Dismantling the federal government. Building a “MechaHitler” AI. Waging a war on Woke. Donating nearly $300 million to get Donald Trump reelected as president. What caused Elon Musk, once a liberal hero, to go down this path?

According to Musk: his estranged daughter, Vivian Wilson.

Doing what he does best — compulsively doomscrolling his own social media site, X — Musk responded to a fan’s post claiming he wouldn’t be the based, Nazi saluting hero that he is today if it weren’t for his daughter’s transition.

“We should never forget that if not for Vivian, Elon Musk never would have gotten involved, never would have purchased Twitter, Kamala Harris would be President and the Left-wing would have total instrumental control over the construction of Skynet,” the poster claimed.

“True,” Musk replied.

Musk might be being a little facetious here, but there’s no denying that he has a weird and unhealthy obsession with Wilson, who publicly came out as transgender in 2022, and her gender identity. He has tirelessly repeated the line that the “woke mind virus killed my son,” and claims that this is why they’re estranged — actually, she disowned him — and not because he regularly misgenders her or says she’s suffering a “tragic mental illness.”

Of course, Wilson’s perspective is pretty different. In interviews, she’s described Musk — who has 14 known children with at least four different  women — as an absent and “cruel” father who would constantly demean her for being feminine, including yelling at her for having a high-pitched voice.

In spite of that, Wilson says that Musk signed the paperwork giving parental consent for her to start the medical interventions to begin her gender transition. It seems totally out of character for him today, but it wasn’t that long ago, we should remind you, that Musk was proudly boasting about how LGBTQ friendly his company Tesla was, even telling bigots, “Don’t buy our car if that’s a problem.” Encapsulating his political about-face, Musk now claims that he was “tricked” into approving Wilson’s gender treatments.

All that being said, Wilson finds ascribing Musk’s villainous turn to her transition somewhat insulting, and implied that his reactionary sympathies were always there.

“It’s such a convenient narrative, that the reason he turned right is because I’m a f**king tr**ny, and that’s just not the case. That’s not what that does to people,” she said in a 2025 interview with Teen Vogue.

“Him going further on the right, and I’m going to use the word ‘further’ — make sure you put ‘further’ in there — is not because of me,” she added. “That’s insane.”

More on industrialists: Trump Shovels $4 Billion Directly to Elon Musk, Who Spent a Fortune Getting Him Elected

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As it turns out, telling the world’s workers to prepare for a dystopia rife with poverty and alienation isn’t the smartest way to market your exciting new tech.

As data centers are shut down by angry mobs and AI surveillance cameras are ripped from their poles, the world’s tech billionaires and CEOs are waking up to the reality that the masses are, broadly speaking, not on board with their plan to automate the world with AI. It isn’t necessarily that working people want to stay shackled to the wage-based employment system, but that folks need those jobs to have any hope of eating, seeing a doctor, and sleeping with a roof over their heads.

Instead of the tone-deaf hype we once heard about AI’s potential, these rich and powerful figures are now moderating their messaging, calling for policy measures to help workers weather the AI storm — or perhaps head off a violent revolt led by the many who lost their jobs.

For example, Amazon executive chairman Jeff Bezos — whose net worth would take the average US worker 3.8 million years to earn on their own — recently shared his new belief that the bottom 50 percent of US earners should pay no federal income tax.

“You could double the taxes I pay and it’s not going to help that teacher in Queens,” he said, painting the federal income tax as the main hurdle for working-class families (though he’s started paying his share in recent years, Bezos paid $0 in federal income tax in 2007 and 2011, when he was already a multibillionaire.)

Elon Musk, meanwhile, has floated the idea of “universal high income,” a play on the well-known concept of universal basic income, where a government issues cost-of-living checks to the broader population (from what we can tell, the only difference is that Musk’s version would be driven by humanoid robots creating radical economic abundance).

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has similar ideas, like a “universal basic compute” where everybody’s income corresponds to a share of his company’s revenue — which would also conveniently make ChatGPT the most important AI chatbot on the planet.

There’s also another option that none of them seem to be pushing: if AI is as disruptive as they say, there’s always the option to pull the plug. That they won’t even consider this choice suggests that their appeals to the toiling masses aren’t in good faith — which at this point should be obvious to just about everyone.

More on AI billionaires: New Website Detects Apocalypse If Billionaire Jets Start Fleeing en Masse

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Elon Musk spent just shy of $300 million supporting Donald Trump’s reelection in late 2024 — a full-throated financial commitment that appears to be paying off in a big way.

Musk’s space company SpaceX, in particular, has massively benefited from the duo’s on-and-off-again relationship, scoring billion-dollar deals with the government.

Most recently, Reuters reports, SpaceX was awarded a $4.16 billion contract with the US Space Force to develop detection satellites that can track and target airborne threats. Just days earlier, the military arm awarded the company a separate contract, worth $2.29 billion, to build a military communications network in low-Earth orbit to support ground-based operations.

Besides the impossible-to-overlook role of Trump and Musk’s cozy relationship, the timing of the announcement will raise plenty of eyebrows. SpaceX is expected to go public soon at a valuation of north of $1.75 trillion, a blockbuster IPO that could directly benefit from a government partner signing a flashy contract.

The latest threat detection contract is part of the Trump administration’s so-called Golden Dome missile defense system. While plenty of fundamental questions remain over its design, the network could cost well over $1 trillion to build out, according to experts, which would be far than the White House has estimated.

The threat detection satellite contract, called the Space-Based Advanced Moving Target Indicator, will see SpaceX develop what Reuters likens to an “interconnected system-of-systems” that collects and analyzes data from a host of different sources, from space-based sensors, to secure communication links.

Zooming out, cushy government contracts have long played a key role in the flourishing and very survival of Musk’s space venture. According to an analysis by the Washington Post last year, SpaceX had received $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits, as of February 2025.

Given their budding relationship and the latest multibillion-dollar contracts, that number has already grown substantially — and will very likely continue to grow, especially as SpaceX looks to go public.

The company is also set to play a key role in the Trump administration’s efforts to return astronauts to the surface of the Moon, and was awarded a $2.9 billion contract in 2021 to build the requisite lunar lander.

More on SpaceX: SpaceX Announces Plans to Put Billionaire on First Rocket to Mars

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