Patrick Pleul/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images
Elon Musk attends the opening of the Tesla Gigafactory Berlin-Brandenburg, March 22, 2022.
Time was when a comparison of Henry Ford and Elon Musk would have focused on their respective roles in revolutionizing automaking. Ford manufactured the first cars priced at levels that enabled millions of people to purchase them, with the first factories that could mass-produce such products. Musk manufactured the first electric cars that, while not yet affordable to a truly mass market, were nonetheless built in sufficient quantity to give electric cars a substantial foothold in an economy slowly and tortuously turning away from fossil fuels.
Would that were still the only way in which the two were comparable. Unfortunately, Musk has since joined Ford as the most prominent American employer of his era implacably opposed to unions. He also is recapitulating Ford’s backing of America First politicos while simultaneously committing major resources to manufacturing in a nation (for Ford, Germany; for Musk, China) posing the greatest threat to liberal democracies. Worse yet, Ford’s vociferous antisemitism helped to fuel the rise of German Nazism, while Musk has now gone all in to promote the rise of Germany’s neo-Nazis, who constitute much of the base of the AfD, which, to the alarm of millions of Germans, may finish second in that nation’s upcoming elections.
In different ways, Ford and Musk both transformed much of American life. Ford’s assembly-line mass production, which he began in 1913, converted the nation to a car culture over the next several decades. First, however, he had to create a stable workforce in his factory, since conditions were so dismal and the pay so low that employee turnover posed a challenge he had to overcome. In 1915, he was persuaded to raise worker pay to what was then an unheard-of $5 a day. Turnover dropped, production speed and volume increased, and the increased pay—which other companies eventually felt compelled to match—created a working class that could actually afford to buy the cars and other products they produced (though buying homes remained out of reach for many until the mass production industries were unionized in the 1930s and ’40s). Economic historians came to describe this mass production/mass consumption system as “Fordism.”
There isn’t yet a system we could call Muskism; indeed, Muskism suggests chaos more than system. Musk, however, has extended his chops to companies (SpaceX, Starlink) in multiple industries, as Ford was never eager to do (he had to be persuaded, as World War II came to America, to build airplanes). Industrially, Musk, to use philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s typologies, is a fox (who knows many things) while Ford was a hedgehog (who knows one big thing).
The problems with Ford and Musk concern not what they knew, but what they believed. Ford may have been the first industrialist to raise pay levels, but he was the last major industrialist in the years preceding our entry into World War II to vehemently, and violently, oppose unionization. While sit-down strikes waged by the United Auto Workers compelled General Motors and Chrysler to recognize their workers’ union in 1937, Ford used his “Service Department”—3,000 violent ex-cons and industrial spies—to suppress all attempts at unionization. When organizers from the UAW local headed by future UAW President Walter Reuther marched to Ford’s giant River Rouge factory in 1937, they were beaten by Ford’s thugs, in an attack that newspaper photographers recorded and sent across the nation. It was only in 1941, by which time the UAW had so aligned itself with Black Detroit workers by championing civil rights that Ford could no longer count on them to cross picket lines, and by which time Ford’s Service Department had become too notorious to the general public to unleash, that the UAW succeeded in unionizing Ford.
Musk has tweeted his way into Germany’s parliamentary election, arguing that “only the AfD can save Germany.”
Musk hasn’t been compelled to hire thugs to clobber union organizers, but he’s hired law firms—the thugs’ latter-day equivalent—to effectively do the same. That’s standard management practice in today’s C-suites, of course, but Musk still stands out by having proclaimed, “I disagree with the idea of unions” in an interview with The New York Times’ DealBook. Musk has since put that disagreement into action by having SpaceX file suit against the National Labor Relations Board, which had alleged two instances of the company using illegal unfair labor practices. The suit contends that the NLRB itself is unconstitutional because its administrative courts rule on such cases—though all such rulings can be, and frequently are, then challenged in federal courts. In 1937, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the NLRB, which has ruled for and against employers and unions for the subsequent 87 years without facing a relitigation of its constitutionality. That, apparently, has not deterred Musk, nor has he been deterred from opposing the unionization of 50 Tesla mechanics in Sweden, where 90 percent of the workforce is unionized and where unions are foundational to the nation’s social contract.
