Elon Musk, Trump and MAGA

Guardian will no longer post on Elon Musk’s X from its official accounts
Platform’s coverage of US election crystallised longstanding concerns about its content, says Guardian

12-13 November
Trump names Elon Musk to lead government efficiency drive
By Daniel Trotta and Eric Beech
Musk and Ramaswamy will lead efficiency department
DOGE intended to dismantle bureaucracy, cut regulations, restructure agencies
Musk and Ramaswamy’s work to conclude by July 4, 2026
Will take ‘advice and guidance’ from outside government, work with OMB
Ramaswamy says he is withdrawing from consideration for Ohio Senate seat
(Reuters) – U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday named Elon Musk to a role aimed at creating a more efficient government, handing even more influence to the world’s richest man who donated millions of dollars to helping Trump get elected.
Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy will co-lead a newly created Department of Government Efficiency, an entity Trump indicated will operate outside the confines of government.
Trump said in a statement that Musk and Ramaswamy “will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.”
Trump said the new department will realize long-held Republican dreams and “provide advice and guidance from outside of government,” signaling the Musk and Ramaswamy roles would be informal, without requiring Senate approval and allowing Musk to remain the head of electric car company Tesla (TSLA.O), social media platform X and rocket company SpaceX.
At Mar-a-Lago, ‘Uncle’ Elon Musk Puts His Imprint on the Trump Transition
He’s on the patio. He’s on the golf course. Everywhere Donald Trump looks, there is the world’s richest man.
(NYT) In nearly every meeting that President-elect Donald J. Trump holds at Mar-a-Lago, alongside him is someone who has been elected to nothing, nominated to nothing and, only a few months ago, had no meaningful relationship with him.
Elon Musk.
The world’s richest person has ascended to a position of extraordinary, unofficial influence in Mr. Trump’s transition process, playing a role that makes him indisputably America’s most powerful private citizen. He has sat in on nearly every job interview with the Trump team and bonded with the Trump family, and he is trying to install his Silicon Valley friends in plum positions in the next administration.
Mr. Trump announced on Tuesday that Mr. Musk would help lead what he called the Department of Government Efficiency, a new body to “dismantle government bureaucracy.” But Mr. Musk’s true influence on the Trump transition effort goes well beyond that posting.
Mr. Musk has assumed an almost mythical aura in Mr. Trump’s inner circle. At Mar-a-Lago one recent evening, he walked into the dining room about 30 minutes after the president-elect did and received a similar standing ovation, according to two people who saw him enter.
Trump says Musk, Ramaswamy will form outside group to advise White House on government efficiency.
According to Politico Playbook, “The bigger picture, however, is how Musk is starting to wear out his welcome with some in Trump’s orbit. After initially making a huge splash with his endorsement, some insiders now say he’s become almost a comical distraction, hanging around Mar-a-Lago, sidling into high-level transition meetings and giving unsolicited feedback on Trump’s personnel decisions. “Elon is getting a little big for his britches,” one insider tells Playbook.

31 October
Elon Musk’s ‘election integrity community’ on X is full of baseless claims
Feed is rife with posts of individuals deemed suspicious and calls for doxxing with little evidence provided of fault

30 October
Judge orders Elon Musk to court over $1 million giveaway in US election
Philadelphia district attorney calls giveaway an illegal lottery
Hearing moved up to Thursday morning from Friday
(Reuters) – A judge ordered all parties, including Elon Musk, to attend a court hearing in Philadelphia on Thursday in a lawsuit seeking to stop a political action committee controlled by the billionaire from awarding $1 million to registered U.S. voters in battleground states ahead of the Nov. 5 U.S. election.

This Is What $44 Billion Buys You
Elon Musk has turned X into a political weapon.
By Charlie Warzel
(The Atlantic) It’s easy to forget that Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter was so rash and ill-advised that the centibillionaire actually tried to back out of it. Only after he was sued and forced into legal discovery did Musk go through with the acquisition, which has been a financial disaster. He’s alienated advertisers and turned the app, now called X, into his personal playground, where he’s the perpetual main character. And for what?
Only Musk can know what he thought he was buying two years ago, though it seems clear the purchase was ideological in nature. In any case, the true value of X—the specific, chaotic return on his investment—has become readily apparent in these teeth-gnashing final days leading up to November 5. For Musk, the platform has become a useful political weapon of confusion, a machine retrofitted to poison the information environment by filling it with dangerous, false, and unsubstantiated rumors about election fraud that can reach mass audiences. How much does it cost to successfully (to use Steve Bannon’s preferred phrasing) flood the zone with shit? Thanks to Musk’s acquisition, we can put a figure on it: $44 billion.

29 October
Why Elon Musk thinks he’ll be f*cked if Trump loses
And he may be.
ROBERT REICH
Why would the world’s richest man be “f*cked” if Trump loses?
Because under a Harris administration, Musk may be held accountable for his many abuses of power — for busting unions and mistreating workers, for using SpaceX and Starlink to monopolize America’s satellite and space infrastructure, and for using his social media platform to knowingly spread dangerous lies.
When I say “may be held accountable,” I don’t mean Musk would be punished for supporting Trump, as Trump has promised to punish his opponents. Instead, Musk’s many possible violations of the law, including some that are quite recent, may finally catch up with him under a Harris administration.
Musk’s daily million-dollar sweepstakes giveaways to people who have registered to vote in battleground states appear to be clear violations of campaign finance law, which makes it illegal to pay money to people to register to vote.
Campaign finance law also makes it illegal for superPACs to coordinate with candidates. As the person in charge of one of the largest superPACs supporting Trump, Musk’s frequent conversations with Trump would appear to run afoul of these provisions, as well.
In addition, Pennsylvania — the state where Musk began his million-dollar sweepstakes — prohibits illegal lotteries and deceiving consumers by not providing a complete set of contest rules including odds of winning and details on how winners are selected.
Musk may also be held accountable for conflicts of interest between his being in “regular contact” with Russian president Vladimir Putin, as reported by The Wall Street Journal last Friday, and his status as one of the most important national security contractors to the U.S. government through his SpaceX and Starlink enterprises.
The Journal reports that Musk’s regular discussions with Putin — confirmed by several current and former U.S., European, and Russian officials — have involved business and geopolitical tensions.

