“This entire thing is completely made up and there’s a reason for this,” Wilson wrote. “He doesn’t know what I was like as a child because he quite simply wasn’t there, and in the little time that he was I was relentlessly harassed for my femininity and queerness.” She continued: “As for if I’m not a woman . . . sure, Jan. Whatever you say. I’m legally recognized as a woman in the state of California and I don’t concern myself with the opinions of those below me.”
Wilson’s Threads posts caught fire, and she was suddenly swarmed with thousands of new followers, many of whom expressed support and applauded her bravery for speaking up.
It was her final word on the Peterson interview that she pinned to the top of her profile, visible to more than one hundred thousand followers: “I look pretty good for a dead bitch.”
With the approach of the 2024 presidential election, Musk would make a break with the Democratic Party. He believed it was an activist-fueled party, and it was Democrats—not him—who had shifted, leaving him and people like him behind. For someone who felt increasingly targeted by the Left, who was exhausted by the perceived infiltration of speech, humor, and corporate governance, there was one clear choice: Florida governor Ron DeSantis , the antiwoke crusader who, unlike Trump, demonstrated a commitment to seeing his agenda through.
Musk was soon all in. He privately mobilized behind DeSantis for 2024. “In the past I voted Democrat, because they were (mostly) the kindness party,” Musk wrote months before the 2022 midterms. “But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican.” Musk declared he had cast his first Republican vote for Mayra Flores, the Texas Republican who won an upset bid for US House in a special election in a Democratic-leaning district. In June 2022, he tweeted that he was leaning toward DeSantis in the 2024 presidential race. Trump, he said, was simply too old, as was Biden. “Trump would be 82 at end of term, which is too old to be chief executive of anything, let alone the United States of America,” he said, after having earlier noted “it’s time for Trump to hang up his hat & sail into the sunset.”
He was effusive in his praise for the Florida governor, however, as he pushed his favorite candidate as almost a shoo-in for the job. “If DeSantis runs against Biden in 2024, then DeSantis will easily win—he doesn’t even need to campaign,” he said.
Earlier in the year, Musk explained his political transformation with a Twitter post showing a cartoon meme created by writer and evolutionary biologist Colin Wright. It depicted three stick figures standing in a line representing the political spectrum. In 2008, the stick figure representing Musk, labeled “me,” stood slightly to the left of center. By 2012, the figure representing Musk remained in the same spot, but the center and left had shifted beneath his feet. Musk was edged closer to the center, and the figure termed “my fellow liberal?” raced leftward, extending the left wing farther out in that direction. By 2021, the center had again shifted beneath Musk, placing him on the right of the spectrum, as the “woke-progressive” called him a “Bigot!”
“I strongly supported Obama for President, but today’s Democratic Party has been hijacked by extremists,” he wrote.
Musk, meanwhile, had also soured on Biden, the president who was pushing major infrastructure and social spending bills as inflation was wreaking havoc on the economy.
“Biden’s mistake is that he thinks he was elected to transform the country, but actually everyone just wanted less drama,” Musk wrote.
There were plenty of Americans in 2024 who felt alienated by the nation’s politics. Musk, though, had money, fame, and power—and other wealthy friends who encouraged him to do something about it. The Left, they said, had gone too far and needed to be reined in.
The latest outrage came when Starlink, Musk’s satellite-based internet service that had been launched in Ukraine after Russia’s brutal invasion, was allegedly told “by some governments” to block Russian news sources, according to Musk. Musk was defiant, saying it would not do so.
“We will not do so unless at gunpoint. Sorry to be a free speech absolutist,” he wrote. It was hardly an unreasonable stance. But to members of Musk’s circle, the tech mogul had latched onto the central issue of the times—one that the future of humanity depended on, to put it in terms he could appreciate.
Musk’s close friend and confidant, former Tesla board member Antonio Gracias, texted Musk at the time, in March 2022, that he was 100 percent in the right. “To the fucking mattresses no matter what,” he wrote in a text message. This “is a principle we need to fucking defend with our lives or we are lost to the darkness.”
Musk “loved” the text, appending a heart to it in reply.
It was only later that month that matters truly came to a head. Musk’s favorite social media platform—the one that had booted Trump a year earlier—made another controversial content moderation decision, one that may have altered the course of history: banning Musk’s favorite satire site.
Twitter suspended the Babylon Bee, a conservative, self-described Christian satire site, after it referred to a transgender woman in the Biden administration, a health official, as “Man of the Year.” The site refused to delete the tweet, effectively making the suspension permanent.
Musk’s partner, Grimes, had urged him to rethink his tweet about trans-inclusive pronouns. But this time, it was his ex-wife Talulah Riley who seemed to have his ear. Riley, an English actress whose two marriages to Musk had ended in divorce, had kept in contact.
“America is going INSANE,” she wrote on March 24, according to text messages revealed in court records. “The Babylon Bee . . . suspension is crazy . . . It was a fucking joke. Why has everyone become so puritanical?”
Then she asked: “can you buy Twitter and make it radically free-speech?” “Maybe buy it and change it to properly support free speech,” Musk wrote back seven minutes later.
Then Musk tapped the “like” button, attaching a thumbs-up to Riley’s text asking him to buy the most influential social media website in the world.
From Hubris Maximus: The Shattering of Elon Musk by Faiz Siddiqui. Copyright © 2025 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.
