I’m still on medical leave, but happy to bring you some of my favorite writers in my absence. Today my friend L O L G O P from The Cause has written an article about one of my favorite topics, divorced billionaires, just for CARD readers! Enjoy. -MJR
Amid the right’s rapid consolidation of media outlets, a long-overdue reckoning has broken through: Musk, a critically beloved documentary now in select theaters.
Alex Gibney has stepped up to do what has not been done at scale since the #TeslaTakedown. The Oscar-winning director exposes the compulsions driving the man who has become the largest single sponsor in Republican Party history—someone who, when he isn’t tweeting or boosting racist tripe, spends millions each day to supercharge a GOP plunging ever deeper into Trump’s depravity.
Running over four hours—longer than Musk has spent with most of his children—crowds say the film flies by, drawing dark laughter at Musk’s staggering social and personal maladroitness. It offers a necessary antidote to Walter Isaacson’s fawning biography, which traded the story of our era for a tired myth of the tortured visionary, missing the spectacle we all saw with our own eyes of an addled freak descending into madness and celebrating installing Trump with two Sieg Hiels. Rather than getting lost in tech-bro hagiography, Gibney focuses on the perspective guaranteed to infuriate Musk most: the women who survived him.
As WIRED’s Miles Klee notes, while the film tracks Musk’s rise as an untouchable oligarch, his former partners deliver the payload—stitching together a devastating portrait of a man petty enough to “let go” of a significant other by unfollowing her on social media.
This narrative focus thrills the man who has waited the longest for America to learn exactly who Elon Musk is. Edward Niedermeyer published Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors in 2019, long before anyone dreamed of purchasing a “I bought this before Elon went crazy” sticker, though the Musk he uncovered then was already drenched in fraud and disdain.
“If you’ve followed the Musk story for a while, the movie will likely be missing major storylines/episodes you remember,” Niedermeyer posted on Bluesky this week. “There’s just no way to get it all in! Gibney’s genius was recognizing that the women’s stories bring so much of the material together, and present the most stark counter-narrative.”
The women who drive this counter-narrative are Justine Wilson, Musk’s first wife, and Ashley St. Clair, a MAGA influencer for a decade (she knows). St. Clair, still in her twenties, quickly fell into a relationship with Musk and had a child with him. She’s since had one of the decade’s great epiphanies and regularly takes to short-form video to expose her ex in a series of clips that have elevated the influencer trope of GRWM (get ready with me) videos to high art.
I’ll defer to Klee and Niedermeyer on how those perspectives land inside Musk, which I haven’t seen yet. But we can all see the value of elevating Wilson and St. Clair as key witnesses in a public prosecution of Elon Musk, simply by scrolling our feeds.
I was struck by Wilson’s recent comments to Kara Swisher (I know), where the mother of Elon’s first kids explained how women are treated in the house where Elon was raised:
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“In the Musk family, women are in the same category as dogs and children,” she says, relaying a joke Musk’s sister Tosca made to her.
This morsel of dark humor cannot be laughed off given what we now know about Elon Musk, the least intentionally funny man ever to live: when he burns billions to put Republicans into power, it isn’t just to pay fewer or no taxes or help himself and his companies get away with crimes; it is to force his personal biases, prejudices, and hatreds upon all of us, ideally forever.
His resentment of non-white people has now led to more than 14 million of the world’s poorest people being effectively sentenced to death, while carving out a welcome mat almost exclusively for white South Africans as refugees. His hatred of his own trans daughter—for choosing, in his mind, to embrace the femininity he despises—has resulted in millions of trans Americans and their families questioning where, if anywhere, they are safe in this country. And his view of women as mere breeding vessels will soon manifest in a Department of Justice assault on the safest, most common form of abortion in all 50 states.
What these women are explaining is how even a very intelligent woman might make the mistake of thinking you can live with Elon Musk and even partner with him, but that willingness is entirely one-sided. To Musk, all but a select few of the people around him are incidental, even the women who bear his children and even the children themselves if they do not conform to his rigid expectations.
The tech-bro joke about the “Nerd Reich” viewing the rest of us as NPCs—non-player characters serving as mere extras to Elon’s main character—hits upon one of the darkest truths Hannah Arendt uncovered: the architecture of radical evil, where human beings are rendered entirely “superfluous.”
“When the impossible was made possible it became unpunishable, unforgivable absolute [radical] evil which could no longer be understood and explained by the evil motives of self-interest, greed, covetousness, resentment, lust for power, and cowardice; and which therefore anger could not avenge, love could not endure, friendship could not forgive,” Arendt wrote.
We are now in the era where the impossible is possible, and almost seems inevitable.
We know millions are dying due to the thoughtless and purposely cruel actions of our government, greenlit by Musk. The US concentration camp system is rapidly expanding and will quickly exceed the numbers of Japanese-American Internment. And one man effectively bought another the presidency that made this all possible.
The ethos of the American experiment has largely been replaced by the pathos of a Gilded Age Apartheid as embodied by Musk and the rest of the PayPal mafia. And explaining that is very difficult! Even if you find the right words, Musk may sue you, buy your company to ruin you, finance your opponent beyond all sense, or just sic his X mob on you and make your life hell.
Yet many elected Democrats still seem to dwell on the fantasy that he’s somehow sensible and can be brought back into the fold. They seem to accept that our country can go on relying on his rockets for essential defense and other life-or-death services.
That’s why they avoided the Tesla Takedown like it was Mar-a-Lago. That’s why they refuse to narrate why America is being bombarded with a tsunami of Nazi-level hate against trans people as Musk tries to both elect Republicans by smearing Democrats and scare any politician from ever championing trans rights. They refuse even though Wisconsin Democrats did exactly that last spring and buried Musk’s candidates by double digits.
Wilson and St. Clair have also refused. They’ve refused to continue making the mistake of staying quiet and letting Elon be Elon. They cannot extricate themselves completely from the father of their kids, but their bravery must inspire us to do what they can’t.
Musk must be a clarifying call to America, or at least Democrats, that freedom and Elon Musk are absolutely incompatible. Our only option is to expel him and his ilk (Peter Thiel and Thiel’s bloodboy JD Vance) from anything to do with our government and make it illegal to buy elections the way they now can.
That may seem more impossible than letting the horrors Musk has delivered us go on indefinitely. But Wilson and St. Clair must remind us that the truth can set us free, and nothing makes Elon Musk more miserable than the truth.
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