- "I prefer to stay out of politics." Those were Elon Musk's words when forced in September 2021 to respond to a claim by Texas governor Greg Abbott that he supported the state's anti-abortion laws.
If he really does prefer to stay out of politics, however, Musk has a funny way of showing it. Over his many years of fame as the chief executive of Tesla, SpaceX, and now Twitter, the South African-born tycoon has attacked everyone and everything from Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders through individual regulatory officials to Covid rules, trade unions, and "pronouns".
In 2022, his public political stances took a sharp rightward turn as he declared his support for the Republican Party, aligned himself with far-right activists on Twitter, disparaged transgender rights, embraced conservative conspiracy theories, and pledged to save civilisation from the "woke mind virus".
Having voted red in the US for the first time earlier in the year, Musk urged his 115 million Twitter followers to put Republicans in control of Congress in November's midterm elections in order to balance against a Democratic presidency and "curb [its] worst excesses".
It is a striking departure from the 51-year-old's aproach to politics before the Covid pandemic, when he carefully triangulated between left and right and donated to both Democrats and Republicans while variously declaring himself a "moderate", a "socialist", and "socially liberal and fiscally conservative".
Yet despite evidence to the contrary, Musk still claims to be an independent who is "neither conventionally right nor left" and committed to healthy debate.
So what does Elon Musk really believe? And - given that he is both one of the world's richest people and the owner of one of its largest social networks - what does that mean for the rest of us?
Embracing the Republican Party
Let's start with Musk's recent support for the US Republican Party, which has been clear and unambiguous, if not without caveats. "In the past I voted Democrat, because they were (mostly) the kindness party. But they have become the party of division and hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican," he said in May.
This came after months of criticism of President Joe Biden, which included hammering his flagship infrastructure and social spending bills for granting subsidies to the electric car industry and increasing the "insane" federal budget deficit. Musk later called the president a "damp sock puppet in human form".
In June 2022, Musk went further, revealing he had voted for Republican congressional candidate Maya Flores in a special election - the first time, he claimed, that he had ever cast a vote for the GOP.