend to be an outsider who is not part of the system, but rather fights it and criticizes it relentlessly - a lesson that, by the way, the Democrats still can't seem to learn.
That's why Musk, a former Hollywood pet who appeared in Marvel movies and smart sitcoms like Theory of the Great Rise, has begun criticizing the film industry for promoting the "woke virus." That's why he is now attacking the mainstream media - the same media that helped promote him as a supposed genius - without scorn. "Now you are the media," he - he repeats to his fans on Twitter, mocking CNN, the New York Times and other leading media outlets.
It seems that this mix of "billionaire-celebrity-outsider" is full of contradictions, but in the hands of a capable peddler of dimwits - like Musk - it works after all.
Thank you, Uncle Sam
When we stop treating Musk like a clown who is about to trip over his own feet, we will finally understand the scale of the threat. The richest man in the world has just bought himself a seat in the White House. And only the biggest gullible person can still think that Musk has views that are at most a little to the right.
For the past several months, a simple rule has been at work on Musk's platform: if someone wants to prop up a right-wing conspiracy theory, the famous billionaire is most likely to help him do it.
The Democratic Party is bringing in illegal immigrants to replace "real" American voters? Go ahead, Musk will be happy to pass on and still comment in his proper style: interesting, disturbing, people should know.
Voter fraud against Trump? But of course Musk will join in promoting this theory.
Or do you want to promote the theory that the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is not helping hurricane victims because it is too busy bringing in illegal immigrants? Musk will help.
And no, unfortunately the controversial billionaire is not just an internal affliction of the United States. The U.S. is still such a powerful and influential country that whoever is in power there affects the rest of the world.
Musk, moreover, loves to interfere in the affairs of other countries. When anti-immigrant riots occurred in the UK, Musk immediately began commenting on them on his platform. He promoted the British right's narrative that migrants are self-inflicted and accused the British government of treating protesters unfairly.
On a similar note, he also accused the German government of being too open to migrants, with Canada, Brazil and Italy also on his list of targets. Each time, the scenario was similar: Musk used his authority and multi-million dollar reach to support the perspective of the far right and incite people against politicians he dislikes.
It should also not be forgotten that at one time Musk boasted about his idea to solve the war in Ukraine. The solution was suspiciously favorable to Russia.
Let's remember that Musk is not a mere observer of the war - his Starlink satellites are a key element in the clash between the two armies. Trump's win has only increased his influence on the issue - we know, for example, that after Trump's victory Musk took part in a phone call between the president-elect and the Ukrainian president. We also know that Starlink was already restricting Ukraine from using its satellites to attack Russian positions in 2022. Billionaire Elon Musk is de facto pursuing his own private foreign policy before he even received a ministerial appointment from Trump.
In the face of such developments, the rest of the world cannot take the comfortable position of a spectator who watches with a mixture of amusement and disgust what goes on in the American political arena. The Americans have dragged us all into this quagmire. Therefore, it is in the interest of all of us to find a way out.
Politics needed yesterday
To understand what that way out might look like, one must first grasp why pro-businessism and anti-elitism have found such a following.
In short: because there is a widespread loss of faith in democracy and, even more broadly, in politics.
People justifiably feel that the most important decisions are made over their heads - by technocratic elites. And any attempt to do something big is derided by these elites as utopian, ridiculous, threatening.
The United States is a prime example of this. Polls show that a majority of Americans would be happy to tax, and tax heavily, their richest countrymen and largest corporations, raise the minimum wage and introduce universal public health care. However, they keep hearing that this is a pipe dream. It can't be done, I think you guys are nuts, do you want to end up like the Soviet Union or Venezuela?
Europe can't boast of any particularly impressive reforms either. It's as if it shot itself out of all the bold ideas at the turn of the 20th century. Public services, universal health insurance, pensions, the 40-hour workweek, labor unions, paid vacations - these are all ideas that are more than a century old!
People like Musk are preying on this political impotence. Since we can't do anything anyway, since we are controlled by technocrats, let's support the one who seems the most powerful, the craziest, the most willing to shake up the entire system. Let something finally change.
This is one of the most grim testimonies to the state of our democracies: that voters time and again cede power to unpredictable oligarchs, choosing to leap into the unknown and hope to "plow through" all the institutions of the state. Plenty of voters have let themselves be convinced that eccentric billionaires are the last substitute for causality in our world. This is the pinnacle of their political hopes: counting on some CEO to revolutionize their corporate state.
At the same time, this gloomy punchline hides a harbinger of hope.
Take away Musk's most powerful weapon.
We can, of course, count on Musk eventually making some kind of mistake, such as getting into a dispute with Trump, which could quickly escalate into a war between the magnates. But even if Musk eventually cusses, someone new will jump in to take his place, tapping into the same disillusionment with democracy, the same admiration for wealthy businessmen and the same resentment of political elites. Therefore, the most effective solution would be to knock the most powerful tool out of Musk's hand - disillusionment with politics.
Actually, every political group has something to think about here.
Moderate and centrist politicians, as well as mainstream political commentators, must finally ask themselves: if the result of our fear of a major political change, are people like Musk and Trump, then maybe we are not as reasonable as we thought?
What more radical and leftist and anarchist activists should ask themselves is another question: is their total criticism of politics as a playing field for corrupt elites counterproductive?
Instead of leading to a grassroots, spontaneous, popular and truly democratic revolution, this criticism seems to support a cynical vision of politics. Political cynicism leads many people not to support a progressive social revolution, but to a conclusion that suits people like Musk: since all politicians and all parties suck, we might as well vote for a powerful, efficient businessman to take the place of inept political elites.
Unfortunately, but under capitalism, the gap left by political parties is not filled by grassroots grassroots movements, but by billionaire populists who have cash, influence and their own propaganda channels.
It would be great if a little more "sensible heads" opened up to bold, pro-social political reforms, and a little more activists dreaming of revolution - to work with the most promising parties and politicians in a difficult and frustrating way, although they are never perfect.
If the former would give up their silly symmetrism of the type "on the one hand a billionaire in connivance with the extreme right, but on the other activists with all this basic income or higher taxes for the rich, so here and here extremes." And if the latter would stop pretending that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is as poor a choice as Joe Biden (and Agnieszka Dziemianowicz-Bąk as bad as Donald Tusk) and that they are as far from Joe Biden as they are from Trump and Musk.
The postwar alliance of socialists, liberals and conservatives brought us the welfare state. Far from imperfect, but the best organization of the political community so far in the modern era. An alliance of "reasonable heads" and "revolutionaries" could help us break the destructive trend of oligarchization of politics - if such an alliance is still possible.
