Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance have something in common besides their fealty to President Donald Trump: They both have Indian partners and really want you to know about it.
Vance makes frequent mention of wife Usha Vance’s Indian heritage, most recently last month at a diplomatic event in Switzerland alongside Asim Munir, the chief of defense forces in Pakistan.
“I’ve joked that I have two very, very important people in my life: an Indian and a Pakistani,” Vance said. “The Indian is my wife, and the Pakistani is Field Marshal Munir.”
When white supremacists targeted his wife during the 2025 election, Vance mounted a weak defense, describing her ethnicity in less-than-flattering terms.
“Look, I love my wife so much. I love her because she’s who she is,” he told Megyn Kelly on her SiriusXM show. “Obviously, she’s not a white person, and we’ve been accused — attacked — by some white supremacists over that. But I just — I love Usha. She’s such a good mom, she’s such a brilliant lawyer and I’m so proud of her.”
At a Turning Point USA event in November 2025, he brought up his wife’s faith instead of her ethnicity, telling the crowd of 10,000 college students that he’d prefer Usha, who is Hindu, to be Christian, but it’s not a problem for him that she isn’t. (Good thing, too, because it sounds like she is not interested.)
All of these remarks drew some backlash. After the Turning Point USA remarks, Suhag Shukla, the executive director of the Hindu American Foundation, told The New York Times that the vice president was “basically saying that … this aspect of [Usha] is just not enough.”
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Now Musk is getting into the “let me tell you about my Indian partner and make it as weird as possible” game. Last week in an interview with The Economist, the SpaceX founder and Trump ally claimed he couldn’t possibly be racist because he has a partner, Canadian tech executive Shivon Zilis, with Indian heritage.
“My partner is … half Indian, and I have four children with her. One of them was named after a famous Indian physicist. So I would say I’m not racist,” said Musk, who’s previously said that “Whites are a rapidly dying minority” and supported far-right, nationalist political figures across Europe.
Musk, the world’s richest man, was referring to one of the couple’s sons, Strider Sekhar, who’s named after both a “Lord of the Rings” character and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, an Indian American Nobel laureate physicist.
There’s a third thing Musk and Vance have in common, besides Trump and Indian women: their “great replacement theory” views.
During Vance’s run for Senate in Ohio in 2022, he framed current immigration levels as an intentional effort by Democrats to shift demographic and electoral power. Vance also shared Musk’s opinion piece backing Germany’s far-right party in 2025, calling it an “interesting piece.”
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Why can’t these two men ― both white, both seemingly interested in whiteness being threatened by immigrants ― stop bringing up their Indian wives and partners?
This type of behavior can be seen as a ‘dog whistle’ or as a way to ‘absolve’ racism, according to experts.
Musk and Vance are two of the most influential white men in America. But in one respect, they’re not so different from the average white person who can’t resist bringing up their nonwhite partner any time accusations of racism come up, said Jennifer Ho, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado Boulder.
“I have lived in four different states over the last four decades of my life and white people of various genders have mentioned their nonwhite spouses, best friends, co-workers, adopted family and in-laws in my presence, sometimes to hundreds of people in a Zoom meeting,” Ho, who’s Asian, told HuffPost.
Why Musk and Vance might be doing it in this particular moment may have to do with the toxicity of the “r” word. No, not that one, though Musk is a fan of it: the other “r” word, racism. While the Trump administration may be actively working to dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion programs, Ho said there’s still a taint, at least among the general public, for anyone to be categorized as a racist.
“Musk has insisted that he can’t be racist and his partner and employees are a shield he is using to protect himself against charges of racism,” the professor said. (In his interview with The Economist, Musk also brought up the diversity of employees at his companies as an argument against his purported racist views.)
“In some ways, it’s a kind of dog whistle to his admirers,” Ho said. “He can ‘own the libs’ by showing people he can’t possibly be racist because people in his intimate orbit, and his own bloodline, are not-white ― or partially nonwhite.”
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Nancy Wang Yuen, an ethnic studies professor at Crafton Hills College in Yucaipa, California, said the belief that having a partner of color ― or a best friend of color ― absolves someone of racism is itself rooted in a racist logic.
“Relationships with people of color do not automatically translate to racial awareness or anti-racist values,” said Wang Yuen, the author of “Reel Inequality: Hollywood Actors and Racism.”
“Women of color, in particular, are often fetishized by white male partners who may continue to hold racist and sexist beliefs unless they actively engage with and challenge the intersecting systems of racism and sexism that shape U.S. society,” she told HuffPost.
Musk and Vance having nonwhite partners and espousing pro-white views may seem irrational and dissonant. As one bewildered Reddit user wrote of the Vances recently, “I don’t get it, how is there so much racism with an Indian wife?” But historically, there’s nothing especially unusual about the dynamic. White men have long reconciled racist beliefs with relationships with Asian women.
“During the various wars in Asian nations it was not uncommon to have soldiers engage sexually and romantically with Asian women, all the while they are killing Asian men and, in some cases, deploying the most racist and dehumanizing language and imagery when they do the killing,” Ho said.
“It’s disappointing — you would hope that things would change in the 21st century, but the lure of white supremacy is too potent,” she added.
Interestingly, many white nationalists on the far right today have also sought Asian partners, holding Asian women up as the ideal, submissive partner. (More often than not, it’s East Asian women rather than South Asian women like Usha Vance and Zilis.)
So all of this is to say, the hypocrisy of these men isn’t anything new (though hopefully both learn how to speak of their “obviously not a white person” partners in more flattering terms).
“I think they see the immigrants and nonwhite people in their orbit as exceptional, just like they are exceptional,” Ho said. “Everyone else is an ‘other.’”
