Musk’s DOGE Is Inspired by Pro-Kremlin Monarchists and 1930s Technofascism

New evidence has emerged tying Elon Musk and the Trump administration to a network of pro-Kremlin operatives in the US with a history of ties to Musk’s own family. The ties suggest that DOGE is a project to resurrect anti-democracy ideas rooted in a 1930s movement that opposed Allied war efforts against Nazi Germany.

Byline Times can exclusively reveal that a former US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) official and longtime Musk employee – working at PayPal, SpaceX and now X – is connected to a movement for the revival of the Russian monarchy with close ties to the Russian Government including its Ministries of Defence and Foreign Affairs – and which believes Russia is engaged in a mortal civilisational war with the West.

The same network has links via Musk’s family to a 1930s technofascist movement. Known as ‘Technocracy’, the movement wanted to redraw the map of the United States to encompass vast swathes of territory from Canada to Greenland to Panama and Columbia and dreamed of replacing democracy with an “efficient” authoritarian regime run by engineers – paralleling what the Trump-Musk administration is doing today.

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The DOGE Operative – Kremlin Ties

In an investigation published early March, former Washington Post cybersecurity reporter Brian Krebs revealed that one of Elon Musk’s most loyal acolytes and longest-serving employees for 28 years, Branden Spikes, worked at DOGE for the first two months of Trump’s second term – before returning to his previous role as the Director of Information Technology at X, the Musk-owned social media platform formerly known as Twitter. 

Although it is not clear what role Branden Spikes played at DOGE, according to Krebs citing sources familiar with the role, he operated at a high-level “within Musk’s inner circle of trust”. 

Before working at X, Branden Spikes held senior roles at SpaceX, where he was the fourth person hired into the company, PayPal (where he was IT director), and Zip2, Musk’s first major software venture. 

Krebs’ report confirmed that Spikes’s ex-wife, whom he divorced in 2011, is a native Russian woman named Natalia Haldeman with ties both to Musk’s family and to Kremlin-aligned civil society groups in the US.

Natalia Haldeman operated within a network of pro-Kremlin Russian American nonprofits. She registered a wide range of internet domains including for an organisation called the Russian Heritage Foundation. 

Photographs obtained by Krebs show Natalia with Branden Spikes at a fundraising dinner alongside Ivan Y. Podvalov, a board director of the Congress of Russian Americans (CRA). Feodor Yakimoff, chairman of Russian Imperial Charity Balls. Both organisations have pro-Kremlin ties. The latter in particular, Byline Times can reveal, has extensive ties to Russian monarchists connected with the Russian ministries of defence and foreign affairs.

The CRA is ostensibly a networking organisation for the Russian diaspora in the US founded in 1973. But it has demonstrated a consistent alignment with Kremlin goals. Today, it is a pro-Trump organisation which has lobbied the US government to drop sanctions against Russia. The Russian Foreign Ministry has reportedly promoted the CRA’s president, Natalia Sabelnil, who also has a track record of lobbying in support of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Yakimoff’s Russian Imperial Charity Balls is sponsored by two Moscow-based groups which advocate a revival of the Russian monarchy and imperial state. One sponsor is the ‘Western USA’ chapter of the Assembly of Russian Nobility headquartered in Moscow. The Russian Heritage Foundation, which has rebranded to Constellation of Humanity, also works with the Russian Imperial Charity Balls. 

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Extreme Russian Monarchists with Ministry of Defence Ties

The Assembly of Russian Nobility (in Russian abbreviated to ‘RDS’ but whose full title is ‘the Union of Descendants of the Russian Nobility – Russian Nobility Assembly’) describes its mission as “the revival of the greatness of Russia, all its constituent regions, the preservation of the historical and cultural heritage of the Russian State, the restoration and continuation of the historical continuity of the state and generations…” 

Founded in 1990 just before the Soviet Union collapsed, the RDS supports the revival of a monarchical form of government inspired by the Russian Empire. Its website calls for the “development of the monarchist idea in the 21st century, the role of the monarchical idea in the modern unity of the peoples of historical Russia, modern views on the past and future of Russian imperial geopolitics.” 

