Elon Musk, the world’s richest man with a fortune valued at $218 billion and founder of companies such as Tesla and Space X, has long attracted widespread interest. His visionary ideas and public activism have certainly been part of a carefully crafted image that has helped him gain new followers and constantly hit the headlines.

Indeed, the South African-born 51-year-old Musk is part of a new generation of billionaires who are not content with just making big money, but also want to be global celebrities and creators of the future world. Dolly Singh, former talent chief at Space X, recently called Musk “a combination of Einstein, Tesla and Rockefeller”. Whether this is an apt comparison is hard to say, but one can be sure that Musk considers himself to be such a person and must have been very pleased with such a paean in his honour.

A plan for Ukraine

Recently, Musk wanted to influence the fate of the world even more than before. On 3 October, the billionaire tweeted his “peace plan” for Ukraine, in which he proposed holding a new referendum under UN supervision on the membership of the four Ukrainian regions occupied by Russia (Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson). In addition, Ukraine should – in his view – come to terms with the loss of Crimea. Finally, he added a demand for the neutrality of Ukraine and a legal guarantee of water supplies to Crimea, which is dependent on intakes in the Kherson area.

Musk’s plan, which meets the Kremlin’s expectations, caused a major upheaval in the West and, above all, in Ukraine. After all, the billionaire was seen there as an ally in the bloody fight against Moscow’s aggression, as evidenced by the Ukrainian army’s use of the Starlink satellite system. The network built by Musk provides the defenders with uninterrupted connectivity and internet access, services that are invaluable in wartime conditions when traditional infrastructure is destroyed.

What’s more, after Musk announced his peace plan, Ukrainian troops conducting a counter-offensive near Luhansk and Kherson suddenly began reporting disruptions in satellite communications. The billionaire was apparently making it clear that he would not support Ukrainian military actions in areas previously occupied by Moscow with his technology.

Elon Musk justified his sudden volition with fears for the future of the world. In his view, Kiev cannot forcibly retake detached territories, especially Crimea, because Vladimir Putin will respond to such attempts with a nuclear attack, which will ultimately lead to the annihilation of the world. “I’m a big fan of Ukraine, but not of WW3” – he wrote on 6 October.

His arguments did not meet with universal acclaim, at least on Twitter, where he announced his plan. In a poll aimed at users of the site, Musk asked them whether they were prepared to support his proposals. Nearly 60 per cent responded negatively. The billionaire disputed this result, claiming that bots, or programmed fictitious accounts, had influenced such a voting result. “[The] biggest bot attack I’ve seen” – Musk concluded.

The poll of Musk and his peace plan was also addressed by Volodymyr Zelenski himself, who posted his own poll in response, asking internet users which Elon Musk they prefer? The one supporting Ukraine or the one helping Russia? The harshest response came from the former Ukrainian ambassador to Germany. Andriy Melnyk, known for his foul-mouthed language, wrote Musk back to “fuck off”, adding that now “no Ukrainian will buy his fucking Tesla”.

What do elections have to do with the war

Immediately, too, there were questions and speculation about the reasons for Musk’s turn towards Moscow. For indeed, the Kremlin took great satisfaction in welcoming the billionaire’s proposals, seeing them as a deep rupture in the ranks of the bloc supporting Ukraine.

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  One answer may be the fear of nuclear annihilation. It is shared by a lot of people in the world, but the vast majority of them do not have the ability to influence the fate of the world. Musk – at least to some extent – does have such influence, so he has decided to use it. However, even if he is genuinely worried about doom, after all, someone must have reassured him of these anxieties. Perhaps he has accessed some leaks from the highest circles of power in Washington. Or perhaps he is simply – which is more likely – adopting the isolationist arguments of the Trumpists.

Republicans are keen to exploit the war in Ukraine for domestic political ends, especially as a fierce campaign is underway ahead of the November congressional elections, in which the Republican Party is now seen as the favourite. Trumpists claim that Joe Biden, with his inept policy towards Russia, has exacerbated the global situation and led to a war, which is now costing the US taxpayer a fortune.

