Elon Musk's polarizing ascent in the MAGA movement

0:01Hey, and welcome to Decoder. This is Alex Heath, Deputy Editor of The Verge. I'm guest hosting today's episode while Neelai is still away for a much-needed vacation. He'll be back next week. Today, we're diving into the bromance between Elon Musk and Donald Trump, and more specifically, how it's impacting the changing right-wing political movement here in the United States. There's no better place to get that temperature check than the Annual Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC. Musk showed up this year for a wild interview. You may have seen clips of him waving around a literal chainsaw there.

0:37Since Musk got close to Trump, I've been curious to know how MAGA diehards really feel about the relationship. I've also been wondering if this administration will go easier on tech companies now that so many of their CEOs have kissed the ring. Thankfully, The Verge's Gabby Del Valle was on the ground for us at CPAC this year. As you'll hear her say in our following conversation, she barely slept. But she got a front row fascinating look at how the world of MAGA really feels about Elon, Doge, and regulating big tech. Even if you're already sick of hearing about the current state of American politics, I think you'll learn something from our convo.

1:14I know I did. Okay, here we go.

1:31All right, Gabby, welcome to Decoder. Hi, thanks for having me. Thanks for being here, especially after CPAC. I know you're tired. You've barely slept. Apologize to the Decoder audience in advance. I am literally so delirious. I've gotten like 10 hours of sleep over the past three days. Honestly, that's probably for the best for this conversation because I have a feeling it will be delirious anyway. It was a really crazy weekend. And I had a very interesting time. For people who don't know what CPAC is, maybe we can start there. Can you explain a little bit about the history of it and why you went this year?

2:11Yeah, CPAC is the Conservative Political Action Conference. It's an annual conference in actually National Harbor, Maryland, D.C. area, but not in D.C. proper. And it's like, as the name would suggest, one of the biggest, if not the biggest, like, annual conservative conferences. But the tenor of CPAC has changed really significantly over the years. I went last year for the first time, and I was like, this is crazy. It's like a Trump rally, but it's supposed to not be a Trump rally. Before Trump spoke, they, last year, they had a reminder that you're not supposed to hold signs up because of how you can't do electioneering at CPAC.

2:51But all the reporters I met who had been covering CPAC for years were like, this was last year. They were telling me, yeah, attendance is kind of going down. Like in previous years, you used to not even be able to move around really from how crowded it was. And this year, it's not like that. It's a lot smaller. And then this year, CPAC 2025 was smaller than last year. Like I noticed it was an even smaller crowd. But that doesn't change the enthusiasm of the crowd. If anything, I think the enthusiasm is greater because it's like the real diehards there. You know, I've been on this tech right beat for a bit and I just wanted to see what the vibes are going to be.

3:33I went to the Bitcoin conference back in July, I think, and Trump spoke at the Bitcoin conference. So I kind of wanted to see if the Bitcoin conference had gone kind of MAGA, has CPAC gone tech? And the answer is like, kind of, but not entirely. Okay, well, we're going to get into that. But first, the Elon of all of this, I'm sure if you weren't paying attention to CPAC, you probably at least heard about Elon's appearance with the chainsaw, the glasses, seemed to be really enjoying himself. This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy. Chainsaw! There's living the dream and there's living the meme, and that's pretty much what's happening, you know.

4:18You're like, I think you're bigger. I mean, Doge started out as a meme. Think about it. And now it's real. Isn't that crazy? And I'm curious because, you know, in the Verges cinematic universe, Elon is obviously a massive figure and that has only grown since the inauguration and with Doge. But when you're there at CPAC, and I love how Politico framed it, they called it MAGA's United Nations. So when you're there with just all these MAGA diehards and Elon's there and Trump is there, who did you come away with feeling like is actually running the government these days? Was it Elon or Trump? That's a really interesting question.

