Play store
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.
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. Source MEE.