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Elon Musk has “deep disdain” for Donald Trump, who he believes is a “con man” and “the world’s champion of bullshit,” according to a sprawling new biography from Walter Isaacson.
The hotly-anticipated book from the famed biographer of Steve Jobs examines the life and career of Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur whose ventures include Tesla, SpaceX, and now X, formerly known as Twitter. Isaacson, who spent two years interviewing and shadowing Musk, delved into his complex views on U.S. politics — which his biographer describes as hatred for Trump but also increasing hostility towards the left.
Musk’s turn to the right has manifested publicly in an open embrace of far-right accounts on X. But despite his MAGA bedfellows, Musk has long held disdain for Trump.
According to Isaacson’s book, which was obtained by Mediaite, Musk had “never been very political,” but contributed to the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. In 2016, he spoke out publicly against Trump, but harbored hope that as president the real estate mogul and reality television star would govern more responsibly than his behavior on the campaign trail suggested.
In December 2016, Musk had a private meeting with Trump, during which he was “baffled” by the then-president-elect’s comments about Tesla and NASA.
“He seems kind of nuts,” Musk said after the meeting, according to Isaacson, “but he may turn out okay.”
On the contrary: Musk “concluded that Trump as president was no different than he was as a candidate,” Isaacson wrote. “The buffoonery was not just an act.”
“Trump might be one of the best bullshitters ever,” Musk told Isaacson. “If you just think of Trump as a sort of con-man performance, then his behavior sort of makes sense.”
Musk eventually resigned from the presidential councils he served on after Trump withdrew from the Paris climate accords.
In the years after Trump left office, even as Musk became more concerned with “wokeness,” he still harbored a “deep disdain” for Trump, “whom he considered a con man,” Isaacson wrote.
While he found Biden to be “boring as hell,” he “says he would have voted for Biden in 2020, but he decided that going to the polls in California, where he was then registered, was a waste of time because it was not a contested state.” (That bit of reporting from Isaacson presents a discrepancy with Musk’s public comments on the 2020 election: Musk told Tucker Carlson in an interview earlier this year that he voted for Biden.)
Despite his contempt for Trump, Musk did not think that the former president should necessarily remain off Twitter, which banned Trump after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022.
Musk told Isaacson that Trump should remain banned from Twitter if he was “engaged in criminal activity” — and even said he believed Trump was.
“I want to avoid the bullshit disputes about Trump,” Musk said. “If he’s engaged in criminal activity — it seems increasingly that he has — that’s not okay.”
“It’s not free speech to subvert democracy,” Musk said.
Then one day, in a “feisty mood” according to Isaacson, Musk posted a poll asking if Trump should be reinstated. The poll was close but the ayes had it, and Musk promised to reinstate the former president.
“I’m not Trump’s fan,” Musk told Isaacson that day. “He’s disruptive. He’s the world’s champion of bullshit.”
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