Published 8 January 2025 in Leadership • 7 min read • 
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Observing Elon Musk’s fervent support for Donald Trump during the US presidential campaign, the Financial Times commentator Edward Luce called him “the Henry Ford of the 2024 election”. Luce was referring to Ford’s backing for the right-wing populist and aviator Charles Lindbergh in the run-up to the Second World War. Â
The similarities go further. Ford and Musk both had fraught relationships with their fathers. Both had a prodigious breadth of interests fitting for their times. Ford’s ranged from schoolbooks to agriculture – he had a suit and tie made from soybeans to promote their use – to creating visitor attractions that recreated America’s past. Musk is obsessed with birthrate decline, multi–planetary existence – insisting that humans need to live on Mars – and creating brain-machine interfaces to ensure artificial intelligence doesn’t wipe out humanity.Â
They are also two of the most consequential industrialists of their (or any) age. Ford created not just the first mass-produced motor car, the Model T, transforming how America and the rest of the world traveled and inter-connected, but the modern factory assembly line. Musk ignited a move toward electric cars, one that had stalled until Tesla forced car manufacturers worldwide to come up with vehicles to compete with his. With SpaceX, he reinvented an American space industry that had appeared to have run its course. They both immersed themselves in the engineering details of their products and understood the importance of controlling supply chains. Â
Both acquired and exploited the communications media of their day: newspapers and radio in Ford’s case – the “Ford Sunday Evening Hour” of music and commentary was broadcast on the CBS radio network – and social media in Musk’s. And this is where they both became, in the eyes of their critics, a menace to their societies. Â
In 1918, Ford bought the Dearborn Independent newspaper, which he used to indulge his obsessive antisemitism. In the newspaper, Ford accused Jews of being responsible for a host of ills, including controlling international finance, promoting Bolshevism, degrading baseball, and corrupting American music with jazz, as Steven Watts outlined in his biography The People’s Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century. Added to this was the sometimes violent action that Ford’s company took against trade unions.Â
Musk’s medium was Twitter, which he bought for $44bn in 2022 and renamed X. Saying he wanted to ensure free speech, Musk used the social network to air a range of incendiary views. When, shortly after his purchase, Paul Pelosi, husband of Congressional leader Nancy Pelosi, was attacked at home, Musk posted a baseless rumor about Pelosi’s relationship with the attacker. Musk deleted the tweet and apologized. When anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim riots took place in the UK in the summer, they were quickly suppressed with arrests and quick prison sentences. This did not stop Musk from saying on X that “civil war is inevitable” in Britain.Â
In his book Elon Musk, Walter Isaacson asks whether this irascibility is the price we pay for industrial innovation. “Would a restrained Musk accomplish as much as a Musk unbound? Is being unfiltered and untethered integral to who he is?” And, if so, “do the audaciousness and hubris that drive him to attempt epic feats excuse his bad behavior, his callousness, his recklessness?” The answer, Isaacson says, is “no, of course not.”
This raises the question of what can be done about the irresponsible behavior of business titans like Ford and Musk. Who can control them and channel their talents in ways that do not damage society?
An obvious answer is their directors, but powerful personalities like Ford and Musk are a match for any board. In 2023, when Musk endorsed an X post saying that Jews promote “hatred against whites”, investors called on Tesla’s board to act. But Nell Minow, a Tesla investor and veteran shareholder rights activist, told CNN that she had “no confidence whatsoever” in the board’s ability to control Musk. Nor did Ford’s directors constrain his antisemitism or anti-unionism.
The law occasionally had an effect. In 1925, Aaron Sapiro, an organizer of farm cooperatives, sued Ford for libel over articles in the Dearborn Independent, claiming that he was part of a Jewish plot to control the US economy. While the legal process was going on, Ford decided he had had enough. As Watts recounts, he was afraid of appearing in the witness box. He agreed to formally apologize to Sapiro and pay a cash settlement. In 1927, he shut the newspaper.
Ford came up against the law, too, in his union-busting. In 1941, the US Supreme Court refused to intervene in a lower court decision requiring Ford to reinstate workers dismissed for union involvement.
Musk has also had legal run-ins. In January 2024, a Delaware judge invalidated his $56bn compensation package precisely on the grounds that the Tesla directors who granted it were too beholden to Musk.
In Brazil, the country’s supreme court ordered X to be shut down for refusing to remove the accounts of far-right groups. Musk was initially defiant but eventually agreed to remove the accounts, acceded to the court’s demand to appoint a legal representative in Brazil, and consented to pay millions of dollars in fines.
However, the law does not always hold Musk back. In October, the US Department of Justice warned that he could be violating the law by offering $1m a day to a registered voter in a swing state in the presidential elections. A Pennsylvania judge allowed the scheme to continue up to election day.
Business partners can try to constrain irresponsible leaders. Advertisers, including Disney, IBM, and Apple, withdrew business from X because of their concerns that the site was no longer moderating controversial posts. In October, the Financial Times reported that spending on X from the top 100 US advertisers in the first half of 2024 was 68% lower than in the same period in 2022, before Musk bought Twitter. That did little to change Musk’s behavior – and had little impact on his other businesses. In the same month, the Financial Times reported that Tesla had seen its shares boosted by a higher-than-expected quarterly profit result and a forecast of a “slight growth” in deliveries.
Public opinion can rein in irresponsible leaders to some extent. Steven Watts wrote that Ford’s “mindless bigotry against Jews indelibly stained his reputation and raised questions about his moral and ideological character that would linger for the rest of his life”. As the popularity of the Model T declined and other car companies built their markets, Ford was revealed as “a man who had passed his peak”.
But here is where Musk’s path diverges from Ford’s. The successive presidential victories of Franklin Roosevelt outflanked Ford’s political views. By hitching himself to Trump, Musk helped ensure a spectacular Republican success. His voice will be influential in the Trump administration. He may moderate his views and behavior, but this has not been his way so far. Nor is he likely to face many constraints if he continues in his customary style.
Ford never gauged or caught the political wave. Musk has done both. Will he benefit from Trump’s vow to protect US manufacturers from foreign competitors, or will his sales in key markets like China suffer? He may be exultant now, but Ford provides a warning: the continuing success of their products rather than their political views determines an industrialist’s long-term success.
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