Elon Musk is a living prototype of the reverse Von Braun, a man who started with rockets and electric cars and ended up in the ideological trenches, slowly backpedaling into the past like a man moonwalking into a burning building.

Von Braun had the good sense to launder himself through history’s acceptable filters. He started as an enthusiastic Nazi, built Hitler’s death machines, and then—when things got dicey—rebranded as the benign wizard of the space age, the kindly explainer of Tomorrowland. He didn’t change, per se. The world just adjusted around him, erasing his unsavory bits like a bad edit in a propaganda reel.

Musk, though, is running this in reverse. He begins as the beloved rocket man, a real-life Tony Stark, the guy who sells utopia by the tweet, a man so flush with government subsidies he can reinvent free enterprise in his own image. And yet, somehow, inexorably, he’s working his way backward, shedding goodwill like a heat shield on reentry. He’s got the chaotic hubris of a mid-century fascist technocrat, but without the tight uniforms or the sense of doomed grandeur. Instead, he’s out there arguing with anime avatars about race science at 3 AM, mistaking engagement metrics for destiny.

Does he complete the loop? Does he go full Von Braun in reverse—first the PR fiascos, then the political extremism, and finally, the outright state-sponsored villainy? Maybe. But history has a cruel sense of humor. Because in the end, Von Braun got to be the grandfather of the Moon landing. Musk, if he keeps up his trajectory, is far more likely to be the grandfather of an NFT-based Panzer division, or worse—a grimly ironic footnote in a Wikipedia article about the collapse of Tesla’s last functional gigafactory.