Republicans who take Musk's money endorse his hate-filled views | Opinion

Billionaire Elon Musk, R-Loathsome, owns Texas Attorney General and U.S. Senate candidate Ken Paxton, along with the GOP’s other midterm election candidates.

So it seems worth noting that Musk also owns, and incessantly expresses, viewpoints that align directly with White supremacists.

Let’s start with Paxton and the Republican Party. 

The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX has single-handedly given $158 million to support Paxton’s campaign. For normal people, that’s a staggering amount of money. It’s more than Paxton’s Democratic opponent, James Talarico, has raised – about $134 million – since launching his campaign.

As The New York Times reported Oct. 16: “Rarely has an individual donor been effectively tied to such a large commitment for a single candidate.”

Elon Musk is bankrolling Ken Paxton, so who do you think is in control?

So if Paxton wins and Musk says “Jump,” how quickly do you reckon Paxton will respond, “How high, glorious sir? And where doth thou wish me to put thy data centers?”

Overall, Musk has given $276 million to either his own super PAC or to Republican-aligned groups, which makes the X owner, as The Times put it, “by far the largest known donor in the midterms.”

With X, Musk has a megaphone and the means to bend and shape narratives and share disinformation willy-nilly. And with his bottomless buckets of money, he has the entire Republican Party in his pocket like lint.

So for those fortunate enough to ignore the tech blabbermouth, let’s look at Musk’s beliefs, which are several steps beyond controversial and should be noted every time the press mentions him.

Musk's clear connections to White supremacist views and thinking

Musk has a disturbing preoccupation with the White race being “replaced” by non-White people. Earlier this year, he shared an X post that read “White solidarity is the only way to survive,” adding “100” to show his support for the point.

An analysis by The Guardian found Musk posted about race on his social media site almost every day in January, including reposting “a screed against 'ethno-cultural upheaval' in Europe from Martin Sellner, a far-right Austrian activist, who is the founder of the ethno-nationalist Identitarian Movement. Musk, who reinstated Sellner’s banned X account in 2024, replied to the anti-immigration post that ‘this is simply a statement of fact.’”

William Braniff, the former director of the Department of Homeland Security’s office for prevention of terrorism and extremism, told The Guardian: “Martin Sellner is probably the most significant global white supremacist right now. He’s the one who pushed the great replacement, and has now pushed the idea of remigration – ethnically cleansing western countries of non-whites.”

Musk is spreading hate to millions on a daily basis, and funding the GOP

Musk has allowed people like antisemite and conspiracy theorist Nick Fuentes back onto X after they were banned when the social media site was known as Twitter. One of Musk’s handpicked Department of Government Efficiency lackeys when he was working under President Donald Trump had been amplifying White supremacist garbage.

It doesn’t take a detective to put it all together. Like all racists or xenophobes or bigots or White supremacists, Musk denies being anything bad. But his constant rhetoric and the people he lauds and associates with tell a clear story of exactly who the billionaire is and how he feels about the White race.

As Jamelle Bouie of The Times wrote in a July column: “With hundreds of millions of followers on a platform he personally controls, Musk stands as the most prominent purveyor of far-right and ultranationalistic rhetoric in the world.”

Musk clearly sees Republicans sharing his twisted worldview

Which brings us back to the first bit. Musk, the guy with all the White-supremacist-aligned thoughts and connections, is by far the biggest funder of Paxton in Texas and of Republican candidates across the country. They are willingly taking millions upon millions of dollars from a hate merchant whose unhinged anti-immigrant, pro-White, conspiratorial views are blasted out to millions of people daily.

And if they win, he will own their political careers. They are fellow travelers, and their destination is nowhere good.

This is a reality that gets missed because Musk’s White supremacist views are often ignored when he’s written about as some great tech genius. I’ll never understand why.

People have a right and a need to know what the man bankrolling the Republican Party is thinking. Because the things he’s thinking are bad, morally and historically. Nothing good comes from such hatred.

Yet Republicans are rolling in it like pigs in mud.

Follow USA TODAY columnist Rex Huppke on Bluesky at @rexhuppke.bsky.social and on Facebook at facebook.com/RexIsAJerk.