Never mind executive orders and the weaving oratory of President Trump: the real rock’n’roll star of American government is also the country’s richest citizen
One of my favourite rock writers, David Hepworth, ended Uncommon People, his book on the passing of the rock’n’roll era, with a celebration of Marc Andreessen. Hepworth saw the venture capitalist and tech bro who, like Peter Thiel and Steve Jobs, got very rich from the cyberworld, in his case Netscape in 1995, as a sort of rock star.
To Hepworth, young fans saw the rock stars of the pre-Internet age as ‘markers of identity’, but their magnetism has weakened because music is not ‘as precious’ as it once was; in the digital era, where everything is available all the time, ‘smart young people looked on and dreamed about being tech stars…Distribution was king.’
That’d make a good tweet, actually. Which brings us, again, to Elon Musk. Like Cher or Madonna or Kanye, he goes by a mononym, and I think he is what a rock’n’roll star looks like in 2025: probably on mind-altering drugs, insomniac or worse, neurologically unhinged, and a multibillionaire through his talent for running businesses and promoting them himself. So far, so Kanye, but not even Mr West owns the means of communication and has the ear of the incoming president, and I hope to avoid much of the souring of the Trump-Musk bromance. Who will blame whom first, and for what, and what happens to the sycophants?
Here’s James O’Brien telling his million listeners on LBC about wor Elon, ‘the de facto deputy President’, on January 6 2025: ‘If you are capable of exercising epic power, it is foolish and naïve to pretend that you can ignore him’. O’Brien’s life and finances have benefitted for his time on Twitter in the 2010s, but if you don’t use what is now called X, nobody would be aware of Elon’s recent dealings into British political life, plus attacks on a government minister and the First Lord of the Treasury, Sir Keir Starmer.
Might the reason for Elon’s activity, O’Brien posits, be through reading propaganda and lies from the sort of people who used to be banned from Twitter but pay X money to express free speech? ‘He desperately wants to believe all of the posts about all foreigners being criminals,’ O’Brien says, referring to Elon’s South African upbringing at a time of apartheid. ‘He just believes the worst excesses of the sewer he has created…two-dimensional race hate.’
Elon has taken over from the objectionable genius Kanye as the world’s most obnoxious, and noxious, man (why always men?). Why doesn’t the King (in all seriousness) have a quiet word with him? Or, better, send his brother Andrew to sort him out. He’s free, and it’ll be no sweat. Journalist Marina Hyde nicknamed him Phony Stark, a wannabe Iron Man with leaden contributions to cultural and political discourse.
Yet, as with putting Michael Jackson or Kurt Cobain or Kanye on a magazine cover, Elon sells, so why would a media organisation or even the BBC not report on him? I know the start of the year is a slow news period, but to report on Elon changing his handle on X is beneath contempt.
And with MPs Jo Cox and David Amess being killed in the line of duty in the last decade, what happens to Jess Phillips, who already has a panic button in her own home having swapped a life assisting abused women to serve as MP for Birmingham Yardley so she could better change the law to help those same women. Jess, who is the Barbara Castle or (she will hate this) Margaret Thatcher of the current Parliament, deserves to get on with her mission, her vocation, without a billionaire who wants to live on Mars spewing disdain for her.
Remember Liz Truss? On about four occasions in late 2022, she had a weekly audience with the monarch, which was one of the perks of being Prime Minister. Nowadays she spends her time plugging her book on ‘saving the West’ in America, where the money is and where Joe Rogan earns millions of dollars for, essentially, just asking questions. Nobody can pin you for doing this, or for having legitimate concerns, or asking for the truth.
Truss is not, never was and never will be a rock star, and nor will Keir Starmer or any of his cabinet. Jeremy Corbyn, perversely, was turned into one, to the shame of the British Labour movement. What was his smash hit: For the Many, Not the Few (Oh Jeremy Corbyn). If Starmer had a song it would be a version of the old D:Ream song with the new title Things Can Only Get Better (But They Will Get Much Worse).
What’s in Elon’s setlist? Money Money Money by ABBA, naturally, as well as Dirty Cash (Money Talks) by Stevie V, which is enjoying a resurgence today. X by Xzibit and the DMX rap X Gon’ Give It to Ya, of course, would represent his little website that tells 200m people what he thinks at any given moment. And because you’re free to do whatever you like with impunity in Donald Trump’s America, let’s mark his space exploration fetish with I Believe I Can Fly by the disgraced crooner R Kelly, and throw in Bad Boy for Life by the accused Puff Daddy, as he was then.
I can stick these into a Spotify playlist but I refuse to share it on Facebook, on which I am no longer active. Just as Spotify treats music and music-makers like cotton and cotton-pickers, as I will outline in a few essays’ time, doesn’t our friend Elon do this for opinion, making billions of dollars from his little mood machine?
As has been noted many, many times, humans have a herd instinct and respond to external stimuli with either fight or flight. I have flown to Bluesky, which is trying desperately hard not to be the home of liberal thought but might be doomed to its siloed state, because fighting a herd of wildebeest on X is futile.
I almost punched the air when I heard music critic Chris Molanphy compare the rise of Bob Dylan to that of Taylor Swift: both pivoted from their initial musical idiom after about five years and four albums, Dylan from folk and Taylor from country; both seized the zeitgeist with their songwriting; and both were, to all intent, pop stars whose fans enjoyed, and still enjoy, what is now called a parasocial relationship with their chosen poet and songwriter. Their keenest supporters are known as ‘fanboys’ or ‘fangirls’. Ticket prices for the 2024 UK shows reached dizzying heights.
I daresay if Elon wanted to play the O2 Arena or Madison Square Garden, he could charge similar numbers. It isn’t cheap to watch a live show, yet Elon gives away his tweets for free so he can sell Tesla cars and influence public opinion on whatever matters come into his head.
I wonder what it must feel like to be a Tesla or SpaceX engineer, knowing that your boss is a contemporary rock star. He’s like a Victorian magnate or Wall Street banking scion, but with no desire to build houses or fund libraries; his tunes are bad, his lyrics worse. Let’s turn the music off and go outside for a bit.