ROME — Former Breitbart News executive chairman Steve Bannon has declared war on Elon Musk, vowing to have the tech billionaire kicked out of the White House by the time Donald Trump is inaugurated.
“I will have Elon Musk run out of here by Inauguration Day,” Bannon told the Italian daily Corriere della Sera this week. “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,” Bannon added. “Before, because he put money in, I was prepared to tolerate it; I’m not prepared to tolerate it anymore.”
At the heart of the recent clash between Elon Musk and Steve Bannon is the immigration question, and specifically the H-1B visas for skilled immigrants working in “specialty occupations,” which Musk has said he supports. But for Bannon, the issue is emblematic of a bigger problem in Musk’s thinking.
“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 said, noting that “76 percent of engineers working in Silicon Valley are non-Americans.”
“No blacks or Hispanics have any of these jobs or any access to these jobs,” Bannon said.
“Peter Thiel, David Sachs, Elon Musk, are all white South Africans,” Bannon observed. “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?”
“We have been fighting this fight for ten years,” he declared. “We are going to expose the entire corruption of the American system, of how money controls everything and hopefully we’ll inspire you in Italy to wake up,” he told Corriere della Sera journalist Viviana Mazza.
Elon “just had a huge defeat here in America,” Bannon argued, on the question of H-1B visas and their importance to the economy of the United States.
“He went out of his way to mock our movement as racist and retards, and he lost,” Bannon said. “We blew him out of the water. He won’t fight. He’s got the maturity of a little boy.”
Musk has had “tremendous loss of credibility here in the United States, and quite frankly, the people around Trump are tired of it,” he said.
Bannon went on to accuse Musk of being self-serving, insisting that his “sole objective is to become a trillionaire.”
“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,” Bannon said.
Bannon said that Musk’s economic support of President Trump has been a positive thing, adding that he should do the same for any of the different populist movements in Europe.
“What’s not positive,” he added, “is when all of a sudden he tries to put his half-baked ideas which are really about the implementation of techno-feudalism on a global scale. I don’t support that and we’ll fight it.”
