něco na téma jeho politických preferencí, těžko si představit, že by mohl být někdo tak mocný zároveň apolitický (respektive bez politických motivů směřujících k ochraně svého impéria) a tvářit se jako inženýr, kterého se tyhle věci netýkají...."$8 free speech subscription"
Elon Musk was never a liberal, and his plans for Twitter were never benevolent | Thomas Zimmer | The Guardianhttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/21/elon-musk-liberal-twitter-plans-benevolentMusk’s actions are fully consistent with the worldview that dominates among far-right reactionary extremists. Yet, many observers seem reluctant to acknowledge that what is happening is exactly what it looks like. People who cover the tech world are still searching for a grand business strategy that would explain all this behavior. And some people whose main occupation is to cover politics are also struggling. The New York Times recently declared Musk’s politics “tricky to pin down”, and said that “what he stands for remains largely unclear”.
From a democratic perspective, it’s highly problematic that tech oligarchs like Musk are amassing so much power and influence. They are not democratically controlled in any way or guided by any concern for the public good. Musk is yet another example of how short the path from a certain kind of libertarianism to the far right is, a reminder that this type of libertarianism is driven by a desire for freedom from regulation and criticism of any kind.
Musk believes that the world works best if people like him are in charge and get to do as they please, unhampered by regulations or demands for equality – because their interests ought to be the same as humanity’s. It’s an inherently anti-democratic worldview that tracks very well with the reactionary idea that the world should be run by wealthy white men. This is what is pulling these people to the right, and why they eventually gravitate toward autocratic regimes at home and abroad.
But what about the fact that Musk doesn’t subscribe to all the typical “conservative” policy positions and never described himself as a “conservative”? Well, he certainly subscribes to the only position that matters on the right today: he is rabidly anti-“Left”. It has become dogma on the right to define Democrats, liberals and “the Left” as an illegitimate, “un-American” threat – that all measures, regardless of how extreme, are justified in the defense of “real America” against the “woke” onslaught. That’s exactly where Musk is.
This doesn’t necessarily signal a fundamental change of his politics and worldview. It’s more plausible to think of his trajectory as an activation of reactionary sensibilities and an accelerating process of radicalization, but not an aberration. Much like other predominantly white, predominantly male elites who have been radicalizing to the right, Musk’s acceptance of democracy and pluralism was always conditional and contingent largely on whether or not it would be set up in a way that preserved their status at the top. That certainly doesn’t mean Musk was ever on board with the idea of leveling traditional hierarchies of wealth, race, or gender – clearly, he was not. As soon as his elite status as an obscenely wealthy white man was scrutinized, his fundamental politics was activated.
Elon Musk Is a Far-Right Activist - The Atlantichttps://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/12/elon-musk-twitter-far-right-activist/672436/I tend to agree with The Verge’s Liz Lopatto, who wrote recently that Musk doesn’t really have political beliefs, only personal interests. But one can have vapid or nonexistent political beliefs and still be a political activist. Political activism is about actions. Publicly, Musk appears deeply committed to the right’s culture war against progressivism in most forms. His purchase of Twitter was an explicitly political act couched in the notion of preserving free speech. But Musk’s notion of free speech is a broad course correction that involves amplifying and advancing the interests of right-wing reactionaries while trolling the left. Musk might argue that this is restoring balance to the system, but if we are judging based only on actions and outcomes, it is very hard to see his tenure at Twitter as anything other than a series of policies intended to benefit a particular ideology.
Whether intentionally or not, Musk has, in effect, been governing Twitter using the classic Frank Wilhoit maxim: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” Put differently, the billionaire has been advancing a long-running right-wing political project described recently by my colleague Adam Serwer as a “belief in a new constitutional right. Most important, this new right supersedes the free-speech rights of everyone else: the conservative right to post.”
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/12/is-elon-musk-conservative-donald-trump.htmlPeters is not alone in characterizing Musk as “a bundle of contradictions and inconsistencies” whose politics are “tricky to pin down.” Several other reporters have puzzled over Musk’s apparent transformation from politically taciturn Obama donor to compulsive sharer of cringe-inducing conservative memes. Musk himself maintains that his politics are “neither conventionally right nor left.” Nevertheless, neither Musk’s political trajectory nor his present orientation seem all that difficult to comprehend or categorize. Musk is not only an identifiable political type but a familiar one. In many respects, he is a conservative in the mold of Donald Trump.
