Updated November 13, 2024 at 12:30 a.m.*
–OpEd–
SÃO PAULO — Now that Donald Trump has won the presidential election in the United States, he is clearly indebted to Elon Musk.
Last month, the world’s richest man embraced the Republican’s campaign so enthusiastically that he ended up securing a final push — and giving the world a huge lesson in how U.S. corruption works.
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It is a scandal. Having obtained a promise of a top position in the future government, Musk pledged to donate at least $500 million to the campaign, according to Trump himself. He did more. He organized dinners to convince other millionaires to donate, like him, “in large numbers,” guaranteeing that it would be a safe investment.
He created a super PAC, an organization to raise funds and carry out actions to support an electoral campaign, called America PAC, whose budget of $180 million, in addition to paying 2,500 people to go door-to-door convincing voters, hired lawyers to fight legal battles that could favor Trump.
On X, Musk praised Trump, used his huge reach to promote far-right conspiracy theories and criticize Democratic candidate Kamala Harris — he even took over a dormant @America profile to campaign.
He used his account with 200 million followers to interview Trump on Aug. 12. During the interview, which was painful to watch, they laughed together about firing workers who go on strike (Tesla is the only major car manufacturer that doesn’t allow its workers to set up a union).
And it seems as though Trump is finally starting to repay his debt. Late on Tuesday, the President-elect named Musk, alongside fellow entrepreneur and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, to lead what he’s calling the Department of Government Efficiency, a new body he plans to establish once he returns to the White House.
“A smaller Government, with more efficiency and less bureaucracy, will be the perfect gift to America,” Trump said in a statement on Tuesday.
Quest for power
As we know here in Brazil, Musk’s tweets are disproportionately driven by the algorithm of the corporation he acquired and which has since lost 70% of its value. Today, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter is little more than a propaganda machine for Elon boy in his quest for power.
So much so that, while posing as a defender of absolute freedom, X suspended the account of a reporter who had obtained confidential information about the Republican campaign and even banned links to the original post on Substack.
This kind of involvement by a billionaire in a presidential campaign is unparalleled in recent history.
In addition, Musk had promised to distribute million a day to voters in key states who sign a petition defending the Constitution. A disguised way of making a lottery for those who vote for Trump, the measure is illegal in any country in the world. But in the U.S. has only received a “warning” from the U.S. Justice Department that it would “potentially” be illegal.
In an interview with pseudo-journalist Tucker Carlson, Musk asked: “How long do you think my prison sentence will be?” if Trump loses?
Elon has mainly been worried about saving his own ass.
Unprecedented involvement
This kind of involvement by a billionaire in a presidential campaign is “unparalleled in recent history,” according to The New York Times. It is the most open purchase of public office by a private interest in recent history.
Imagine if the late Roberto Marinho — the Brazilian communications tycoon who founded and owned the media conglomerate Grupo Globo until the early 2000s — had done the same thing: stepped onto the platform of a presidential candidate, openly poured millions into it, having already secured his place in government. Or if this had come from the Odebrecht construction giant.
It would be a scandal, opinion columns like this one would multiply — not only in Brazil but around the world. And all of them would remind us that, in fact, Brazil is a corrupt country, corruption here is endemic, there’s no way around it. It will never work.
But American corruption is perverse because it is legalized.
Brazil corruption…
In the United States, greedy corporations and unscrupulous people like Musk — lauded as great entrepreneurs who move the country forward — manage to change the laws so that buying parts of the state is seen as an act of great entrepreneurial vision.
Business geniuses. The creation of the super PACs is exactly that: a way of normalizing direct political influence by corporations and millionaires. A way of legalizing the “caixa dois” — or parallel bookkeeping to evade taxes.
Let’s remember that using such practises to finance political campaigns formed a large part of the corruption allegations that so shocked public opinion and the press during the Lava Jato anti-corruption probe in Brazil.
The American system is corrupt from the core.
Corruption that even led to billion-dollar fines for Petrobras and Odebrecht in the United States, applauded from here in Brazil as a much more evolved country, much cleaner than ours and, therefore, with the moral stature to fine our companies for dirty corruption that didn’t even happen in their land.
Now, when Odebrecht financed João Santana to run political campaigns for left-wing candidates in other Latin American countries, this was what it was all about: a millionaire corporation paying for political campaigns to take advantage of the elected politicians.
… vs. U.S. corruption
I’m shocked that this doesn’t shock anyone. That we are colonized to the point of not seeing what is screaming in our faces. The American system is corrupt from the core, no matter how much it is given a veneer of normality.
