What Does Venezuela Mean to Elon Musk?
Elon Musk. Photo: EFE.
By:
August 8, 2024 Hour: 2:42 pm
By engaging in the U.S.-led anti-Venezuela agenda, he seeks to increase his political influence in Washington.
With Elon Musk’s rise in recent years in the ranking of the world’s richest people, the South African-born billionaire’s efforts to decisively influence the U.S. political scene have increased.
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His private endeavors align with the libertarian right and other factions across a spectrum where Donald Trump is also a significant ideological reference.
In the context of the presidential elections on July 28, Venezuela now enters Musk’s sphere of interest for political, ideological, and economic reasons.
In Musk’s Arena
The clash between Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and Musk has generated countless headlines and sparked controversy in digital panels and opinion articles. As attention focuses on the exchanges between them, Musk’s potential interest in Venezuela as a key element of his rhetoric is often overlooked. Musk leads several companies with global reach that operate in the technological field:
- Tesla, a company that designs, manufactures, and sells electric vehicles and technology associated with green energy.
- SpaceX, which builds spacecraft and offers transportation services.
- Neuralink, which is developing products in the field of neurotechnology.
- X, which was the last company acquired by Musk.
His business portfolio covers four fundamental areas: the Internet, new energy, technology related to the transhumanist movement, and outer space. Musk’s companies are well-established on Wall Street, and he is globally recognized for his companies’ market capitalization, his political positions, and his narcissistic personality, which often dominates media headlines.
SpaceX is a major contractor—worth billions of dollars—for the Department of Defense, NASA, and the U.S. intelligence community. Simultaneously, Tesla benefits from generous government subsidies and tax credits for the electric vehicle industry.
His activism is tied to libertarian ideology and the new American right, even associated with the far-right, to the extent that he blames the “left” of the Democratic Party, referring to the Bidens and Clintons, for undermining U.S. hegemony.
He has positioned himself as a prominent right-wing figure and defends his opinions with the authority that comes from being the owner of X since 2022, a platform from which he promotes the so-called “culture wars” between right-wing factions and progressive woke movements.
Twitter previously maintained significant lobbying efforts with federal authorities to avoid limiting its activities and had substantial political influence in Washington. Now, X is the preferred platform for political communication, where most presidents and officials worldwide make their statements and express their opinions.
Elon Musk arbitrarily manages this social network according to his own purposes. For example, to support the coup agenda in Venezuela, he removed President Maduro’s gray verification badge, which is given to government actors.
This is a symbolic attack on Maduro’s presidential figure, his office, and his dignity as the nation’s head of state. It is also a direct attack, considering that Musk supports the extremist narrative stemming from Maria Corina Machado and Edmundo Gonzalez.
However, Musk’s support is not driven by genuine sympathy for the Venezuelan opposition. At its core, it reflects his role as a promoter of the international far-right, which is gaining power in the United States, Europe, and parts of South America.
Interests and Positions
Economy and Resources. Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves and one of the most significant gas reserves. It also possesses important minerals for the energy transition, including copper, iron, bauxite, coltan, cassiterite, nickel, rhodium, and titanium.
Musk’s economic interest may lie in these resources. However, the political reality is much more critical for the magnate when it comes to Venezuela.
On the International Ideological Front. Musk declared that Javier Milei has his blessing and said he would “encourage people to fully support him,” a stance that can be supported by the technological means he possesses.
Argentina, besides having an ultra-liberal government that advocates for reducing the state to its bare minimum in economic and social areas, hosts one of the Latin American’s largest lithium reserves in the provinces of Catamarca, Salta, and Jujuy.
In fact, Argentina is part of the so-called Lithium Triangle, where approximately 85 percent of a mineral essential for Tesla’s value chain is found. His friendship with Milei has an economic foundation that accompanies their political-ideological positions.
With Machado, the situation is similar but not identical. She is part of the far-right ideological spectrum. Like Milei, she proposes a neoliberal regime, prides herself on libertarianism as a political philosophy, and identifies herself as part of the international far-right, which also includes Giorgia Meloni (Italy), Jose Antonio Kast (Chile), and Santiago Abascal (Spain).
Machado is also connected to Abascal’s Disenso Foundation, which politically links Musk, Milei, Meloni, and Likud, the party led by the genocidal Zionist Benjamin Netanyahu.
Towards the American Pinnacle. After the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Pennsylvania in July, Musk officially announced his support for the U.S. magnate’s candidacy for the November elections. Reports indicate that he will donate US$45 million each month to his campaign until election day, making him the technology billionaire who contributes the most money to the Republican Party.
Figures from this party have shown their support for Machado over the years. Florida senators Marco Rubio and Rick Scott maintain direct contact with her and even pressured the Biden administration to recognize Gonzalez as “the president-elect.”
Among the Republican elites and Elon Musk, there is a convergence of political and ideological interests that explain his hostility towards Venezuela.
On one hand, his support for Latin American far-right figures places him within the same spectrum, bolstered by X, the world’s leading digital opinion platform.
On the other hand, and this is more important, Musk inserts himself into the Republican discourse on Venezuela to increase his influence in Washington’s corridors.
Among technology magnates in the U.S., the Tesla’s owner competes with Mark Zuckerberg, the Meta’s owner, to gain greater sway within the political circles at the White House and Congress. The Facebook creator, however, does so from the Democratic Party’s side, as Jack Dorsey did when he was Twitter CEO.
In the existing political struggle in the United States, Musk is increasingly taking center stage, in addition to lobbying in favor of his companies in Congress and the exposure of his figure through X.
For this reason, his rhetoric against President Maduro has gained unusual prominence in Venezuelan politics. Musk’s calculations revolve around the dividends he expects to reap if Trump returns to the White House and if Machado, a coup plotter who has the explicit support of Florida’s most extreme Republicans, is enthroned.
In short, Elon Musk engages in the U.S. agenda against Venezuela due to the economic interests represented by the country’s mineral reserves, his ideological affiliation with the dogmatic libertarian right, and his efforts to increase his influence in U.S. political circles.
For this plutocrat, Venezuela represents an opportunity to elevate his profile to new heights in the context of the acute political and social crisis in the United States.
Autor: Mision Verdad
Fuente: Mision Verdad
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