Elon Musk egged on a race riot, then became a trillionaire. What are we even doing?

The images coming out of Belfast — the city in Northern Ireland made famous by decades of ethnic violence that came to be known simply as, “the Troubles” — were horrific enough. The sight of cars and homes ablaze and hordes of masked, young men roaming the city streets brought back painful memories for old-timers.

“I lost my teenage years to the Troubles,” a shell-shocked, 71-year-old, Paul Sharkey, told the New York Times, after watching a flaming van crash near his home on the outskirts of Belfast. “I thought moving out here I had got away from them — from the bombs and bullets, all the rest of it...“

Remarkably no one seems to have been killed in a couple of nights of riots that targeted Belfast’s Black and brown immigrant communities after a Sudanese migrant was charged with a stabbing — captured on video — that left a white man in a coma. But terror was felt across Northern Ireland’s largest city, as volunteers raced to rescue families from burning homes, immigrant addresses were posted online, and workers were afraid to go to work after a nurse was attacked.

And yet there was something about this anti-immigrant pogrom in Belfast that was just as appalling as the pictures of burning streets and fleeing children. Their biggest cheerleader was not some street thug in a balaclava but the richest person in the history of Planet Earth, urging the rioters on from some posh hideaway on the other side of the Atlantic.

Tuesday morning, as news of the stabbing attack spread across the United Kingdom, Elon Musk took to X — the influential social-media site that was called Twitter when he bought it in 2022 for $44 billion — to amplify a post by UK far-right extremist leader Tommy Robinson. It called for white people “to hit the streets” that night and protest what Robinson called “yet another invader attack on our people.”

“Only by protesting REPEATEDLY and LOUDLY will there be any change!!” wrote the U.S.-based, South African-born electric-car-and-spacecraft mogul, just hours before the sadly familiar loudness of repeated explosions rocked Belfast.

Musk’s tweet was hardly a one-off. In a flurry of X posts attacking immigration, he told his 240 million followers that British Prime Minister Keir Starmer “hates white people” while sharing an image of the Black suspect which simply said that “millions must go.” When his diatribes started provoking a backlash, he wrote: “Murderous migrants beheading innocent people in their home town is what’s making people angry, not ‘social media’!”

The nonprofit tech watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate found that Musk’s posts about Belfast and racial politics in the U.K. were viewed an astonishing 64 million times. The center noted that the amplified posts from Robinson — banned from the pre-Musk Twitter for hate speech, but restored in 2023 — drew responses calling for lynching and other forms of violence. Musk has also been using X to promote a fringe, far-right anti-immigrant party called Restore Britain, an off-shoot of the Nigel Farage-led Reform UK.

It’s kind of bizarre that this then-billionaire not-too-busy-to-hate found the time for this, in a week where he had one job: to make sure the long-awaited stock offering of one of his major business ventures, SpaceX, launched on Friday without blowing up like some of its rockets.

Unfortunately for the star-crossed Musk, investors’ shock and revulsion over the entrepreneur’s vile posts caused ...

O.K., if you follow the news you know that the unfinished sentence above was a little bit of cynical misdirection. Wall Street, from the biggest investment banks to starstruck smalltime day traders could not wait to throw their cash at SpaceX and its founder. They acted as if Musk the anti-immigrant hatemonger and Musk the tech visionary were two different human beings, even as they also ignored the fantastical malarkey of SpaceX’s dream to build data centers in outer space.

By the end of a tumultuous week, the tulip-mania demand for SpaceX stock — with the market valuing the money-losing company at a gobsmacking $2.1 trillion — made the already world’s richest person wealthier in a way that defies comprehension. The man who wanted to burn everything down on Tuesday became the planet’s first trillionaire on Friday.

Even as the globe — excepting that island of basketball joy in Gotham City — watches a decadent Donald Trump turn 80 by tarnishing the White House with a tacky ad-draped display of barbaric bloodsport that would have embarrassed Caligula’s Rome, Elon Musk is truly the ultimate story of our modern empire’s decline and fall.

» READ MORE: What Elon Musk wants is worse than you think | Will Bunch Newsletter

The problem is which Elon Musk story to tell. Each narrative is more shocking than the next.

