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Last week, President Joe Biden awarded the 2024 Presidential Medal of Freedom, the U.S. government’s highest civilian honor, to 18 people. On his way out the door, Biden almost seemed to be trolling his successor and his supporters with the honorees, who included some of the right’s greatest modern villains: Hillary Clinton, Bono, and George Romney (Mitt’s deceased moderate father) among them. Then there was Robert F. Kennedy, Bill Nye “the Science Guy,” and Jane Goodall—curious choices as science skeptic RFK Jr. prepares to take over America’s federal health regime. Maybe most troll-seeming (or, if you like, the most liberal fever dream) of all among the medalists, though, was George Soros, the Hungarian-born Jewish financier and philanthropist who is also the subject of countless right-wing conspiracy theories.
To some, the medal was due recognition for Soros’ decades of philanthropic efforts through his Open Society Foundations to promote more democratic, humane, and just societies around the world. To others, it was a sad little end to the Biden administration: a man who did not manage to stop Donald Trump from returning to power awarding a man who worked toward promoting liberal democracy only to see it wane worldwide in what are likely his final years alive. (Soros is 94.) And to people who have long railed against Soros’ political influence, including Elon Musk, it was a disaster.
“A travesty that Biden is giving Soros the Medal of Freedom,” the world’s richest man tweeted on X, the platform he owns, sharing a post that quoted himself saying that Soros “fundamentally hates humanity” and is trying to erode the fabric of civilization. In another post, Musk offered: “George Soros looks quite good here. Must be the lighting,” along with an A.I.-generated image of Biden handing a medal to Emperor Palpatine, the villain from Star Wars.
This is well-trod territory for Musk, who, in 2023, in addition to saying that Soros hates humanity, likened him to Magneto, a Jewish Marvel supervillain. This summer, Musk accused the Soros family of being puppeteers of elected Democratic officials. Just this week, he said that Soros is creating a “fake asylum-seeker nightmare that is destroying Europe and America.”
This is antisemitic. As I’ve written before, it is, in fact, so obviously antisemitic that to take time explaining why is to risk humoring the worst-faith arguments, but in any case: Musk’s posts about Soros go far beyond criticism of what Soros has actually said and done, and instead assign to a Jewish person (who survived the Holocaust, but no matter) malicious motivation and practically all-consuming power. It is not antisemitic to say that billionaires have too much influence in politics, or that you disagree with how Soros spends his philanthropic dollars or political donations. But to go a step (or several steps) further, as Musk does, and allege that Soros is plotting to corrode humanity or civilization plays on old tropes about powerful Jews seeking to undermine or poison the societies to which they can never truly belong. (I will here say that I do not know what is in Musk’s head or heart, and I do not mean to assign intent to him. I do not know, nor do I care, whether Musk is an antisemite. I only know that these are classic antisemitic tropes.)
But it is not only antisemitic, as smears around Soros often are. In Musk’s particular case, the smears can be viewed as projection. The dark myth of Soros represents what Musk, in his newly political life, seems to aspire to: an all-seeing, all-knowing power and influence to shape governments to his will and his interests because of his bottomless pockets. Musk’s political donations began to lean Republican in 2017, and, since then—and particularly over the past four years—he has pursued a level of power and influence on American government and society at the highest levels and scale. After buying Twitter, he donated a quarter of a billion dollars to help elect Trump and other Republican candidates. Since succeeding, he has strong-armed members of Congress, inserted himself almost literally at Trump’s right hand, and earned a de facto administration position co-leading the “Department of Government Efficiency.” Now he’s setting his sights globally, too. He’s turning himself into a mirror image of what he has accused Soros of being all these years, pursuing the very power that he has claimed Soros has.
It has long been obvious that many of Soros’ critics do not actually care about money in politics, or about the distribution of power between ultrawealthy individuals and everyone else, or whether a society in which billionaires can put their thumbs on the scale of elections and governance can ever really be an open, equitable society. For example, in 2022, then–Fox News personality Tucker Carlson asked, “Why is some foreign-born billionaire allowed to change our country fundamentally?” He put forth this question on Fox News, helmed by Australian-native billionaire Rupert Murdoch. When one listens to the substance of the critiques, they are rarely about Soros having and using money in politics, but rather about what he uses his money for: things like supporting progressive prosecutors in district attorney races, or, through OSF, funding NGOs supporting immigrants (not “migrant caravans,” though he was accused of funding those). That, say, Tucker Carlson would be unhappy with this was never especially surprising: If your life’s work is putting forth a vision of society in which some are more entitled to civic participation than others, you will probably be against someone who is trying to ensure equitable small-d democratic opportunity for all. And that someone like Carlson or Musk would be hypocritical in their critiques of Soros and his project is not especially shocking, either.
What distinguishes Musk’s Soros smears, instead, is that Musk is himself presently doing the things that he is accusing Soros of doing while accusing Soros of doing them. It’s one thing to remind people that you said Soros is trying to corrode civilization, but quite another to do so while tweeting that the king of England should dissolve his country’s own government. Soros is too involved in world politics? Musk, the richest man in the world, is boosting Germany’s far-right AfD party while staying nightly in the U.S. president-elect’s property, achieving the distinction of being his “most important donor, most influential social media promoter and a key adviser on policy and personnel,” per the New York Times. And plenty have accused Soros (and his son and successor, Alex) of being puppet masters, but most of them haven’t gone on to meet foreign leaders alongside the president-elect.
Perhaps there are self-justifications. Soros is often accused of being a secretive, shadowy, behind-the-scenes power (though he has in fact published books outlining his ideology), whereas Musk is tweeting out his opinions. Maybe Musk, Trump, and their allies feel that Musk doesn’t count as a behind-the-scenes power if he’s front and center on the scene.
But here, too, I do not wish to be like Musk, pretending I can read a billionaire’s mind and that I know what he tells himself about his plots and plans. Fortunately (or not), I do not need to do that in order to describe what is happening: Musk is engaging in antisemitic smears in accusing Soros of destabilizing humanity, yes. But more importantly, in the meantime, the tycoon is marshaling his wealth, his megaphone, and his personal influence to move U.S. politics and world governments exactly where he wants them to go. There’s little wonder Elon Musk is attacking the founder of Open Society. In his vision of society, power is more open to Musk than to anyone else.
