The Current - How Elon Musk helped shift Silicon Valley to the right

Episode Date: October 14, 2025

He’s one of the world’s most influential entrepreneurs and is behind companies like X, Tesla and Space X. But what role is Elon Musk playing in the tech industry’s shift to the right, and how did growing up in apartheid South Africa shape his worldview? Jacob Silverman is the host of the new CBC podcast Understood: The Making of Musk and the author of “Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the radicalization of Silicon Valley.”

Okay, I know, I know it's not time for the holidays, but can we talk about Mariah Carey for a second? She just dropped her first full album in seven years. We're going to talk about that on Commotion, but also we're going to celebrate 20 years as her iconic record, The Emancipation of Mimi. For this episode and a whole lot more, you can find and follow Commotion with me, Alameen Abdul Mahmood, on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for the greatest capitalist in the history of the United States of America, Elon Musk. It was Elon Musk's moment.

You probably remember it. He bounded onto the stage, dressed in his trademark black, and he let out a roar. America's just not just going to be great. America is going to reach heights that it has never seen before. The future is going to be amazing. Elon, Elon, Trump and his money into Donald Trump's re-election campaign, one of many tech leaders who did the same, and then he stood behind the president at the inauguration.

A potent signal of Silicon Valley's shift to the right. Elon Musk and Donald Trump have, of course, very publicly fallen out, but Musk remains one of the world's most influential and well-known entrepreneurs behind companies, including X, Tesla, and SpaceX. He is the richest man in the world, and he has outsized ambitions. He's fixated on colonizing Mars and has a seemingly insatiable drive for dominance. But what explains Elon Musk? How did his upbringing in apartheid South Africa shape how he sees the world today?

And what does Elon Musk's story tell us about the shift to the right by so many tech titans? Jacob Silverman is the host of the new CBC podcast, Understood the Making of Musk. He is also the author of the newly released book, Gilded Rage, Elon Musk, and the radicalization of Silicon Valley. Jacob, good morning. Thanks for having me. You open your book by saying that you started writing it on a hunch back in 2023. What was the hunch? Well, I saw that people in the tech industry were increasingly, at least a certain elite within the tech industry was becoming more vocally right wing and just more involved in politics.

I was looking at the time at David Sacks, who now has a position of the Trump administration, pouring money into recall elections in San Francisco, mostly local efforts. And I started looking more broadly and who are the kind of people that Sacks was talking to? And I thought, you know, this seems like something that is going to be a big factor in the 2024 election. I remember telling my book editor when we were just sort of talking about the idea, you know, I think Musk might get involved in the 2024 election, which, of course, is a huge understatement in retrospect. So let me ask you about that, because those are great journalistic instincts following up on a hunch. It's even better when the hunch proves right. But did you at any level imagine the story ending up where it is today and it's still an ongoing story? But with Trump reelected, Musk being his right hand man, for that short, yet very pivot. at a point of time. And again, we'll see where this all goes. Yeah, I certainly didn't expect it to go the path it did or to the extent. You know, I thought I had identified some trends that were happening in American culture and society. But that's what was unprecedented about the

2024 election. We've seen a lot of money in U.S. politics in the last decade. We had this era of basically unlimited political spending via these super PACs. But, and so we'd had other oligarchs from our society put a lot of money behind candidates. But, We had never seen this closeness, especially visually. Occasionally some rich guy would come out and introduce Trump at a rally or something like that. But he wouldn't be a partner on the campaign trail and in the Oval Office and sitting in on meetings with foreign heads of state. There's that kind of merger between Musk and some of his colleagues and their private interests and the Trump campaign and then the Trump presidency, which I do think is really unprecedented. Elon Musk is sort of ubiquitous.