The saga that I’ve started to recount here, about a man whose wealth is now greater than the yearly gross domestic product of all but the 21 richest nations, who uses that power to urge poor white people to firebomb and assault their Black and brown neighbors, isn’t even the worst thing that Musk has done. Not by a longshot.

The prequel to Belfast came just over a year ago when Musk — after spending some $288 million, an all-time U.S. election record yet the equivalent of sofa-cushion change for a future trillionaire, to put a dictatorship-minded Donald Trump back in the White House — was handed an all-access pass to our federal government for what was dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

Musk and his young DOGE dudes took a chainsaw — as Musk boasted by brandishing a real one — to any program that advanced world peace or the plight of its most underprivileged. In particular, the utter destruction of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which Musk bragged about tossing into a proverbial woodchipper, has been blamed by a number of experts for an unthinkable hundreds of thousands of deaths across Africa, Asia and elsewhere from disease or hunger, with children as most of the victims.

Remember when we were outraged that our leaders said they could shoot one person in the middle of Fifth Avenue? How quaint.

And yet there’s another Musk storyline on top of the obvious question of, why are so many people betting their money on literally the world’s greatest purveyor of hate speech, and the alleged architect of a born-in-the-USA genocide? That question is, why are we collectively throwing all this money at Musk at all?

The 1990s Wharton School graduate started with some good ideas — an early stake in PayPal that gave him the funds to launch SpaceX and take over early EV leader Tesla. But his revenue stream is increasingly from the crony capitalism of government contracts, not the free market — as Chinese EV makers have been cleaning Tesla’s clock. And it’s almost lazy, yet true, to describe SpaceX’s business model as pie-in-the-sky science fiction.

The openly racist tycoon isn’t even a good businessman, and yet he has failed upwards to $1.1 trillion. I think there’s one question about Musk that towers over all the others.

What are we even doing here?

It’s easy to look at Musk as an amalgamation of the many, many things that are wrong with the world right now. He is a poster child for the policies that have enabled an Epstein class of billionaires with more dollars than we have the ability to count, even as thousands starve and his fellow Americans can’t pay the rent. He has so many scandals that some of them — his data center polluting a predominantly Black neighborhood in Memphis, or the DOGE cuts that could have slowed the spread of Ebola, or stopped the arrival of the screwworm striking Texas cattle — couldn’t even fit into this longer-than-typical column.

Musk and his destructive abuse of his massive X platform has given him the power to manipulate the struggling masses into attacking each other — instead of the small circle of people hording the world’s wealth, led by Musk himself. When buying Twitter wasn’t enough for his obscene ambitions, he decided to buy the White House.

When I wrote about Musk for the very first time two years ago, I reached for the obvious cliche and called him a Bond movie villain, but that was far too generous. He has devolved into one of the most problematic entrepreneurs in human history, Henry Ford behind the wheel of a Cybertruck.

It’s past time to look inside ourselves and ask one more question: Now that Musk has shown us who he really is, why do we continue to support him? Why do millions of investors pay so much for the magic beans of Tesla and now SpaceX to endorse the lead spreader of racist ideology — putting aside the fact his stock bubble will burst any day now?

Why do so many leading politicians across the United States and the U.K. — liberals as well as conservatives — and supposedly socially conscious corporations, among others, still use X to convey information, when its owner uses it to promote views that really aren’t any different from David Duke or the Ku Klux Klan?

That’s also a question for myself. In November 2024, when Trump was reelected with Musk’s support, I moved about 98% of my social-media posting over to Bluesky. But I didn’t close my X account, which still had 80,000 followers, because I wanted to keep posting my columns there so a few more folks might read them.

Today, I will make one last post on X — a link to this column, in the vain hope that the platform’s proprietor might see it, and that other folks will join me in quitting. Tonight, sometime before I sit down to watch Les Éléphants stomp Ecuador, I will delete my account for good.

You should too.

We’ve all helped to create this monster, and we all can do our small part to slay the dragon. There are hopeful signs, led by the thousands who came out this weekend in Belfast and elsewhere in the U.K. to protest Musk-fueled hate. If we don’t act quickly and nonviolently to undo the massive policy failure of the world’s first trillionaire, the raging fires of Belfast are going to look like child’s play.

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