Elon Musk’s shift to the right, support for Trump, and defense of free speech have turned a former liberal darling into a target of the Left’s growing hostility toward billionaires.
October 29, 2026
As the midterms approach, the Left has gone nearly berserk in its hatred of trillionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk. Yet its escalating venom would have been almost inconceivable before 2022, when Musk publicly declared that he would be voting Republican.
Before Musk’s recent political reversal (he voted for both Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020), he was beloved by the Left as the first successful upstart challenger to the century-long dominance of the Big Three fossil-fuel automakers. Liberals once loved his revolutionary, electrically powered Teslas and drove them proudly as a green virtue signal.
Not now. Far-left podcaster Jennifer Welch has run out of Nazi epithets for Musk. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—ironically, given her own limited talents—trashed Musk as “probably one of the most unintelligent billionaires I have ever met or seen or witnessed.”
Fellow multibillionaire Bill Gates smeared Musk for supposedly “killing the world’s poorest children” by promoting cuts to U.S. foreign aid programs.
Just this week, former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich even demanded that Musk’s SpaceX and Starlink be nationalized and run by the government—a move more associated with Cuba or the old Soviet Union than with the United States of America.
Such unhinged venom can contribute to violence. In early 2025, leftists launched more than 80 attacks against Tesla cars and dealerships—and sometimes even individual Tesla drivers. Similar cases of vandalism and arson have continued into 2026.
So why did the Left go from hailing Musk as the next Thomas Edison to treating him as public enemy No. 1 and targeting him with death threats?
The Left once loved all the tech and Wall Street billionaires who ensured that Democrats always had more money than Republicans.
Billionaire George Soros and his various foundations have channeled well over half a billion dollars to left-wing candidates and causes in just the last six years alone. Billionaires like Reid Hoffman, Tom Steyer, and the now-imprisoned Sam Bankman-Fried gave hundreds of millions to the Democratic Party and its candidates.
But Elon Musk now embodies everything the enraged Left hates.
First and most obviously, Musk no longer endorses Democrats. Instead, in 2024 and 2026, he donated hundreds of millions of dollars to help Republican candidates.
Second, Musk gave lavishly to the hated 2024 Trump campaign, especially in critical swing states. Furious Democrats actually blame him for Trump’s victory.
Third, Musk paid billions of dollars to buy the liberal social media company Twitter. He eliminated censorship, renamed it X, and turned it into a free-speech platform that no longer catered to left-wing dogmas.
Fourth, Musk was instrumental in conducting the 2025 DOGE cuts that reduced the federal workforce by some 270,000 employees. DOGE also helped slash USAID programs that had often been involved in politicking abroad to support globalist and left-wing causes.
Fifth, the spurned Left has started hating billionaires as much as it once worshipped them. Its members now talk openly about confiscating wealth, nationalizing private corporations, taxing net worth and unrealized gains, and regulating and suing large companies to drive them out of business.
In 2020, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, donated some $420 million to help ensure greater Democratic turnout—and they were deified for helping to defeat Trump.
Now Zuckerberg has been talking about fleeing left-wing California if it passes a “billionaire tax” on net worth.
Billionaires like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, and Palantir’s Alex Karp—along with other Silicon Valley magnates such as Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, and David Sacks—have drifted rightward, fearing the new agenda of the Islamist-sympathizing socialist Democratic Party.
Sixth, and perhaps most important, Musk—one of the greatest entrepreneurs of the last hundred years—is not shy about his own talents and spectacular successes, ensuring even more left-wing envy and venom.
Musk not only brought stranded U.S. astronauts home but also helped revive the moribund NASA space program.
This year, his company will launch more satellites than all other countries and private corporations combined. Indeed, by June 2026, it had sent into space more satellites than humanity had launched in total since Sputnik. SpaceX’s behemoth Starship, the most powerful rocket in history, dwarfs its Chinese, European, and Russian rivals.
The upstart Tesla has the highest market capitalization ($1.5 trillion) of any car company in the world. Musk’s social media platform X may have nearly 600 million monthly active users.
His artificial intelligence company, SpaceX Super Intelligence, and its Grok model are among the world’s best-known.
Musk’s Neuralink may become the first company that allows the paralyzed and the blind to regain their lost abilities.
His Boring Company has created a subterranean transport service in Las Vegas and is building another in Nashville.
Musk is history’s first trillionaire. He is a mechanical and business genius, and he may well be one of the most brilliant technological entrepreneurs, not just of the last hundred years but of all time.
So is it any wonder that the new democratic socialist Left, with its insistence on equality of results, despises everything that Musk does and represents?
Victor Davis Hanson
