Is Elon Musk A Russian Asset?
We could be witnessing another attack on democracy from another narcissistic, delusional billionaire with extremely suspicious links to a foreign government.
by Ben Cohen
The headline of this article is deliberately provocative. I don’t know for certain whether Elon Musk is a Russian asset. Musk’s level of wealth and influence means he plays power games few people can really understand, but his behavior in recent months has been so troubling that the question at least needs to be asked.
As of writing this, Musk has just disbanded Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council, falsely accused the former head of the council of being a child groomer, and has urged his fans to follow QAnon.
This is not normal, even by Musk’s notoriously low standards.
Given Musk has also injected himself into the Ukraine/Russia war explicitly on the side of Russia, it is fair to ask what his relationship is with Vladimir Putin. We also need to know why he is behaving exactly like a Russian asset.
I am aware that inferring something is awry places me in a somewhat precarious position. Musk can boot me off of Twitter. His trolls are going to hound me when this gets shared on his personal fiefdom. I am going to be accused of “liberal hysteria” and engaging in a witch hunt. But Musk is injecting so much chaos into US politics (and global politics) that we need to build a fuller picture of his presence and force him to answer for his behavior.
What is a Russian asset?
New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait wrote a superb essay in 2018 persuasively arguing that Donald Trump was a Russian asset, probably since the late 1980’s. Here’s how Chait defines the the term given to those individuals used by the Russian state:
During the Soviet era, Russian intelligence cast a wide net to gain leverage over influential figures abroad. (The practice continues to this day.) The Russians would lure or entrap not only prominent politicians and cultural leaders, but also people whom they saw as having the potential for gaining prominence in the future. In 1986, Soviet ambassador Yuri Dubinin met Trump in New York, flattered him with praise for his building exploits, and invited him to discuss a building in Moscow. Trump visited Moscow in July 1987. He stayed at the National Hotel, in the Lenin Suite, which certainly would have been bugged. There is not much else in the public record to describe his visit, except Trump’s own recollection in The Art of the Deal that Soviet officials were eager for him to build a hotel there. (It never happened.)
What happened after is damning. Continues Chait:
Trump returned from Moscow fired up with political ambition. He began the first of a long series of presidential flirtations, which included a flashy trip to New Hampshire. Two months after his Moscow visit, Trump spent almost $100,000 on a series of full-page newspaper ads that published a political manifesto. “An open letter from Donald J. Trump on why America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves,” as Trump labeled it, launched angry populist charges against the allies that benefited from the umbrella of American military protection. “Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests?”
Trump’s letter avoided the question of whom the U.S. was protecting those countries from. The primary answer, of course, was the Soviet Union. After World War II, the U.S. had created a liberal international order and underwritten its safety by maintaining the world’s strongest military. A central goal of Soviet, and later Russian, foreign policy was to split the U.S. from its allies.
Trump had little political power in the 1990s and 2000s, but he did take huge loans from Russian banks to bail out his floundering businesses. When Trump got into office in 2016, US foreign policy changed fairly dramatically with Trump’s objectives neatly dovetailing with the Russian government’s. Trump went to war with NATO, threatened to pull military aid to Ukraine, and managed to turn much of the GOP and the right wing media into pro-Russian mouthpieces. He repeatedly praised Putin in public and expended a lot of political capital advancing specific Russian policy goals. Furthermore, Trump was an agent of chaos and created an incredible amount of instability in the American political system. This was an explicit goal of the Kremlin’s as witnessed through their massive disinformation campaign in 2016. The Russian government funded an incredibly effective social media operation designed to rip American society apart with Trump’s political campaign playing a central role.
It is possible Trump never understood that he was a Russian asset, but I suspect there really was kompromat on Trump and that he knew exactly what he was doing. Despite the insistence from the far right and far left that this is a conspiracy theory, more evidence has come to light in recent years adding substance to the accusation (via The Daily Beast):
For years, there have been whispers that the Russian government holds compromising materials on Donald Trump. Now, The Guardian claims to have its hands on an alleged leak from the heart of the Kremlin that shows them boasting about “kompromat.”
The supposed leak obtained by The Guardian reportedly claims that President Vladimir Putin personally approved a nefarious plan to throw Russia’s support behind Trump’s 2016 campaign. The document states that Putin, his spy chiefs, and top ministers agreed that a victory for a “mentally unstable” Trump would permanently weaken the United States.
The document also reportedly states that the Kremlin has so-called kompromat—or damaging intelligence—on Trump. It cryptically refers to “certain events” that happened during “non-official visits to Russian Federation territory.”
This cannot be dismissed as a conspiracy theory. It is entirely plausible given there is a great deal of supporting evidence.
