Elon Musk's alliance with Donald Trump is causing concern across liberal America

How has Musk helped Trump?
Elon Musk officially endorsed Donald Trump for president on 13 July 2024, shortly after the president-elect survived an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. Since then, Musk has become Trump's most visible backer, and one of his largest donors. He injected more than $130 million of his own money into a Trump political action committee, funding advertising and get-out-the-vote operations. Many billionaires try to influence politics behind the scenes, but it is unprecedented to do it so publicly: Musk shared a platform with Trump at rallies; he even decamped from his home in Texas to Pennsylvania, a crucial swing state, where he appeared at town hall events and held a $1 million daily giveaway for pro-Trump voters. On election night, he watched the results come in with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Florida.

How helpful was his backing?
It's not clear that Musk's funding actually had an influence on the race, though no doubt it didn't hurt the Republican ground campaign. Far more valuable was the broader boost his public endorsement gave to Trump. Maga supporters were visibly encouraged that the world's richest man, and one of the US's leading industrialists, had backed their candidate. Musk's support, analysts argue, also created "a permission structure" for others, especially other tech bosses, to come out in support, which had been rare until the summer. And in terms of raw publicity, Musk has been priceless. He has more than 204 million followers on X/Twitter, whom he has deluged with pro-Trump talking points in recent months. He also put out links allowing voters to register in swing states. According to Wired, "something like 30 million people saw these posts, and one million people clicked the links".

What's in it for Musk?
Musk has recently become a passionate anti-liberal campaigner. But beyond pushing his political agenda, he also stands to benefit handsomely in business terms. Trump rewards loyalists, and Musk's network of companies – running from electric cars and clean energy (Tesla), to rockets (SpaceX), to satellites (Starlink), to social media (X), to AI (xAI), to brain-chip implants (Neuralink), to tunnelling (The Boring Company) – are all affected in various ways by government policy. According to Politico, as of last year Tesla and SpaceX had racked up more than $15 billion in federal contracts. Trump has boasted that Musk will send a rocket to Mars during his administration, which would mean a massive contract for SpaceX. Musk has already started to reap the benefits of a Trump second term: Tesla's stock has shot up 39% to a 132-week high. Musk's own estimated fortune has grown by $54 billion, to more than $319 billion.

How does Trump see Musk's role?
Trump has appointed Musk to lead a new "Department of Government Efficiency" ("Doge" also references a cryptocurrency based on an internet meme); Trump's stated ambition for this department is for it to "dismantle" bureaucracy. Musk is "poised to live out the ultimate techno-authoritarian fantasy", said Franklin Foer in The Atlantic: being invited into government "to play the role of the master engineer, who redesigns the American state – and therefore American life – in his own image". He is also likely to have a much increased say in federal regulation, which often affects his businesses in ways that he describes as "irrational". There have been at least 20 investigations into his companies, including five by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration into Tesla's self-driving systems. Using the term "conflict of interest" to describe all this sounds rather "quaint", said Gita Johar of Columbia Business School.

What other policy areas might Musk affect?
He has emerged as a key player in the Ukraine War, because Ukrainian forces rely on the Starlink network for their main battlefield communications. Pentagon officials were forced to plead with the mogul in 2022 after some Ukrainian troops lost access to Starlink. Musk has also endorsed pro-Kremlin peace plans; and there have been reports (denied by both parties) that he has been in regular contact with Vladimir Putin for the past two years. He also made a surprise appearance during Trump's first phone call after his re-election with President Zelenskyy of Ukraine last week. Musk's links to China have caused concern, too. The country is Tesla's largest market after the US, accounting for 33% of all sales. Musk last year repeated Beijing's official line that Taiwan is an "integral part" of China, to the alarm of the Taiwanese.

How about his control of X?
When Musk bought Twitter in 2022, for $44 billion, he vowed to make free speech central to the platform's future. He purged the company's standards and misinformation staff, and removed some protections (rules against "misgendering" trans people have been scaled back). He also restored more than 62,000 accounts – including Trump's. Liberals say he has changed it into a "pro-Trump echo chamber". Musk argues that he has simply made it more neutral, and that his moves represent a long-overdue challenge to "mainstream media" attitudes.

How will the partnership proceed?
It is likely to be volatile. Both Trump and Musk are thin-skinned, and fall out with people easily; both like being the centre of attention. "I think it is important to keep in mind that the two of them may not be able to coexist in the same place," said the pundit Kara Swisher on CNN. "Elon is very petulant, and so is Trump, and I don't think Trump's going to like the attention that Elon is going to grab for himself." If they do fall out, it is likely to be spectacular. Both men are terrific grudge-holders, both have the world's attention, and neither is shy about taking his complaints public.

