Musk once fashioned his image primarily around fighting climate change by building electric cars to limit pollution and rockets that could one day help humans flee to Mars from a dying earth. He's now at the forefront of a growing class of Silicon Valley billionaires championing a libertarian movement as a backlash to the California region's historically liberal ideology - which Musk now derides as a “woke mind virus.” His rising political involvement could put his industrial empire in a position that current and former employees likened to the Gilded Age, when industry barons including J.
P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller held broad sway over government policy that impacted their companies and their wealth.
Musk’s growing power excited his fans and backers who also view government as an impediment to his high-tech ventures, including Shervin Pishevar, a venture capitalist who has invested in SpaceX and advocated for Silicon Valley’s shift toward Trump. Cutting regulation, he said, would speed SpaceX's efforts to get to Mars. “He’s going to make America function like a startup,” Pishevar said of Musk.
“There’s no greater entrepreneur in American history than Elon Musk." Musk’s political ascension comes after perceived slights under the Biden administration that accelerated Musk's embrace of Trump’s rightwing populism. For example, Tesla wasn’t invited to an August 2021 EV summit at the White House that featured only unionized Detroit automakers that pro.
