Musk has often claimed that physics is at the center of his worldview: He talks about the search for natural first principles as a motivation for his actions in business and life more generally. And “first principles thinking” has become something of a mantra in Musk world. It evokes both rigor and a childlike, innocent approach to any problem, however complex.

The idea is that you’re going to break down any technological problem, whether automobiles or rockets, and you’re going to start from scratch. Then you’re going to derive whatever solution you come up with from very fundamental axioms. And in this process, nothing anyone else has done up to that point, no inherited tradition, will count. In fact, the underlying premise is clearly that all of that inherited thought and practice is bad, old, dusty baggage that we’re better off doing without and moving on from.

There are advantages to this approach, as the demonstrated success of Tesla and SpaceX can attest. But, as any competent car reviewer will tell you, there are also huge downsides. Tesla vehicles do often appear to be engineered by Martians, as though the industry did not have decades of experience in how to set up and optimize and efficiently manufacture the chassis, steering, and brakes of a modern high-performance car.

And when it comes to politics, the advantages of this “start from scratch” approach are far less clear. Musk and his DOGE team have now drawn on his habits of mind to position themselves to destroy government agencies, principally the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and meddle with the very wiring of government in the United States, in the form of the Treasury payments system.

It’s true, of course, that you can derive inspiration for politics and ethics from analogies to physics. Think about the impact of Isaac Newton on modern political thought: the notions of equilibrium in economics, the stability of equilibria—these are ideas derived from physics analogs, mechanics more often than not. Or think about the impact of cybernetics in the early computer age. And this is even more stark when you think about engineering, a close cousin of physics. Vladimir Lenin famously defined communism as Soviet power plus the electrification of Russia. The authoritarian technocracy movement of the 1930s and ’40s drew similar inspiration from engineering. Musk’s maternal grandfather, who would later emigrate from Canada to South Africa, was involved with that movement.

The knock-on effect of these kinds of positions, analogizing physics to politics, is twofold. First, it is likely to be bad physics. Second, even if you can derive an ideology from physics-based analogies, is what you end up with really political? If politics is about argument, disagreement, the play of human emotions and ideas, then deriving one’s politics from engineering or physics analogies can never be taken at face value. Either it is political and acknowledges itself as such—but then the physics and mechanics will have to be acknowledged as no more than metaphor—or it is not politics but an authoritarian technocratic vision that actually seeks to suppress the political.

Nicolás Ortega illustration for Foreign Policy

What’s indisputable is that Musk has personally benefited from his political involvement. Today, Musk’s personal net worth is estimated in the $330 billion to $350 billion range; it fluctuates with the stock market, $10 billion up, $10 billion down. As recently as the summer of 2024, his assets were valued at $170 billion and back in the doldrums of 2023 at $130 billion.

What has changed in between? Nothing fundamental about the business outlook for Tesla, which is the core of Musk’s personal wealth. Tesla, in fact, has been having a tough time, as consumers are starting to reject the brand for its newfound association with Trump. The obvious explanation for the more than doubling of Musk’s huge personal wealth was the fact that Trump’s bid for the presidency was successful, Musk was his biggest donor, and he is now perhaps the man who is closest to Trump. His partnership with Trump fuses his personal interests with the country’s own.

With what, from Musk’s point of view, is a relatively trivial investment, he is now creating facts on the ground. The question is, why hasn’t anyone done this before?

There does not have to be any kind of malfeasance. There doesn’t even have to be any conflict of interest. What is good for Trump is good for Musk is good for America: That is how they will imagine it, and they will act accordingly. SpaceX, to name just one example, through its relentless innovation and investment, has already earned a place at the core of the U.S. space program. Trump, who created the U.S. Space Force during his first presidency, could easily expand that program and SpaceX’s place in it. And Musk will think of himself throughout as being on the right side of history.

With what, from his point of view, is a relatively trivial investment, he has demonstrated the force of his vision and is now creating facts on the ground. Arguably, the question is, why hasn’t anyone done this before? Obviously, Trump is uniquely susceptible to this kind of idiosyncratic personal influence. He loves business success. And while no one has had the resources that Musk does, there are still plenty of multi-billionaires out there. Why are their donations to the political system, why is their effort to suborn politics generally, so mealymouthed? Yes, one sees a few millions spent here or there. But Musk bought Twitter and put down $277 million on Trump and other Republicans in the 2024 election, and look at his return! It is a spectacularly successful investment.

The only obvious analogies that come to mind might be the relationship between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Indian oligarchs such as the Ambanis. They made a truly long-term and large-scale investment in a political personality who would change the game in their favor, not just narrowly but in a much broader sense.

You could think of this “investment in politics” as proactively shaping the environment around the vision that also animates Musk’s business ventures—as an enablement of further risk-taking. Or you could think of his intervention in politics more defensively.

Is it better to sit back, stay in your lane, and enjoy your wealth, waiting for history to happen to you? Or is it better to place a serious bet and try somehow to manage the conflict? Musk has clearly opted for the latter route. Are there risks and contradictions? There obviously are. Tesla is hugely exposed in China. It is one of the firm’s largest markets and an even larger share of worldwide production.

