Musk may indeed have won Trump the election. But his Wisconsin cheesehead humiliation proved he’d lost the juice
At Waterloo, Napoleon rode to his defeat wearing the fetching forest green uniform of a light cavalry colonel and his signature bicorne chapeau. In Wisconsin, Elon Musk rocked up in a novelty cheesehead hat.
Dramatic? Okay, maybe a tad. The tech mogul’s disorderly rout in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election this April, after splashing nearly $20 million on the race, was not Musk’s final defeat. Even now, amid the glowing ruins of his thermonuclear exchange of views with his erstwhile bestie Donald Trump, it would be unwise to count him out.
Nevertheless, the Wisconsin debacle marked a turning point in Musk’s relationship with his presidential patron. And it’s crucial to understanding just how their alliance unraveled so quickly and so explosively.
Cast your mind back to the unfathomably distant past of March 19, 2020. While the world plunged headlong into disaster, Musk — having previously tweeted that “the coronavirus panic is dumb”, while falsely claiming that “kids are essentially immune” — predicted that there would be “close to zero new cases in the U.S. by the end of April”.
Today we know that COVID-19 ended up killing an estimated 1.2m people in the U.S. and 7.1m people across the world (maybe far more). Around the same time, Musk reportedly made a private $1m bet with the philosopher Sam Harris that U.S. COVID-19 cases would never top 35,000.
According to Harris, Musk never paid out, and the disagreement ended their friendship. “It was not long before he began maligning me on Twitter for a variety of imaginary offenses,” Harris later wrote.
In this we see the seeds of Musk’s next five years. His attitude to COVID-19 exemplified his willingness to tweet from the hip and spread misinformation even with millions of lives at stake. His increasingly strident opposition to lockdowns and vaccine mandates, calling the former “fascist”, presaged his embrace of movement conservatism and his descent into COVID conspiracism and antivaxism. And his alleged ghosting of Harris suggested a thin-skinned reluctance to ever admitting that he’s wrong.
Even so, in those days Musk was popular and admired across the political spectrum. He was the genius rocket-builder who put a sports car in orbit and made electric vehicles mainstream. He’d served as inspiration for the Marvel movies’ take on Tony Stark, and graced the cover of TIME as its 2021 Person of the Year.
Some tech journalists and electric vehicle experts had a less flattering view. They’d witnessed Musk’s willingness to attack his critics and pursue petty grievances; to bend the truth, pick pointless fights, and (allegedly) break the law. But these incidents don’t seem to have penetrated into wider public view.
That remained the basic picture even as Musk’s politics changed drastically. Piqued by his daughter Vivian Wilson’s coming out as transgender, and seemingly aided by the brain-pickling effect of his favourite social network, he shifted rightward — from self-proclaimed “socialist” and centrist to redpilled crusader — and ultimately underwent a full-fat far-right radicalization.
As recently as December 2022, Musk’s net approval rating among American voters was narrowly positive, with many simply not knowing enough about him to have an opinion. By mid-2024, when Musk’s political shift finally brought him into alliance with Trump, his popularity was dropping slowly. Still, it stayed close to neutral through the election in November and for weeks afterwards as citizens waited to see what Trump 2.0 would bring.
All of which is to say that Musk might be right when he claims that he won Trump the election. While it’s impossible to know what happened in the alternate universe (or, perhaps, the parallel simulation) where the tycoon did not intervene, there’s every reason to think he made a big difference.
Obviously his money helped; with a total contribution of $291m, he was both the biggest individual donor of the 2024 election cycle and the biggest of any election since at least 2010. Yet money isn’t everything.
Musk’s endorsement gave permission to other tech barons to swallow their doubts or fears about Trump. Technocratic businessfolk who fancied themselves as hard-headed intellectuals, focused on excellence and competence above ordinary partisan politics — not a natural fit with Trump’s governing style, to put it generously — now had one of their own tribe to help them imagine that Trump would build, build, build rather than burn, burn, burn.
