I may have been surprised by this week’s election results, but I wasn’t surprised to be surprised. I’d made a conscious choice a while back to simply assume Harris would be elected, for no better reason than to not meet trouble halfway. I’ve learned, with time, that it’s often best to not waste time and emotion on anxieties about things you can’t control, and simply deal with bad things once they’ve happened.

This mentality has become something of a necessity after nearly a decade of following Elon Musk. From the moment I stumbled onto Tesla’s battery swap scam in 2015 it became increasingly clear that Tesla’s core business is fundamentally challenged and propped up by fraud, and that eventually it would have to face a reckoning. As time has passed I’ve had to balance that basic understanding with Musk’s ability to somehow tapdance away from every possible consequence, time after time, endlessly delaying the inevitable.

I won’t pretend that I haven’t been driven to moments of despair by this state of affairs, but on the whole it has actually fostered a battle-tested sense of optimism. When Musk pulls off one of his time-buying stunts, I always ask myself: did this actually change the underlying sustainability of his empire? The answer is always no. With the exception of a brief period during the remarkable COVID era boom in Tesla’s core fundamentals, which ultimately didn’t last, I’ve never found good reason to abandon my core belief that Tesla’s valuation and business practices are unsustainable. Go through this enough times, and you’ll start to believe that even Joe Biden’s too-slow and ultimately ineffectual move towards holding Musk accountable might bear fruit.

Obviously that won’t be happening now. Musk desperate all-in bet on Trump was clearly pivotal in swinging the election, and at the very least we can expect the glacial DOJ investigation into the blatant and lethal “Full Self-Driving” fraud to be killed off. The myriad regulatory conflicts at the heart of his political involvement will go away, at least for the next four years. Though Musk and Trump’s relationship is likely to be unpredictable and rocky, Musk’s electoral intervention have bought him another four years of functional impunity for the many crimes he has already committed.

One of the lessons that should be taken away from this election is that Musk’s intervention was likely quite decisive. Unless you spent the last decade watching Musk’s online misinformation machine pump a deeply troubled startup into a nearly trillion dollar behemoth, it’s hard to understand the power he wields. Especially in a post-Twitter landscape where mainstream liberals finally started to let go of his “epoch-defining genius” branding, it was too easy to assume everyone went through that transition. It was especially easy for me to believe his myth had shattered, having waited years for people to finally start seeing him the way I did.

Had the exit polls showed that women or social issues were critical to swinging this election, we could downplay Musk’s role. But the fact that men and economic issues appear to have been the deciding factor speaks to him being a prime mover. I’ve already seen Musk drag people who previously saw themselves as liberal into openly right wing rhetoric, just through the power of his cult of personality. By presenting himself as a pragmatic centrist who wants to bring his business acumen to improving the economy and government efficiency Musk was the ideal coat of “normalwashing” for a lot of men who don’t see themselves as very ideological in either direction, allowing them to vote for Trump as a centrist prosperity candidate. His firehose of at least $130 million aimed at swing states probably didn’t hurt either.

Realizing how much Musk may have pushed this result over the line brings me back to the terrible irony I explored in these pages before the election: the fact that Musk, and therefore this election result, is the toxic fruit of mainstream liberalism. After all it was liberals, not conservatives, who told me over and over again that Tesla had to break some eggs to save the planet. That I was blowing things out of proportion. That even if Musk had committed a bit of fraud, allowed a little pollution, abused a few workers, spread a little misinformation, that this was either normal and acceptable, or just the price of a historic clean energy revolution. That the noble ends of environmentalism and multiplanetary life justifies more or less any means.

What bothers me now is not just that these people told me to tone it down when I should have toned it up, that I was overblowing the danger Musk represents when I was in fact underblowing it. The really ugly and obvious mistake they made, which we must all either learn from or be doomed to repeat, is that the means always, inevitably become the ends. Now that Musk is riding toward a seat of unprecedented government power, EV companies are tanking on Wall Street and coal companies are rallying; the noble cause has melted into thin air, and the only thing left defining Elon Musk is the fraud and abuse his vanished ideals used to excuse.

For me, Musk’s reliance on “ends justify the means” logic was one of the original red flags about his entire deal. I certainly wasn’t doomed to always be a Tesla hater: I’ve always liked EVs, I believe strongly in protecting the environment, and I’m a lifelong west coaster who kinda loves the idea of having a “home team” automaker. What turned me off about Tesla early on was the cynicism: the willingness to simultaneously violate environmentalist principles and use them justify other bad acts. I first saw that cynicism when reporting on the battery swap station, and the more I saw how the online fanbase was turning into a totalitarian personality cult the more it turned me off. It was never the ends that bothered me, it was always the means.

Chief among those means was the very idea that the ends justify the means. From the very earliest days of Musk’s online personality cult, he and his fans would almost never actually refute the facts and criticisms that bubbled up, they would either justify them or attack the critics themselves. It was an incurious, antagonistic movement, that slathered its ugly, illiberal core with a thick layer of smarm about the nobility of its cause. All that has changed today is that the ideological paint has worn off, exposing the misinformation-fueled, power-acquiring infernal machine beneath.

If there’s a lesson to the last decade leading up to this election, it’s that we need to focus less on the ends people espouse and more on the means they employ to achieve those ends. Talk has become exceedingly cheap on these internets, and people reveal themselves less in what they say than how they say it. We need to get better at looking at how people use the internet, and discern whether they are using it as a tool to debate ideas and build consensus, or push people into a thought-terminating misinformation cult. We know how to do this when it involves causes we already don’t like, but this election proves that liberals are unable to see or stop creeping fascism when the call is coming from inside their ideological house.

Hopefully it’s not too late to learn.