What happens when the worlds billionaire starts to crave political muscle? Chaos reigns.
This election season, Elon Musk has thrown his support behind Donald Trump and other authoritarian figures worldwide. Last month he publicly endorsed Donald Trump adding to the list of political maneuvers he has engaged in since purchasing Twitter (now rebranded as X). Notably, he reinstated Trump’s account shortly after acquiring the platform. Recently, Musk also hired a Republican operative experienced in voter mobilization to aid Trump’s campaign.
Musk, the techie billionaire, owner of Telsa, SpaceX and X commands significant influence and loyalty in certain circles. Under his leadership, X has become one of the most powerful social platforms for political discourse, but it has also emerged as a hub for misinformation and radical messaging that spreads like wildfire. Lately, Musk himself has been using the platform excessively and incessantly to disseminate misinformation and radical rhetoric.
According to a new report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Musk has posted 50 false election claims on X this year alone, garnering a staggering 1.2 billion views. None of these posts have been flagged by X’s supposed fact-checking system. He even reposted a faked version of Kamala Harris’s first campaign video with an altered voice track sounding like Harris and saying she doesn’t “know the first thing about running the country” and is the “ultimate diversity hire”. Musk tagged the video as “amazing,” and it has since gained hundreds of millions of views.
Reports suggest that Musk’s influence extended to Britain’s recent summer riots, with X playing a crucial role in spreading false information about an attack on schoolgirls. Furthermore, Musk not only publicly confronted the elected leader but also used X to undermine their authority and incite violence. He allowed instigators of hate to spread lies, retweeting them himself further, thus showing his support for them. Musk has even ominously predicted a future civil war over immigration at least eight times in the past 10 months.
Musk has sacked at least half its trust and safety team. According to a report in El Pais published last year, Twitter under Musk approved 83% of censorship requests from authoritarian governments. In Turkey, just two days before the elections, all accounts critical of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan were blocked. Similarly, in India, X removed content related to the BBC documentary critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. So much for Musk calling himself a “free speech absolutist”. Before Musk’s takeover, Twitter complied with 50% of such requests, in line with the compliance rate indicated in the company’s last transparency report. But ever since Musk got control the figure jumped to 83%.
Musk appears increasingly intoxicated by his own power, displaying hypocrisy where trust becomes mistrust and safety equates to censorship. He believes fervently that wealth can buy power, sway power. Although Musk told The Atlantic this month that he would accept the results of the 2024 election, he added a caveat: “If there are questions of election integrity, they should be properly investigated and neither be dismissed out of hand nor unreasonably questioned.” He continued, “If, after review of the election results, it turns out that Kamala wins, that win should be recognized and not disputed.”
Musk is a man of many faces, as we well know. While many are hoping for a Kamala Harris victory, Musk is betting on Trump—a once-upon-a-time billionaire—to return to the White House, perhaps seeing in him a vehicle to extend his own influence. After all, chaos begets chaos, and a billionaire trumps billionaire.
