Steve Bannon blames Gavin Newsom for creating Elon Musk

Critics say California governor Gavin Newsom’s new podcast, This Is Gavin Newsom, is an attempt to appeal to the center ahead of a possible 2028 presidential bid. But the governor claims his goal is to begin an open dialogue with people who don’t agree with him. So who would be better to speak to than the right-wing populist nationalist, host of War Room — and intellectual godfather of the MAGA movement — Steve Bannon?

During their conversation, Newsom wanted to address Bannon’s issues with Musk.

“Do I have any issues?” Bannon joked before quoting himself in calling Elon Musk “a parasitic illegal immigrant.”

The governor wanted to tease out the contradictions in how Bannon feels about the oligarch. The War Room host has been a staunch supporter of the work that DoGE and Musk have been doing to cut back on waste, fraud and abuse. He even went as far as to tell Newsom, “Elon ought to take a California DoGE and sit down with you.” But Newsom asked Bannon how he balances this admiration for Musk’s work with the disdain he has for him as a person.

Bannon responded with pragmatism. “I’ve got a lot of problems with Elon, and you know that. Elon knows it. But what I do admire is that he is trying to get this situation to get the waste, fraud and abuse out. I hope it gets to a trillion dollars. I’m his biggest supporter of that.”

Bannon said Musk joined the MAGA coalition after “he saw the math of what we were doing as grassroots of this precinct strategy — canvassing, he backed the play.” Bannon said Musk’s engineer brain kicked in when he saw the winning strategy of Trump’s 2024 election. And although he takes some of the credit for flipping Elon, he blames Newsom for creating him.

Newsom agreed. “It was our regulatory process and our subsidies to create this market. You’re 100 percent right.”

Bannon said that this extended to other tycoons, including Mark Zuckerberg. “You guys loved all the oligarchs, in particular Elon, until they flipped. And remember, all the rest of these oligarchs were all progressive Democrats until 11 p.m.”

To Bannon, leaders like Newsom are participating in a Frankenstein-esque process — creating a monster, getting upset when it breaks free from their control and starts a rampage and then trying to chase down the monster they created in the first place.