Elon Musk isn’t taking over the federal government just because he wants our money.
Of course, for those consumed by greed, there’s no such thing as “enough” money or power, and he’s not rejecting any of the billions of dollars in federal contracts his companies have received. But any financial boon from his ongoing heist of federal agencies is a side benefit to what he’s really hoping to accomplish: The slow extermination of undesirables and their eventual replacement with the spawn of the wealthy elite.
After all, if you or I had $400 billion to our name, we likely wouldn’t spend our days tweeting hundreds of times and picking online fights with astronauts who accuse us of being incorrect. And with a net worth comparable to the GDP of Hong Kong, Musk can certainly afford to retire early, spend quality time with his 13 children, lavish them with gifts and trips, and not concern himself with politics. So why is he so hell-bent on putting federal agencies under his thumb?
As I’ve written previously for Occupy.com, Elon Musk is an unelected billionaire carrying out a soft coup with the tacit blessing of President Donald Trump. In just over a month, Musk has managed to have his representatives gain control of the most vital organs of the federal government:
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They have hijacked the General Services Administration (effectively the federal government’s landlord), which enables them to physically access all federal buildings and deny access to anyone they don’t want inside.
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Musk’s employees have also gained access to the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, which houses all of the payment systems the US Treasury Department makes to hundreds of millions of Americans to the tune of roughly $6 trillion per year — including Social Security and Medicare benefits, government contracts, small business loans, and federal income tax returns, among many other things — though a federal judge has temporarily halted their access while litigation plays out.
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Musk’s team has commandeered the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which has power over millions of federal employees and their sensitive personal data. The OPM also includes medical histories, which is a potential HIPAA violation.
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Musk’s henchmen have also gotten a hold of the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration, the Federal Aviation Administration, and even the Pentagon. Their access to IRS data is thankfully limited thanks to a recent agreement, but their powers and levels of access are still incomprehensibly vast and growing every day.
This power grab seems excessive for anyone, let alone the wealthiest man on the planet with more money than could be spent across dozens of generations. Musk has said he merely wants to make the government more efficient and root out waste and fraud, though the idea that a South African billionaire cares so deeply about saving the US government money strains credibility. Moreover, Trump has already fired numerous inspectors general — the government officials charged with actually rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse throughout federal agencies — shortly after taking office. If targeting wasteful spending was truly his goal, Musk would be clamoring for them to be reinstated. Rather than take him at his word, Americans can discern Musk’s true intent when connecting the dots.
The sinister nature of Elon Musk’s natalism
As the son of South African businessman Errol Musk born in apartheid-era South Africa, Elon Musk’s views could have been inherited from his father. Errol Musk explained in a 2022 YouTube video that the name “Elon” comes from the writings of German scientist Wehrner Von Braun (a member of the Nazi party who later joined the SS), who once wrote of humanity colonizing Mars and the human leader of the red planet having the title “Elon.” Errol Musk is also an ardent natalist who once reportedly said: “the only thing we are on Earth for is to reproduce.”
While Errol Musk had seven children, Elon Musk has 13 confirmed children by four different women. His most recent child was born last fall to 26 year-old far-right influencer Ashley St. Clair. He previously had seven children with his first wife, Justine Wilson (the seventh died of sudden infant death syndrome), three children with Canadian singer Grimes (whose real name is Claire Elise Boucher), and three children with Neuralink executive Shivon Zilis. But Elon Musk’s father, the mothers of his children, and even one of his own children have said he’s a bad father. So it’s hard to argue he’s having so many children because he loves fatherhood and being a dad. It’s even harder to say Musk is a family man given that he spent Thanksgiving with Donald Trump and his family, rather than his own.
In fact, St. Clair, whose son with Musk is now reportedly five months old as of February 2025, said her child’s father has only been around his new baby for a total of three hours since he was born in September. In her custody lawsuit, St. Clair said Musk was not present at his new son’s birth, and that the last time he’d seen his son was on November 30, 2024. But text messages show Musk telling St. Clair that he wants to “knock [her] up again” and that they have a “legion of kids to make.” Grimes recently pleaded with Musk publicly on his X social media platform to contact her about a “medical crisis” one of their children was going through, and urged him to stop parading around their four year-old son X Æ A-Xii in the open. Musk’s estranged daughter, Vivian Wilson (who was born Xavier and later transitioned from male to female), has said that Musk was an absent father for most of her life and once found out that she had another half-sibling only after reading a Reddit thread about the RuPaul Drag Race reality show.
Musk’s stated desire to have more children despite apparently not wanting to play a role in their care or upbringing could be a part of his obsession with the so-called “Great Replacement Theory.” Adherents of the theory believe that there is a secret plot to “replace” whites as the majority demographic in western countries with immigrants and people of color. Musk has tweeted repeatedly about the need for people in western countries to procreate more, and has amplified videos of far-right politicians espousing the Great Replacement Theory on his X account, which has more than 200 million followers.
Rolling Stone reported last year that Musk pinned a tweet to his profile for weeks that showed a graph comparing the number of new immigrants arriving to the US to the number of babies born to American mothers. And in 2023 he once alleged that Black South Africans were advocating for “white genocide.” This is the same conspiracy theory that led a white man to massacre 10 people at a supermarket in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York in 2022. And as Newsweek reported, other adherents of the conspiracy theory have carried out mass shootings against marginalized communities like at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas in 2019, and at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand that same year.
