Elon Musk, David Sacks, and the Ignorant Isolationism of the GOP
SINCE RUSSIA INVADED UKRAINE TWO YEARS AGO, a couple of celebrity billionaires have been among the loudest opponents of U.S. support for Kyiv. The entrepreneur and investor David Sacks, for instance, says Ukraine and the United States are propagating a “WAR OF LIES” to maintain public support for the war effort. The Silicon Valley financier has also prophesied that a Ukrainian defeat is inevitable, the Zelensky government will be overthrown, and the war is “depleting” NATO. To Sacks’s post making these predictions on X, his friend (and fellow member of the “PayPal mafia”) Elon Musk responded: “Accurate.”
Neither Sacks nor Musk, of course, has any idea what they’re talking about. They’re figures with massive resources and influence, yet they don’t seem capable of distinguishing good information from bad. They regularly cite clueless conspiracy theorists, ignore experts on Ukraine and Russia, and make bold predictions which turn out to be false. For example, in October 2022, Sacks predicted that American sanctions against Russia (with which almost every European country participated) had “backfired on a soon-to-be-shivering Europe.” But Europe had plenty of energy to stay warm in the winter of 2022-2023 and has even more this year.
According to Musk, there’s “no way in hell” Vladimir Putin will lose the war. While Musk supported the Ukrainian military in the early days of the invasion with satellite communications from Starlink, he notoriously prevented Ukraine from using the technology for a 2022 operation in Crimea. His X feed is now decidedly anti-Ukraine, as exemplified by a recent Spaces discussion featuring himself, Sens. Mike Lee and J.D. Vance, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Sacks on what Lee described as the “disastrous Ukraine funding bill.” Tucker Carlson’s humiliating interview with Putin—which gave the Russian leader/war criminal a full two full hours to rewrite the history of the war and lambaste the Ukrainians as a bunch of Nazis, etc.—was hosted on X.
Entrepreneurs-turned-pundits like Musk and Sacks are effective propagandists because they present themselves as political outsiders opposing the despised Washington “elite.” (If two billionaires with degrees from Stanford, the University of Chicago, and the University of Pennsylvania aren’t elites, then no one is.) It’s a good time for self-proclaimed outsiders in American politics. Trump was the ultimate political outsider, and still positions himself as one despite having been president for four years and effectively owning one of the two major political parties. After Musk took over X, it quickly became a home for anti-establishment demagogues like Carlson, Alex Jones, and Candace Owens. Musk often tweets about the imminent death of the mainstream media and presents his troll-infested platform as the inevitable alternative. Sacks retweets Ukraine commentary from fringe conspiracy theorists, including one of the original progenitors of the pizzagate conspiracy theory and a former musician-cum-Candace Owens ally who tried to pass off a 2021 video as proof of Ukrainian corruption in 2024.
But Musk and Sacks aren’t the transgressive rebels they play on X. America First isolationism is taking over the GOP, and the party’s pro-Ukraine faction has been shriveling. This shift is particularly evident in the refusal of House Republicans to vote for aid to Ukraine—even after the Biden administration offered a sweeping immigration overhaul in exchange for it. Trump opposed the deal, so his lackeys in Congress obeyed. Musk and Sacks aren’t independent or heterodox voices on Ukraine—they’re just mouthpieces for the populist right, which has become the new Republican establishment. Sacks even moderated the glitchy, embarrassing launch event, on X and featuring Musk, for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign in May 2023. Their allies, Lee and Vance, aren’t peripheral figures—the former is a scion of a political dynasty and the latter is a potential Trump running mate. And like their populist political allies, they have resorted to regurgitating Russian propaganda about the causes and consequences of the war in Ukraine.
Sacks often declares that supporters of Ukraine are bloodthirsty warmongers and members of the sinister neocon establishment, while he’s a humanitarian who wants to stop the bleeding and secure a peaceful resolution to the conflict. “Right now,” he warned 16 months ago, “we are locked on an escalatory path, and the destination ahead is Woke War III.” If Woke War III does break out, Sacks would assign responsibility to “neoconservatives” who “largely walked out of the Republican Party over Trump” and “the Left,” which “has discovered a new love for interventionist foreign policy, as long as it serves ‘democracy’ and opposes ‘autocracy.’” (Note the scare quotes, as if the difference between Ukrainian democracy and Russian autocracy—or the difference between living in a free country and an unfree one—is just rhetorical.)