Recently, Kevin McCarthy, the Republican minority leader in the House of Representatives, even announced that military and financial aid to Ukraine would be cut if the Republicans won. “There will be no more issuing of blank cheques” – he stipulated.

Elon Musk – unlike most US business sharks – cannot be counted among Biden’s supporters, which, incidentally, made him an outsider in this environment. Politically, he is closest to the Republican governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, considered a potential candidate in the US presidential election in two years’ time.

DeSantis has been sharply critical of Biden’s foreign policy since the start of the war in Ukraine, and while he has never spoken out against Ukraine, he has also avoided explicitly condemning Moscow. He also recently defended Musk’s decision to stop funding satellite communications for Kiev, suggesting that Ukrainians attacking the billionaire’s peace proposal were themselves “biting the hand that feeds them”.

In the end, Musk decided to maintain Starlink’s use in Ukraine, although it will not be operating in areas occupied by Russia. It also remains to be seen whether the billionaire will not change his mind soon, because, as he himself pointed out, maintaining satellite communications for Ukraine has so far cost him $80 million, which should be reimbursed to him by the Pentagon.

Musk publicly announced in June that he would probably support DeSantis’ candidacy for President of the United States. It is therefore reasonable to believe that he shares similar views with the Florida governor – including on issues concerning Ukraine and Russia. On this occasion, it is therefore easy to predict what policy the Republicans intend to pursue after winning the election. And how important a role the increasingly politically engaged Elon Musk may play in this race.

The Russian prompter

Some speculated that Putin himself was behind Musk’s ideas. And that the billionaire had presented his peace plan after an earlier telephone conversation with the Kremlin dictator. Musk denied this, maintaining that the last time he spoke to Putin was 18 months ago and that the conversation at the time was about plans for space exploration.

However, Fiona Hill, Donald Trump’s former Russia adviser and author of a number of valuable books on Russia and Putin, believes that Moscow’s dictator likes to tickle people’s big egos and then use this politically for his own ends. She suggests that Musk may find it satisfying that Putin favours his efforts to end the conflict. But in order to get his approval, Musk needs to meet the Kremlin’s expectations more broadly.

And it comes out. “Whether one likes it or not, Crimea is absolutely seen as a core part of Russia by Russia. Crimea is also of critical national security importance to Russia, as it is their southern navy base. From their standpoint losing Crimea is like [the] USA losing Hawaii & Pearl Harbor” – he wrote this week. “If Russia is faced with the choice of losing Crimea or using battlefield nukes, they will choose the latter. We’ve already sanctioned/cutoff Russia in every possible way, so what more do they have left to lose?” – he asked. And in doing so, he once again made it clear that Russian pretensions towards Ukraine should be recognised.

A peculiar detail is worth noting here. As it happens, in writing in his peace plan about Crimea, Musk referred to the handing over of the peninsula to Ukraine as “Khrushchev’s mistake”, who relinquished it to Kiev in 1954. This term (“Khrushchev’s mistake”) is characteristic of Russian historical propaganda and it is difficult to imagine Musk using it spontaneously. There is therefore some circumstantial evidence that indeed the ideas he included in his peace plan were suggested to him by someone from Russia, or at least by someone with strong Russian ties.

A new kind of businessmen

It is possible that Elon Musk truly felt that he was the saviour on a mission to save the world from impending doom. Among his many ventures, many fit into this mission of his. Even Musk’s flagship projects such as Tesla’s electric cars or the manned spacecraft produced by Space X are justified by a concern for the future of the world. Because Tesla’s job is – in addition to making a profit, of course – to fight for the climate, and the far-reaching goal of the space missions carried out by Space X is to make it possible for humanity to inhabit Mars and other planets. Because one day the Earth will no longer be fit for living.

Musk is very concerned about asteroids flying close to Earth and the fragility of the human species. The company he owns, Neuralink, is working on creating implantable brain-machine interfaces to give humans additional capabilities. Musk would like for disabled people to be able to regain their full abilities thanks to research funded by his company.