Musk’s conquest of the state will represent one step forward in the quest for power by the new digital oligarchy, the techno-oligarchs, who act exactly like the traditional oligarchs, the plutocrats that the Justice Department was so vocal about fighting when it launched its investigation into foreign corruption in companies like Odebrecht and Petrobras.
It is the quintessence of U.S.-style corruption — cynical, self-indulgent and imperialist. The country is so corrupt that it deceives itself and the rest of the world about its own honesty and good intentions.
What could Musk gain?
In Musk’s case, what advantages are we talking about?
Once in the White House, Musk will have plenty of energy to do as much damage as he wants, as will vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, who is a friend of another techno-oligarch close to Musk, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. What he wants is not just the position of coordinator of the “department of government efficiency” that Trump promised him as a gift.
What he wants is to avoid at all costs that his businesses are regulated, to pay taxes, to answer criminally for the harm they have caused to society, to comply with the law. Under the fallacious mantra of “maintaining competitiveness,” “reducing the state,” “maintaining free enterprise,” what he wants is not to give up an inch of profit from his companies and his people. He wants to maintain the digital Wild West.
Any relation to the billionaire technocrat from the film “Don’t Look Up” is no coincidence.
But he also wants to gain government support — government subsidies that he says he wants to reduce. One example raised by the website Politico concerns the subsidy that Starlink wants to receive of 5 million under a rural support program created by U.S. President Joe Biden. It’s worth a read: The site describes how Musk has formed personal allies in Washington in order to get his hands on this prize.
Another of Musk’s dreams, according to Politico, is to curb environmental legislation that prevents his company SpaceX from sending people to Mars more quickly — any relation to the billionaire technocrat from the film “Don’t Look Up” is no coincidence — to maintain and expand his large contracts with the State Department and NASA, which exceed billion, and, of course, to control legislation relating to artificial intelligence (AI).
Although Biden’s executive order requiring the government to more firmly monitor the application of AI is rather timid, Trump has already promised to throw it in the garbage bin.
Far-right techno-oligarchs
Let’s remember that in the last election, one of the decisive factors in holding off the coup attempt was the action of Big Tech — including Twitter, Facebook and Google (YouTube) — to “de-platform” Trump’s accounts and suppress his coup speech. Today, the game has changed, largely operated by far-right billionaires including Musk.
A part of Silicon Valley has understood that a Trump administration would be more favorable to them than a Democratic one — after dozens of actions by the Justice Department to break the oligopoly and remedy the anti-competitive practices of these companies.
Trump, who has already worn out his vocal chords criticizing Big Tech, gladly accepted these techno-oligarchs as new allies.
We are one step closer to the techno-oligarchy taking over the American state.
The greatest proof that we are talking about an oligarchy, and not just an isolated technocrat, is the equally scandalous stance of The Washington Post, owned by Amazon owner Jeff Bezos, which for the first time in 48 years did not endorse one of the two presidential candidates.
The decision generated open criticism from the paper’s former editor-in-chief Marty Baron, who called it “cowardly” at a time when clearly one of the candidates is a threat to democracy. Bezos shrugged it off: He said that the endorsement of America’s second largest newspaper doesn’t matter.
But the reality is clear as air: the owner of Amazon prefers a government that doesn’t want to regulate technology companies. It’s also worth remembering The Washington Post’s editorial condemning the Brazilian Supreme Court when it suspended Twitter, calling the decision “irresponsible” and “authoritarian.”
Even then, Bezos was proving to be an ally in the anti-illegal crusade of the techno-oligarchs, of which Musk is only the most brazen face.
Resisting in the rest of the world
Perhaps the defeat by our Supreme Court in Brazil — when Musk had to tuck his tail between his legs, pay the fines and comply with our law — has taught the techno-oligarch that, in order to continue undermining the laws of other countries, he also needs a state to call his own: the American state.
It would be naive to think that the plans recently described by journalist Jamil Chade, for a potential Trump administration to use USAID to foment the global far right, would not include calls for the tireless defense of freedom of expression, which today is already mixed with the narrative orchestrated by Big Tech spin doctors to curb any regulation.
Now that Trump has won, we are one step closer to the techno-oligarchy taking over the American state.
The rest of the world will be left with the inglorious task of fighting it in their own countries, trying to establish respect for local laws and creating new rules to limit the power of these companies, which today operate by their own rules without any supervision.
*Originally published November 6, 2024, this article was updated November 7, 2024 with enriched media.
