A document authored by an anonymous group of whistleblowers accuses Elon Musk of attempting to spearhead a private hostile takeover of the US Government on behalf of an extremist anti-democracy philosophy known as the ‘neo-reactionary’ movement, by effectively hijacking the Republican Party.

The group, who are withholding their identity for fears of being targeted, includes former Silicon Valley and US technology leaders. They describe themselves as former followers of the neo-reactionary movement, also known as the ‘Dark Enlightenment’ – a burgeoning Internet philosophy which seeks to abolish the drive for greater equality and the very existence of democracy itself.

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“Elon Musk’s unchecked consolidation of power over government infrastructure, financial systems, AI governance, and digital media does not serve the interests of the Trump administration or the broader conservative movement”, warns the memorandum. “While some may view Musk as a useful instrument in dismantling the bureaucratic state, in reality, his actions demonstrate that he is not working for Trump or the Republican Party, but rather for his own power and the broader neo-reactionary agenda.”

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The neo-reactionary movement traces back in particular to the online writings of Curtis Yarvin, a 51-year-old computer engineer who has received investments from billionaire technology investor Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and set up the data behemoth and Pentagon contractor, Palantir.

Musk, the memo warns, is moving rapidly to take control of the apparatus of US Government power on behalf of a core network of interests who subscribe to Yarvin’s ‘ Dark Enlightenment’ ideology. Other leaders in the US technology oligarchy aligned with Musk who subscribe to Yarvin’s ideas include Marc Andreessen (partner at venture-capital firm A16Z and author of the Techo-Optimist Manifesto), Balaji Srinivasan (former chief technology officer of Coinbase and author of the Network State), David Sacks (who co-founded PayPal with Peter Thiel), and of course Thiel himself.

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According to the memo, “Despite this open disdain for the President, Yarvin recognizes the President’s utility—not as a leader, but as a tool… Yarvin even rejects the revolutionary impulse among the President’s supporters. He derides January 6 as ‘the last lame breath of mobocracy in America’ and scoffs at the idea that Trump’s base—’used-car dealers, general contractors, small-town investment advisors’—could ever rise up and install a new ‘Trumpenreich.’”

The memo reveals that Musk’s actions fit alarmingly well with Yarvin’s prescriptions for how a Trump administration can be exploited by the neo-reactionary movement to install a new faction of elitist Silicon Valley technocrats at the helm of a hollowed-out US Government. It highlights the following paragraphs from Yarvin:

“In a world where voters elect Trump with a mandate to just take over the government—as completely as the Allies took over the government of Germany in 1945—he will probably screw it up, anyway. Yet he doesn’t have to screw it up. (The only way to not screw it up, for Donald Trump, is to be the chairman of the board, and delegate to a single executive ready to be the plenary CEO of America.)”

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The end goal of this movement is shocking. The memo notes, for instance, that the neo-reactionary movement advocates a form of “techno-monarchism” where the CEO-ruler uses “data systems, artificial intelligence, and advanced algorithms to manage the state, monitor citizens, and implement policies. Yarvin’s vision for society is chillingly explicit; he suggests that unproductive members of society should be dealt with through a ‘humane alternative to genocide’—one that removes ‘undesirable elements’ from the public sphere without ‘any of the moral stigma’ of mass murder. His proposed solution? A VR prison where individuals are ‘waxed like a bee larva into a cell.’”