The commonalities between Trump’s and Musk’s politics do not end with their mutual radicalization via the pursuit of likes and retweets. Both men also advertise a commitment to free speech that amounts to little more than a plea for personal license. Trump is surely more hypocritical in his critiques of political correctness, given that the former president has endorsed all manner of draconian restrictions on religious practice and freedom of expression. But Musk’s avowed commitment to open discourse is also highly context dependent, with the mogul forcing former Tesla employees to sign indefinite nondisclosure agreements, stonewalling media critics, and, apparently, suspending Twitter accounts that mock him.
Finally, and most alarmingly, both Musk and Trump have a penchant for describing progressive cultural power as an existential threat to the nation (if not the human race) in terms redolent of fascist oratory. “The woke mind virus has thoroughly penetrated entertainment and is pushing civilization towards suicide,” Musk recently declared.
None of this is to say that Musk’s politics are literally indistinguishable from Trump’s. In addition to his disparate views on climate and immigration, Musk claims a more ambitious (if ambiguous) ideological project than the former president ever did. For the most part, Trump has always sought his own aggrandizement as an end in itself. Musk seems genuinely concerned with humanity’s long-term fate, even if this preoccupation may function principally to rationalize his own egoism and self-importance.
Elon Musk political views: Is he Democrat or Republican, and does he back Trump? | The Independenthttps://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/elon-musk-twitter-deal-politics-b2244771.htmlI prefer to stay out of politics." Those were Elon Musk’s words when forced in September 2021 to respond to a claim by Texas governor Greg Abbott that he supported the state’s anti-abortion laws. If he really does prefer to stay out of politics, however, Musk has a funny way of showing it. Over his many years of fame as the chief executive of Tesla, SpaceX, and now Twitter, the South African-born tycoon has attacked everyone and everything from Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders through individual regulatory officials to Covid rules, trade unions, and "pronouns".
Yet despite evidence to the contrary, Musk still claims to be an independent who is “neither conventionally right nor left” and committed to healthy debate.
So what does Elon Musk really believe? And – given that he is both one of the world’s richest people and the owner of one of its largest social networks – what does that mean for the rest of us?
Musk’s caveats about supporting the GOP echo his longstanding claim to be a “centrist” or an “independent” who does not fit into traditional boxes of left or right. For years, he has offered varying definitions of his own politics. His most consistent theme has been that he is “socially liberal and fiscally conservative”, or even “socially very liberal”. In 2020, he put it this way: “I’m socially very liberal. And then economically right of center, maybe, or center. I don’t know. I’m obviously not a communist.” In 2018, he described himself as “a utopian anarchist of the kind best described by Iain Banks”, referring to the late Scottish sci-fi author who wrote longingly (if sceptically) of a space-faring anarcho-socialist civilisation called the Culture, which has no money, no poverty, no wage labour, no police, no prisons, no standing army, and nearly infinite abundance of basic goods. At another point Musk claimed to be a “socialist”, but “not the kind that shifts resources from most productive to least productive”. He later said we should not take what he’d said too seriously.
All in all, it’s hard to reconcile Musk’s actions in 2022 with his claims of centrism. Nor does his alliance with pro-Trump outrage merchants say much for his once-vaunted “social liberalism”, which previously led him to favour “direct democracy” over representative democracy and advocate for the release of people imprisoned for cannabis offences.
Musk has long argued for a universal basic income to support human workers whose jobs, he believes, will soon be replaced with artificial intelligence (AI). In some ways that's a pretty left-wing idea, since it would involve spending enormous amounts of taxpayer money. But it has also been favoured by some conservatives such as Richard Nixon and free market economists such as Milton Friedman, both of whom felt it would prevent government bureaucrats deciding who deserves benefits and avoid punishing recipients for finding work.
Musk is not attempting to meet the dangerous future through government action or massive collective institutions like formal movements or trade unions. Instead, he wants to solve it himself, through hierarchical top-down for-profit companies run by him where he decides how to allocate capital. In other words, he is his own kind of technocrat: a talented engineer and huge nerd who thinks engineers and nerds can design better systems of government and economics than currently exist.
WhenTIME magazine named Musk its 2021 Person of the Year, it described him this way: “The man from the future where technology makes all things possible is a throwback to our glorious industrial past.” But many of the people who actually lived in that past reviled its industrialists as “robber barons”, and their misdeeds inspired regulations and social policies that are still in place today.
That is why Professor Lepore describes Muskism as containing "a lot of feudalism", saying: "It’s like there are these lords and the rest of us are the peasantry and our fates are in their hands because they know best... The presumption that Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, [two of the] wealthiest people in the world, get to decide the extraterrestrial fate of humankind is a bizarrely regressive notion."