(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. Elon Musk y nosotros)
In Spain today it is almost as difficult to read a political news item about the United States that is not riddled with falsehoods and manipulations as it is to hear a truth about Pedro Sánchez’s real character on Televisión Española. That is why the most useful thing to do when reading information about Donald Trump’s administration and its policy is to guess between the lines what might come close to the truth in that purée of prejudices, disqualifications, suppositions elevated into unquestionable realities, slanderous theories and gratuitous conclusions.
It is certainly shameful, but let nobody believe that the German press, for example, is much better; since the disastrous reign of Angela Merkel it has had a unanimity unlike anything seen since the spring of 1945. Nor should anyone believe that those European sources which in principle have a duty to strive not to be tendentious are much less so. Like the whole interminable spectrum of the media fed by the European Commission and its tentacles in order to try to convince Europeans that everything they can see with their own eyes going utterly wrong is in fact going divinely.
And to get them to see that the only thing good Europeans must do is go on applauding the winning team of the grand alliance of People’s Party members, socialists, liberals, greens and communists. And pay taxes, of course, without complaining, while they put up with the deterioration of their living conditions at work, in their bank account, in their children’s school, in the safety of the streets.
But let us return to the Spanish media’s capacity to disfigure reality to comic levels. It turns out that Elon Musk has now made good on his announcement of three months ago that he would go back to devoting more time to his companies, after spending the promised hundred days entirely absorbed in the enormous and epic tasks of running the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
With DOGE, Elon Musk and his team have done a job nobody would have believed possible before, which is to analyse urgently and exhaustively the spending of the federal administration of the United States and to apply, virtually, the real chainsaw that Javier Milei, the Argentine president, gave him in January.
Elon Musk has cut hundreds of billions of dollars from spending, which he has saved the taxpayer. And he has also brought to the surface a whole world of abuses, frauds, embezzlements and black holes through which fortunes were draining straight out of the federal budget, in many cases for decades and in some for as long as centuries.
Musk has shown how billions were squandered, embezzled and outright stolen, channelled to ideological rackets, to thousands of supposedly non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that lived off the government, and to associations, companies and individuals who have lived embedded as permanent parasites in the federal structures.
Musk has brought to light the criminal scandal of USAID, the development aid fund that devoted billions, disguised as humanitarian aid, to organisations, media outlets and pressure groups, all of them globalist, left-wing and woke, which carried out their activities of interference, pressure and propaganda all over the world.
The whole progressive racket has of course wept a great deal, because the goose that laid the golden eggs has been taken away from them. That some injustice has been committed is likely in this massive emergency felling of the jungle of subsidies. Those will be put right in due course. But it has demonstrated for history that the monster of institutionalised corruption can be confronted peacefully and simply by administrative means.
Elon Musk has been and is a hero of our time, however much people may wish to defame or ridicule him. Not only did he make and does he make the only electric cars that make sense, alongside the Chinese mini-cars. Not only does he launch rockets that come back down and park themselves, which is a marvel. He spent a fortune on ending the left-wing monopoly on social media. He bought a digital platform, Twitter, that was in the hands of an ever more totalitarian left which intervened brutally against all the conservative forces and especially against Donald Trump. And it was Musk who made it possible for Trump’s message to triumph this time against the unanimous and mendacious chorus of the lying globalist caste that was orchestrating the show with the senile and absent old man.
Musk, who came, like all the great magnates of Silicon Valley, from the complicit progressive milieu with no principles other than ambition, underwent a personal development that took him to positions of defence of conservative values and a very healthy hostility toward the whole woke plague. And since then he has sacrificed an immense amount of his own money to help the United States, and the rest of the West as well, recover some freedom of expression.
He said from the outset that he would be in the administration to help Donald Trump for just the right amount of time, because what he wants is to go to Mars. He is without doubt the person who has done most to help Trump reach the presidency, and to do so, as he knew as a businessman and a visionary, it was necessary to make enemies. He knew there would be many of them and that this would also be immensely costly for his own businesses and for his shareholders. He accepted that, just as he has accepted that the left, always violent when it loses, would set about burning Tesla dealerships and factories to the applause of some and the barely disguised satisfaction of most of the media of the globalist caste.
This enormous labour of patriotism for the exclusive benefit of the American taxpayer is a colossal act of benefaction that he knew very well would cost him dearly. “This is an expensive job”.
Meanwhile, in the Spanish media they have concocted a marvellous film about the break-up, the collapse and the failure of what has in reality been a superb and perfect piece of work. A political and cultural phenomenon of the first magnitude in which the only jarring note is the criminal revenge of a left dispossessed of the channels for robbing taxpayers and financing, from positions of absolute advantage, its struggle for a regime with no alternative. They all wish bankruptcy on him for it. I do not think Musk fears the bankruptcy of his companies, and if he were to go bankrupt he is young enough to succeed with others. But he has entered history not because of his money but because of the use he has made of it and his commitment to a project against theft and, above all, against the lie.
I therefore take this opportunity to express my infinite gratitude to a man who has accepted that saving civilisation is well worth a steep fall on the stock market. And he has certainly helped to ensure that, at least on social media, the monopoly of the self-interested versions of reality dictated by the globalist left, once again ever more abusive and totalitarian, has been broken.
Many of us here in Spain value it especially, in a country where the great fortunes and the powerful businessmen, with the very rarest and most honourable exceptions, are always submissive to power to the point of shame and nausea, and show patriotism only if there is business to be done in it. Over the past 40 years, the only nations that have had great donors and patrons in Spain are the ones that do not exist. To the Spanish Nation the rich have devoted nothing but contempt.
With the small change of a few of them a powerful national media alternative could be created to put an end to the near-monopoly (I write from within an exception) of a media landscape that is corrupt, mendacious and contemptible in its submission to a government that is by now openly criminal, illegitimate, abusive and unconstitutional, a government that has had no majority for a budget for two years but still has money to buy its survival, its impunity and its continued plunder of the public purse. That is why they attack Elon Musk so much. Because his example could do a great deal to help end the nightmare in which our homeland lives and ceaselessly degrades.
Hermann Tertsch is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.
