Elon Musk is still on the MAGA Express, whether he likes it or not

MAGA is the motorbike. Musk is the sidecar. Don’t forget where the engine is, matey.

Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ passed the other day — no thanks to Elon Musk. Credit where it’s due: Speaker Mike Johnson and other hard-nosed House operators held the line, and faced down lolbertarians and starfuckers like Thomas Massie. For everything else that may or may not be wrong with it, both macroeconomically and otherwise, what is most important for the future of America is that they delivered an estimated $170bn increase in real border enforcement, including $75bn in extra funding for ICE alone. For context, that means ICE will probably consume more than the entire Marine Corps budget.

I’ve always liked Johnson. He’s not textbook MAGA, but he’s a principled conservative radicalised by the last administration’s opacity around Biden’s health. He understands the stakes, and on this occasion he has delivered the goods.

Let’s compare him to Elon Musk. Musk, high on his own supply of updoots and ketamine, in a fit of rage that also seemed to include accidentally turning Grok into ‘MechaHitler’ to try to impress Catturd, has decided to launch a vanity party to spite Trump: the so-called ‘America Party’ (an unfitting name considering who their actual supporters are if there ever was one). Then, having totally burned all his bridges that did not lead to Ian Miles Cheong, he rested for a few days, busying himself playing computer games as everything, including the AI he values in the tens of billions, collapsed around him.

From the outset, the ‘America Party’ was scammy. Like so many things Musk, this was the creation of an online poll in which literally anyone from around the world could vote. Like the Poles (the other sort) breaking Enigma, we had plenty of forewarning that a car crash like this would happen, and should have planned accordingly. Alarm bells should have gone off during the H1-B visa fiasco over the festive period, when a few Indian strivers thought it was good optics to attack Heritage Americans on Christmas Day while they were scrolling Musk’s website after they had opened their presents. Musk’s X is already a dumpster fire of shitcoin, pornography, and penny stock scams. It is therefore both unsurprising and fitting that someone has already cybersquatted the ‘@AmericaParty’ handle to promote a crypto rug-pull.

This is part of a broader trend on the tech bro ‘Right’. They surround themselves with cliché-reciting sycophants, and as a result, their political instincts are completely uncalibrated. The America Party won’t get anywhere. But it serves as a useful reminder to any aspiring tech-libertarian (or indeed any libertarian) reading this fine publication:

MAGA is the motorbike. Musk is the sidecar. Don’t forget where the engine is, matey.

If you need a refresher on the ‘why’, consider who Elon Musk actually is: a white multi-billionaire, born in apartheid South Africa, who now owns a global communications chokepoint. He has a strange fixation on deeply unfunny, Reddit-tier memes, techno-utopian fantasies, and both rhetoric and behaviour that skirts dangerously close to eugenics. And, crucially, as befits an oligarch needing to be put back into his place by the American people, he also directly interfered in the 2024 Presidential Election. You couldn’t script a better cartoon villain for a Netflix special released at the peak of Woke in 2022 if you tried. Needless to say, if the Democrats ever regain power, Musk won’t be spared, even after his break with Trump. He’ll be sued, investigated, regulated, and possibly prosecuted (his DOGE antics were legally dubious at best). At a bare minimum, he will be socially excommunicated, and he will financially suffer.

Musk believes in a kind of tech-libertarian exceptionalism, and there’s a whole essay to be written on that pathology. His interventions in the last election, while occasionally welcome, came late, at the point when it was already clear that the Democrats had decided to make an example of him. This is emblematic of a wider issue among tech bros: a deep ingratitude toward the MAGA movement. Sometimes it’s ideological. But more often it’s personal because, frankly, many of them are just awful people. Whether they speak in founder-bro glossolalia because that’s just what’s expected, or because they’re genuinely that deluded, is a chicken-and-egg question. Either way, the outcome is the same: they come off as sweaty, shifty, and vaguely inhuman; like the early LLMs hallucinating their way through human interaction.

At their core, they believe in nothing apart from their own PR. They surround themselves with the worst people you know: sycophants like Richard Hanania, third-rate podcasters (too many to list), and LinkedIn warriors cosplaying as metapolitical visionaries. It’s basically an echo chamber powered by flattery and microdoses of Adderall. (On that note, the drug use makes them even more tedious than they would be otherwise. Dropping acid and inventing prog rock is forgivable if you’re The Grateful Dead. Slightly less so if you’re inventing a payment-processing widget and calling it ‘disruptive’.)

With the Democrats defeated and out of power for four years, Musk and his clique seem to think Trump owes them a favour; as if support can be invoiced retroactively. But politics isn’t a market. There are no liquidity events in political vengeance. You don’t hedge with power factions — you pick a side. And if you betray the only coalition that tolerated you, you don’t become a kingmaker. You become a liability.

As Aneurin Bevan once said: ‘We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run down.’

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This article was written by LaoCaiLarry, a Pimlico Journal contributor. You can subscribe to his Substack here. Have a pitch? Send it to pimlicojournal@substack.com.

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