Steve Bannon Vows to Run ‘Evil’ Elon Musk Out of Trump’s Orbit
After a spat over the future of H-1B visas threatened a full-blown schism in Trumpworld, MAGA elder and longtime Trump adviser Steve Bannon has publicly declared war against Elon Musk, vowing to run the billionaire out of President-elect Donald Trump’s influence circle before Trump becomes president.
During a weekend interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, Bannon said he “will have Elon Musk run out of here by Inauguration Day.”
“He will not have a blue pass to the White House, he will not have full access to the White House, he will be like any other person,” Bannon added of his fellow MAGA loyalist, who since the election has glommed onto Trump as an influential adviser.
The former White House strategist described the South African billionaire as “a truly evil guy, a very bad guy,” noting that he “made it my personal thing to take this guy down.” Bannon added that “before, because he put money in, I was prepared to tolerate it; I’m not prepared to tolerate it anymore.”
Bannon linked his disdain for Musk, and other powerful tech moguls, to their recent dispute over the use of H-1B visas by Silicon Valley corporations. “This thing of the H-1B visas, it’s about [how] the entire immigration system is gamed by the tech overlords. They use it to their advantage, the people are furious,” Bannon said. “He will do anything to make sure that any one of his companies is protected or has a better deal or he makes more money. His aggregation of wealth, and then — through wealth — power: That’s what he’s focused on.
“Peter Thiel, David Sachs, Elon Musk, are all white South Africans,” Bannon continued in his interview with the Corriere. “He should go back to South Africa. Why do we have South Africans, the most racist people on earth, white South Africans, we have them making any comments at all on what goes on in the United States?”
Last month, a wider dispute about specialty occupation visas threatened to explode into an outright MAGA civil war. H-1B visas have long received bipartisan criticism as a mechanism through which companies can underpay talent, while exercising outsized control over their career trajectory and prospects by tying their immigration status to their employment. For the right, their opposition to the category of visa has less to do with the prospect of worker exploitation as with their general “immigrants are stealing our jobs” mentality.
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Musk publicly defended H-1B visas, at one point writing: “The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low. Think of this like a pro sports team: if you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be. That enables the whole TEAM to win.”
Bannon punched back, calling Musk a “toddler” in need of a wellness check after the billionaire told his critics to go “fuck yourself in the face.”
During his first term, Trump criticized the visas as “very bad” and “unfair” to American workers, and went so far as to propose incentives for companies to “hire American.”
“The H-1B program is neither high-skilled nor immigration: These are temporary foreign workers, imported from abroad, for the explicit purpose of substituting for American workers at lower pay,” he said in 2016.
This time around, Trump sided with Musk, writing on Truth Social that he has always “been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program.”
The capitulation solidified concerns among some that Musk has an outsized grip on the reins of the incoming president. The billionaire has all but moved into Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, and acts as a constant shadow — both physically and politically — to the president-elect.
During an interview earlier this month, The New York Times’ Maggie Habberman — a longtime Trump reporter — said that the president-elect “does complain a bit to people about how Musk is around a lot.”
Trump has never been known to share a spotlight, and if Bannon is looking to run the richest man in the world out of his orbit, it seems he may have a few buttons he could push.