By New York Post (Politics) | Created at 2025-01-12 15:09:31 | Updated at 2025-01-12 19:11:18
4 hours ago
Days after fawning over what tech magnate Elon Musk’s deep pockets could do for the MAGA movement, Steve Bannon went berserk on the world’s richest man and vowed to limit his White House influence.
Bannon, 71, who hosts the “War Room” podcast and has a penchant for plotting all-out brass-knuckled political warfare, suggested Musk “should go back to South Africa” and decried his stance on H1-B visas.
“I will have Elon Musk run out of here by Inauguration Day,” Bannon, told the Italian daily Corriere della Sera last week, per excerpts translated by his former employer Breitbart. “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.”
“He is a truly evil guy, a very bad guy. I made it my personal thing to take this guy down,” he went on. “Before, because he put money in, I was prepared to tolerate it. I’m not prepared to tolerate it anymore.”
Last month, just before Christmas, a war erupted within the MAGA movement between the tech bros and immigration hardliners over H1-B visas, which permit foreign workers to come to the US for specialty occupations.
Musk, 53, a US citizen who emigrated from South Africa, emerged as a fierce defender of H1-B visas. President-elect Donald Trump, 78, eventually backed Musk’s stance and the tech billionaire. But Bannon hasn’t let the H1-B visa flap go.
“This thing of the H-1B visas, it’s about the entire immigration system is gamed by the tech overlords, they use it to their advantage, the people are furious,” Bannon told the outlet
Bannon also unleashed on other big-name billionaire Trump backers.
“Peter Thiel, David Sacks, Elon Musk, are all white South Africans,” he added. “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?”
Billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel, is German-American but lived in South Africa and Namibia as a child.
He had worked with Musk on PayPal, had been a top backer of Vice President-elect JD Vance’s Ohio Senate bid in 2022.
Musk has espoused increasingly conservative viewpoints in the public eye since the COVID-19 pandemic. In the GOP primaries, he backed alternatives to Trump, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R). However, after the July 13 assassination attempt, Musk began going all in on the president-elect.
Since Trump’s election victory, Musk has spent a large chunk of his time hunkered down at Mar-a-Lago. Trump has tapped him to helm the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which isn’t actually a government department.
Democrats have attempted to poke at both Musk’s and Trump’s egos and pit the two against each other. Last month, when Musk whipped up public opposition to a government funding bill in Congress, Democrats branded him “President Musk,” though Trump has so far declined to take the bait.
Bannon complained that Musk’s “sole objective is to become a trillionaire.” Bannon has previously called for more taxes on the wealthy and warned about a French Revolution-style uprising in the US over the growing disparities between the mega-rich and the poor.
“[Musk] will do anything to make sure that any one of his companies is protected or has a better deal or he makes more money,” Bannon further groused. “His aggregation of wealth, and then — through wealth — power: that’s what he’s focused on.”
Bannon also took a jab at Musk for appearing to concur with a post on X that suggested Americans are too “retarded” to do the jobs that companies use foreigners via the H1-B visa system. Musk later deleted that post.
“He went out of his way to mock our movement as racist and retards, and he lost,” Bannon complained. “We blew him out of the water.”
Before Musk got behind Trump, Bannon had lashed out at the Tesla and SpaceX for not being critical of China. Musk has waded heavily into US and European politics, but largely eschewed mention of China, where he has factories and a massive Tesla sales business.
Just last week, however, Bannon argued that despite their differences, Musk joining the MAGA movement could be an important boon and took note of the billionaire’s efforts to wade into European politics.
“I support his participation because the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” Bannon told Bloomberg. “Musk just spent a quarter of a billion dollars to elect Trump.”
“If he puts the same amount of money into all of Europe that he put behind Trump, he will flip every nation to a populist agenda. There’s not a centrist left-wing government in Europe that will be able to withstand that onslaught.”
