When (and Why) Exactly Did Elon Musk Make His Hard Turn to the Right?

“The coronavirus panic is dumb,” tweeted Elon Musk in early March 2020, his first public comment on COVID-19. (It was also his first tweet to earn more than one million likes.) To him, the true virus was informational. The cybernetic collective of social media functioned like a communal id, where posts spread not because of their truth but their “limbic resonance.” “You can’t talk people out of a good panic,” Musk told Joe Rogan, “They sure love it.” By late March, he had landed on a new phrase for the phenomenon: a “mind virus.”

It was an interesting choice of words. Social media virality had been Musk’s great asset, the mechanism through which he converted attention into value. But here, virality was being invoked in a negative sense: it wasn’t just about circulation but sickness. The phrase reached back to Richard Dawkins, whose 1993 article “Viruses of the Mind” argued that human consciousness was susceptible to infection by irrational ideas like religion and superstition the way malware infected a computer. For Musk, social media was now the superspreader of such contagions.

If Musk had formerly conceived of the cybernetic collective as a safeguard against an evil AI, he now saw it as a carrier for a mental plague that evil humans were using to sicken the minds of millions.

He elaborated further in a conversation with Joe Rogan on May 7, 2020. As the “memesphere” had become global, Musk said, it created the conditions for a “mind virus” that could infect the whole world. Rogan was confused. He thought Musk was talking about Neuralink—a virus that interfered with a brain-computer interface. No, Musk clarified: a mind virus referred to a “wrong-headed idea that goes viral.” To Musk, the political-economic struggles of the pandemic were not just being waged in factories or governments but in the immune systems of collective thought itself.

Twenty-one days later, a group of protesters burned down a police station in Minneapolis in retaliation for the killing of George Floyd, a Black man murdered by a white officer. Protests spread around the country and around the world. By the summer of 2020, between 15 million and 26 million Americans had participated in the demonstrations, making it the largest social movement in U.S. history. One consequence was the election of Joe Biden in November 2020: as multiple studies have shown, the protests contributed to Democratic electoral gains across the country.

Once in office, Biden would pursue the most progressive domestic agenda in decades. His administration oversaw an expansion of the social safety net, a regulatory push around antitrust and consumer protection, and the most pro-labor National Labor Relations Board since the 1940s. The sequence of events fits the classic pattern of a Twitter Revolution. The George Floyd protests seemed to fulfill the promise of social media as a catalyst of progressive change. The woke social network that spawned Occupy Wall Street and Me Too now brought tens of millions of Americans into the street and helped eject Donald Trump from the White House. The hashtag progressivism of the 2010s had been vindicated on a very large scale.

In retrospect, however, the victory was fleeting. The George Floyd protests provoked a major backlash. Right-wing forces mobilized on social media to counter narratives about police brutality and racial inequality, and to celebrate figures like Kyle Rittenhouse, the white teenager who shot three men with a semi-automatic rifle at a protest in Wisconsin in August 2020 and was subsequently acquitted of all charges after claiming he acted in self-defense. Conservatives increasingly appropriated the word “woke” for their own purposes, turning it into a catch-all for the kind of politics they opposed. “Woke” had been a Black term and then, at the hands of figures like Jack Dorsey, came to describe the supposedly democratizing effects of social media. In the aftermath of the George Floyd protests, however, it became a pejorative label for perceived excesses in the pursuit of justice. By 2021, national Republicans were railing against “wokeness.”

This was the backdrop against which Musk’s thinking about virality underwent a further mutation. After labeling the coronavirus panic a “mind virus” in the spring of 2020, over the course of the following year he became convinced that something more virulent was circulating: a “woke mind virus.” His first public use of the phrase came on the evening of December 2021, when he posted the following tweet: “traceroute woke_mind_virus.” Traceroute is a diagnostic tool used to map the path of data through the internet—the digital equivalent of injecting dye into a patient’s veins to illuminate areas of concern in an MRI. In his elliptical way, Musk was expressing a desire to trace the spread of the woke mind virus. The term’s origin probably lies with right-wing commentator Dave Rubin, who had started tweeting about the “progressive mind virus” in 2019 and by 2020 had devised a new slogan: “Wokeism is a mind virus.”

Regardless of the precise etymology, however, Musk’s adoption of the phrase signaled his rightward shift. 2022 was the year he began to consistently proclaim right-wing viewpoints. As he did so, he frequently referred to the woke mind virus as his principal enemy. At stake was no longer just whether he could reopen his factory, but the survival of civilization itself. “Unless it is stopped, the woke mind virus will destroy civilization and humanity will never reached [sic] Mars,” he tweeted in May 2022.

The imperative to merge with the machine had originated in the need to prevent AI from annihilating the human race. But the woke mind virus designated a new kind of civilizational threat—one that perversely exploited the solution to the problem of superintelligence. If Musk had formerly conceived of the cybernetic collective as a safeguard against an evil AI, he now saw it as a carrier for a mental plague that evil humans were using to sicken the minds of millions.

