Elon Musk’s Political Weapon
7 min read
On the day that Elon Musk announced his intention to buy Twitter in April 2022, I tried to game out how the acquisition might go. Three scenarios seemed plausible. There was a weird/chaotic timeline, where Musk actually tried to improve the platform, but mostly just floated harebrained schemes like putting tweets on the blockchain. There was a timeline where Musk essentially reverted Twitter to its founding ethos—one that had a naive and simplistic idea of real-time global conversation. And then there was the worst-case scenario: the dark timeline and its offshoot, the darkest-darkest timeline. Here’s how I described that one:
The darkest-darkest timeline is the one where the world’s richest man runs a communications platform in a truly vengeful, dictatorial way, which involves Musk outright using Twitter as a political tool to promote extreme right-wing agendas and to punish what he calls brain-poisoned liberals.
Some 29 months later, this appears to be the timeline we’ve living in. But even my grim predictions failed to anticipate the intensity of Musk’s radicalization. He is no longer teasing at his anti-woke views or just asking questions to provoke a response. To call him a troll or a puckish court jester is to sugarcoat what’s really going on: Musk has become one of the chief spokespeople of the far right’s political project, and he’s reaching people in real time at a massive scale with his message.
Since his endorsement of Donald Trump in July, Musk has become the MAGA movement’s second-most-influential figure after the nominee himself (sorry, J. D. Vance), and the most significant node in the Republican Party’s information system. Musk and his platform are to this election what Rupert Murdoch and Fox News were to past Republican campaigns—cynical manipulators and poisonous propaganda machines, pumping lies and outrage into the American political bloodstream.
Though the mask has been off for a while, Musk’s intentions have become even more blatant recently. Following Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, in which Swift labeled herself a “childless cat lady” in reference to an insult deployed by Vance, Musk publicly offered to impregnate the pop star. And just this past weekend, Musk did the following:
- amplified a conspiracy theory that ABC had leaked sample debate questions to the Harris campaign
- falsely claimed that “the Dems want to take your kids”
- fueled racist lies about immigrants eating pets
- shared with his nearly 200 million followers on X that “Trump must win” to “preserve freedom and meritocracy in America”
- insinuated that it was suspicious that “no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” adding a thinking-face emoji. He subsequently deleted the post and argued that it was a joke that had been well received in private. “Turns out jokes are WAY less funny if people don’t know the context and the delivery is plain text,” he wrote in a follow-up on X.
Whether Musk is telling the truth about his assassination post or offering up a feeble excuse for his earnest trolling doesn’t matter. Although he’s trying to explain this post away as just a harmless bit of context collapse, what he’s really revealing is the extent to which he is captured by his audience, pecking out posts that delight the only cohort willing to offer the attention and respect he craves. The parallels to Trump may be obvious at this point, but they also account for Musk’s ability to dominate news cycles.
Like Trump in his Apprentice and The Art of the Deal eras, Musk before his political obsessions was a celebrity famous in a different, mostly nonpolitical context. Although Musk’s volatility, contrarianism, and disdain for the press were a matter of record before his MAGA turn, his carefully constructed popular image was that of a billionaire innovator and rocket scientist (Musk was reportedly an inspiration for Tony Stark’s character in the Iron Man movie franchise). Which is to say: Many people experienced Musk’s right-wing radicalization not as inevitable, but as a shocking departure. Right-wing diehards amplified him with glee, as proof of the ascendance of their movement, while liberals and the media amplified him as a distressing example of the proliferation of online brain worms in a certain slice of Silicon Valley.
