Dear reader,
On Monday, Elon Musk will have a front row seat to the most contentious Carrie Underwood concert of all time: Donald Trump’s inauguration. He’s expected to sit with Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Trump’s cabinet members, a menacing assortment of libertarians, tycoons and anti-vaxxers.
The billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX has been ingratiating himself with Trump for years. After he purchased Twitter (now X), he unblocked Trump’s account, then donated hundreds of millions to his re-election campaign. Soon, Musk will set up shop inside the White House complex to head the Department of Government Efficiency, a mysterious and unofficial operation to slash spending. In fact, he’s become so deeply involved in the president-elect’s affairs that other MAGA insiders, like Steve Bannon, are already trying to oust him.
But, before he was a public megalomaniac, Musk was a private one. In 2023, Haley Steinberg wrote about Musk’s early years in Ontario, where he attended Queen’s University. Even then, his now-infamous character traits—relentless ambition, delusional techno-optimism and egotistical social climbing—were on full display.
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