5:02And I would say kind of both and. Elon's appearance was a surprise. And this to me was kind of shady. One of the first speakers that day was J.D. Vance. And before J.D. Vance came on, Mercedes Schlapp, she and her husband run the show, came on stage and was like, we have a really exciting speech coming up with someone who really smart tech guy, like really important. And this was right before J.D. Vance came up. So I thought she was kind of like alluding to his heel connections and venture capital past. But no, she was talking about Elon. So it was very weird. And then everybody lost it. And then J.D.

5:39Vance came on and J.D. Vance got a standing ovation. It's not like Elon got more attention than Trump. It's like everybody loves Elon and they love Trump and they love Steve Bannon and they love J.D. Vance. I asked people after Elon's speech I was like what did you think of it and they were like oh I thought it was fantastic and I was like what did you think was fantastic about it they were like I just think what he's doing is great but then I would also ask them what did you think of Bannon's speech because Bannon's was right after and they were like oh I thought it was fantastic and I was like okay so what do you think of Bannon's criticisms of Elon one guy put it to me like this he's like you know like when two guys go out drinking and it gets kind of heated and they get into a bar fight, but at the end of the fight, they hug it out.

6:24That's Elon and Bannon. Like, they're working towards a common goal, but they may have some disagreements. So to answer your question about who's running the show, every single speaker, including all of the international speakers, which I assume is what Politico is referring to by magazine United Nations, like Liz Truss spoke, Georgia Maloney, Javier Millet, Eduardo Bolsonaro, tomorrow, everybody name-checked Doge. And they were like, we need one of those for our government. We need Elon to do what he's doing in our government. But they also name-checked Trump. But then when you look at the news that's coming out around all of this, like Elon demanding that every federal employee send him an email with five things they did last week, and then Kash Patel being like, now you guys don't have to do this.

7:11It's actually really unclear who is running the show. I'd say that, you know, from the outside, it looks like they're kind of trying to embarrass the agencies that they see as being liberal. So like the National Park Service or the NIH, but then like DHS and now the new purged of all dissenters FBI can kind of do whatever they want because they're already like, they're down for the MAGA vision in a way that maybe the National Park Service is not. What is the MAGA vision as it relates to tech? Did you come away from CPAC with any kind of understanding of that? Yes. The MAGA vision as it relates to tech is number one, break up big tech.

8:00Number two, when I interviewed Steve Bannon, before I even got to ask a question, he said my thesis was flawed because I told him I was writing about the tech MAGA coalition. And he's like, yeah, your thesis is flawed. That's not what's going on here. And he basically told me that MAGA is a nationalist populist movement and big tech is anti-nationalist, anti-populist. So I asked Bannon about Elon specifically. And he said, Elon is quite a complex relationship. I disagree with him on so much, which is fundamental. But also Elon backed our play. do you actually buy that when bannon says our play i mean isn't he more of a mega outsider now do you feel like he actually has influence in the camp i think his influence is declining but i think i think he has a lot of sway over the base when i interviewed him he had this like setup in the i guess like expo section where all the booths were and every time he was there, he was getting swarmed by people, like just absolutely swarmed by people.

9:06Like I tried to go interview him at one point and they were all singing for he's a jolly good fellow at him and like lining up to get his autograph or to shake his hand. The person who took me down there to interview him was like, oh, he's, he's doing his Pope thing right now. And I was like, what, what Pope thing? And he was like, oh, like when people go up to him and he blesses them. I do not feel like I'm equipped to comment on his influence over Trump, but I am equipped to comment on what I saw which is that like your average CPAC goer loves Steve Bannon but also they love Elon and they don't see a contradiction there it was kind of a land of contradictions like there was a panel on encouraging family formation and it was it was kind of like a like an anti-abortion panel but it was also talking about the importance of the nuclear family And then there was a guy who was taking the stage while the mother of three of his kids was tweeting at him like, hey, Elon, our child is sick.

10:01There's a medical emergency. Please respond. And he's ignoring this and waving around a chainsaw on stage. So, like, it's a land of contradictions. And yet the contradictions don't really matter. We need to take a quick break. We'll be right back.

