Elon Musk is a race-war entrepreneur

Elon Musk is back in the public eye - this time, to reassure us he’s “not a racist”.

Last month, in an interview with the Economist’s editor-in-chief, Zanny Minton Beddoes, Musk shared his thoughts on several of his pet projects: artificial super-intelligence, making billions, and anti-Muslim racism.

When asked whether he was anti-Muslim, Musk did not deny it. Instead, he carefully parroted a tired set of tropes – about “rape and murder”, “antithetical views”, and the “imposition of rules and laws” – tropes that have long been in frantic circulation in far-right and mainstream discourse about Islam and Muslims.

What he meant to tell us, of course, was that he could not possibly be anti-Muslim, because what he reasonably opposes are violence, a lack of integration, and the erosion of democracy.

But lest we fall into the trap, we should recognise that whether Musk privately harbours anti-Muslim views is actually beside the point. The focus should be on what kind of political actor he has become.

Musk is not just another billionaire with racist views. He does not merely comment on racial conflict or predict its arrival. He is a race-war entrepreneur.

Through one of the largest communications platforms in the world, Musk rehabilitates race thinking, reasserts racial antagonisms, amplifies myths of white dispossession, and recasts culture as a struggle for racial power.

Racial ideology of domination

Musk appears to think that being anti-Muslim is not the same thing as being racist. He is not alone. Across much of Europe and North America, commentators and governments have spent years insisting that Islamophobia is not a form of racism. Racism, they assert, is a matter of biology, and Muslims are a cultural and religious group.

Yet, racism has never depended on biological difference alone. It has always involved attributing fixed characteristics to populations and treating those characteristics as evidence of immutable difference. Culture has been a key mechanism by which this process has and continues to take place. And this is precisely how Musk talks about Muslims.

He constructs Muslims as a population with an inherent disposition towards violence, misogyny and despotism

When he invokes "rape and murder", "antithetical values", and the "imposition of laws and rules", he constructs Muslims as a population with an inherent disposition towards violence, misogyny and despotism. He holds Muslims apart as a uniquely distinct category of the human.

More than that, Musk appears to think that Muslims are a threat to western life: the anti-West, a powerful civilisational force destined to dominate and ultimately annihilate whiteness.

This racialisation serves an important ideological function. It allows asylum seekers, migrants and immigrants more broadly to be conflated with Muslims and for Musk to present demographic change as evidence of "demographic replacement" and "White genocide".

We know the myth of "white decline" is one of Musk’s favourite subjects. This past January alone, he posted related content on 26 of 31 days, and he has also promoted the Great Replacement theory.

In one post on X (formerly Twitter), Musk wrote: “Whites are a rapidly dying minority”, generating more than 17 million views and around 150,000 likes.

Technically, he’s right, because all people die – and populations die out if they don’t have enough babies.

That’s why Musk advocates abundant procreation, an imperative he himself has taken seriously, having fathered at least 14 children (so far) with multiple women. But only if those reproducing are white and smart, as he appears to think he is. “If each successive generation of smart people has fewer kids, that’s probably bad,” he once opined.

His stance is clear: high-IQ people should have more children. And given his penchant for race science, it’s not hard to infer who Musk means by high-IQ people. The Nazi salute he gave at US President Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration in early 2025 offers a revealing indication.

But Musk is not just the "face of pro-natalism", a whitewashed, de-Nazified euphemism for eugenics; he also serves as the C-suite architect of the contemporary far right.

When asked in the Economist interview whether he supported the far right, Musk bristled at the “absurd characterisation” of “normal people”.

Musk wants us to think he is merely a supporter of far-right politics. He prefers to present himself as the voice of ordinary people; a megaphone for views that everybody was always thinking all along. A truth-teller instead of an ideologue. The reality, however, couldn’t be more different.

Manufacturing the people's enemies

With his immense wealth and ownership of one of the world's largest social media platforms, Musk is not just commenting on political “trends” set in motion by the people. He is actively helping to organise contemporary far-right politics.

Musk poured millions into Trump’s presidential campaign. He has endorsed far-right political movements around the world, including the National Rally in France, Restore Britain and Alternative for Germany. He has worked to keep far-right politicians, such as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in power.

He has restored X accounts belonging to prominent far-right agitators, including Katie Hopkins, Martin Sellner, and, of course, Tommy Robinson.

This is political power, not passive observation. That is why describing Musk as a mere supporter of the far right is an understatement. Musk is a key architect of far-right movements across the globe.

More crucially, his racial architecture involves bloody violence. Musk has repeatedly warned of "civil war", inviting his followers to believe they are facing an existential emergency that requires extrajudicial violence.

“Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back, or you die,” he declared at the Unite the Kingdom rally in London.

Musk does not simply predict annihilatory violence. He frames it as both inevitable and morally necessary to respond proportionately.

Consider Musk's decision to stream Citizen Vigilante to millions of followers on X. The film presents Europe as a civilisation under siege by migrant men portrayed as sexual predators and offers vigilante violence as the solution. Its message is clear: the state has failed; ordinary people must act.

Weeks earlier, Musk amplified a racial take on a stabbing in Belfast, describing it as an attempted beheading and helping inflame racial tensions he helped create in the first place.

This is why calling Musk a race-war entrepreneur is not hyperbole. Entrepreneurs do not merely anticipate markets; they create them.

Similarly, Musk does not just anticipate racial conflict. He invests in its narratives, expands its audience, and lowers the moral guardrails against mass violence.

Musk belongs to a history of political figures, from Joseph McCarthy, Adolf Hitler and Maximilien Robespierre, who claimed they were only describing reality while in fact they were manufacturing the people’s enemies.

An ideological scaffold

Musk tells us he isn’t racist. By now, we know that question is beside the point.

Whether Musk privately considers himself racist matters far less than what his politics do: they construct a racial vision in which Muslims become a civilisational enemy, demographic change becomes evidence of White dispossession, and violence recast as racial self-preservation.

The danger is not what Musk believes. It is what he teaches millions of others to believe – and what they may one day conclude they must do because of it

Musk provides the ideological scaffolding for a contemporary race war. Through his wealth, his platform, and his extraordinary influence, he does more than amplify race thinking and grievances. He organises them into a coherent worldview.

That is why Musk is more than another wealthy white man with racist views. He represents something more consequential: a new kind of political actor who combines immense economic power, digital infrastructure, algorithmic reach and racial mythology to manufacture the conditions of possibility for bloody racial conflict and mass unrest.

The danger is not what Musk believes. It is what he teaches millions of others to believe – and what they may one day conclude they must do because of it.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.