“He’s an illegal immigrant parasite,” Steve Bannon told a British journalist, referring to Elon Musk. He was at it again a few days later on his War Room podcast, listened to by his populist army. “He is an evil man, who thinks only of taking advantage of Trump,” he said about the South African-born billionaire.
And the MAGA world is with Bannon. The real “guru” of the populist movement bewitched by the president painted Musk as an elitist outsider, an interloper in the group that Bannon helped shape from the beginning. He sees him as a globalist financier who has muscled his way into the inner circle to protect his own interests by pitting the MAGA agenda against the interests of the ultra-rich, whom Musk represents and who currently occupy key positions in Trump’s orbit.
“Mr. Musk has been privately irritated by Mr. Bannon’s attacks at times, according to people in touch with him,” New York Times reporters Tyler Pager and Maggie Haberman wrote. But he has only rarely engaged with Mr. Bannon. “Bannon is a great talker, but not a great doer,” Musk posted on X, his social media platform, last month. “What did he get done this week? Nothing.”
Despite the animosity, Trump has made it clear that he wants them to play nice. Last month, the president asked Bannon to stop attacking Musk and requested, sources said, that the two men “meet privately.” The meeting, writes The New York Times, “has not yet happened and it is unclear if or when it will happen. But Mr. Trump’s effort to mediate between the two men reflects the president’s awareness that Mr. Bannon has a powerful megaphone with key parts of the MAGA base.” Musk “has only rarely dealt with Bannon,” and he has happened to be irritated at times by the former Trump adviser’s attacks.
Bannon has long expressed his strong skepticism about Musk’s political sincerity, highlighting the Tesla CEO’s close ties to the Chinese government and his previous criticism of Trump before supporting the president’s campaign.
Bannon attacked Musk and other “tech bros” allied with Trump late last year for supporting H-1B visas, which allow highly skilled immigrants to work in the United States. In his podcasts since then, he has warned his listeners that the Tesla CEO and other Silicon Valley tycoons, many of whom supported Democrats in the past before jumping on the president’s bandwagon, are not to be trusted because just as they abandoned Democrats they will abandon him eventually.
Bannon, who had an acrimonious falling-out with the president in 2017 before returning to Trump’s good graces by supporting his attempts to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election, continues to be an extremely influential voice in the MAGA world. In recent years, Musk has also built a loyal following among these supporters, with his increasingly anti-woke stance and his purchase of Twitter, transformed into the megaphone of the right. “Musk is the volume button,” former Trump strategist Barry Bennett told the New York Times. ”Now on X, you can reach millions of people whereas 10 years ago you could only reach a few tens of thousands. Musk has made this possible. Many people in the MAGA movement depend a lot on the medium to distribute their messages. They are very grateful to him for allowing this to happen.”
Bennett, who worked with Bannon in Trump’s first campaign, also noted that “Bannon has been a conservative all his life” and is “naturally suspicious of people who pop up and don’t have the pedigree that he has.” It would also appear that in addition to fighting for what he considers “the soul of the MAGA movement,” Bannon may be positioning himself for a political race of his own.
“Steve is looking around,” said Raheem Kassam, an old ally of the Breitbart News editor. He is convinced that, after finishing second in the 2028 GOP primary poll at the CPAC meeting last month, Bannon “is now looking at the future of the movement where he sees an atheistic, amoral, Beijing communist-aligned, irresponsible ‘foreigner’ who at some point will want to take over … the MAGAs, and I think he is right to express his concerns.”