I think most people just feel like they know him. and we know the broad strokes of his life. What's great about the work you're doing is you're saying, how did the boy become the man that we all see today? So tell me more about where he grew up, what his adolescence was like. Sure. He grew up in Pretoria, which was the administrative heart of apartheid South Africa. And by the time, he grew up, as some people know, under a rather imperious father named Errol Musk, who just recently, there was a big article in the New York Times about a number of accusations of abuse towards his various children. Musk has not been as explicit about any abuse from his father,

but has indicated that there may, that there's at least some verbal abuse and that he's criticized his father a lot as basically a terrible person. Just to specify on the allegations, as you say, this is the New York Times. Errol Musk denies the allegations. He says family members are trying to get money from his eldest son, Elon, and that he's not been convicted of any crime. You know, what's worth also noting there is that Elon Musk, according to what we know in that Times article on some of his own admission he's helped out some of his

siblings and it seems like a lot of them did turn to Musk for help with Errol and that Musk at times has tried to keep his distance from his father and act as sort of this this protector of sorts for some of his siblings they in some ways had a typical white South African upbringing I mean they were racial elites they were not they were English speaking they did not speak Afrikaans. So there was that distinction, and we do go into the podcast regarding what some those distinctions mean, like what part of the ruling class does he come from. His father had a local political position at a time, analogous, I believe, to a city council member. He also ran a small business. This was a nice, prosperous upbringing for South Africa, and certainly in comparison

to the indigenous black population there. But in many ways, it wasn't unusual. And we talked to one of his high school classmates who says that, you know, Musk was kind of a nerdy kid like the rest of us and he was smart enough but didn't stand out. How did that upbringing for Elon Musk create a blueprint for his political ideology? Sure. Well, Musk has tried to distance himself from apartheid and he did leave the country before he had to face possible conscription into the country's army. And but I think you can see other elements of that society and of the politics him, influencing him. For one thing, of course, he was an elite just by default and by the color of his skin. And he was in a society that was highly engineered, you know, that was

racially engineered and stratified in a very deliberate way. I mean, one of the most explicit projects of this kind that we've ever seen. And I think at the very least, that gave him this idea that engineers could run society or could reorder society in a fundamental way. We talk in the podcast about his Canadian grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, who was part of this band political movement in the 40s called Technocracy Inc. And it's a bit what it sounds like, a technocratic movement, but an authoritarian one to basically replace elections and political parties with scientific experts running society. Another attitude or idea that we talk about in the podcast is this South African concept called a boss cap or bossism. And that was part of

kind of underlying political ideology, which essentially said that there was a white man in charge in any room and that a lot of businesses and other ventures were kind of run in an authoritarian style by, you know, the reigning white man of that organization. And I think that that's something that a couple of people have written about in sort of must business activity here in the U.S. And I certainly, in the imperious way he does seem to run his companies, has some of that bossism, I think, of South Africa. So as you said, there's a deep Canadian connection. connection to Elon Musk as well. He's a Canadian citizen through his mom who was born in Saskatchewan. He went to Queens University in Kingston, Ontario. What did you uncover in terms of

how the Canadian experience, if I can put it that way? His time in Canada, how that shaped him. Well, Canada was certainly somewhere he desired to go. It was important to him in that way because he wanted to get out of South Africa to avoid conscription, but this was someone who was a tech fanatic or nerd like a lot of folks who really wanted to come eventually to the US to Silicon Valley and be part of things. And I think Canada was that first step for him. I mean, he had a legal ability to come here. And I think it represented an opportunity of escape. And it's a strange sort of return from us because Haldeman left here, partly because he was excited about what the newly apartheid state of South Africa was doing. I mean, Haldeman, I think you can call a race

and certainly did not have very egalitarian views. And he wanted to go to South Africa to help build apartheid. That was something he believed in. And then you have his grandson who shares a lot of the same qualities, you know, very adventurous kind of authoritarian attitude, big visionary or big dreams about life for himself and for politics, making the reverse journey. So Elon Musk is a guy who sometimes often talks about himself,

views himself as a savior for humanity. So you talked about how his experience in apartheid South Africa sort of fed into that. But are there other breadcrumbs around the trail where that sort of ideas of one's self-importance was being built for him? Well, we do have this sort of amusing anecdote in one of the episodes where a high school friend of his Rudolph Pinar talks about playing video games with him. This is when most people would pretend to be, you know, an elf with a name from Tolkien or or dwarf warrior or something like that.

But all of Elon Musk's characters were named after himself. It was like, oh, he's Elon the strongest or Elon the smartest. And I think there was a way in which, even if that wasn't the kind of ego that we see today out of him, he was sort of trying to invent this Superman persona for himself, maybe especially in high school when he wasn't that distinguished socially or academically. But even also, we interviewed someone who was his boss at this tech company called Zip 2, which was how Musk made his big for his fortune. And in some ways, might have been his last boss in his life.

