It’s a testament to the energy and drive of Elon Musk that he’s now a key adviser to an incoming president of the United States who he helped elect this year — and this is a side project for him. What stamp collecting is to most of us — something we make time for when not engaged in our day jobs — influencing the future direction of the United States government is to Musk. This is not to minimize his significance.
Far from it. The revolutionary businessman represents a distinctive and unexpected contribution to the Trump coalition. From the perspective of a decade ago, if you had said the most visionary and wealthy entrepreneur on the planet was at the right hand of a Republican president-elect, promising to cut a couple of trillion dollars from the federal budget and bring massive innovation to the economy, you might have assumed Paul Ryan or someone in his ideological camp had gotten elected.
The former Speaker of the House and vice-presidential nominee was a relentless advocate of entrepreneurship, economic dynamism and a slimmed-down government. Within the GOP, the rise of Trump the populist put the political squeeze on the likes of Ryan, whose business-oriented, free-market creed suddenly felt stale and out of touch. Now, a version of that worldview has returned via Musk.
To be sure, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX is a different animal. He has an in-your-face persona, a bit of a Silicon Valley version of Trump. He’s been radicalized on immigration, becoming a fi.