Elon Musk is a migrant.

There is a difference between a migrant and an immigrant. An immigrant is a person who moves to another country with the intention of living there permanently. The great majority of immigrants to America come for work or personal safety or affection for the way of life. Their goal is to assimilate.

A migrant is someone who moves from one place to another, often across country borders, for various reasons with money high on the list. The United States is Musk's third nationality. He started off as a South African. He then became a Canadian. Now he's an American.

Musk is an entrepreneurial genius. Of that there's no doubt. But his pursuit of wealth and power has shown him soulless regarding the communities he lords over. And his support of the man who tried to overthrow this country's elected government does not speak of any strong attachment to American tradition, namely, the U.S. Constitution.

Though already wealthy, Donald Trump's slobbering before Vladimir Putin strongly suggests he wants to become oligarch wealthy. It's unclear whether Musk or Putin is the richest man alive. Either might assume Trump could be acquired.

For all his bashing of California, Musk got his start soaking in the advantages of being a tech entrepreneur there. In 2002, he launched SpaceX in the Los Angeles area. In 2004, he joined Tesla, based in Palo Alto, and made it the electric vehicle giant it is today. And along the way, he helped himself to more than $3.2 billion in direct and indirect California subsidies since 2009.

Musk had every right to move SpaceX and social media company X, formerly Twitter, to Texas or anywhere else. But he should spare us the baloney of his stated reason, California's law aimed at protecting transgender children. I share his aversion to a lot of the wokeness, but Musk's tweet that the bill was "attacking both families and companies" was laughably histrionic.

Look, Musk wanted less regulation, lower taxes and official hostility to organized labor. Why didn't he just say that?

He did stop the United Auto Workers from unionizing the giant Tesla plant in Fremont, California, threatening those who joined with loss of their stock options. That would have been illegal.

In a recent conversation on X, Trump praised Musk for firing workers who went on strike. "You're the greatest cutter," Trump gushed. "I look at what you do. You walk in and say, 'You want to quit?' I won't mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, 'That's OK. You're all gone.'" They laughed in unison.

The worst part of this exchange wasn't the firings. It was the evident pleasure Trump took in visiting pain on workers.

California does have ways to get even. Tesla sales there have fallen 17% in the first half of this year, whereas sales by other EV makers soared — from 26% for Ford to 77% for Rivian. And a state commission just voted against more SpaceX launches from the Vandenberg Space Force Base outside Los Angeles.

Musk recently played the yahoo arguing that the budget deficit under Biden was "insane." It happens that Trump ran up the national debt by twice as much as Biden. His plans for tax cuts and spending would add $7.5 trillion to budget deficits over the next decade, according to The Wall Street Journal. Kamala Harris' proposals would add half as much.

But, you know, this isn't really about government spending. Trump says he'd invent a position for Musk in a future administration. If so, what a convenient stop the United States would have been for Elon Musk.

Froma Harrop covers the waterfront of politics, economics and culture with an unconventional approach. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com.