Sacks presents himself as the hero in a grand narrative about suppression and censorship: “When the war is finally lost,” he writes, his critics will declare that he was part of a “fifth column of Putin apologists who stabbed the Ukrainians in the back.” His X feed is full of cryptic warnings about creeping authoritarianism: “Questions are the basis of truth seeking. But they slow down a mob. So asking them must be discredited.” Or: “For a liberal, authoritarianism abroad is an obsession, but authoritarianism at home is necessary.” (No scare quotes this time.) Or: “While declaring war on authoritarianism, the Biden regime seeks to jail their main political opponent Trump and punish Elon for allowing freedom of speech.”
While Sacks congratulates himself for standing up to an imaginary new McCarthyism, he dismisses the real dissidents who have risked their freedom and even their lives to defy Putin. After Alexei Navalny was murdered in a Russian prison, Sacks offered his assessment: “Why would Putin kill Navalny? He already had him under lock and key. Navalny had little support in Russia. No threat whatsoever.” If Navalny posed “no threat whatsoever,” why did Putin lock him away in an Arctic prison? Why was he forbidden from running for president? Why did the FSB attempt to assassinate him in 2020?
While nobody should accuse Sacks or Musk of being part of a “fifth column” (which really would be an echo of McCarthyite slander), the fact that they’re apologists for Putin is a matter of public record. It’s no surprise that Russian state media is fond of them, just as it’s no shock that Putin chose Carlson to be his interviewer (many other journalists have tried to sit down with him). On February 17, the Russian state-run news agency TASS published an article about Sacks and Musk titled: “Elon Musk agrees US lying about situation in Ukraine.” The propaganda outlet RT published a similar headline the following day: “Musk agrees Ukraine conflict is ‘war of lies.’” Both articles were particularly focused on Sacks’s claim that support for Ukraine is based on “lies about how [the war] started” and the idea that “we [the U.S. and its allies] have rejected multiple opportunities for a negotiated settlement.”
For Ukraine, the “negotiations” in early 2022 took place at the wrong end of a gun barrel. Good-faith negotiations don’t begin with one side amassing 200,000 troops on your border and threatening to destroy your country if you don’t do so yourself. Even after Russian tanks crossed the border and Russian bombs started falling on Kyiv, Zelensky was willing to negotiate. There were multiple rounds of negotiations after the full-scale invasion had begun.
While there are valid (though not necessarily persuasive) arguments against American support for Ukraine—the war is unwinnable, the risk of nuclear escalation is too high, etc.—Sacks and Musk don’t limit themselves to these arguments. They rewrite history, ignore Putin’s crimes, and relentlessly attack Zelensky, Biden, and Ukraine’s European partners.
Sacks and Musk misuse jargon like “escalation” as a rampart to hide behind whenever confronted by the possibility that they might have to think. “As long as this woke-neocon alliance is allowed to set the terms of the debate, we will continue to see a one-way ratchet toward greater and more dangerous escalation of this conflict,” Sacks warns. “Relentless escalation is very risky for Ukraine and the world,” agrees Musk. For both, escalation is something the United States and its allies do by abiding by the commitments they made in the Budapest Memorandum, but not something Putin did when he tried to gobble up his neighbor, threatened to use nuclear weapons (a threat he just reiterated during his annual state of the nation address), perpetrated war crimes on a massive scale, and annexed large chunks of Ukraine. Escalation, in their view, is not a risk to be managed, but an excuse for giving dictators whatever they want.
The historical record on the origins of the war in Ukraine is so clear that apologists for Russia are forced to grossly distort this record to make their case. The entire interview with Carlson is a testament to Putin’s deep sense of historical grievance about Russia’s declining role in the world—as well as what he views as his own role in reestablishing Russia as a great power by force. Putin has been making these revanchist arguments for years, from his March 2014 address after the annexation of Crimea to his July 2021 essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.”
