Billionaire SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk sounded an alarm on his X platform Thursday regarding the current global state of affairs and opined that the great powers are “sleepwalking into World War III.”
He also ripped the Biden administration for its monetary and foreign policy, noting that penalizing Russia and other developing powers was hastening the demise of the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency.
“With this weaponization of the dollar, I think we’ve overplayed our hand. Weaponizing the dollar with sanctions. You’re now seeing a lot of countries de-dollar their transactions because we’ve sort of forced it. This goes beyond Russia, China, and Iran because countries like Brazil or India still want to transact with Russia and they can’t do it with dollars, so we’ve forced them to de-dollarize their transactions, thus weakening the strength of the dollar in the world,” he said during a Twitter Space on Monday with David Sacks and 2024 GOP presidential contender Vivek Ramaswamy.
“So, these actions are strategically foolish. Like I said, we should stand back and ask what is the most important thing. The most important thing is avoiding World War Three because we may never recover from World War Three. And I think we currently have the risk of World War Three increasing rapidly. I think if relations are re-normalized with Russia, the probability of World War Three is dramatically lower,” he added.
Later, he noted that American and Western industrial power, once insurmountable, is now being challenged as well by China, Russia, and India, among others.
“We’re not fighting small fry here. The potential is not a small fry battle. It is a massive battle where the industrial capacity is of comparable size to the Western alliance,” he said.
“Or greater, at this point, China has more manufacturing capacity than the United States,” Sacks offered.
“That is correct. It’s roughly on par, let’s just say one could debate whether it is bigger, but the point is we don’t have an overwhelming advantage on industrial might, and the foundation of war is economics,” Musk countered.
“This should be obvious to everyone, but it is often lost at this point: The foundation of war is economic power. Especially industrial output. How many tanks, guns, and drones can you make relative to the other side? That’s what it comes down to. And it may be the case, if not now, in the future it probably will be, that a Russia-China-Iran alliance can outproduce the Western alliance,” the X platform boss went on.
“Unfortunately, our policy has been forcing Russia and Iran to ally with China. It’s been forcing them. What choice have we given them?”
“Russia has the raw materials, and China has the industrial capacity. It’s, frankly, a perfect match from a war standpoint. So I think we need to stop doing that. It’s unwise, and I think it will lead to an immense risk to civilization,” he continued.
Musk concluded: “I want to emphasize there’s a civilizational risk — there are tragedies on an individual level, tragedies on a community level, and then there’s civilizational risk. We just need to make sure that we’re not putting civilization itself at stake, which is World War Three. I think we are sleepwalking our way into World War Three with one foolish decision after another.”