Through conferences, summits and other activities, the RDS wants “to show that the monarchical form of government has not only not outlived itself, but, on the contrary, is both quite successful in the modern world and promising in the future, that in modern Russia there are enough social and political movements… who stand on such traditionalist positions, in the context of the imperial tasks of the Russian State and the prospects for their implementation in the space of Eurasia and the World.”

The group is also ardently anti-Western and sees itself at the forefront of a global civilisational conflict between a resurgent Russian empire and the West:

“In March 2022, the leadership of the RDS issued a patriotic Statement in support of the defence of Russia, Russian civilization in the face of the unprecedented military-political and economic confrontation of the collective West, stating that it is in such times that the Russian Nobility must show its historical duty to protect the Fatherland from the desecration of shrines, preserve the national heritage and ensure the viability of Russian civilization.”

The Assembly also actively interacts with a range of Russian Government departments and agencies “including presidential and government structures, various ministries, including the Ministry of Defence, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Federal Agency ‘Rossotrudnichestvo’ the Ministry of Culture of Russia, the Russian State Military Historical and Cultural Center under the Government of the Russian Federation”

Another sponsor of the Russian Imperial Charity Balls is the Russian Imperial-Union Order (RIUO), another Kremlin aligned monarchist organisation, originally founded in 1929 by Russian exiles in Paris who wanted to preserve Tsarist legitimacy. 

The RIUO supports many Kremlin initiatives that align with its values (such as church revival and patriotic education), and the Kremlin frequently consults or includes the RIUO in state events. The Kremlin has especially embraced parts of the RIUO’s agenda such as Orthodox heritage, veneration of the Romanovs, condemnation of the Bolshevik legacy and the glorification or Russian imperial history to bolster Putin’s own legitimacy and Russian nationalist narratives.

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Keep It in the Family

Yet Branden Spikes’s past marriage with Natalia – whom he praised for having “the best intentions”, “no funny business”, “no bad blood” and “loves America” – reveals that he is close to Musk not just professionally, but personally. 

As Krebs explains, Natalia was previously married to Elon Musk’s cousin, Reeve Haldeman. Both Elon and Reeve are grandsons of Joshua Haldeman, who is the father of Maye Musk, Elon’s mother. 

Another photo obtained by Krebs via Natalia Haldeman’s Facebook page confirms that her family is close to the Musks – it shows Natalia Haldeman’s mother with Maye Musk on Mother’s Day in 2022, about a month after Musk publicised his intention to buy Twitter. “My Mom and Elon’s Mom. Happy Mother’s Day” wrote Natalia.

Joshua Haldeman, Musk’s maternal grandfather, was a white supremacist and antisemite who supported South African apartheid. According to Musk’s father, Errol Musk, the elder Haldeman was also a Nazi sympathiser. In a podcast interview (52:46) in November 2024, Errol Musk said:

“Her [Maye Musk’s] parents by the way were very fanatical in favour of apartheid. This is quite interesting. Her parents came to South Africa from Canada because they sympathised with the Afrikaner government.

They used to support Hitler and all that sort of stuff. But they didn’t know, obviously, I don’t think they knew what the Germans, the Nazis were actually doing. In Canada, they were part of the Nazi, the German party in Canada, and they sympathised with the Germans.”

Neither Maye nor Elon Musk have taken the opportunity to deny Errol’s claims about Musk’s grandfather. 

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Enter the TechnoKing

One of the earliest voices warning of the implications of Musk’s ancestry is Emmy-award winning technology entrepreneur and journalist Jim Stewartson. Three years ago, Stewartson reported that in the 1930s, Joshua Haldeman had been a leader in Howard Scott’s Technocracy Incorporated movement which was banned by the Canadian Government due to its vehement opposition to Canada’s involvement in the Second World War against Nazi occupation of Europe. Joshua Haldeman was a member of Technocracy Incorporated from 1936 to 1941.

Scott’s Technocracy Incorporated proposed abandoning business as the driving force of the American economy, and replacing representative democracy with massive social engineering centered on technicians, especially engineers, as an efficient elite who would plan and engineer a new economic order.

Scott dismissed business people, social scientists, lawyers and teachers as “charlatans”. Society would be run by a “techno-autocracy,” a self-perpetuating elite that would also be overtly hostile to “aliens and Asiatics”.