Putting Elon Musk’s fascist signaling in its proper context
If Elon Musk is a true believer in the Great Replacement Theory, then having as many children as possible could be viewed as his own contribution to drive up the white birthrate. And it contextualizes a February tweet in which he responded to Trump’s tweet of the quote “He who saves his country does not violate any law” with 14 American flag emojis. Notably, Musk tweeted the 14 flag emojis at 2:14 PM, or 14:14 on a 24-hour clock. This could be a reference to the infamous “14 Words” slogan uttered by neo-Nazis: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” The Anti-Defamation League refers to the 14 Words as “the most popular white supremacist slogan in the world.”
Trump’s controversial tweet that Elon Musk quote-posted is understood as a Napoleon Bonaparte quote, but it has a much more recent point of reference: Former FBI counterterrorism official Frank Figliuzzi mentioned in a February MSNBC interview that neo-Nazi terrorist Anders Behring Breivik — who killed 78 people in Norway in 2011 — also used that quote in his 1,500-page manifesto. Breivik believed he was acting nobly, and argued that feminism and multiculturalism were to blame for what he viewed as a declining European society.
On Inauguration Day, Elon Musk gave a speech at a rally in which he saluted the crowd twice with his arm outstretched and his palm facing down. The Guardian referred to it as “back-to-back fascist salutes,” while fascism scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who was born to a Jewish father, posted to Bluesky: “Historian of fascism here. It was a Nazi salute and a very belligerent one.” Even though Musk pushed back and said “the ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired,” the Associated Press reported that far-right groups interpreted the salute as a gesture of solidarity with their causes. Vivian Wilson said after the salute went viral that it was important to “call a spade a fucking spade,” though she didn’t mention her father by name.
Musk also publicly endorsed Germany’s far-right AfD party ahead of the recent parliamentary elections, in which AfD placed second next to the center-right opposition party. He notably said that Germany needed to “move on” from “past guilt,” which the chairman of Israel’s memorial to Holocaust victims said was an “insult to the victims of Nazism and a clear danger to the democratic future of Germany.” One AfD candidate defended the SS in 2024, saying they were “not all criminals.”
The South African centibillionaire has also surrounded himself with people who harbor far-right, racist, and anti-Semitic viewpoints. 25 year-old engineer Marko Elez, who initially stepped down from Musk’s team after he was linked to a pseudonymous X account that tweeted things like “I was racist before it was cool,” “normalize Indian hate,” and “you could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” was eventually brought back into the fold after Vice President JD Vance (another extreme natalist) gave Musk permission to do so. Gavin Kliger — another one of Musk’s acolytes — authored a now-deleted Substack post in which he credited Holocaust denier and neo-Nazi Ron Unz as the person who prompted his “political awakening.” Kliger is Musk’s point person for the IRS, and Elez is currently at the Social Security Administration.
In January, Dr. Philip Low, who was one of Musk’s longtime friends, elaborated on his personal experience with the Tesla and SpaceX CEO in a viral 1,900-word Facebook post. He also posted versions to Bluesky and LinkedIn. Low — who was the founder of a Bay Area tech startup — said he and Musk initially bonded over the fact that they were both bullied in high school, were the sons of men who had violent marriages, and who had similar friend circles in Silicon Valley. Low said Musk would often discuss his “women problems” with him, that the two went to each others’ parties, and that Musk was an early investor in his company.
“Everything Elon does is about acquiring and consolidating power,” Low wrote. “That is why he likes far right parties.”
Low went on to suggest that the reason Musk gave “two Nazi salutes” on Inauguration Day was simply because he “enjoys a good thrill and knew exactly what he was doing.” He added that the gesture was done as a means of building his relationship with “the Nazi wing” of the Republican Party, and that he hoped the crowd at the rally would “reflect his abject gesture back to him, thereby showing complete control and dominion over it.”
“He only wants to control, dominate and use you — don’t let him and cut him and his businesses out of your and your loved ones’ lives entirely,” Low wrote. “Remember he is a total miserable self-loathing poser, and unless you happen to be one too, he will be much more afraid of you than you should ever be of him.”
All of this should merit much more investigation from the press and our elected officials into the true motivation behind Elon Musk’s desire to be the ultimate decider in whether millions of federal employees will have jobs; retired government workers will get their pensions; elderly people will get their Social Security and Medicare payments; working-class people will get their income tax returns; hungry families will get their food stamps and WIC benefits; and starving people in predominantly Black and Brown countries will get life-saving aid. When someone who has expressed affinity with racist conspiracy theories, who employs people that embrace eugenics and draw inspiration from Holocaust deniers, and whose former close friend said he “believes he is above everyone else” has power over so many lives, it requires a much more urgent response from our institutions than we’re currently seeing.
When connecting the dots, it isn’t difficult to argue that Musk is likely a white supremacist obsessed with increasing the white birthrate and simultaneously killing off undesirables by cutting off their aid. With his current control of federal agencies, he could feasibly ensure that wards of the state, along with poor Black and Brown people in underdeveloped countries, can die off and eventually be replaced by the children of the wealthy elite. If this is indeed his goal, then we need opposition politicians to act accordingly. The stakes are higher than they’ve ever been, and their power as elected officials sworn to uphold the Constitution is far greater than an unelected billionaire’s artificial power as Donald Trump’s hatchet man.
Carl Gibson is a journalist whose work has been published in CNN, USA TODAY, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Houston Chronicle, the Louisville Courier-Journal, Barron’s, Business Insider, the Independent, and NPR, among others, Follow him on Bluesky @crgibs.bsky.social.