And this boss says to him, they sat down to have a conversation. Musk was about 25, and he starts talking about how he's Alexander the Great. And I don't know whether that comes from growing up in such an elitist society. I certainly think it would be part of that. But the sense, I think, in his mind, that he had to make himself into this kind of person. And I think that also plays into the salesmanship we see all the time from Musk. Let's take a listen to another voice we hear from in the podcast. This is Derek Proudian.

Is that how I said? Proudian, yep. He's an investor. He met Musk when Musk was in his 20s, new to Silicon Valley. Let's take a listen. This kid's got a kind of reality distortion field that goes around him. And, you know, after you talk to him for an hour, you're kind of convinced that, you know, up is down and left is right. And whatever he wants to convince you of, it's very persuasive.

And so he would come into these meetings with executives who had, you know, 20 plus years. of experience in their functionary, and he'd tell them that they were full of shit and that, you know, he knew better. I mean, I guess that's one way to walk into Silicon Valley, right? Yeah, that doesn't work in every industry, but does work in some like tech or maybe finance. So how does he fit in? I think this was sort of a new culture forming. I mean, or at least tech culture was changing in some ways from perhaps a somewhat more

egalitarian, but certainly more liberal-minded culture with its roots in the 60s and 70s counterculture and seeing computers and tech as almost a way to explore new frontiers and to be a little against the man or the powers that be. I mean, obviously we have a different kind of tech culture now. But in that period, you know, Musk was, I think, a bit of a novelty. I think there were people he alienated. But this was also an era in which other people were coming in, especially, you know, people like Peter Thiel with Randy and ideas of personal greatness. And so in some ways, you know, the industry allowed people to kind of talk themselves into these kinds of roles, and especially white men like Elon Musk.

Hi, I'm Mike Figgis. I wrote and directed movies like Leaving Las Vegas and time code. And recently, I was on the set of Francis Ford Coppola's infamous passion project, Megalopolis, making a fly-on-the-wall documentary. In Unfiltered, the Mike Figgis podcasts, I'll share stories of watching a mad genius at work. Get unfiltered. The Micfigure's podcast, wherever you get podcasts. So he worked at PayPal. That's where he sort of entered the ecosystem, the broad ecosystem.

And you say his work with PayPal, quote, gave him the money and self-belief that he could engineer his way out of any problem. Tell me more about that. So Zip 2, this first company, was a little more. modest and its ambitions. It basically made online yellow pages or event listings and things like that for newspapers. But PayPal was made out of the merger of X, the first X, which was an early payments company that he had founded, and Peter Thiel's Confinity. And then what happened there was the company was a huge success. I mean, it was decently successful on its own, but it got bought

by eBay for more than $1.5 billion. A huge amount at the time, now that's not necessarily a big, payday in tech, but he got, he made a couple hundred million dollars from that and was able to, I think, start charting his own future. And this is when he started telling people, you know, I'm not going to spend too much of it. I'm going to, this is going to be rolled into my next venture. With PayPal, they had, he and Teal and others had made inroads into the highest levels of venture capital in Silicon Valley and the highest levels of executives. So I think he was a lot better position then to start doing big things like SpaceX. So it's him and Teal who are part of what kind of referred to as a PayPal mafia. Who else is in that bunch? Mostly people

who we now identify as conservatives in the industry. A few who are Democratic donors like Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, the guys who founded YouTube. Roloff Botha, who's also a South African friend of Musk, was brought over to be one of the executives at PayPal. He is now the head of Sequoia, the most powerful VC firm in the United States. But you had all these people who came together. They're nearly all white men, all men, but almost all of them white men, a few South Africans. And they formed this network, essentially. And in a lot of ways, it was a political network just as much as it was a professional and network of friends. And people like Peter Thiel was a dyed-in-the-wool political animal from early on since he was in college. I think