There is certainly a lot of self-promotion in these announcements, as Musk wants to be seen as a demiurge and creator of a new reality. There are even suspicions that he created Bitcoin – a cryptocurrency enabling payments beyond the control of banks and state institutions – and made a lot of money from it. After all, he had previous experience with the creation of online payment services such as X.com or PayPal, of which he was a major shareholder and from which his great global career began.

Elon Musk is no different. He is simply louder than the other businessmen and craves for media attention more. In fact, all of America’s next-generation business is now seen as the vanguard shaping the future great world. It is no coincidence that the core of this business is the technology industry. For it is modern technology that is supposed to be what science was for the pioneers of progress in the past, treated not only as a tool for learning about nature, but also as a basis – though not always justified – for questioning reality and remodelling society. Sometimes violent and revolutionary.

If anyone has seen the film The Circle, they may remember its depiction of a technology corporation whose employees, in exchange for privileges and good salaries, form a collective that is absolutely subservient to their employer. Of course, the film’s vision of a toxic sect led by a charismatic technological guru is exaggerated, but it reflects quite well the direction in which contemporary large corporations are heading. They are now headed by businessmen of a very different type than in the past. Usually passionate and educated at left-leaning universities (although this is not the case with Musk), they use their corporations not only as machines for making money, but also as battering rams forging a new reality. It is their guiding principle to bring about a global revolution: technological, social and cultural, that distinguishes the new generation of businessmen from their predecessors coming from the old bourgeois families.

The first was Gates

Microsoft founder Bill Gates is seen as the main guru of the new revolution. Right-wingers and defenders of the traditional order see him – largely rightly – as the initiator of rapid social change in today’s world. In 2015, Gates predicted that the next global crisis would be caused not by war but by a pandemic. And while his statement referred to fears caused by the ebola epidemic that had attacked West Africa a year earlier, conspiracy theory supporters saw this as evidence that Gates had “invented” the recent pandemic in order to turn the existing world upside down under its pretext.

Gates, of course, did not invent the pandemic, because it is a fact. But it is also a fact that the shock of the pandemic actually became an opportunity for rapid change. And for a huge cash grab made by the world’s technology companies.

The accusations against Gates have some grounds. Once he had earned his hundred billion dollars, the Microsoft founder set about “fixing” the world, together with his now-ex-wife . As part of this “fixing”, he focused primarily on the fight against climate change. The promotion of renewable energy, electric cars and vegan food is largely thanks to the campaigns he has funded. However, it is hard not to notice that the technology companies have earned billions of dollars more from this. This is why some people doubt Gates’ sincere intentions.

He himself is keen to put the money he once earned into projects that will “repair the world”. Among them are funds for the creation of agricultural cooperatives in Africa engaged in… soya production. Gates hopes that this will increase the supply of the raw material needed to produce vegan food and, in the process, make money for African farmers, thus improving the region’s economy and somewhat curbing the labour emigration of local people to developed countries. Another thing is that the creation of soya monocultures could prove deadly for local wildlife in the future.

In general, Gates is right when he makes it clear that overpopulation in Africa and the poverty it causes is a serious problem for the world. The other thing is that the proposed solutions concern not only the cultivation of soya, but also the promotion of abortion. Not only in Africa, by the way. It was the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that was – according to the media – among the leading sponsors of the successful campaign to legalise abortion in Ireland in 2018.

Recently, the Microsoft founder has taken on new projects. Among them are building an “eco-friendly” engine for seagoing ships and developing technology that dims sunlight to create a global cooling effect.

Today, after the outbreak of war in Ukraine, Gates is somewhat less talked about. For he seems to have been overshadowed by the rising star of Elon Musk. Musk has a different outlook, comes from a different background (he is not even American), but what he has in common with Gates is a great hubris expressed in the belief that he can set the world’s direction and earn a lot of money in the process.

