Musk says he has 'wised up' in reply to the 'takers' having the right to vote
Musk's reply did not happen in a vacuum: the world's richest man has already been tied to a $1 million voter-registration giveaway that court filings later said involved handpicked MAGA supporters, not a random drawing.
By Ryan Merket ยท Published
Why it matters
Musk is no longer only arguing about taxes, regulation or socialism. The reply shows the richest founder in tech drifting toward a politics that treats broad democratic participation itself as the problem.
Elon Musk (@elonmusk) escalated his attack on New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani into a broader fight over democratic participation, replying "I have wised up" after Devon Eriksen (@Devon_Eriksen_) urged him to abandon classical liberalism and argued that "takers" should not be allowed to use the vote to extract from "makers."
The exchange began with Musk replying to a Fox News post about Mamdani: "Mamdani has built nothing. He is a taker, never a maker." Musk did not define "taker" beyond applying it to Mamdani. Eriksen then widened the premise, writing, "Elon, this is the moment where you're supposed to wise up and abandon classical liberalism," and arguing that if "takers" are allowed to vote, they will take more and make it more rewarding to be a taker.
Musk's three-word response landed differently because of his recent election-adjacent history. The world's richest man previously paid people to register to vote for a chance to win $1 million, an episode later complicated by court filings that said the winners were handpicked MAGA supporters rather than the product of a random drawing.
That context makes the Mamdani exchange harder to dismiss as another insult. In Eriksen's formulation, "takers" are not just one politician but voters accused of using democratic power to take from "makers." Musk's reply, read against that prompt, suggested sympathy with moving away from classical liberal assumptions about equal political participation.
The response drew a sharp rebuke from Yann LeCun (@ylecun), who was previously Meta's chief AI scientist, a Turing Award winner, and one of the most influential researchers in modern artificial intelligence. LeCun's intervention matters for tech readers because this was not a routine partisan dunk: it was a senior AI figure publicly warning that Musk and his allies were crossing from policy argument into hostility toward democratic principles. "If there were any lingering doubts that you and your friends were against the very principles of democracy, you just removed them," LeCun wrote.
On July 4, the posts turned Musk's criticism of Mamdani from a tax-and-wealth fight into a much larger red flag: a billionaire who has already tested the boundaries around voter registration appearing to endorse a framework in which some people should have less democratic power because they are deemed "takers."