Elon Musk, Trump and MAGA

19-20 September
Elon Musk Is Debasing American Society
He’s not just enabling trolls; he’s personally endorsing their posts.
By Thomas Chatterton Williams
(The Atlantic) … When Elon Musk acquired Twitter and changed its name to X, he promptly went about stripping its capacity for content moderation, reinstating extremist accounts, and boosting the reach and visibility of the worst trolls. I have heard many blithe rationalizations of the pragmatic and even salutary benefits of “knowing what people really think.” But the pervasiveness and normalization of what was, until very recently, niche and stigmatized bigotry has been astonishing to witness. Although there was plenty of racism on the internet during Trump’s first and second campaigns, it wasn’t this ubiquitous on mainstream networks such as Twitter. On Musk’s X, the racism has now become so relentless and self-confident that it amounts to a genuine qualitative difference.
“If I had to summarize the intent of X’s algorithm at this point, it would be twofold,” Sam Harris remarked this week on his Making Sense podcast. “The first is to make Elon even more famous than he is. And the second is to make every white user of the platform more racist.

What Happened to Elon Musk
A conversation with Charlie Warzel about how the tech billionaire became a mouthpiece for MAGA
By Lora Kelley
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.
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 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.
… 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?
Elon Musk Has Reached a New Low
Welcome to the darkest timeline.
By Charlie Warzel
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.

18 September
How Elon Musk amplified content from a suspected Russian election interference plot
Musk, apparently unaware of the company’s Russia funding source, engaged with content from Tenet Media and its creators at least 60 times.
(NBC) As Elon Musk increasingly weighed in on politics in the last several years, he used his massive following on his social media app X to repeatedly amplify content from a company that appears to be at the center of an alleged Russian covert operation to manipulate U.S. public opinion ahead of the 2024 election.
Musk, one of the world’s richest people, boosted content from creators and accounts tied to Tenet Media at least 60 times, resharing the operation’s posts and engaging in back-and-forth replies with Tenet’s paid pundits on X.
Musk’s posts, shared with his 198 million followers, put Russia-aligned conservative talking points in front of possibly tens of millions of eyeballs, according to the viewership data published by X, and he did so apparently without knowledge of the alleged Russian money behind the operation.

Elon Musk boosts fake Trump rally bomb threat and false claims about the election
CNN — Elon Musk is using his social media platform to promote misinformation about the presidential candidates in the lead up to the November election, amplifying false claims Wednesday about a Trump rally bomb threat and immigrants eating pets in Ohio.
While Musk’s posting of provocative, incendiary content on X is nothing new, the speed with which he has promoted false claims in recent days is striking given the breadth of Musk’s digital reach, with his posts regularly finding their way atop users’ feeds.

17 September
11 WTF Moments From ‘Character Limit,’ the Book About How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter
The billionaire’s takeover of the platform has been a very public disaster. The action behind the scenes was even crazier
(RollingStone) Elon Musk‘s tumultuous takeover and rebranding of Twitter — now X — played out in very public fashion: the $44 billion offer, an attempt to walk it back, and a lawsuit that forced Musk to complete the deal were followed by massive layoffs, a spike in misinformation and extremism on the platform, botched updates, and the return of notorious bad actors whose accounts had been permanently suspended — as well as an exodus of the advertisers that account for the site’s revenue. …
Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, a new book out today from New York Times tech reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mac, takes readers behind the scenes of the unusual acquisition and its messy consequences. …
Blowing a Fortune on a Fake Private Eye
When Musk got in trouble for smearing a British diver involved in the 2018 rescue of a Thai youth soccer team in a flooded cave as a “pedo,” he made efforts to prove the unfounded accusation true. To that end, his wealth manager and CEO of his brain implant company Neuralink, Jared Birchall, paid $52,000 to someone he thought was a private investigator to dig up dirt on the man. In fact, their sleuth was a former convict without credentials who “fed Birchall and Musk false information” about the diver. Musk managed to beat a defamation suit anyway.
Musk’s Drug Habits Almost Led to an Intervention
Musk has been open about his use of drugs like ketamine, to the alarm of leadership at Tesla and SpaceX. As Conger and Mac report, he has also been known to take LSD or ecstasy at parties, and to stay up late tweeting on Ambien, a drug that is meant to be a sleep aid. This chemical cocktail led to such erratic behavior that in early 2022, shortly before Musk would launch his bid for Twitter, close family “began discussing a possible intervention that could make him aware of his issues.” Musk was “unreceptive” to their concerns. …

