A whiff of Musk

Waft your Hardcore email with the fascist billionaire and watch the dough roll in!

If you’re a casual consumer of the news, you may have the impression that Elon Musk is more or less done with politics now — certainly when compared to the early Trump II days, when his DOGE vandals rampaged through the federal bureaucracy, wrecking agencies and stealing government data, and he disastrously invested millions of dollars and his own loathsome presence in a failed attempt to sway a Wisconsin Supreme Court election. Didn’t DOGE fade away, and didn’t Musk say he was going to spend “a lot less” effort on political ventures after his Wisconsin fiasco?

If you pay closer attention, you may know that DOGE still has moles in the federal government; one of their continuing duties seems to be hobbling useful government agencies via know-nothing bros shoved into key positions like wrenches into the gears of industrial machinery (a strategy Trump also employs outside the DOGE paradigm, with hires such as Gregg Phillips, the oafish propagandist recently planted at FEMA). Musk and rightwing news outlets continue to insist DOGE is done, which is probably the clearest sign it isn’t.

And while Musk hasn’t inserted his own disgraced presence into U.S. politics since his aborted, unpopular plan to start his own party in July, his social media company continues to pump white nationalist brain-poison into the feeds of impressionable addicts. And, as Paul Krugman described this week, Musk is personally amplifying X’s global threat to democracy — when the European Union fined him for shady business practices, he “went berserk, declaring that the EU should be abolished and threatening personal retribution against the ‘woke Stasi commissars’ responsible for the fine.”

So Musk remains a dangerously well-funded, malign force in not only American but also global affairs. But to readers of what we at REBID call Hardcore — our term of art for ragebait emails that lure your senile relatives to rightwing garbage sites — Musk is instead the new Thomas Edison, who inspires senile MAGA adherents, not to invent, but to invest.

I have mentioned before that Hardcore emails, once mainly about poorly-written political propaganda, has shifted under Trump II to something more like a standard grift operation, preying on its elderly readers’ medical fears and dreams of wealth. In the latter category, there is a large strain that focuses on Musk.

Some of these invent political intrigues involving Musk and alleged to be going on behind closed doors. Often these talk about Musk “feuding” with Trump, as with this specimen from a thing called “American Capital Crew”:

This is all kayfabe — in this case, a link in the email sends you to an endless pitch video having nothing to do with Musk (“Trump’s ‘Secret Project’ Stuns Investors — 3 stocks to buy before Congress approves the Pentagon’s historic $1 trillion budget”). Its real point is that Musk is an opponent worthy of Trump, as King Kong is worthy of Godzilla, and that their battles will be entertaining and perhaps financially educational — why not click through to see?

But other Musk-specific Hardcore alludes directly to his reputation as a business titan. These readers believe that, rather than parlaying other people’s companies into fortunes, Musk is the genius and mastermind behind the rockets and robots and ugly cars they see on the news. So while they tend to respect any big businessman (unless he has been proven “woke”), they especially revere Musk. And Hardcore scribes know this and send out emails like this, sent under the subject line “How to partner with Elon Musk (without being rich)”:

Dear Reader,

Even though Elon Musk’s xAI is a private company...

There’s now a way for regular people to take a stake in it – without needing insider connections, accreditation, or deep pockets.

Tech legend and angel investor Jeff Brown just revealed how in a recent presentation... He believes xAI may be the most important AI project of the century.

This links to an eterna-video entitled “Urgent alert from tech legend who predicted the rise of Bitcoin, Nvidia, and Tesla:… WANTED!... 300 People To to Learn How to ‘Partner’ with Elon Musk on Project Colossus BEFORE January 1.” The video features a guy who looks like Techbro Father Christmas. The quote marks around “Partner” might scare you off, but Grandpa’s already fumbling with the password for his bank account.

Another email pitches :

Dear Reader,

Forget rockets or brain implants…

Elon’s new AI product could be his biggest innovation yet.

This new product “could well shape the technological and economic future of our society.”

Elon Musk predicted that…

“It will transform everything. People will be talking about this moment in a hundred years. It might be the biggest asset value appreciation in history.”

This pitch, too, leads to a video: “Tech legend who predicted the rise of Bitcoin, Nvidia, and Tesla reveals…” Hey, it’s Techbro Christmas again! But in this case the topline is “Elon Musk’s 10X Project… Elon believes his new AI product could be worth 10 times MORE than PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, and X... COMBINED. It could mint new millionaires across America and even put up to an extra $30,000 in your pocket every year. (Watch the live demo below!)”

And if Gramps doesn’t have the scratch to invest in these, at least he can pick up a credit card that’s kinda-sorta affiliated with the idea of Elon Musk:

Whatever the Hardcore reader’s asset level, there’s an Elon-infused grift for him. If you wonder why Musk doesn’t sue at least the most egregious of these shysters, it could be that it’s more trouble than it’s worth, or professional courtesy — or it could be that Musk has learned, as Trump has learned, that in our current debased culture there really, really is no such thing as bad publicity.