Elon Musk is decided. The disruptor is determined to disrupt San Francisco.
The whimsical and charismatic CEO of Tesla (TSLA) and owner of Twitter, considers San Francisco to be the laboratory of the new culture war.
Unlike some conservatives, who will lead this fight in right-wing states and cities where the risk of failure is limited, he wants to lead this fight in a progressive bastion. If he takes over San Francisco in this ideology battle, the victory will be epic, the tech mogul seems to think.
It will be an outcome which will give the signal and the courage to other conservatives to lead the fight in regions where the cards are not favorable to them. An ideological victory in San Francisco, the city of the counterculture movement, would also make the billionaire an icon of the right, one who succeeded where no one on the right had ever tried and dreamed of winning.
With this in mind, Musk has decided on a strategy of repeating that San Francisco has become a lawless city where street violence is the new normal. San Francisco, according to the billionaire, his tech bros and his millions of fans on Twitter, is a city that is dying, emptying day by day.
'Zombie Apocalypse'
He does not even hesitate to use the metaphor of the apocalypse to describe the decline, according to him, of the city-mecca of American tech.
"Downtown SF looks like a zombie apocalypse. People who’ve not been there have no idea," Musk said on April 10.
The image the tech mogul uses here can be applied to several major cities emerging from the coronavirus pandemic. Town centers have been deserted as companies have adopted a new way of working. The digitization of businesses is also pushing retailers and small businesses to close stores.
But for Musk, it seems that San Francisco is one of the few cities to experience this phenomenon. The facts clearly say that Downtown San Francisco is emptying.
The city’s vacancy rate grew to a record 32.7% in the first quarter of 2023, from 32.1% in the fourth quarter of 2022, according to Savills. "We expect office availability (in San Francisco) to continue to increase in 2023 as the slowdown in the technology sector persists,” said Savills, a commercial real estate firm.
In addition, long before the pandemic, San Francisco was experiencing a homeless crisis and a fentanyl-driven drug crisis. This cocktail of problems has thus completely transformed the streets of Downtown San Francisco, exasperating the city's inhabitants and deterring tourists.
By repeating the attacks on the city and regularly drawing an apocalyptic imagery, Musk intends to play on the perception of insecurity that is omnipresent among the inhabitants of the city.
"I think San Franciscans are still very much concerned about public safety and we still have a long way to go to make San Francisco as safe as it needs to be," District Attorney Brooke Jenkins said last month. "And so, this isn't always necessarily about data. It's about the way that our residents and business owners and even visitors feel. And so that is what drives me every day, is to make sure that they aren't just safer in reality. They're also safer in the way that they feel when they step outside of their doors every day."
'Woke Mind Virus'
Musk therefore takes the opportunity to beat the drum against San Francisco until the people overthrow the local elected officials, who are mostly Democrats, in the next election because the objective is to fire the Democratic political elites. The billionaire has thus just asserted that the evil that is destroying San Francisco is quite simply progressive ideology. Basically, what has been the identity of the city for several decades. He therefore seems to advocate a radical change of ideology and values.
It all started with a thread in which one of his fans pointed out that comedian Dave Chappelle blamed San Francisco's "downfall" on the city's Democratic leadership.
"Dave Chappelle skewers San Francisco’s downfall, blames woke leadership: ‘what the f*** happened to this place?’," the user posted on May 15.
Musk, who had defended Chappelle when the latter's transphobic remarks caused an uproar in the past, agreed.
"Rightly so," the billionaire commented. "The disaster that is downtown SF, once beautiful and thriving, now a derelict zombie apocalypse, is due to the woke mind virus."
Basically, the evil that is destroying San Francisco is the woke mind virus, which is an expression encompassing progressive values and ideas. In the US, it is represented by the progressive left wing of the Democratic Party.
The anti-woke movement, which usually brings together conservatives and far-right activists, accuses the progressives of trying to impose on society policies regarding racial diversity, gender equality and identity, and environmental, social and corporate governance, aka ESG, all with no thought about diversity of opinion and freedom of speech.