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12:36We're back with Verge Policy Reporter Gabby Del Valle, who is just on the ground at CPAC. Next up, we dig into how the conference's attendees really feel about big tech and what Elon Musk is doing with Doge. So back to what Bannon was telling you about big tech and what you heard about just when you were there, the vibe generally towards big tech. It's not great, safe to say. I mean, I would think that with all the, you know, ring kissing that all the big tech CEOs have done with Trump since he won the election, maybe that sentiment would have shifted. But it sounds like you're saying it hasn't.

13:14It has not. So Bannon called them techno feudalists. He was also like, they want the government to bail them out when there's a problem. And that's taxpayer money paying out the oligarchs. This was his framing. All the names of the panels were really funny. It was like anti-big tech, anti-big business. So there was one called BlackRock Life Matters, which I think was supposed to be BlackRock's Life Matters, but the apostrophe was in the wrong place. And it was all about woke corporations and how we will not support woke corporations here. There was a panel called Nowhere to Run, The Takedown of Left Tech, which was supposed to be Brendan Carr, Mike Davis, and then Senator Eric Schmidt from Missouri.

13:57And then Brendan Carr just wasn't on stage. that panel was all about like how big tech is anti-free speech they were talking about how big tech was threatening to take away section 230 protections like it's funny like i don't think people in the cpac audience like care about like section 230 but like they were just kind of hooting hollering for whatever people said on stage did you have many conversations with attendees just kind of on the sidelines about any of these issues? Or I'm curious, like, just what the average CPAC goers view of these issues are, like, where does tech rank for the list of priorities that your, you know, 2025 CPAC goer has?

14:43It's hard to say who the average CPAC attendee is. There's like a bunch of different kinds of people. So there's kind of like the conservative of boomer contingent. There's this group from Texas, the Trump tribe of Texas, and they're all wearing gold sequined jackets and carrying around letters that spell out Trump, and one of them's dressed like Lady Liberty. There's a lot of that kind of stuff. Then there's your J6 contingent, the recently freed January Sixers were all there. During Trump's speech, they were all chanting, J6, J6, J6, right next to the media pen, so it was kind of hard to hear Trump.

15:19Then you've got your kind of like young, like intellectual conservatives, like people affiliated with like the Claremont Institute, like young Hillstaffers, like they're very like aesthetically and ideologically different from like the MAGA boomers, if that makes sense. they're in a lot of ways like less socially conservative but also in other ways more socially conservative it's weird it's like it's really hard to map politically and like I think all of these people converged for example the first official night of CPAC there was a Steve Bannon after party at this restaurant in DC called Butterworth's and when I got there the line was like spilling out the door halfway down the block.

16:08And there were people, again, this is just pure aesthetics, but people in jeans and t-shirts and then people in floor-length sequined gowns and then everything in between. And all of this is to say that this is, despite Bannon saying that my thesis is flawed, it is a coalition-based movement. They wouldn't have won without each of these coalitions showing up. And I think the choice of J.D. Vance for vice president kind of exemplifies the expanding of that coalition because 2016, Trump chose Mike Pence to appeal to the kind of pro-life religious conservative vote. He's got those people. Those people are locked in.

16:48This time around, the choice of Vance and also Elon's inclusion in it kind of has expanded the MAGA base beyond mainstream social conservatives whose primary concerns are like abortion or gay marriage. That's still part of it. But now a lot of it is like tech policy, regulation of speech. Was there anyone you talked to there or heard on stage being critical of Doge? Or was everyone just fully in on what Elon's doing? Okay, what's really funny is nobody was critical of Doge, but some people were very critical of Elon. Did you watch the speech? I did, unfortunately. You know how at the end there is this painting that kind of like made its way through the crowd and was handed to him?

