MUSK UNTETHERED How Elon Musk Accumulated More Unchecked Power Than Anyone in American History — And What He Intends to Do With It

Send us Fan MailSurviving Trump • Episode 33 • Series 4: Corporate Power and ControlOn October 27, 2022, Elon Musk walked into Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters carrying a bathroom sink. He posted a video. The caption read: “Entering Twitter HQ — let that sink in.” Within hours, he had fired the CEO, the CFO, and the head of legal policy — timed deliberately so the executives couldn’t cash in their stock options. He posted two words: “The bird is freed.”The business world called it the dumbest deal in history. Investor Ross Gerber called it “the dumbest deal in the history of business.” They were looking at the wrong story. Musk didn’t buy Twitter to make money. He bought it to build something else entirely.What’s in This EpisodeWhat Musk actually built — and why it was deliberate: Within 12 hours of the deal closing, researchers recorded a nearly 500% spike in racist slurs on the platform — a coordinated test by bad actors watching for the rules to change. Musk’s response was to dismantle the infrastructure designed to stop it. He laid off 3,700 employees, dissolved the Trust and Safety Council, and reinstated thousands of banned accounts — including Donald Trump, neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin, antisemite Nick Fuentes, and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. By April 2024, NBC News documented 150 verified paid accounts posting pro-Nazi content. During one week alone, 7 pro-Nazi posts accumulated 4.5 million views. X was collecting subscription fees from these accounts and running advertiser ads alongside them — while Musk was simultaneously suing the advertisers who fled.What Musk posts — in his own words: In January 2026, the Guardian documented Musk posting about race or immigration on 26 of 31 days. He reposted claims that whites are “a rapidly dying minority.” He responded “true” to a post warning that white people would be slaughtered as a demographic minority. He amplified Martin Sellner — the Austrian far-right activist who founded the Identitarian Movement and mainstreamed the great replacement theory in Europe — and called his posts “a statement of fact.” Sellner received money from and exchanged emails with the Christchurch gunman who killed 51 people at two mosques in New Zealand in 2019. Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Extremism, reviewed Musk’s posts and said: “If you stripped Elon Musk’s name off of these things and showed them to me, I would think that this was a white supremacist.”The psychology behind why it works: Researchers have identified two distinct mechanisms — status threat and symbolic threat — that explain why Musk’s content is so effective at moving people toward authoritarian politics. Status threat is the fear that your group is losing its position in society. Symbolic threat is the fear that the country no longer reflects your values or your place within it. Studies show that when people feel culturally displaced, they become more willing to support extreme political solutions. X’s algorithm rewards inflammatory content because outrage drives engagement. Musk didn’t just remove the guardrails. He built a platform designed to spread fear as widely as possible — to between 75 and 111 million Americans, and more than 600 million people globally.The $278 million political operation: Musk’s America PAC spent $278 million in the 2024 election cycle — the largest individual political expenditure in American history. More than $200 million went toward voter mobilization in battleground states. The daily $1 million sweepstakes, presented as a random lottery, was not random — winners were pre-selected and signed contracts to become paid spokespeople. The Philadelphia DA called it “political marketing masquerading as a lottery.” More than 1 million registered voters in 7 swing states handed America PAC their personal data to enter. That data is now the subject of a “data project discussion” between Musk’s political advisor and Red Oak Strategic — a Republican analytics firm with direct ties to the Heritage Foundation, the institution that produced Project 2025.What he got in return: On the day after Trump won, Forbes put Musk’s net worth at $285 billion. By early 2026 it had grown to between $780 billion and $839 billion — an increase of roughly 170% to 190%. His artificial intelligence company received a Pentagon contract worth up to $200 million. Grok, his AI chatbot, is now deployed across classified and unclassified military networks — with live data from X feeding directly into military intelligence systems. The Pentagon authorized Grok for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons — uses that Anthropic, the AI company that produces Claude, explicitly refused on ethical grounds. The scandals didn’t end the relationship. The Trump administration expanded it.Why It MattersEpisodes 30 and 31 documented billionaires buying the press to control what the public sees. Episode 32 documented the donor class funding the Project 2025 blueprint in private. Episode 33 documents something different — and in some ways more dangerous. Musk doesn’t operate in private. He operates in public, every day, to hundreds of millions of people.Project 2025’s immigration agenda — mass deportation, ending birthright citizenship, treating undocumented people as an invasion — requires a public that already believes white America is under existential threat. You cannot sell industrial-scale deportation to a country that feels secure. Musk has spent three years manufacturing that fear, at scale, on the most powerful communications platform on earth.The First Amendment protects the press from government censorship. It has nothing to say about the richest man in the world who controls the platform, funds the candidates, feeds data into military intelligence systems, and has removed every accountability structure designed to check that kind of power. That is the story this episode tells — and the question it leaves open: whether the institutions designed to stop one man from accumulating this much power still have the will and the authority to do so.Support the showBella Goode is a pseudonym — but the voice, research, and mission are all real. A Republican turned Democrat advocate in 2016, I was raised by middle class parents in Pennsylvania.  I’m a former marketing executive, entrepreneur, and lifelong learner with an MBA from Wharton and a Master’s in Psychology from Penn. I spent decades telling stories in the business world; now I use those skills to connect the dots in American politics.I’m here because the truth matters — and because the stakes have never been higher. Surviving Trump isn’t lighthearted. It’s clarity, evidence, and a fight for the future of our democracy.Follow my blog on Substack https://survivingtrumppodcast.substack.com