Haldeman was at one point arrested in Canada for involvement in the group, which had been banned due to its subversion of the war effort against Adolf Hitler. Haldeman would later defend the infamous antisemitic conspiracy pamphlet, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion: “… the plan as outlined in these protocols has been rapidly unfolding in the period of observation of this generation.”

He also declared that apartheid South Africa was leading “White Christian Civilization” against the “International Conspiracy” of Jewish bankers and the “hordes of Coloured people” controlled by them. By 1950 he would emigrate to South Africa to settle. In 1951, he told the openly pro-Nazi newspaper Die Transvaler that the Canadian government’s attitude “had encouraged me to come and settle here”.

Haldeman was killed in a flying accident when Elon Musk was three years old. But the young Musk reportedly grew up on tales about his grandfather, “idolising family legends about Haldeman’s adventures – how he flew across the Indian Ocean and circumnavigated Australia in a single-engine plane.”

He told one journalist with pride: “He did this in a plane with no electronic instruments, and in some places they had diesel and in some places they had gasoline, and he had to rebuild the engine according to whatever fuel they had.”

In 2021, Musk changed his job title at Tesla to “Technoking of Tesla”, in what seemed to be an allusion to technocracy.

Indeed, the influence of Haldeman’s ideology on Musk is unmistakeable – particularly in terms of the parallels between the Technocracy movement and the current actions of the Trump administration.

Howard Scott’s Technocracy plan envisioned expanding the territory of the United States to create a new “Technate of America”. This would encompass many of the same territories that Donald Trump has been especially aggressive toward in his second term: Canada, Greenland, Central America, the Caribbean, and parts of Columbia, Venezuela and the Guyanas. 

“The government of the United States should take immediate action to acquire these territories and others,” urged Haldeman’s colleague in Technocracy Incorporated, Scott. “The acquisition of these territories should be a mandatory part of the program of Continental defense for immediate achievement.”

The Trump-Musk administration has followed many of the same proposals. Apart from an obsession with demonising ethnic ‘diversity’, the administration has attacked South Africa for seeking to correct decades of unjust white supremacist land ownership – due to apartheid systems whose legacy was not dismantled – and move to declare acquisition interests in seemingly disparate pieces of territory from Canada to Greenland.

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The Dark Enlightenment

The background of Elon Musk, and his longtime employee Branden Spikes, suggests that these parallels are hardly accidental – but part of a longstanding effort to resurrect the ideology of technocracy in a new digital world. 

One of the key conduits of that technocratic thinking into Silicon Valley is Curtis Yarvin, an American technology entrepreneur who has received investment from pro-Trump billionaire Peter Thiel. 

A founder of the neo-reactionary (NRx) or ‘Dark Enlightenment’ movement, Yarvin’s writings have been read by Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon, Vice President JD Vance, State Department director of policy planning Michael Anton and other Silicon Valley investors like Marc Andreessen. Yarvin’s influence on Trump world is so powerful that he was invited to a Trump inaugural gala in January 2025 as an informal guest of honour. 

Yarvin’s writings and blogs call for a future of hyper-capitalist city-states ruled by authoritarian CEO monarchs, effectively nation-states run like tech companies​. He proposes a model called “Patchwork”: breaking up large countries into many small sovereign entities “each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions”​. In each mini-state, an all-powerful CEO (the “proprietor”) wields undivided, absolute authority, unencumbered by elections or public consent​. 

The resemblance to technocratic thinking is clear: Yarvin’s American “CEO-monarch” or “Caesar” would govern through centralised, top-down decisions, valuing efficiency and expertise over any democratic process​. Just as 1930s technocrats sought to run society by scientific principles, Yarvin explicitly frames government as an engineering problem to be solved.

In 2012, Yarvin spoke at a conference about the need to “reboot” the US government through “RAGE”, which stands for “Retire All Government Employees”. “If Americans want to change their government,” he said, “they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia.”

What has begun in the US through DOGE is just the beginning. The Kremlin-aligned technology oligarchy behind the Trump-Musk administration aims to destroy democracy not just in the United States, but to leverage US power to fracture the entire Western geopolitical order. Their vision is a “Patchwork” of authoritarian ‘network states’ that answer not to citizens, but to the technokings.

Dr Nafeez Ahmed is the author of ALT REICH: THE NETWORK WAR TO DESTROY THE WEST FROM WITHIN (2025)