Is there any guarantee that this won’t clash with Trump’s trade policy or the geopolitics of more hawkish members of his entourage? Absolutely not. But do you have a better chance to influence the course of events and to find pragmatic fixes that may work for your business if you are inside the administration? Of course you do. Apple, which successfully lobbied for tariff carveouts during the first Trump administration, demonstrated what could be done. Musk is going to go one better. Like Apple CEO Tim Cook, Musk has formidable contacts up and down the Chinese hierarchy. Perhaps he can find some way to square the circle. What Musk doesn’t consider an option is retreating into an imaginary position of neutrality.

But at a deeper level, it is useful to consider the way in which growing up in the truly protean environment of South African politics in the 1970s and ’80s might have shaped the underlying risk-taking form of Musk’s politics—his understanding of the fungibility of constitutions and of history itself.

His formative years were spent in an environment that was in dramatic flux, with the system of apartheid buckling and apocalyptic scenarios of race war (which are still very much present in South Africa today) overshadowing political life. Everything was up for grabs. No political system could be ruled out. It was not an environment easily conducive to developing a liberal imagination. Musk’s father was reputedly liberal, although in the South African context that meant discussing multicameral parliaments to allow some measure of Black representation. According to Musk, he himself left the country to avoid conscription into the South African military, which was a pillar of apartheid.

It is useful to consider the way in which growing up in the truly protean environment of South African politics in the 1970s and ’80s might have shaped the underlying risk-taking form of Musk’s politics. 

Musk, Peter Thiel, and others in their Silicon Valley milieu have in common that they like to “think the unthinkable” about all sorts of things. It connects to the habit of thinking about politics on the basis of scientific axioms. And in a situation like that of late apartheid South Africa, when everything is subject to revision, what else do you do? You have to recur to first principles.

But Musk’s adventures in European right-wing policy suggest his motivations may be less transparent to himself than he would admit. Around the factory he built outside Berlin, he has had some uncomfortable encounters with German politics repeatedly posing resistance to his business plans. Musk is reportedly on unfriendly terms with certain parts of Berlin’s terminally hip party scene. At this point, Musk probably quite likes the idea of disrupting Germany for the sake of retribution. And when you apply first principles to that emotional math, you rapidly arrive at the conclusion that the German far right deserves strong support.

When you see him in conversation with Alice Weidel, co-leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, Musk comes across as almost naive. In terms of its program, though the AfD is commonly labeled far-right, it is not more right-wing than the Republican Party in the United States. The one difference is history—so Musk has concluded that Germans should worry less about their Nazi past.

What Musk isn’t going to do is tamely follow the example of someone such as Bill Gates, who took his immense fortune earned via Microsoft and poured it into conventional good causes such as global public health and education. Gates is a baby boomer. He cultivates conventional tastes and has a reputable collection of American art. Musk is a poorly socialized, somewhat feral computer kid of the 1970s and ’80s who, through maverick energy, has made himself the richest man in the world. Thinking outside the box is simply the only way he knows.

Elon Musk holds a chainsaw during the annual Conservative Political Action Conference at National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Maryland, on Feb. 20. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

Hostile audits in the form of invasions of government infrastructure and physical occupations of office buildings are not unknown in political history. In the later stages of the eurocrisis, for instance, inspectors from the so-called troika—the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund—made visits to Greek government buildings and accessed their computers and files to make determinations about the shape of the country’s future spending.

But that took years and followed a procedure. What we have seen in the first weeks of the second Trump administration is an assault more in the style of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. With a budget of $40 billion, USAID is a small part of the U.S. government machine, but it accounts for more than 20 percent of official development assistance worldwide. The destruction of that agency is like nothing we’ve ever seen in recent history in terms of governmental change.

There may be a strategy. Musk seems to want to break things. He may think that disrupting the U.S. government will unlock huge, undreamed-of efficiencies.

The teams that he is using to drive change comprise a mixture of teenage engineers, staff on loan from his various businesses, and high-flying lawyers. Layoffs have hit nearly every federal agency, from the Education Department to the Small Business Administration to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. If there is a plan they are implementing, it seems haphazard.

But there may be a strategy. Musk seems to want to break things. He may think that disrupting the U.S. government will unlock huge, undreamed-of efficiencies. He may even imagine displacing much of the government with private enterprise, as SpaceX has effectively done with NASA. But most recently, he has resorted to an ugly gardening metaphor to describe his vision:

I think we do need to delete entire agencies, as opposed to leave part of them behind. … It’s kind of like leaving a weed. If you don’t remove the roots of the weed, then it’s easy for the weed to grow back. But if you remove the roots of the weed, it doesn’t stop weeds from ever going back, but it makes it harder.

A gardener, of course, is someone who has cultivated the practical knowledge to identify weeds, to differentiate them from plants in need of tending—precisely not someone, in other words, who works according to first principles.