Musk's turn to 'dark Maga'
Not long ago, Musk considered himself a centrist. "I'm socially very liberal, and then economically right of centre, maybe," he said in September 2020. Musk had donated to Obama's campaign, as well as to some Republican candidates; in 2015 he called Trump's presidential run "embarrassing". Yet by 2020, his metamorphosis was already under way. In April, he had described the pandemic stay-at-home orders that closed Tesla factories as "fascist". Later in 2020, his then-16-year-old child asked him to sign off on a medical transition from male to female. Musk did, but later claimed he'd been deceived. "My son Xavier is dead, killed by the woke mind virus," he said this year. "I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus after that."

Musk is now driven by hostility to progressive ideology. He said that he bought Twitter to save it from the "mind virus". His posts on X, as he renamed it, increasingly reflect not just libertarian views, but also far-right views: he has repeatedly accused Democrats of voter fraud, and has amplified anti-immigrant conspiracy theories (in August he said of Britain's anti-migrant riots: "Civil war is inevitable"). In July, Musk appeared next to Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania, wearing a black Make America Great Again hat and proclaiming: "I'm not just Maga, I'm dark, gothic Maga."

"Watching a wounded animal in its death throes is never an edifying experience," said Iain Dale in The i Paper. That is how it felt last week observing the Archbishop of Canterbury vainly trying to hold onto his job in the wake of a damning report into the Church of England's worst known abuse scandal. The subject of the report was John Smyth, a barrister and prominent evangelical Christian who, over four decades, had inflicted sadistic thrashings on more than 100 boys and young men, first at Christian summer camps in England and later in Africa. Justin Welby was informed about Smyth's serial predatory behaviour in 2013, shortly after he became Archbishop. Yet he and other Church leaders failed to ensure that the allegations were properly investigated, and Smyth's abuses may have continued up to his death in Cape Town in 2018. On Tuesday, Welby finally bowed to mounting calls, from within and outside the Church, for his resignation.

He had to go, said Nick Timothy in The Telegraph. Welby crossed paths with Smyth in the 1970s when he volunteered at summer camps, and he has admitted being warned, back in 1981, to "stay away" from him. Yet when he was told in 2013 that the police had been notified about Smyth's abuses, he didn't bother following the case up. In fact, a Church official had only talked to a police officer and no formal complaint had been made. In 2017, when a Channel 4 documentary blew the lid on Smyth's crimes, Welby pledged to meet the abuse victims, but he didn't do so until four years later. Given how vocal the Archbishop has been about the shortcomings of other institutions – in 2017, he attacked the BBC over its handling of the Jimmy Savile scandal – for him to have continued in office would have been a travesty.

The irony is that Welby, a former oil executive, was chosen as Archbishop for his managerial skills, said Stephen Bates in The Guardian. Neither a "profound theologian nor an inspirational preacher", he was seen as a man who could sort out the Church's "administrative inertia". Yet he "failed to grasp the safeguarding nettle".

Welby's record cannot be judged a great success, agreed The Times. His failure to take a clear stand on issues such as gay priests, and his embrace of "modish causes" such as slavery reparations, ultimately satisfied nobody. He's a "decent and thoughtful" man, and it's sad that his archiepiscopacy had to end in this way, but he was right to resign. Smyth's decades of abuse caused huge suffering. "Those who had grounds for knowing and acting, yet did not, failed the victims and thereby also the Church."

The supermodel Heidi Klum is a global star who has appeared on more than 150 magazine covers, has her own lingerie line and appears on TV shows such as "America's Got Talent", says Alice Thomson in The Times. But she's also a down-to-earth 51-year-old German mother of four who is happy to talk about everything from sausages to sex, and who gets called Helga at home. "I liked being called Heidi after an adorable mountain girl in a red dress, but I'm also Helga, the practical one; 'You vant me to milk ze cow?'" she explains, adopting a thick German accent.

She is, she says, still "very German. I have my dirndls, which I wear to the Coachella festival. I can knit and I'm a bit crafty. I can make you a scarf and a pompom. I eat sausages all the time and sauerkraut and pickles, even in LA. I make potato salad, schnitzel and goulash for the children. I'd like to set up a kebab shop near my house. And white asparagus. I love it more than anything." She is also, she adds, chronically "on time, which is very German", and does (some) of her own housework.

Raised in a town outside Cologne, Klum is aware how differently her life could have turned out if she hadn't entered a modelling contest aged 18, and won. Her older brother, a bus driver, never left their home town, and has only been to visit her in America once. "It was the journey of his lifetime, but he was worried he would get shot."