Meta’s Nick Clegg says Elon Musk has potential to be a political ‘puppet master’

On a podcast with BBC’s Nick Robinson, Meta’s president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, talked about how Elon Musk is “playing an outsized role in both the election and now the formation of the new U.S. administration.” 

Clegg said he thinks that Elon Musk has a “choice” when it comes to his political future: to be an “avid and well-heeled supporter” or to become a “puppet master, going well beyond Trump, deciding who the next Republican candidate should be and the one after that, and so on, so forth.” 

He stopped short of saying the SpaceX billionaire is a threat to democracy, but he did say that being a “puppet master” who influences candidate selection for years to come is “quite different to the general tradition of American democracy.”