Vitamin R: Elon Musk and the Oligarchic Prerogative
- john raymond
- Sep 14
- 3 min read
Vlad Vexler’s latest intervention is characteristically sharp. He isolates the danger of Musk’s statement at the Robinson rally—“violence is coming to you, you either fight back or die”—and shows how it arises from a compulsive personality unable to distinguish between the virtual squabbles of Twitter/X and the lived consequences of physical violence.
Vexler is correct to call this reckless, illegitimate, and globally destabilizing. But there is a further angle worth stressing. What Vexler reads as personal pathology may also be understood as the phenotype of oligarchic prerogative itself.
As such, Musk’s behavior is not just the symptom of an erratic brain; it is the predictable expression of an entrenched elite that believes it owns the public square. This pathology is not incidental—it is structural.
Musk speaks as he does because oligarchs have always relied on channeling public rage away from themselves and toward convenient scapegoats. What looks like a man “losing control” of his own mind may in fact be the performance of a social role: the reckless boy-king of an empire he never built but now commands, redirecting mass insecurity away from his monopolistic power and toward liberal institutions, feminists, immigrants, and defenders of democracy.
To an American audience, this pattern is all too familiar. Musk is not unique. He is of the same species as Rupert Murdoch, another man “not of America” who nevertheless managed to bottle her ignorance and pour it back into her people, feeding them a diet of resentment, tribalism, and cultural self-hatred.
Both Murdoch and Musk embody the same oligarchic logic: stand outside the nation, seize control of its information channels, and use them not to illuminate but to manipulate. Murdoch’s medium was the tabloid and the cable channel; Musk’s is the algorithmic feed. But the effect is the same.
What Vexler describes as Musk’s compulsivity—the rapid uptake of irresponsible private messages, the impulsive belief that Britain is on the brink of collapse, the childlike inability to separate digital drama from real-world violence—is intelligible not as random malfunction but as the oligarchic prerogative phenotyped.
It is the phenotype of entitlement, the expectation that one man’s whim—his—should set the horizon of public debate. His balance of psychopathy, narcissism, and greed hardly matters; the deeper fact is that the class Musk represents lives in the conviction that it may rewire society in its own image, and that the rest of us exist only as inputs in their drama.
The American who sees Musk for what he is recognizes the family resemblance. Bezos sends symbolic all-female crews to space and stages oligarchic weddings while stripping society through monopolistic domination. Musk, by contrast, drapes himself in the rebel mantle and tells mass rallies that “violence is coming.” Different instruments, same score: keep the people disoriented, distract them from the concentration of wealth and power, and redirect their anger downward onto imagined enemies rather than upward toward the true authors of their dispossession.
This is why Vexler’s analysis is not wrong but incomplete. He is right to call Musk’s statement illegitimate, compulsive, and dangerous. But the broader frame is that what appears as personal loss of control is also the signature of oligarchic control.
This is precisely how elite prerogative manifests when it is expressed through the mouthpiece of a man who is not accountable, not elected, not responsible—yet who believes himself to own the public square.
The consequence is grim but clarifying. We are not dealing with the pathology of one man. We are dealing with a class, a pattern, a structure.
As such, Musk is not an aberration. He is but one phenotype of the same oligarchic genes.
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