Opinion | Elon Musk has succumbed to the anti-woke mind virus

CEO, billionaire and puppetmaster of the Department of Government Efficiency Elon Musk often parrots the idea of a “woke mind virus” that has infected the American people — one that is eating away at their brains and turning them into left-wing loons and zombies. Like everything else Musk says, the phrase is nonsense, and it only serves as a buzzword for him to lazily reject anything progressives say as the drivel of some brain worm.

But the idea of a political mind virus is intriguing, and if we chart his personal history, I believe Musk more than anyone else exhibits the most symptoms of a politically induced neurodegenerative disease — an anti-woke mind virus.

I have never liked Musk. I am a socialist, and I will never have a truly positive opinion about a billionaire, no matter their politics or their philanthropy or the quality of their work. But as far as billionaires go, there was a time when Musk was a comparatively decent guy to have in the 1%.

Tesla didn’t invent the electric car nor pioneer the move toward electric vehicles, but the improvements the company made on EVs and its success with the Model S series pushed other automakers to pour more resources into their electric motors to catch up with Tesla’s performance. 

As electric car infrastructure rose throughout the 2010s, Musk regularly called out fossil fuel subsidies and retweeted articles on the dangers of climate change. Whether he truly desired a cleaner world or simply saw it as a realm to develop his tech and accumulate wealth, Musk was an environmentalist, even if only in name.

In 2018, Musk bragged about Tesla receiving a perfect score in LGBTQ equality for the fourth year in a row. He said below his tweet, “Don’t buy our car if [LGBTQ equality]’s a problem. People should be free to live their lives where their heart takes them,” followed by a string of rainbow-colored heart emojis.

Four years later, in 2022, when Tesla scored perfectly for the seventh consecutive year, Musk tweeted about it again, but this was in some ways the last bastion of “good guy” Musk. Tesla notably never received a perfect score in LGBTQ equality again, and by this point, two and a half years into Biden’s term as president, Musk was beginning to show signs of the anti-woke mind virus nestling in his cranium.

Only a day before that 2022 tweet, he posted an anti-pride month meme depicting companies’ rainbow icons as a tornado barreling toward the viewer. It was an unremarkable and generally inconsequential post, but I believe 2022 marked an activation of the virus. It was like your 12-year-old brother watching a “Triggered SJW” compilation on YouTube for the first time, but if that instead happened to a 50-year-old man with the spending power to purchase an entire social media platform.

He bought Twitter later that year, and perhaps the dialectic between his imagined vision of himself as the savior of free speech and the reality that hundreds of thousands of his users wish death upon him catalyzed a rapid spread of the anti-woke mind virus, firmly cementing his descent into the loathsome and irredeemable oligarch we see in the newspapers today.

Despite the burning hatred I feel for him, there is a corner of my brain that contains a twinge of sympathy. This is a man who, less than a decade ago, could have been lauded as a genius entrepreneur, an inspiration to young engineers, a socially progressive voice among the 1%.  But in effectively a three-year period, his obsession with fighting an unwinnable war against a fabricated enemy of wokeness has immortalized him forever in history as a deadbeat father, a narcissistic bureaucrat and a Nazi.

Musk regularly retweets false statistics and bigoted caricatures of our nation’s most vulnerable. Musk ruins careers by cutting hundreds of billions in government spending, a sum which barely surpasses half of his own net worth. Musk denounces his own transgender daughter, whom he publicly declares is “dead” because it is easier for him to fathom a dead child than one who, to quote him in 2018, “lives their life where their heart takes them.”

To a lot of people, Donald Trump and Musk are two sides of the same Dogecoin. But I do not believe Trump has the virus. Trump has always wanted riches and power, and he’s found a way to attain them. I would bet money that Trump does not care remotely about abortions or immigrants or trans people, and he certainly does not care at all about “wokeness.” He convinced his constituency to care about them, and it’s easy to scare them into caring about it more.

Musk, however, has allowed these issues to bleed into his personal life and consume his being. Musk tweets an average of 68 times every day — some days tweeting nearly 200 times — and there is not a single hour of the day that he tweets less than once on average. He has shattered relationships with his ex-wives, he is paranoid he will be assassinated and he so desperately wants the approval of the people who deify Trump but never quite manages to win it. 

It’s terrifying, yet equally sad, to watch a middle-aged man’s brain be eaten alive by the bogeyman of wokeness, all while throwing his horde of wealth at whatever will let him take as many people down with him as he can. No matter how many podcasts he does or articles he headlines or fake agencies he leads, he remains nothing but an egomaniac who fell victim to the very fear campaign that he’s helping Trump push. 

Donald Trump is destroying trans healthcare, immigration, racial equity, medical research, higher education, reproductive rights and really anything that doesn’t quite fit into his construction of wealthy white America. But Elon Musk — that man is destroying himself.

Thomas Riley warns against falling prey to the anti-woke mind virus. Ask about a vaccine at tjr83@pitt.edu.