Like many critics of U.S. support for Ukraine, Sacks argues that the conflict isn’t about Putin’s imperialism—it’s a “war over NATO expansion.” (Carlson spent the first 30 minutes of his interview trying to get Putin to blame NATO and Western aggression for the invasion, but he instead received a long-winded historical lecture justifying Russian imperialism, and only belatedly did Putin note his opposition to NATO enlargement.) But Putin guaranteed the continued expansion of NATO by invading Ukraine. Finland joined the alliance in April 2023, and Sweden joined on February 26. Putin was willing to risk this outcome to pursue his original goal: territorial aggrandizement. Sacks is outraged that Ukraine is a candidate for membership in NATO, but this process was accelerated by the war as well. Before the Russian invasion, NATO membership was still a long way off—maybe infinitely far—for Ukraine. A month into the war, Zelensky said he was willing to discuss Ukrainian neutrality in exchange for a ceasefire. Putin refused to allow Russian media to report on this offer, which was delivered in Russian. The invasion changed everything. At last year’s NATO summit, the allies recommitted to Ukraine’s eventual membership, discarding the requirement for a membership action plan. A recent survey found that 86 percent of Ukrainians now want their country to be in NATO by 2030.
Sacks and Musk often insist that they’re just concerned taxpayers with prudent concerns about Washington’s support for Ukraine—their discussion with Lee, Vance, et al. focused on transparency regarding aid and weapons deliveries, corruption in Ukraine, and other practical issues. At one point, Musk incredulously asked, “What is the rationale given for sending vast sums of money with no accountability to Ukraine?” Sacks wanted to know what was being done about corruption in Kyiv. Neither of them, apparently, could be bothered to Google their questions.
Sacks and Musk are never more than a few sentences away from some egregious falsehood about the history of the war or some echo of Kremlin propaganda—like the idea that Navalny, arguably the second-most important Russian politician of the twenty-first century, behind only Putin, was a nobody. Or the idea that the war has “depleted” NATO when it has actually galvanized and expanded the alliance—a record 18 allies expect to meet or exceed the spending target of two percent of GDP this year. Or the idea that Zelensky is the one responsible for the bloodshed in Ukraine, instead of the dictator next door who could put an end to the carnage at any moment.
Sacks and Musk think of themselves as renegade truth-tellers standing against a flood of mainstream propaganda, censorship, and persecution. Musk publishes grifters like Carlson— who tells his millions of followers that amplifying Putin and marveling at the beauty and cleanliness of train stations in Moscow is something called “journalism”—in the name of free speech. Never mind that an actual journalist might have covered the story of the hundreds of Russians who were being detained for protesting Navalny’s death. Carlson didn’t mention Navalny in his chat with Putin. Of course, as a general rule, Musk has very little to say about the restrictions on speech in authoritarian regimes like Russia or China (where X is banned). After all, Tesla vehicles built in China accounted for over half of the company’s global deliveries last year.
Sacks darkly refers to “the narrative” on Ukraine and argues that it’s held aloft by Orwellian deceptions and propaganda. “Somebody is doing opposition research on me,” he recently told his followers. “That’s how you know you’re having an impact.” While he’s being “relentlessly smeared” over his position on Ukraine today, he says he’ll be “vindicated” tomorrow. In Sacks’s telling, Navalny didn’t matter, but Sacks is a dissident who can really make a difference.
The billionaire populists should lighten up. Although Sacks appears to believe he’s the target of a government-funded smear campaign, he won’t find himself in an Arctic gulag anytime soon. While Musk thinks there’s “no way in hell” Ukraine can win the war, he won’t suffer the consequences of a Russian victory. And best of all, the billionaire populists don’t have to worry about speaking truth to power anymore. Trump is the establishment in the Republican party—he’s leading the primary by 63 points, he has a real shot at returning to the White House in November, and he wants to abandon Ukraine just as badly as they do.