Musk was someone more who had a general social tolerance. I mean, until I think it was 22, he used to tweet every year that Tesla got an award from an LGBTQ organization in the U.S. as a great place to work if you're from that group. And he at one point in 2021 or 22 said, if you don't like that, you can buy your cars elsewhere. And that, of course, has totally changed. And one thing I talk about is his daughter coming out as trans, certainly changed him and made him, I would argue, pretty openly transphobic. But yeah, this is someone who was being shaped by the people around him, but didn't really want to get involved directly in politics until much more recently. What was it that caused Elon Musk to swing to

the right politically and throw his support behind Trump? You mentioned one of his own children being trans, started maybe shifting his views on social issues, but what really got him there? Yeah. I mean, I think for some of these people, it's opportunistic as much as it is about personal belief. But, you know, Musk, we've heard him talk about the woke mind virus. That is, it sounded silly at first, but that is a very real thing for him. And he had said in a public interview, the woke mind virus killed my son. And he was referring to his child coming out as trans.

Of course, Vivian Wilson, his trans daughter is not dead, but she has disowned him. And that just personally for him was a very big deal. I mean, he said that his daughter's school made her a communist. You hear this kind of thing elsewhere among some of these people like Bill Ackman, a prominent financier in America who's kind of a musk ally, has said that Harvard turned to, daughter into a Marxist. So, you know, some of this stuff actually does come from the personal

experience of these guys. And then what you also see with Musk in particular is further conflict with the state. During COVID, he had to close down his main Tesla factory in Fremont, California for a while. That angered him tremendously. He eventually opened it without permission and said, rather dramatically, if you're going to arrest anyone, please let it be me. There were other things like he wasn't invited to a meeting of EV of electric car, electric vehicle companies at the White House under the Biden administration. He took that very personally. So it's things like that, some of which he takes personally, but it's also a belief among him and some of his colleagues that some of the rank and file in the tech industry, but also young people in general are

adopting political views, including on social justice issues like Black Lives Matter, like Me Too in sexual harassment, like on Israel and Gaza, that they just don't recognize or approve of. They don't like the fact that a lot of young people now have social views. They might be capitalists or they might want to work at tech companies, but they have demands or interests of their own. And that's just not something that's acceptable to this new ruling class in tech. One other view that Musk holds dearly is that he's a pronatalist. He has 14 kids. What does it tell us about his worldview? Well, it certainly shows that he is intent on having as many kids as he can.

He has done it different ways. A lot of it's via IVF. Almost all the kids he has had via IVF are boys. That's, I think, actually significant for why he was so outraged by his daughter coming out as trans. And she has said that, Vivian Wilson. She said that she felt like she was a product that was ordered up and then rejected because she turned out to be queer and then trans. And so we know that Musk has a compound in Texas. where at least a couple of the mothers live.

He is in an ongoing custody battle with Claire Boucher, A.K. Grimes, who's Canadian and has, I believe, three kids with him. But this is also something where he is reaching out to women he finds attractive on X, who he has never met in person, and offering them his sperm to reproduce. I mean, this is a strange thing. This is not just someone who's having a lot of kids or a lot of relationships. This is a real project that he thinks he needs, he thinks that people. like him, but also, of course, himself need to reproduce as much as possible. That's an oversized sense of self or ego of magnitudes. I think most people are just like, what?

And it comes from a real sense that he and people like him are genetic elites. And now they're getting a lot more into embryo screening and trying to screen for intelligence or things that could be used as kind of proxies for intelligence. They, of course, screen more for disease and things like that now. But that's where things are pretty much going for some of these tech elites. They are working with companies or sometimes investing in them, where they can, you know, screen not just for genetic diseases, but potentially for other characteristics. Because the attitude that's now arising in tech and among tech natalists is that they need to optimize their children. So they can go colonize Mars and live on.

Yeah. Or why not make children who can better survive the incredibly unforgiving conditions of Mars if you can adjust their genome a little bit? that is certainly something that's on the minds of Musk and other people. I want to play one more voice that we hear in your podcast. This is Atlantic journalist Adrian LeFrance, who wrote a piece called The Rise of Techno-authoritarianism back in January. I felt that people needed to understand the outsized political influence that these many tech leaders are having, not just political influence, but influence sort of on all of our lives. in particular a small group of tech leaders really see themselves as the ones who should be making decisions on behalf of a population that didn't elect them and that alarmed me.