Enter Elon Musk
I first began to suspect something was awry when Musk began tweeting out a “peace plan” for Russia and Ukraine that so heavily favored Russia even Republicans called him out for it. The plan allowed Russia to annex Ukrainian land and prevented them from joining NATO in return for, well, nothing:
More troubling were the finer details of Musk’s plan that he floated in person at a conference in Aspen. Former U.S. National Security Council official and Russia analyst Fiona Hill picked up on this telling Politico there was only one reasonable explanation for Musk’s bizarrely specific understanding of the region’s water supplies. Hill stated that:
It’s very clear that Elon Musk is transmitting a message for Putin. There was a conference in Aspen in late September when Musk offered a version of what was in his tweet — including the recognition of Crimea as Russian because it’s been mostly Russian since the 1780s — and the suggestion that the Ukrainian regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia should be up for negotiation, because there should be guaranteed water supplies to Crimea. He made this suggestion before Putin’s annexation of those two territories on September 30. It was a very specific reference. Kherson and Zaporizhzhia essentially control all the water supplies to Crimea. Crimea is a dry peninsula. It has aquifers, but it doesn’t have rivers. It’s dependent on water from the Dnipro River that flows through a canal from Kherson. It’s unlikely Elon Musk knows about this himself. The reference to water is so specific that this clearly is a message from Putin.
Respected geopolitical analyst and Eurasia Group president Ian Bremmer reported that Musk told him he spoke directly with Vladimir Putin before releasing his plan. Musk then denied any conversation had taken place.
Days later, Musk threatened to stop providing internet access to Ukraine via his company Starlink. The Satellite company has been perhaps the most crucial source of communication for Ukraine’s military after Russia destroyed its cellular phone and internet networks.
Follow the money. And the influence
We know that Musk has taken money from the Kremlin for his Hyperloop company via the Russian Direct Investment Fund, a sovereign wealth fund controlled by Vladimir Putin. We know that Musk was planning to build a Tesla plant in Russia in 2021, having revealed it during a forum he was invited to by Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov. We know that the Biden Administration has been so concerned about Musk’s ties to Russia and other potentially hostile foreign entities that they investigated blocking his purchase of Twitter on the grounds it presented a national security threat. We know that Musk is using Twitter explicitly to attack Democrats and sow extreme social division in America.
This is deeply concerning and the public has a right to know more about the man who now owns the world’s “digital town square”.
Fiona Hill had this to say about Elon Musk’s new role as a Russian stooge:
This [the Musk peace plan] is a classic Putin play. It’s just fascinating, of course, that it’s Elon Musk in this instance, because obviously Elon Musk has a huge Twitter following. He’s got a longstanding reputation in Russia through Tesla, the SpaceX space programs and also through Starlink. He’s one of the most popular men in opinion polls in Russia. At the same time, he’s played a very important part in supporting Ukraine by providing Starlink internet systems to Ukraine, and kept telecommunications going in Ukraine, paid for in part by the U.S. government. Elon Musk has enormous leverage as well as incredible prominence. Putin plays the egos of big men, gives them a sense that they can play a role. But in reality, they’re just direct transmitters of messages from Vladimir Putin.
Does this make Musk a “Russian asset”? Personally, I think there is enough evidence to make the categorization reasonable. To reiterate: Musk has a history of financial ties to Russia. He has taken Russian money. He has high level connections in the Kremlin, and has transmitted messages directly from Vladimir Putin. He is also acting as an agent of chaos in America, right when the country needs to present a unified front against Russian threats of nuclear war.
Musk’s most vociferous supporters are far right, pro Russian conspiracy theorists, and he is using his recently purchased social media platform to rile them up. In this light, asking whether the Kremlin has kompromat on Musk isn’t so conspiratorial.
Musk is apparently a big believer in transparency, as witnessed by his recent “Twitter Files” dump. So let’s start asking him for some transparency, starting with any correspondence he might have had with the Kremlin over the past year. If we can see messages between Twitter executives and the Biden/Harris presidential campaign, we can see Musk’s chat history with the Kremlin too.
We have seen this playbook before. In 2016 a Russian asset became president of the United States and nearly ended democracy in a deadly riot. We could be witnessing another attack on democracy from another narcissistic, delusional billionaire with extremely suspicious links to a foreign government.
As Musk’s public profile grows alongside his vile Twitter spats, so does his ability to wreck what is left of American civil society. Let’s not do this again.
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"Musk is apparently a big believer in transparency, as witnessed by his recent “Twitter Files” dump. So let’s start asking him for some transparency"
Musk's belief in transparency and free speech is like any Republican's belief in "freedom": They believe in it for themselves, are completely opposed to it for others.
At this point, the idea of kompromat affecting a majority of voters seems quaint. Short of an HD video showing one of them defecating on the American flag or abusing a child, it’s hard to imagine anything bad enough to make an impact on Trump’s or Musk’s popularity. Trump has known this for a while and Musk is starting to realize it for himself. A “piss tape” or anything of that ilk wouldn’t matter to their supporters. If they’re doing Putin’s bidding at this point, it’s about Putin holding out positive incentives rather than kompromat, imho. The lesson of the 2016 and 2024 elections is that a lot of voters simply don’t care if Trump is morally reprehensible, and the same almost certainly applies to Musk.