That Musk is polarizing is important, but what allows him to attract attention is this change of context. A far-right influencer like Charlie Kirk or Alex Jones is expected to spread vile racist conspiracies—that is what they’ve always done to earn their living. But as with Trump in his 2016 campaign, there is still a lingering novelty to Musk’s role as MAGA’s minister of propaganda. Many people, for example, still don’t understand why a man with unlimited resources might want to spend most of his time acting as a political party’s in-house social-media team. Musk has been a troll for a while, but his popular image as a savvy entrepreneur stayed intact until only recently. He was the subject of a largely flattering, best-selling biography as recently as last year. He appeared on the cover of this magazine in 2013 as a contender for the world’s greatest living inventor. In fact, even when Musk muses about how strange it is that no one has tried to shoot Harris, popular news outlets still cover it as a departure from an imagined status quo. On Monday, a New York Times article described Musk, a man who recently hosted a fawning interview with Donald Trump on X and has amplified conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate, as “the world’s richest man,” who “has established a reputation as an edgy plutocrat not bound by social conventions when it comes to expressing his opinions.”
That nearly every one of Musk’s utterances is deemed newsworthy makes him a perfect vector for right-wing propaganda. Take Musk’s role in spreading the nonsense about Haitian residents in Springfield, Ohio. According to an analysis delivered by the journalist Gaby Del Valle on Vox’s Today, Explained podcast, Musk replied to a tweet by Kirk on September 8, in which the influencer had shared a screenshot from a Springfield resident on Facebook claiming that Haitians in the area were eating ducks, geese, and pets. Musk’s reply served to amplify the claim to his followers and admirers just two days before the presidential debate, where it was directly referenced by Trump onstage. The lies “left the ecosystem of right-wing Twitter partially because Elon Musk got involved,” Del Valle said. Like Trump before him, Musk is able to act as a clearinghouse for the fringier ideas coming from the far-right fever swamps.
Musk’s is the most followed account on X and, as its owner, he has reportedly asked engineers to algorithmically boost his posts on the platform. (Musk has denied that his tweets are deliberately amplified, but the platform shows them even to people who don’t follow him.) The architecture of the site, most notably the platform’s algorithmically sorted “For You” feed, routinely features Musk and news about Musk, which increases the likelihood that anything the billionaire shares will reach a wider audience on a service that is still at least somewhat influential in shaping American political discourse. It sounds conspiratorial to suggest that Musk is tweaking the algorithmic dials on his site or using X as a political weapon, but the truth is that Musk doesn’t even need to demand that his company boost a specific message. Musk has spent nearly two years installing his own account as X’s main character and shaping the platform’s architecture in his own image. The politics of X are inextricably linked to Musk’s own politics.
It would be far too simplistic to suggest that X is the reason for the chaos of our current political moment, or that Musk is solely responsible for the dangerous rhetoric that has contributed to terrorizing Haitian residents and thoroughly disrupting life in Springfield. Trump and Vance chose to amplify these messages too, and doubled down when called out on it. X is a comparatively small platform, past its prime. It was full of garbage before Musk bought the site, and its architecture goaded users into being the worst versions of themselves long before the billionaire’s heel turn. But under Musk’s stewardship, X has become the worst version of itself—a platform whose every policy and design choice seems intended to snuff out our better angels and efficiently raise our national political temperature.
X under Musk is a pressure cooker and an insidious force—not necessarily because it is as influential as it once was but because, to those who can’t quit it, the platform offers the impression that it is a mirror to the world. One hallmark of Fox News is its ability to conjure a political perma-crisis, in order to instill a pervasive sense of fear in its audience. X, with Musk as its de facto director of programming, has created an information ecosystem that operates in much the same way. But the effect isn’t felt just among MAGA true believers.
As we lurch closer to Election Day, it’s easy to feel as if we’ve all entered the Great Clenching—a national moment of assuming the crash-landing position and bracing for impact. One gets the sense that the darkest forces in American life are accelerating, that politicians, powerful billionaires, and regular citizens alike are emboldened in the worst way or further radicalized. Every scandal, gaffe, and tragedy seems to take on a new political significance—as a harbinger of a potential electoral outcome or an indicator of societal unraveling. And it is exactly this feeling that Musk and his platform stoke and feed off every day.
