At first thought, any comparison between the world’s richest man and those intrepid signers of our Declaration of Independence might seem ludicrous. After all, the former delights in trolling leftists, while the latter put it all on the line with their pledge of “our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”

Yet, in the never-ending contest between Liberty and tyranny, between limited government and bloated bureaucracy, Elon Musk merits our consideration. Whatever one thinks of the mercurial Musk, this much is certain: He has put his money — and, increasingly, his personal safety — where his mouth is.

“Musk’s embrace of right-wing politics risks turning off car buyers and sinking Tesla’s stock.” So reads a recent headline from the Associated Press, which adds, “The sales numbers were particularly bad in Germany and France in January, down roughly 60% each, more than the average decline for the more than two-dozen European countries surveyed. Sales in France fell another 26% in February.”

Tesla’s stock price fell 5.6% on Thursday, and it’s now down 45% from its December post-election peak. As CNN reports, “Just since Trump took office and Musk began wielding power they have lost 38% of their overall value.”

In addition, Tesla dealerships, charging stations, and owners are being targeted in political “protests” nationwide. Gunshots were fired into vehicles at one Oregon dealership and Molotov cocktails at another. In Massachusetts, charging stations were set afire, and a Boston man claimed he had a free-speech right to deface Teslas. And pretty much no matter where you are in the nation, Tesla owners are ubiquitously given a grotesque finger gesture.

“I used to be adored by the Left,” Musk said recently. “Less so these days.”

Less so? Let’s set aside the stock price and the vandalism for a moment and consider Musk’s physical safety.

“These are real enemies,” suggested Joe Rogan during a recent podcast with Musk, prompting this response: “I think they actually want to kill me. And the reason I know that is because they say so online. There’s, like, Reddit forums where they don’t just want to kill me; they want to desecrate my corpse.”

Musk added: “At this point, I think I’m at the top of the list for a lot of homicidal maniacs. They’re doing the same thing to me that they did to Trump, which is that they’re making it sound like if you kill me, you’re a hero.”

One Indiana-based Internet sicko threatened to “gut” Musk and drag “his corpse through the streets.”

Musk knew full well the risk he was taking when he decided to support Donald Trump. He knew the Biden administration would weaponize the government against him. But he did so anyway. That took guts. He didn’t need all this. He could’ve simply sailed along, avoided controversy, and continued to make billions on his Tesla sales. Instead, he chose to oppose the leftist forces that are wrecking the United States. He really has pledged his life and his fortune.

This isn’t to say that Musk has endured what, for example, the Declaration’s New Jersey delegation suffered. Those five — Abraham Clark, John Hart, Francis Hopkinson, Richard Stockton, and John Witherspoon — lost pretty much everything. As William Bennett wrote in his appropriately titled Our Sacred Honor, “The Hessian soldiers aggressively pursued Hart, who had to leave his wife at her sickbed and go into hiding. He finally returned to his farm, now destroyed, to find his wife had died from the trauma, his children scattered. He died a despondent man a few years later.”

Still, Musk is being threatened with death. How serious are the threats? It’s hard to know. But how serious were the threats on Donald Trump’s life?

Musk doesn’t have Secret Service protection, either. But, come to think of it, neither did Trump — with the notable exception of Sean Curran.

Prior to all this, Musk spent $44 billion to ensure a free-speech platform on the Internet, and now, next to Trump, he’s the most hated man in America. All this for having denounced DEI, wokeism, bureaucratic bloat, and obscene spending, and for trying to keep our federal government from going off a fiscal cliff.

You’re welcome, America.

We wonder: Has anyone ever sacrificed more wealth to advance the causes of Liberty and limited government? As Musk himself said a long time ago when reflecting on the price he paid for Twitter, “$44 billion was not the cost of Twitter. It was the cost of free speech.”

It wasn’t always this way, though. As Walter Isaacson writes in his 2023 biography of Musk:

Musk had never been very political. Like many techies, he was liberal on social issues but with a dollop of libertarian resistance to regulations and political correctness. He contributed to the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and then Hillary Clinton, and he was a vocal critic of Donald Trump in the 2016 election. “He doesn’t seem to have the sort of character that reflects well on the United States,” he told CNBC.

But after Trump won, Musk became cautiously optimistic that he might govern as a renegade independent rather than a resentful right winger. “I thought that maybe some of the crazier stuff he said during the campaign was just a performance, and he would land in a more sensible place,” he says.

A month after the 2016 election, Musk was convinced by a good friend, fellow tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel — a libertarian who was also an early Trump supporter — to meet with Trump and other tech CEOs at Trump Tower. As Isaacson writes, “Musk thought the meeting was odd but that he found Trump to be friendly.” “He seems kind of nuts,” Musk said afterward, “but he may turn out okay.”

It was during Joe Biden’s disastrous term that Musk’s not-so-subtle move rightward began to alarm his leftist friends. By then, he was attending GOP fundraisers hosted by former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and then tweeting out his reassurances: “To be clear, I support the left half of the Republican Party and the right half of the Democratic Party!”

As I wrote of Musk a little over a year ago: “Whatever eccentricities and human frailties the man has, his commitment to the cause of free speech isn’t one of them. Let’s face it: It’s become increasingly apparent that Musk didn’t buy Twitter to expand his financial fortune. Nor did he buy it just to slap a fancy X on it. He bought it because he understood that free speech is fundamental to a free and prosperous society, and he saw it slipping away.”

The man is a patriot. By the time of the first assassination attempt on Trump, Musk had seen more than enough.

Clearly, Trump appreciates Musk’s sacrifice. As he told Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo yesterday: “What he’s done is unbelievable. … He’s found hundreds of billions of dollars worth of fake contracts, and I’ve read them. Just a tiny portion of them. The other night, transgender surgery on mice. … The whole thing’s a scam, and you’ll find, ultimately, that the money that they sent comes back to a lot of the people that made those deals.”

“He’s done a great job,” Trump concluded, “and he’s paying a price for it. He didn’t need this. … He actually is a real patriot. This is something that’s really not good for him, and yet he’s doing it.”