So techno authoritarianism or as some of us are now calling a techno-fascism seems to be this belief that one, anything can be fixed through the power of technology. It's a really techno-determinous view. But their view is that technological innovation is the most important. thing for society, for societal advancement, for solving our problems, and that anything else, especially democratic politics, is secondary. Someone like Peter Thiel has been on record for a long time as saying he's not really a firm believer in democracy. He thinks capitalism and democracy are in tension with one another, and he vastly prefers capitalism. And over the last few years,

there have been mild, I would argue, mild regulatory efforts from the Biden administration to keep some of the industry's worst excesses in check or to regulate things like crypto or to even break up some of the big monopolies like Alphabet slash Google. And that really disturbed a lot of the tech industry. And the lesson that they took away from that is we need to seize the reins of power more directly, not just donate or Musk himself have been donating rather quietly to some Stephen Miller run organizations. He's Trump's advisor, who was basically the architect of mass deportations. So, you know, Musk had some political interests. But I think there was this wide, wide agreement among his class by the time of the 2024 election came around was, look, we need to do a lot more and we can.

And so that's when you saw them not only pouring more money in than almost any industry has ever done before, but also having many seats at the table with Donald Trump and being around him at events, choosing his staff, you know, even helping choose J.D. Vance, who is a former venture capitalist. They're very excited about that. So the thing about the Musk-Trump falling out is we don't really know where this goes from here. And is it really just like a deep falling out as some people have characterized it. But we know this. Elon Musk has tremendous power. He has tremendous amounts of money. I think he might become the world's first trillionaire.

So where do you see Elon Musk next? Because for a lot of people, the decisions, the plays that he makes really affect their daily lives. Yeah, that's the thing. even when we're talking about, you know, Musk's personal life, like his children. Like, actually, these things affect a lot of people. Or if you're investing in companies that are pioneering new forms of genetic engineering, that potentially affects a lot of people. So unfortunately, kind of whatever Musk thinks or happens to him tends to affect the rest of us.

You know, he recently seemed to make up with Trump at the Charlie Kirk funeral. I think that's how politics works now in the U.S. I mean, the transactional nature of things is not new, but Trump is probably the most transactional president we've ever seen. And these two had had arguments before. After the January 6 riots, Musk and some other venture capitalists and tech executives kind of politely said, maybe it's time to move on to someone else. And Trump had insulted Musk and said, oh, if he comes up to me, I could get him to beg at my feet. And of course, they made up from those kind of mutual insults. And I think they can continue making up again if they want to. I think Trump,

has established himself as, you know, the power does truly reside in the executive office of the presidency. And Musk will, at least in the immediate term, have to respect that. But they need each other still in some ways. Musk is probably the biggest defense contractor in the United States. The Defense Department needs him for something like 70 to 80 percent of all satellite launches and for going to the International Space Station elsewhere. And Musk, of course, needs those government contracts. He needs those relationships. So I think that'll continue. Just before I let you go, there is a segment of the population that says things like he's crazy, he's bananas, he's just a tech bro, he's just a gazillionaire, who cares what he says. Do we do

that to our peril? I think so. And, you know, we see how Musk can move the news cycle every day just by posting something on X or last year he was a major force in promoting this, frankly, this lie that there was an invasion of people mostly from the global south of undocumented migrants coming to the U.S., that there was something called the Great Replacement Theory going on, which has inspired mass shooters, which is this idea that liberals and Jews actually are bringing in foreigners to change the demographic and racial character of the country. And he was right there promoting that idea all along. And really, I mean, the hysteria we have now about migrants in the U.S., Musk has played a huge role in promoting that.

So I think what we need to understand is how to have perspective, maybe not report on what he's on every tweet or every post. But we have to understand that even if he seems silly, ridiculous, unstable, you know, there's been a lot of reporting about his potential drug issues. Like, this is someone who we still have to take seriously and have to understand that his actions, just like how many people didn't take Trump seriously at the beginning. beginning. I mean, there are many ways in which American politics are totally absurd or which we laugh about them every day and don't really seem to make sense. But that's how it works now. The

two most powerful people in U.S. politics are in some ways ridiculous characters, but they're also very powerful ones who don't necessarily have the public's best interests at heart. Thank you very much. Glad to be here. Jacob Silverman is the host of the new CBC podcast, Understood the Making of Musk. You can listen to it wherever you

get your podcast. He's also the author of Gilded Rage, Elon Musk, and the radicalization of Silicon Valley. You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.

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