After the Bell: Trump and Musk’s mad musings on Fort Knox’s gold reserves reflect far-right obsessions

In the 1964 James Bond film Goldfinger, 007 thwarts an attempt to contaminate the gold reserves of Fort Knox with a dirty atomic bomb — an attack that would have rendered the bullion worthless, triggering a meltdown in the US economy. 

Six decades later, Elon Musk — who in the eyes of many resembles a Bond supervillain straight out of central casting — will soon go to Fort Knox to inspect the reserves, along with US President Donald Trump, to ensure that none of the gold has been pilfered. 

Musk got this ball rolling on 17 February 2025 with a post on X, the social media platform he owns, in which he raised the possibility that the gold may indeed have been stolen.

Trump then raised the issue last week during a speech to the Republican Governors’ Association. 

“We’re going to open up the doors. I’m going to see if we have gold there. We want to find out, did anybody steal the gold in Fort Knox?” he said. 

Trump subsequently announced that he and his sidekick Musk — who is overseeing the slashing and burning of the US federal government — would go to Fort Knox together to inspect the reserves. 

For the record, Fort Knox is supposed to hold 147.3 million ounces of gold, which is worth more than $420-billion at current red-hot prices and accounts for about 60% of US reserves of the precious metal.

Gold in total accounts for about 75% of US reserves because, unlike other countries, it cannot hold the greenback as a foreign reserve currency. 

So Fort Knox is a big bloody deal and, if it has been ransacked, the consequences for the US economy would be dire. 

But why the sudden speculation from Musk and Trump that an epic heist has perhaps been pulled off at the heavily guarded facility in Kentucky, which has security features that should make it impenetrable? 

For starters, such speculation is hardly new; it has just been raised into the wider public domain from the fever swamps of the US far right by the public musings of Trump and Musk. 

CMI Gold & Silver, the oldest bullion dealer in the US, offers a brief but insightful blog post on the issue. 

Read more: The Fort Knox gold conspiracy theory

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJdf67PwmS8

It pointedly notes that the US Treasury Department is “said” to conduct Fort Knox audits annually, but critics allege they are “... not fully transparent and independent”. 

The last major public inspection, which allowed members of Congress and the media inside the vaults, took place in 1974. 

CMI notes that the decades-old conspiracy theories about Fort Knox fall into two broad categories. 

One holds that much or all of the gold has been stolen; the other that many of the gold bars are fake.

Neither scenario, it must be said, seems remotely plausible, but the US far right historically has been drawn to conspiracy theories.  

Consider, for example, this passage describing its conspiracy-riven perceptions:

“... the country is infused with a network of communist agents ... the whole apparatus of education, religion, the press, and the mass media are engaged in a common effort to paralyse the resistance of ordinary Americans.” 

You would be forgiven if you thought this was a contemporary depiction of the MAGA movement and Trump, who keeps banging on about how the “Lunatic Radical Left” has taken hold of all of these institutions — with the notable exception of religion — in a diabolical effort to destroy the “real America”. 

But it is in fact a passage from the great US historian Richard Hofstadter’s classic 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”, which clinically dissects this conspiratorial cast of the conservative mind as a recurring thread in American history to explain its state of play in the 1960s.

With its disdain for science or evidence — which easily gives rise to conspiracy theories — in pursuit of an agenda of raw power in the hands of white Christian males, Hofstadter’s observations of the US right remain astute in 2025. 

For example, many Trump supporters believe that the 2020 US presidential election was stolen, that Barack Obama is a Muslim communist who was born in Kenya and that leading Democrats are part of a cabal of cannibalistic child molesters engaging in Satanic rituals. 

If you believe this kind of nonsense, you might actually believe that Fort Knox has been robbed of its gold. 

And the Fort Knox conspiracies reflect another historical obsession of the US right: its infatuation with the precious metal. 

Hardline US conservatives such as the late talk radio host Rush Limbaugh and former Fox News host Glenn Beck — who spouts conspiracies constantly on his podcast — are among a long list of prominent right-wing personalities who punt or have punted gold. 

Conservative Republicans have also long pushed for a return to the gold standard, which would see the US dollar linked directly to the precious metal. Former US president Richard Nixon removed the greenback’s convertibility to gold in 1971. 

I don’t mean to dish gold as an asset class or store of value or express an opinion about it. There are legitimate reasons for including or excluding it from your investment portfolio, depending on your tastes and appetite for risk, and lots of informed debate about the subject. 

But I would simply note that for the US hard right, gold almost seems to have a magical allure, which has an attraction if you engage in magical thinking. And if the gold standard was back in place, many American conservatives see it as a path to abolishing the US Federal Reserve, another target of their wrath. 

Musk and Trump’s concerns about Fort Knox’s reserves are also a red rag to gold bulls at a time when the price of the precious metal has been scaling record peaks, driven by emerging market central bank demand and the swirling uncertainties unleashed by Trump 2.0.

Gold hit new historic highs this week of more than $2,900 an ounce and it seems only a matter of time before it reaches $3,000 an ounce. 

“Doubts about US reserves could fuel increased demand from investors and central banks, potentially sending prices soaring,” Mining.com notes. 

Read more: Fort Knox explainer: Why verifying the US gold reserves matters

Perhaps it was simply a coincidence, but the gold price’s record highs earlier this week were reached in the wake of Trump’s latest comments on the matter over the weekend. 

A conspiratorial mindset might just see an attempt to stoke the market on this front — just saying! 

But who would have imagined when Goldfinger was being filmed that six decades hence a white South African with far-right leanings would be inspecting the gold in Fort Knox, much of it tainted by the blood of black migrant workers exploited by an industrial meat grinder that laid the economic foundations of apartheid.  

Fact can indeed be stranger than fiction. But one of the many deplorable things about the far right is its disinterest in facts and preference for fiction. DM