17:34Oh yeah, yeah. I interviewed the guy who painted that like a couple hours before Elon spoke and I just like ran into him in the lobby. Describe the painting real quick. So there's Elon's head and there's like these kind of beams of light coming from it and then on the in a corner there's like an astronaut on Mars there's a flying car, there are spaceships, there's like satellites. And so I interviewed the guy who painted this again, before Elon spoke, like after Elon was announced before he spoke. And he told me unprompted that he thinks Elon is a wolf in sheep's clothing. There are some people who are there who are terrified of like Neuralink.

18:15They're terrified of transhumanism. They're really afraid of the idea of their brain having a chip in it or uploading your consciousness onto the cloud. It freaks them out. So they're not really worried about the dismantling of the federal government. They're worried about Neuralink. Yeah. Yeah. They don't really care about the dismantling of the federal government very much. And in many cases, they support it. But yeah, this Neuralink stuff really freaks some people out. And yeah, I talked to to bannon about it as well and he similarly was like look i support cutting waste from the government but like i think neural link is scary and bad why do you think that is where does that through line come from is there something in the the maga persona that is going to make people just i mean it's obviously it's it's pretty freaky kind of what neural link is doing but it's just interesting that that was a common refrain that you heard yeah i mean i it actually it makes a lot of sense to me because again if we're looking at like the coalition there is like a religious element and like a christian element to this there's like this idea of living a natural life i mean that's kind of where the rfk stuff comes into and then you've got this tech futurist wing that is not only not interested in living a natural life but like like bannon and i talked about agi and he was like that's gonna take people's jobs like like that's not that's not nationalist.

19:43That's not creating jobs for Americans. That is taking jobs away from Americans. So there's this group of tech optimists, or I guess, I don't even know if they're optimists. There's this group of people who are like, we will keep innovating. We'll keep advancing. This is the future. And there's this other group of people that's like, okay, but to what end? And they see the tech camp as being kind of fundamentally anti-human and it really freaks them out. So I think that's where the schism is brewing. But it's kind of a long-term schism. Like in the short term, Elon is dismantling the federal government and the bureaucratic state and giving Trump a bunch of money.

20:23So we need to take another quick break. We'll be back in a minute.

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21:27CPAC left Gabby feeling like even though it seems like the tech industry has already won over Trump, these companies are very much not out of the woods yet. That's really interesting and honestly, not what I expected. I also expected Trump to talk about tech maybe a little bit more during his speech. I know that it's just this kind of classic chess beating moment for him. But I thought maybe he would throw some digs at all the CEOs, you know, coming in, kissing the ring, the lawsuit settlements, the inauguration donations, all that. He didn't really. I mean, everyone's seen or heard about Elon's appearance at this point.

22:07Did J.D. Vance have anything to say about the tech industry or AI? Were there any leaders of the administration giving any kind of coherent or cohesive, you know, views on any of the issues that we cover at The Verge all the time? Vance didn't really. He mostly talked about immigration, how everything kind of comes back to immigration. Every single person on stage at one point or another talked about how it's awesome what Doge is doing and how great Elon is and how important he is for the movement. But mostly in the context of speech and during the panel that Brendan Carr was supposed to be on, It came up as like, these tech elites are trying to tell you what to think and how you can express yourself, but not anymore.

22:56Because of Elon. Because of everything. But like, literally every single, like the thing was just DEI, DEI, DEI, government spending, government spending. Can you believe your tax dollars were going to fund a trans opera in Guatemala? Each person was like a, like, it was like Mad Libs. And you wrote this great piece for us recently calling out the fact that all this DEI stuff that the far right is spewing is really a smokescreen for something much more sinister and intentional. And I'm curious, you know, coming out of CPAC, if you feel more strongly that your piece is correct or if it changed at all how you see the party using that in like the culture war and to advance other agendas.

23:46I think if anything, it made me feel like I was right on the ball. The way that people talked about it, I think Megyn Kelly said something about trans opera in Columbia. And I remember that one because I was born in Columbia and I was like, Columbia. But it was like, again, every single speaker had their own kind of Mad Libs thing of woke art exhibit in country was kind of the construction. I mean, at one point I was just standing there, like in the hallway, looking for a way out because it was so crowded because everybody was swarming around the border there trying to get a picture with him. And I look up from my phone and this guy starts talking to me and asking if it's my first CPAC.

