Why Elon Musk is an Ayn Rand villain

And he's not anyone's definition of a hero

I’ve been meaning to write this piece for months now, and I’ve simply been overwhelmed by events and by the sheer amount of evidence that compiles to support my thesis that Elon Musk is a villain. I’m not the first to make that claim, but I’ve been making it for months now and I want to get my thoughts down, for the record.

Rather than write the dissertation that I hope to complete one day, I’m going to summarize my position. And although I title this piece “Why Elon Musk is an Ayn Rand villain,” in response to those “Objectivists” who assert — even today — that he’s an Ayn Rand hero, I’m speaking to anyone regardless of agreement with Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism.

I don’t expect you to just take my word for it. I have copious evidence to support my contention, and I will post that as I get time. But I am confident that everything I say here is based on demonstrable facts — and none of it is a secret. It’s all out there in the open, and the best place to start is scrolling Musk’s feed on X. Remarkably, I’m really just scraping the surface in this piece. (UPDATE: I’m thinking to turn this into an evolving piece, by plugging in examples and evident to illustrate my contention.)

To begin with, Musk lies, all the time, and in fact considers the truth to be irrelevant and inconvenient. He uses X to amplify Trump's lies today, and he turned X into a "right-wing" propaganda machine spreading every insane conspiracy theory and blatant piece of disinformation -- lies, distortions, and fabrications -- to get Trump elected and to support our slide into Trump’s dictatorship.

Musk games the X algorithm, and more recently his Grok 3 AI chatbot, to favor posts by him and those on his side. On July 8, 2025, Musk’s manipulations apparently led Grok to spout antisemitic rhetoric and promote Hitler — almost certainly, the result of Musk wanting to reduce “leftist bias” and make Grok provide right-wing answers. It worked.

I could stop there regarding the question of an Ayn Rand hero, because honesty is a central virtue of Objectivism. No such dishonest person can be considered virtuous, let alone a hero. And speaking purely practically, no such dishonest person can be trusted. Why people believe a man who lies to them all the time about the facts of reality is beyond me — while at the same time refusing to believe him in those rare instances when he tells the truth about what he’s actually doing.

Musk is a crony, a grifter, and a con man. It’s debatable if he’s an oligarch, but an argument can be made. He's leveraged fraud and government policy to build his companies. He almost certainly should be in jail for election fraud and interference involving the $290 million he spent electing Trump. In fact, he joked during the election cycle about how he would go to jail if Trump wasn't elected. And in 2022, he went to Trump begging for money, and Trump said Musk would go down on his knees if he demanded it — a fact that’s been conveniently forgotten or ignored.

Musk abuses ketamine (and possibly more) and constantly rants on X — posting hundreds of times a day. He exhibits clear signs of being completely unstable and, indeed, unhinged. He paid people to play video games for him so he would rank as the #1 competitive gamer, relentlessly boasting about it as a badge of honor — until he was exposed as a fraud. And it was always a ridiculous boast, given that competitive players spend many hours a day competing in what’s essentially a full-time job.

He sees reality as a computer simulation with only certain people -- like him -- being unplugged from the Matrix while everyone else -- like you and me -- being mere non-player characters (NPCs) who are computer programs manipulated by people like him. This is reflected in his metaphysics and his epistemology, and has knock-off consequences for his ethics and politics. Essentially, he sees NPCs as irrelevant cannon fodder in the marketplace of politics and ideas — just like NPCs in the video games he professes to enjoy that can be sacrificed with impunity.

He cozies up to Neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and the Nazi-leaning AfD in Germany. He has been instrumental in pushing the "will of the people" majority-rule democracy narrative that Trump is using to justify his dictatorship and destroy our Constitutional republic. He demonizes non-whites of all kinds, and has jumped on the nationalist and nativist bandwagon in calling for mass deportations. More ominously, he's a central figure in the techno-fascist movement that wants to burn everything down to build their own little crypto-anarchy kingdoms.

He is a species-level altruist, wanting us to spend our lives and money to build a colony on Mars in case there's an asteroid or other Earth-ending event some time in the future, and he tells people to have children they don't want and can't afford to stave off population collapse. He's all about sacrificing us today so that "the human species” and "consciousness" might survive disaster in some undefined future. And he has 14 children with four women and only spends time with one of them, and he's building a compound in Texas to house his brood -- all of which were conceived via IVF or surrogate in loveless relationships with random women.

And yet, he also led DOGE to cut USAID programs aimed directly at keeping children alive. Of course, those programs were in regions like Africa. Combine that with his posting only about population declines in white European countries (and the United States), it’s quite obvious which children matter to him.

In short, the idea that he is some kind of hero is utterly mind-blowing, let alone an Ayn Rand hero. If Rand were alive today, I'm certain that she would write a novel featuring Musk as the central villain. Trump and the rest of them might be lesser antagonists.

Incidentally, I think that some people want to prop Musk up as an Ayn Rand hero for one of several reasons, or some combination. First, there’s the shallow epistemology, where people base their opinions on a tenuous grasp of the facts. Second is a related tendency I’ve seen in some “Objectivists” to deal in rationalism, that is, to think in terms of floating abstractions (e.g., “great businessman”) disconnected from the facts. Third, I think some people just want a hero, and they’ll invent one where they can’t find one in reality — maybe most likely, Objectivists need John Galt to be real, or their entire worldview falls apart. (Since I first wrote this post, I decided that Objectivism is not my philosophy.)

So, they say that Musk is a hero because of his business acumen, his productive effort, his innovation, and his glorification of humanity. However, I think each of those is highly suspect, and in no case could they be enough to excuse his deep corruption. I think it’s far more possible that Musk is good at one thing — hiring good people to run his businesses for him, marshaling resources from whatever source (including government largesse and favors), and playing the crony game of the mixed economy. The rest, like his top ranking in competitive gaming, is most likely a fraud.

Note that Ayn Rand’s heroes are people of both mind and action. Hank Rearden discovered Reardon Metal by his own scientific effort. Dagny Taggart ran Taggart Transcontinental, hands-on, not sitting behind a desk as a mere CEO. John Galt invented his motor. Howard Rourke designed his buildings. These were both moral and practical heroes, by Rand’s standards. Note that in Atlas Shrugged, Galt literally endured torture rather than deny reality. Of course, these characters were philosophical ideals, not real people. But, real — or desirable — or not, Musk certainly wouldn’t be one of them.

Compare that to Musk’s intrinsic dishonesty, that is, his complete rejection of reality. And it’s literally impossible for any one person to be more than just a figurehead in so many complex businesses. Toss in Musk’s involvement in the Trump campaign, for months, and the time he’s spending today on DOGE and his other governmental “responsibilities,” and it’s even more far-fetched to think he’s doing anything of real value.