I have written in the past few weeks one essay defending and championing Elon Musk for exposing government waste, and another censorious of him for the ruthless manner in which government workers are being laid off en masse. I write about him for now a third time, not because I especially want to, but because for all of his many virtues and talents, he is fast becoming more a liability than an asset, and I hope he will reverse course.
There is much to admire about Elon Musk. His genius is undeniable. He took an idea — several ideas, in fact — that the experts scoffed at, and built not one, but multiple companies that reshaped industries. Tesla proved electric cars could be viable and desirable. SpaceX rekindled American pride in space exploration. Starlink is bringing internet to places the government has ignored for decades. Neuralink has opened all sorts of medical frontiers once thought impossible. And Twitter — pardon me, “X”– is that rare tech company that resisted the censorial instincts of the left. It is no exaggeration to say that nobody in my lifetime, if not much further back, has done more to protect free speech, and by extension democracy itself, than Elon.
And yet, for all this, Musk seems determined to make it increasingly difficult to defend him.
His latest offense? Retweeting the mindless, sophomoric assertion that “Stalin, Mao, and Hitler didn’t murder millions of people. Their public sector workers did.” This is not just nonsense; it is historically illiterate, morally offensive, and politically self-destructive.
Let’s set aside, for a moment, the absurdity of the claim itself. No serious person can pretend that Adolf Hitler was not the architect of the Holocaust, or that Stalin’s purges were some kind of rogue bureaucratic mishap. I understand the perils of big government, but it was not public sector inefficiencies that loaded Jews onto trains, or sent starving Ukrainians to their deaths. These atrocities were designed, ordered, and carried out with full intent by ideological madmen who believed in their own monstrous vision. To suggest otherwise is to trivialize history and insult its victims.
But beyond the historical revisionism, what is most frustrating about Musk’s post is that it is precisely the kind of self-inflicted wound that the left hopes he will keep making. It hands them an easy attack: “See?” they will say, “Musk is an unserious crank, an anti-government fanatic with white supremacist tendencies who can’t distinguish between totalitarian genocide and public service.” I do not believe those things of Elon, but man, he is right now acting like a defendant who, having fired his own attorney, seems determined to prove the prosecution’s case against him.
The problem is not just this one tweet. It is part of a disturbing pattern.
In November 2023, Musk replied “You have said the actual truth” to a blatantly antisemitic post claiming that Jewish communities promote hatred against whites. This was not some deep philosophical musing, this was a straightforward endorsement of an old, vile conspiracy theory. Then there was his bizarre fixation on the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), accusing it of being “anti-white” and blaming it for advertising losses on X. More recently, in January 2025, he made a gesture at Trump’s inauguration that looks suspiciously like the Roman salute popularized by Mussolini, and which is far too similar to a Nazi salute. Even if one gives him the benefit of the doubt — and let’s assume, for a moment, that he meant nothing by it — this is at best a stupid move by one of the most intelligent men ever to live, and his unwillingness to distance himself from those who celebrated the moment should concern anyone who takes these matters seriously.
One could argue that Musk is just careless, that he is too wrapped up in his own self-image as a fearless contrarian to see the damage he is doing, that he thrives on provocation for provocation’s sake. Perhaps. But at what point do we stop making excuses?
Conservatives believe in small government, not no government. We believe in accountability, not anarchy. We criticize bureaucratic bloat, but we do not pretend that teachers, police officers, firemen, and government pencil pushers in cubicles are somehow spiritual heirs to the SS. The right does not win by spouting half-baked libertarian slogans cribbed from a freshman philosophy class. We win by being the adults in the room, by standing for order, responsibility, and truth. And Musk, with his reckless dabbling in historical revisionism, to say nothing of his slash and burn modifications to our government, is making that job much harder.
Our champion of free speech and individual enterprise is now becoming a liability. More and more, his Twitter feed reads like a parody of an unhinged internet troll, rather than the sharp, visionary businessman who took on the establishment. His inability to resist indulging in contrarian nonsense is turning him from a valuable ally into a walking embarrassment.
Musk needs to decide what he wants to be. Does he want to be a serious figure, a defender of free speech, a challenger to government overreach, an example of what private industry can accomplish? Or does he want to be just another reactionary, chasing clout from the worst corners of the internet? Because if this is who he is, if this kind of foolishness is what we should now expect, then conservatives need to do more than distance ourselves.
We need to rebuke him outright.