In the same interview in which Musk voiced his opposition to the very idea of unions, he also marveled at the level of EV consumption in China, making clear that the Chinese market was key to Tesla’s future, and therefore that Tesla’s continued manufacturing presence in China was key as well. Musk has worked hard to cultivate good relationships with China’s leaders, even as Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and a fair number of non-Republicans believe China poses a threat to the American economy and (chiefly among those non-Republicans) liberal democracy generally.
In this, too, Musk is following Ford’s lead. During the 1920s, when the Soviets’ New Economic Policy encouraged capitalist investment in the still-new USSR, Ford opened a major plant in Russia. In the 1930s, Hitler’s coming to power in Germany didn’t convince Ford that he should shut his factories there. Indeed, the company continued to produce and expand there even after World War II had begun (two years before the U.S. entered the fray at Pearl Harbor). Ford’s son Edsel even attended a dinner at New York’s Waldorf Astoria in 1940 to celebrate the fall of France to Hitler’s armies.
Which brings us to Ford’s most notorious activities: his promotion of antisemitism, which during his lifetime was exceeded only by the Nazis. In 1920, Ford purchased The Dearborn Independent, a weekly Detroit-area newspaper, which he made sure got distributed all across the United States. He used it to continually attack the Jews for every cosmic wrong, even reprinting and distributing The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a forgery written by Russian Czar Nicholas II’s secret police to encourage pogroms against the nation’s Jews. The Protocols purported to be a document written by rabbis that advocated, among other things, the killing of Christian children. In the early 1920s, Ford also “authored” (that is, hired ghost writers to commit his thoughts to paper) and “edited” (with ghost editors) the four-volume anthology The International Jew.
By the early 1920s, Ford’s antisemitism had attained global reach. The International Jew was translated into multiple languages, including German. One Nazi Party founder and leader, Baldur von Schirach, later said, “I read it and became antisemitic.” When Hitler wrote Mein Kampf in 1924-1925, he singled out Ford for praise, calling him a “great man,” and hanging a large portrait of Ford in his Munich office. Ford’s continuing production in Germany during the first two years of World War II strongly suggests he had no qualms about the Nazis controlling all of Europe.
Fast-forward now to Elon Musk, who today has no qualms about neo-Nazis ruling Germany. Quite unsolicited, Musk has tweeted (X-ed?) his way into Germany’s parliamentary election, which will be held next month, beginning by arguing that “only the AfD can save Germany.” The Alternative for Germany is a far-right, vehemently anti-immigrant and racist party that has grown in strength, particularly in the economically depressed states that were formerly part of East Germany, since it was founded a dozen years ago. Musk has argued that it’s not a neo-Nazi party, but a number of self-professed neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers have been in the party’s leadership, while the German government views it as a potentially violent threat to German security.
Unlike some of Europe’s other neofascist parties, such as France’s National Rally, the AfD isn’t committed to maintaining the kind of national social democratic welfare state for its white native population, which is part of the white working-class appeal of other nations’ xenophobic parties. The party’s founders were disproportionately right-wing economists opposed to the European Union extending any debt forgiveness or aid to Greece and other Southern European nations during the post-2008 depression. Those founders are long gone, but their anti-statist and anti-union economics—including calling for the abolition of the minimum wage and of such labor practices as including worker representatives on corporate boards and having worker-manager councils in workplaces—remain in place. All that surely appeals to Musk, who has continually opposed the efforts of IG Metall (Germany’s main industrial union) to organize the giant Tesla plant in Brandenburg.
Since his initial tweet, Musk has doubled down on his involvement in the upcoming election, authoring an op-ed in Germany’s leading Sunday newspaper and offering to stream over X an interview with the AfD’s leader later this month. Germany’s current government, its leading political parties (except AfD, of course), and its unions and other civil society groups have all noted that no foreign industrialist has ever intervened in a German election before, though Musk has responded that it’s precisely his investment in German-based manufacturing that gives him the standing to do that. Neither Musk nor his critics have cited Ford’s investments in Nazi Germany or his affinities with the Nazis as a precedent for such actions, but they’re there, in plain view.
For that matter, in opening X to a range of far-right loudmouths and conspiracy-peddlers, a number of them parroting antisemitic myths and tropes, Musk has been on the receiving end of a condemnatory statement from the Anti-Defamation League. He had retweeted and endorsed one X posting that asserted that Jews promoted “anti-white” racism, and in response to the ADL’s condemnations, he blamed the group in particular for encouraging such hatred. The resemblances to Ford grow ever more pronounced, and ever more grotesque.
