What Happened to Elon Musk

Elon Musk has said some shocking things online in recent days, even by his standards. He amplified conspiracy theories about the presidential debate, promoted false claims about the Democrats, and wrote a now-deleted post suggesting that it was suspicious that “no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala” (in follow-up posts, Musk claimed that he was just joking). I spoke with my colleague Charlie Warzel, who covers technology, about how Musk, a man once known primarily for his inventions and contributions in Silicon Valley, became a mouthpiece for the MAGA movement.

From the Fringes

Lora Kelley: Elon Musk has been crossing into the worlds of conspiracism and disinformation for a while—but he seems to be taking things even further lately. Why might he be going this far? What’s in it for him?

Charlie Warzel: It’s complicated, but it’s also deceptively simple. We can’t be inside this guy’s head, but he does seem to truly feed off of and love attention. Musk has been moving in a right-wing direction for a long time. But his purchase of Twitter and how he mishandled it—with advertisers, and de-verifying users—really alienated people and accelerated his turn. Many people used to think of him as the Thomas Edison of the 21st century. He was branded as this innovator and savvy businessman. When he walked into Twitter and made a mess of it, he lost cachet among this group of people who saw him as a genius. Now he’s trying very hard to appeal to the only people who really care about him anymore—including those who reside in the far right corners of the internet.

Lora: Why is Musk getting so involved in this presidential election, and with Trump (who apparently said he would give Musk a role leading a government-efficiency commission if he wins)? Is he making some kind of play to be a great man of history, or is he after power in a potential Trump administration?

Charlie: Elon Musk basically bought Donald Trump at the top. He endorsed him moments after the first assassination attempt, when Trump was riding a wave of positive attention, when Joe Biden was still in the race and it looked like Trump was probably going to dominate him. So much has changed since Musk endorsed Trump in July. If he were truly a savvy political operator, he would be hedging his bets right now, saying I can’t fully alienate myself from one political party, because I have all these government contracts and so many other interests that I need to be able to at least sit in a room with with Democrats.

I think the fact that he has effectively just become the in-house social-media team for Donald Trump speaks to the fact that he’s not just making a political calculation. He’s not playing a game of 3-D chess. It seems to me that he’s truly radicalized.

Here’s a guy who has, like, six jobs and has decided to spend most of his time tweeting propaganda for a political candidate and hosting him on his platform. Does he want another job? It’s entirely possible. But I really think what he wants more than anything else is to be that sort of Rupert Murdoch person for this political group. He seems to be trying to fit himself into the role of power broker.

Lora: In some ways, Musk’s turn feels surprising. But has he always sort of been like this?

Charlie: I started covering Musk in the 2010s. And there were signs of this stuff—picking the fight with the cave diver, the way he would dismiss claims around Tesla, irresponsibly tweeting in ways that had the power to move stock prices. He was a loose cannon and showed a lot of signs of his disregard for the rule of law and authority. But for most people, that was overshadowed by the image of Elon Musk, the great innovator.

Because of his background and fame in tech, everything that he does that seems outrageous becomes newsworthy. Media organizations don’t cover everything that Alex Jones says, because Alex Jones has been a conspiracy theorist since the beginning. But when Musk muses trollishly about the assassination of Kamala Harris, as he did last weekend on X, it is covered in this way of: What happened to this guy?

Not only did his previous branding keep people from really seeing what he’s become until it was too late. But it’s also keeping him in the public eye. It allows him, like Trump did in 2016, to garner this outsize attention. There’s this real urge to try to make narrative sense of him.

Lora: How has Musk’s audience shaped his actions?

Charlie: When you’re captured by your audience, you behave in a certain way—in Musk’s case, tweeting a lot and being a troll—and you attract an audience as a result. And then the audience, over time, starts to own you, because you are performing for them. You’re allowing the audience to dictate what it is that you do and say, because you’re so hungry for approval.

Musk has found this group of people who are giving him the attention he wants for doing this. And in the classic social-media way, he’s got to keep coming up with ways to delight them. That usually means increasing the intensity of his posts. If he tweets a conspiracy theory, and people laud him as a truth teller, then next time, that conspiracy theory has to be a little more extreme. You become the person that your followers want you to be, instead of thinking for yourself.

Lora: Musk has this devoted audience on X—but is he changing people’s minds, on or beyond social media? In what ways is Musk actually influential?

Charlie: I don’t get the sense that he is influential in terms of changing minds on social media. It seems like he delights people who already believe all this kind of stuff. Where he is influential is dragging things from the fringes into the mainstream news cycle. He has this massive amplification account—he has the most followed account on the platform, which he obviously also owns. Musk is chained to X, following all kinds of right-wing garbage accounts. He sees it; he amplifies it. It is deemed as newsworthy because of who he is. And then a fringe-y talking point is front-page news. That, I think, is his influence.

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