The music was booming. The ballroom was packed. And Elon Musk was onstage, waving a chain saw in the air.
I had already seen other surreal sights at the Conservative Political Action Conference — a man with a cat on his shoulder, freshly pardoned Proud Boys roaming around — but it was clear that this would be one of the indelible images of the annual MAGA confab.
Musk roared — or was he just making a chain saw noise? This, he said, was the chain saw he was taking to the bureaucracy. “Chain saw,” he repeated for effect. He did not turn it on.
It was a gift from Javier Milei, the far-right Argentine president who stormed to power in 2023 and who has drawn effusive, at times almost graphic, praise from Musk.
The episode showed how Musk doesn’t just cozy up to right-wing leaders — he also seems to copy them.
In 2022, Milei, an economist and former media personality, released a “chain saw plan” that would have cut public spending and sharply reduced the number of ministries in Argentina’s government. Milei showed up to campaign rallies with a functioning chain saw — and his supporters followed suit with replicas — that represented his demonization of a group he called “the political caste.”
Once Milei took office, Musk showered him with online compliments and talked business with him behind closed doors, as my colleagues wrote last year. He has done the same with right-wing leaders in India and Brazil, in a convenient marriage of his political beliefs and his desire to make more money for his companies.
And Musk has made a point of talking up Milei’s approach to government cuts, calling them “awesome” in a January post on X and praising Milei for “deleting entire departments.” He’s now calling for the United States government to do the same.
Musk’s embrace of the global right delighted the CPAC attendees, who welcomed him as one of their own even though it wasn’t so long ago that he was a Democrat warning the world about climate change. Everybody was on the same page about what really mattered.
“I don’t really approve of his, like, family situation, where he’s got so many kids,” said Pam Roehl, 59, referring to Musk’s 12 children with several different women.
But Ms. Roehl, a retiree who splits her time between Chicago and Nashville, loves the X platform. And she loves what Musk is doing in the government.
“Getting to the bottom of, like, government waste, I think, is phenomenal,” she said.
