From Josh Marshall:
Against the backdrop of a month of chaos and destruction, something began to shift more or less in the middle of this week. I don’t want to overstate what it portends in the short term. Elon Musk remains firmly in the saddle. And even as many of Trump’s advisors grow concerned about the impact of Musk’s rampage, Donald Trump himself appears to be maintaining his support. The moment was captured yesterday at what are now the more or less constant CPACs where Steve Bannon tossed off a Nazi salute and Musk appeared in a “Dark MAGA” baseball cap sporting a chainsaw and basking in the adulation of the MAGA/CPAC faithful awash in the joy a certain kind of individual derives from destruction and pain. The picture itself is a key signpost in the story. Make a note of it. Musk himself posted it to Twitter, labeled with “The DogeFather” and flexing with the text: “This is a real picture.”
...2025 might be the first time in human history where we have a genuine supervillain walking among us. Humanity has spawned numerous monsters, of course: Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot. But I’m talking about the supervillain on the Gotham/Metropolis model. The glad-handing, fantastically rich, this-dial-goes-to-11 over-the-top weirdo with his raucous bevy of cheerleaders who is in fact evil and has a cartoonishly stupid but yet very real plan to take over the world. Look at that picture again. You can easily imagine running it over every 2025 political ad about the chaos and immiseration he unleashed on the country.
But what kind of supervillain? Peter Thiel is the shadowy, mysterious type—the one who manipulates everything from behind the scenes. Musk is the megalomaniac type, the kind who insists on telling the hero about his evil plan, with schemes so grandiose and badly thought out that they would probably foil themselves if no secret agent were available to step in.
With the possible exception of transgender rights, Peter Thiel is more ideologically extreme—sometimes much more extreme—across the board than Elon Musk (just read the infamous Cato essay where he gives his take on women's suffrage), but he is far less emotionally needy.
Musk has an insatiable craving for attention and adoration. He seeks out worshipful crowds. He tells improbable stories about punching out the high school bully (but only to those journalists unlikely to check out his stories). He pays people to play video games for him so he can go on Joe Rogan and claim to be one of the best in the world. (If he were a golfer, his partnership with Donald Trump would not survive their first game.)
Musk has limited impulse control, particularly when angry. Both men are petty and vindictive, but while Peter Thiel patiently waited years to destroy Gawker by secretly funding Hulk Hogan's lawsuit, Musk lashes out immediately to any perceived insult with public name calling, threats, and rage-firing. This last one drove managers at Tesla to advise employees to take roundabout routes around the building in order to avoid walking past the CEO.
The list of possible motivations for Elon Musk is long and complicated, but one thing you should keep in mind is that everything we've seen so far—the bullying, the erratic behavior, the certainty, the apparently deliberate dickishness—is all absolutely consistent with everything we've seen from him in the past.
If you are shocked by any of this, it just means you haven't been paying attention
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