Marketing professor and anti-MAGA podcaster Scott Galloway launched an unhinged attack on Elon Musk, branding the billionaire a “traitor to the West” before invoking the infamous Rosenberg espionage case, which ended with the execution of two Americans during the Cold War.
Galloway spewed the incendiary comments during a discussion with former technology journalist Kara Swisher about Silicon Valley’s growing influence, arguing that the United States’ obsession with billionaire innovators has created a dangerous double standard.
However, what began as a familiar critique of Silicon Valley’s billionaire class quickly took a darker turn. Galloway compared Musk to aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh, whose sympathies toward Nazi Germany before America’s entry into World War II remain a controversial chapter in U.S. history. Galloway then invoked Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the American couple executed in 1953 after being convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage for the Soviet Union.
“We lined up the Rosenbergs against a wall,” Galloway said, before insisting Musk should be held to the same standards as other traitors.
Galloway stopped short of explicitly calling for Musk’s execution, but bringing up two spies who were put to death while calling him a traitor was a striking comparison.
Here are Galloway’s remarks in full:
Okay, so I’ll go fail first. I think the idolatry of innovators has gotten so out of control. I was talking to the secretary before this. If you go up and down the West Coast, you’re going to see literally companies. The West Coast is littered with multi-trillion dollar companies, and you get to the Canadian border, it stops. You get to the Mexican border, it stops. And yet these individuals are quick to credit their grit and their character for their success and blame the government for their failures.
And what is so disappointing, that’s not my fail, because if you tell a 30-year-old male who’s Jesus Christ, he’s inclined to believe you. The fail is that we have begun believing through this ridiculous, unhealthy, and dangerous idolatry of innovators that they get to live by an entirely different standard. Elon Musk is a traitor to the West.
[crowd applause]
In the 30s, we had this incredible hero, Charles Lindbergh, an innovator, and he felt that we should be on the side of Germany. And a lot of people felt that way. We had spent tremendous capital, a lot of loss of young men in World War I, and we thought, you can understand, we don’t want to go back, right? And his view was we should partner with Germany and Hitler.
What if, and this could have very easily happened, he was a hero. What if he’d raised the capital to buy Boeing? He probably could have done it. And then when we lent B-17s to run bombing runs over Germany to the RAF, what if he had figured out a guidance for a flight system and then mid-1940, before we were involved in the war, decided to throttle back those guidance systems and the blitzkrieg in London got worse, and more homes and more civilians were destroyed and killed respectively. What would we have done to Charles Lindbergh?
But it’s uncomfortable and weird because we’ve decided someone who’s a trillionaire, makes a great EV and can land a rocket on scissors is held to a different standard. We lined up the Rosenbergs against a wall. This is a traitor to the West, and you should be held to the same standards as every other traitor in the West.
The Rosenbergs were convicted in 1951 of conspiring to commit espionage for the Soviet Union and executed at New York’s Sing Sing prison two years later. Their case remains one of the most controversial espionage prosecutions in American history, particularly because of the severity of the punishment.
Galloway’s remarks come amid an increasingly hostile climate surrounding Musk, with the billionaire facing criticism over his political activities and his role in the Trump administration.
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