24:29And we start talking. He's like, have you ever heard of Doge? Have you heard of DEI? And I was like, well, yes, I have. I don't live under a rock. But he was telling me how the government was funding Politico and that way that affected Politico's coverage because the government was giving them money. So they wrote things that were woke. And I was like, well, no, like there were government subscriptions to Politico Pro and like, it's a very just normal thing. And he was like, no, no, you don't understand. Like, that's not what was happening. At the same time, like I keep going back to the National Park Service because that one makes me especially sad.

25:05They like fired like a thousand park rangers over the weekend or this past week, all of the government employees that have been fired or let go recently or asked to resign, like, that's not like even using a generous definition of what they consider to be DEI, like, that's not what this is. And you ask anybody about that, and they'll just be like, trans puppet show in Iran, actually, like, that's what we're cutting. Like, that's not what our money should be going to. Our money should be going to Americans. And I'm like, well the people who work in these government jobs are Americans like what about that and then they'll be like deep state right and you know we shouldn't pretend that you know these millions of government workers that Musk is trying to cut that there aren't many of them that are Republicans or who voted for Trump and I guess that's where I'm wondering like I don't know if CPAC had a lot of government employees in the audience or obviously you know people were speaking, but I've been wondering if the cuts that Elon is pushing forward through Doge will backfire in the sense that he's also targeting Republicans.

26:10He's targeting Trump supporters with these cuts. I'm wondering if you saw any of that at CPAC or not. I think they could. I didn't see any of this at CPAC, but I mean, I've seen just like online. And again, it's hard to know like what's true and what's not when people are just like tweeting about it and posting it on Reddit. But there are already examples of people who voted for Trump or who's relatively voted for Trump losing their jobs and then thinking, oh, wait, that wasn't supposed to be happening to me. And again, I have no way of verifying this, but that just doesn't seem in keeping with the spirit of what doge is purporting to be did your understanding of the MAGA cohort change at all do you feel like you have a newer or a changed sense of what is driving all this after coming away from CPAC I think the thing that's hard is that there's because it's so coalition-based, there are so many different motivations that kind of lead people to organize under this one guy who is Trump.

27:21The question I have is what happens after Trump? The easy answer is J.D. Vance, but there was a petition going around to get Trump to run again in 2028. Well, he's just downright hinted at it himself that he'll do it, right? We shouldn't pretend that this is not out of the realm of possibility, even at this point. There was a petition for that. And I mean, I think it does kind of raise an interesting question, which is like, what do they do without Trump? Because he unifies all of these different tendencies and kind of allows the Republican Party to paper over these contradictions. I mean, he, you know, himself is this like New York rich guy who is like claiming to speak for the heartland.

28:11Like that's a contradiction there. Then you've got like the tech money versus populist nationalist contradiction. Because like if we're to take Bannon and the Bannon wing at their word, like Bannon told me he loves Lena Kahn. So there's a contradiction there. There's a contradiction between the religious right and the kind of like tech transhumanists. And like Trump has so much charisma and just like this ability to get away with not answering questions that the contradictions don't really matter. Even the way that people talk about voting for Trump sometimes, they'll be like, oh, you know, I don't like everything the guy says, but he's got some good ideas about this thing or that thing.

28:58So what do you do when that's over? There were some really uncharismatic people on stage who, when they said, and I was talking to President Trump, everyone would be like, yeah. So yeah, I don't know what happens. I don't know what happened, who fills the power vacuum that he'll leave if he leaves a power vacuum, I guess. President Elon? Well, he can't. He's not a natural born citizen. What are laws, Gary? But I guess it doesn't matter. I mean, come on. This is 2025. Yeah, I mean, that's a really good point. I mean, he doesn't even need to do it. I mean, the other thing that I wonder, because of the new email that people have to send, and then the heads of these agencies being like, don't send the email, it's fine.