The Philadelphia Inquirer's editorial board has declared Elon Musk the enemy of the people — not because he broke any law, but because he's spending his own money on the wrong party.
The Inquirer's editorial, titled "The people vs. Elon Musk," frames the world's richest man as a singular threat to American democracy for spending at least $445 million on Republicans in the midterms, on top of $290 million to help return Donald Trump to the presidency. The board calls these figures "obscene" and warns that Musk "could continue such spending indefinitely" given his wealth. The stake for ordinary Americans: whether the press gets to decide who's allowed to participate in politics, and how much.
What the Inquirer doesn't dispute is that Musk is doing something perfectly legal — exercising the same political speech rights the Supreme Court has protected since Buckley v. Valeo in 1976 and Citizens United in 2010. The editorial instead attacks the rulings themselves, arguing that "the superrich spend more and more to elect a government that, in turn, does more and more to make them richer."
Follow the money, and the Inquirer's real grievance comes into focus. The editorial notes that Musk's companies have received at least $38 billion in government contracts and public subsidies over two decades, per a Washington Post analysis. It claims Musk wants "more government money and less government regulation" in return for his spending. Fair scrutiny — but the Inquirer applies it selectively. The board name-checks George Soros as merely "an eternal bogeyman of the right" and Bloomberg and Steyer as men who "squandered" money on their own campaigns. No similar alarm about what those Democratic-aligned billionaires wanted "in return."
Then the editorial drops the mask. Musk, the board writes, harbors "a virulent bigotry toward racial minorities, immigrants, and trans people" and a "preoccupation with white supremacist notions, which he translated into deadly federal policy by eliminating foreign aid during his disastrous stint as Trump's so-called government efficiency czar." No evidence cited. No examples given. Just assertion dressed as fact.
The St. Paul Pioneer Press ran a piece headlined "On Elon Musk, Ukraine, Starlink and hypocrisy" — but the actual content of that article was unavailable, replaced by the paper's obituary submission guidelines. Whatever the editorial said about Musk and Starlink's role in Ukraine remains buried.
Here's the open question: the Inquirer insists that "any man" wielding this influence over a major party is "troubling," but that Musk specifically is "downright frightening." If the spending is the problem, why isn't the spending itself the story — regardless of who writes the check? The answer is that it never was about the money. It's about who's spending it, and on whom.