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There are several ways to understand Musk’s turn to the right. The material reasons are easy to surmise. Like other billionaires who projected a liberalish public image, especially those from Silicon Valley, Musk felt alienated by the growing influence of the American left. He despised President Biden’s proposal for a wealth tax on the super-rich, as well as the administration’s support for unions and the regulatory and anti-trust push of FTC Chair Lina Khan. Biden’s failure to invite Musk to a White House summit of electric-vehicle manufacturers in August 2021, reportedly because of Tesla’s history of union-busting, enraged him. Another grievance was the Justice Department’s August 2023 lawsuit accusing SpaceX of discriminating against asylees and refugees in its hiring practices. Musk has repeatedly claimed that federal export control laws prohibit SpaceX from hiring such individuals, which is incorrect.

Musk also formed an affinity with the right through their shared hostility toward public health measures during the pandemic. When he was lambasting the lockdowns, the people cheering him online were conservatives—up to and including President Trump himself, who had used his bully pulpit on Twitter to demand the reopening of the Fremont plant. Musk’s first sustained interactions with right-wing accounts on Twitter date from this period. Further, the prospect of building a new fanbase on the right may have appealed to him, especially as his views on COVID-19 ran the risk of hurting his reputation among liberals.

But none of these factors account for the apocalyptic intensity of Musk’s rhetoric. “The woke mind virus is either defeated or nothing else matters,” he tweeted in December 2022. Neither do they say much about the content of the virus, what its “code” actually consisted of. Musk himself wasn’t always much help on this question, as he liked to cast a wide net. (When the chief film critic of The New York Times failed to put Top Gun: Maverick in his top ten list for 2022, Musk decried the paper for being “woke.”) We can come closer to an explanation by starting with a theme that occupied an especially prominent role in his tirades: transphobia. “Pronouns suck,” Musk tweeted in July 2020. It was an opening salvo in an anti-trans campaign that steadily intensified in the coming years.

This wasn’t unique to Musk: anti-trans politics became a defining feature of the right-wing counteroffensive launched in the aftermath of the George Floyd protests. Moreover, Musk had a personal connection to the issue: his daughter Vivian came out as trans through an Instagram post in 2020, and officially changed her name and government-documented gender on the day of her eighteenth birthday in 2022. Musk later told Jordan Peterson that he considered his child to be dead—“killed by the woke mind virus.”

For Muskism, this border war had to be waged in such a way as to erase some lines while hardening others. Humanity should merge with the machine—so long as it remained segmented by gender, race, and class.

Musk’s transphobia suggests an answer to the question of what the woke mind virus really meant, and why the stakes of the struggle to defeat it may have felt so existential. Muskism’s mandate to meld us with our machines represented an effort to turn humans into cyborgs, both figuratively and literally. The cyborgs of the Muskist imagination were drawn from cyberpunk science fiction, where cybernetic augmentation gives people superpowers, such as enhanced strength and intelligence. But it is also possible to think of a transgender person as a cyborg. Their superpower is the ability to modify their body to better fit their gender identity, which is achieved through the use of technologies like hormone replacement therapy and surgery. This raises a troubling possibility for Muskism: dissolving the boundary between the natural and the artificial might open the door for other boundaries to be redrawn.

The theorist Donna Haraway, in her 1985 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,” pointed to such opportunities as proof of the cyborg’s progressive potential. Communication technologies and biotechnologies were “recrafting our bodies,” she wrote. In doing so, they enabled new configurations of identity and embodiment. Cyborg feminism wasn’t just about expanding the palette of personal expression, however, but inventing a new kind of politics. By “rejoicing in the illegitimate fusions of animal and machine,” cyborg feminists could discover the political forms capable of fracturing the “matrices of domination” imposed by capitalism, patriarchy, and racism.

But this wasn’t the only shape that a cyborg politics could take, Haraway cautioned. The fusions of animal and machine could also serve to strengthen traditional social hierarchies rather than undermine them. Here, the endpoint was “the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet,” an idea that Haraway associated with Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars program. The “grid of control” is a good description of Muskism’s guiding ambition. (The Star Wars reference is also evocative, given the importance of the program’s legacy to the early years of SpaceX.) Vigilance was required to ensure that the cyborg synthesis did not disturb the existing distribution of power. In the Western tradition, Haraway observed, “the relation between organism and machine has been a border war.” For Muskism, this border war had to be waged in such a way as to erase some lines while hardening others. Humanity should merge with the machine—so long as it remained segmented by gender, race, and class. Call it cyborg conservatism.

Wokeness became Musk’s all-inclusive term for anything that endangered this arrangement. In George Floyd’s America, traditional hierarchies of gender, race, and class were being challenged on multiple fronts. And technology was playing an integral part. If technology let trans people alter their bodies, it also let activists record police violence on their smartphones and share the recordings on social media. This is, after all, how George Floyd’s murder was documented and disseminated, leading to the first protests. Cyborg fluidities were overflowing the grid of control.

These developments may help explain why the woke mind virus felt so threatening to Musk. It wasn’t just the prospect of a platform weaponized for mind control, of memes repurposed as pathogens. There was a more fundamental anxiety. When we fuse with our machines, it is hard to predict where such fusions might lead.

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From Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed by Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff. Copyright © 2026. Available from Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.