Gary Marcus How Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and the Silicon Valley elite manipulate the public (paywall)

16 September
Secret Service ‘aware’ of Elon Musk post about Harris, Biden
(BBC) The US Secret Service says it is “aware” of a social media post by Elon Musk in which he said that “no one is even trying” to assassinate President Joe Biden or Vice-President Kamala Harris.
Mr Musk has since deleted the post and said it was intended as a joke.
His post on X, formerly Twitter, came just hours after the suspected attempted assassination of Donald Trump at his golf course in Florida on Sunday.
The tech billionaire is a close ally of Trump, who has vowed to enlist Mr Musk to run a “government efficiency commission” if he wins a second term as US president.
The controversial tech mogul is considered a close ally of Trump and formally endorsed him in the aftermath of a separate assassination attempt against the former president that took place at a rally on 13 July in Butler, Pennsylvania.
In that attempt, the suspect fired multiple rounds, injuring Trump and killing an attendee at the rally.
Since then, Mr Musk has often tweeted or re-posted messages critical of both Biden and Harris and in support of Trump.

6 September
How Elon Musk Is Influencing Donald Trump
(NYT) Their fast-evolving political friendship has become a potential minefield, as Mr. Musk’s sprawling businesses may present conflicts of interest if Mr. Trump is elected in November.

5 September
Trump says Musk could head ‘government efficiency’ force
Donald Trump said he would enlist Elon Musk to run a “government efficiency commission” if he wins a second term as US president.
Speaking to the Economic Club of New York on Thursday, Trump said the X owner had agreed to head a task force to conduct a “complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government” and make “recommendations for drastic reforms.”
The two men have alluded to the idea for several weeks, but Thursday’s comments were Trump’s most direct indication yet that he might want Mr Musk to play a role in his potential second administration.
“I look forward to serving America if the opportunity arises,” Mr Musk posted on X on Thursday morning. “No pay, no title, no recognition is needed.”

From Forbes: Musk, who says he’s worried about population collapse, has ten children with three women, including triplets and two sets of twins.

24 July
Elon Musk is going all-in on Donald Trump
CNN — At first glance, Elon Musk and Donald Trump wouldn’t seem to be natural allies.
One has made cutting greenhouse emissions a major business selling point. The other questions the need to cut emissions at all, denouncing most forms of clean energy as at best unnecessary and at worst destructive.
One wants to move away from fossil fuels and convert all car sales worldwide to electric vehicles. The other believes EVs will be an economic disaster for America and that the nation should produce and burn more oil.
But as of last Saturday, Musk is now publicly endorsing Trump’s presidential reelection bid. And the Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the matter, reported Monday that Musk is now planning on supporting Trump’s presidential campaign by committing $45 million a month to a new super PAC backing the former president.

2023

3 October
‘We need to get to Mars before I die.’
Exclusive excerpt from ‘Elon Musk’ by biographer Walter Isaacson
By Brett Tingley
(Space.com) Walter Isaacson’s sweeping biography of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk reveals what drives the innovative entrepreneur to consistently push the envelope.
The founder and CEO of SpaceX not only leads the most revolutionary and active spaceflight company on the planet, but also heads the electric car company Tesla and social media giant X (formerly known as Twitter), to name just a few of Musk’s many endeavors.
Biographer and journalist Walter Isaacson spent two years with Musk in order to write Elon Musk, a new, best-selling biography that explores what makes the entrepreneur and innovator tick.