Words of thanks from Beijing

It has long been known that control over the flow of information gives power. However, if this control has a global reach, the power thus gained becomes truly immense. This is precisely the case of the US technology companies, which, operating for a quarter of a century in the internet industry, have managed to build themselves an information monopoly on an unprecedented scale.

It is not just about popular social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, but also about application shops (App Store or Google Play) and so-called cloud services, i.e. servers that store data of hundreds of millions of Internet users. In the latter sector, Amazon, owned by Jeff Bezos, until recently the richest man in the world, is the biggest player.

Someone who, like Elon Musk, wants to create reality cannot remain on the sidelines. The billionaire already set his sights on buying Twitter a few months ago, which in recent years has become the most important platform for many people in the world to exchange information. Whoever has control of Twitter can have a great influence on what people think and what they stand for. Because the service is by no means a simple application where everyone writes what they want. Of course you can write anything, but the whole thing is controlled by algorithms. They decide which content is promoted and which is left out. Incorrect posts can be blocked. So, freedom of speech, but only within set boundaries. And these limits are set by the owner.

There is every indication that Musk will take over Twitter. His efforts to buy the service have caused a lot of excitement in the US, especially among representatives of the liberal establishment fearing that the incorrigible and Republican-friendly Musk could pose a threat to their position. The purchase of Twitter has been, and continues to be, fraught with obstacles, but his motivations are not only political. After all, Musk does not like to overpay and always aims to buy at the lowest price possible. Twitter is no exception.

Musk can even deliberately tarnish his image if it can benefit him business-wise. In September 2018, he publicly drank whiskey and smoked a marijuana joint. According to some, he did this in order to drive Tesla’s share price down. When, indeed, the share prices fell, he started buying them back, increasing his stake in the company cheaply. After a while, the shares became more expensive again, and as their prices rose, Musk’s wealth increased.

Hence, there is speculation that Musk’s peace initiative on Ukraine may also be of a business nature and linked to some kind of financial game. The pretext for such hypotheses was provided by another – parallel – political proposal by Musk, in which the billionaire advocated the creation of a special administrative zone in Taiwan, administered from Beijing, which, he said in an interview with the Financial Times, “would be reasonably acceptable, although it probably won’t make everyone happy”.

In gratitude for this “constructive” proposal, Tesla’s Shanghai factory, which accounted for roughly half of the corporation’s global sales last year, was exempted from taxes by the authorities in Beijing.

However, it is difficult to say what profits Musk would like to make in Russia. Unless, of course, it is not about Russia at all, but about business conducted in America and around the world. Perhaps Musk is playing for a fall in share prices again? Or maybe he really has dreamt up a way to bring the war to an end, which will further strengthen his position. Not only business-wise, but also politically.

Of course, there are serious dangers involved. It is already apparent that Musk – in collaboration with Governor DeSantis – would like to have more of a say in America in the future. To be like the “platinum donor” from the film Don’t Look Up, an eccentric billionaire who, thanks to the gigantic donations made during the race for the White House, gained key influence over the President’s decisions after the elections.

It is sometimes difficult to avoid the impression that reality increasingly resembles that of the film, with democratically elected politicians losing ground to various celebrities who seek the limelight and garner more public attention.

And it is not even about influential billionaires like Musk, but much lesser figures, self-proclaimed YouTube experts, popular bloggers or mere impostors who are gaining popularity as a result of the growing crisis of confidence in public institutions in the West. It is also possible that behind these new “authorities” there are people of real influence who are promoting their own interests in this way.

Elon Musk is a living proof that, with the help of big money and the rise of social media, the previous Western model of democracy, in which the electoral process played the most important role, is being replaced before our eyes with a plebiscite in which our future – including the question of war and peace – will be decided by the number of clicks and likes.

–Konrad Kołodziejski

TVP WEEKLY. Editorial team and journalists

–Translated by jz

The author is a doctor of social sciences and a publicist. He was a lecturer at the Institute of Russia and Eastern Europe, Faculty of International and Political Studies, Jagiellonian University.