28 October
Why Does Elon Musk Still Have a Security Clearance?
The U.S. government seems to think he’s too big to fail.
By Tom Nichols
(The Atlantic) Yesterday, The New York Times reported that people around Donald Trump are trying to figure out how “to quickly install loyalists in major positions without subjecting them to the risk of long-running and intrusive F.B.I. background checks.” Trump’s people, unsurprisingly, are worried about whether they’d pass a background check: As Atlantic contributor Peter Wehner wrote in September, the MAGA-dominated GOP “is a moral freak show, and freak shows attract freaks”—who tend to have a hard time getting security clearances. The first Trump administration was rife with people (including his son-in-law, Jared Kushner) who were walking national-security risks, none worse than Trump himself. A second term, in which Trump would be free of adult supervision, would be even worse.
Trump is surrounded by people who shouldn’t be given a clearance to open a checking account, much less set foot in a highly classified environment. But Musk has held a clearance for years, despite ringing the insider-threat bells louder than a percussion maestro hammering a giant glockenspiel.

MUSK READ: Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner this morning “sued to halt Elon Musk’s $1 million daily giveaway to voters in battleground states including Pennsylvania, calling it an illegal lottery that skirts state requirements and violates consumer protection laws,” the Philly Inquirer’s Jeremy Roebuck and Chris Palmer report. “The suit, filed in Common Pleas Court in Philadelphia, is the first legal action challenging the controversial sweepstakes launched earlier this month by Musk’s America PAC. It comes a week after the U.S. Justice Department warned the tech billionaire that the giveaway violates federal laws banning inducements to voters.”
(CNN) Philadelphia DA sues Elon Musk and his super PAC over $1M sweepstakes

26 October
Elon Musk worked in US illegally in 1995 after quitting school – report
Washington Post contrasts the episode with the South African multibillionaire’s anti-immigration views
(The Guardian) The boss of Tesla and SpaceX, who has in recent weeks supported Donald Trump’s campaign for a second presidency while promoting the Republican White House nominee’s opposition to “open borders” on his X social media site, has previously maintained that his transition from student to entrepreneur was a “legal grey area”.
But the Washington Post reported Saturday that the world’s wealthiest individual was almost certainly working in the US without correct authorization for a period in 1995 after he dropped out of Stanford University to work on his debut company, Zip2, which sold for about $300m four years later.

Heather Cox Richardson October 25, 2024
A bombshell story last night from the Wall Street Journal reported that billionaire Elon Musk, one of the richest men in the world, who is backing the election of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump with a daily million-dollar sweepstakes giveaway and gifts of tens of millions to the campaign, has been in regular contact with Russian president Vladimir Putin since late 2022. Reporters Thomas Grove, Warren P. Strobel, Aruna Viswanatha, Gordon Lubold, and Sam Schechner said that the conversations “touch on personal topics, business and geopolitical tensions.”
Today, NASA administrator Bill Nelson called for an investigation into the story. “If the story is true that there have been multiple conversations between Elon Musk and the president of Russia,” Nelson told Burgess Everett of Semafor, “then I think that would be concerning, particularly for NASA, for the Department of Defense, for some of the intelligence agencies.”
Musk appears to be making a bid for control of the Republican Party for a number of possible reasons, including so he can continue to score federal contracts and because the high tariffs Trump has promised to place on Chinese imports would guarantee that Musk would have leverage in the electrical vehicle market.
Musk has been in secret contact with Putin since 2022, says bombshell new report
The Russian president even asked the billionaire for a Starlink favor.
(Politico Eu) According to the Journal’s intelligence sources, Musk and Putin continued to have talks into this year, even as Musk began to ramp up his criticism of U.S. military support for Ukraine and became actively involved in the election campaign of Republican candidate and former President Donald Trump.
Putin once asked the entrepreneur to avoid activating his Starlink satellite internet service over Taiwan as a favor to Chinese President Xi Jinping, two people briefed on the request said.

24 October
Elon Musk Is a New Kind of Political Donor
His zealous efforts to help Donald Trump get elected could shape the race.
By Lora Kelley
(The Atlantic) Over the past three months, Elon Musk has mobilized his many resources—his exceptional wealth, far-reaching online platform, and time—for a cause that could have profound effects on his personal fortune and American society: electing Donald Trump.
Musk is going all in: In addition to donating $75 million to America PAC, a group he founded that backs Trump, he has also temporarily relocated to the all-important swing state of Pennsylvania to effectively run Trump’s get-out-the-vote strategy from a war room he set up in Pittsburgh. He has stumped on the trail, hosting a Trump town hall in the auditorium of a Pennsylvania high school last week and telling locals to go “hog wild” on voter registration. And, in his latest stunt, he has offered $1 million a day to registered voters in swing states who sign an America PAC petition backing the First and Second Amendments—a move that the Justice Department reportedly said might be breaking election laws. His efforts may prove consequential: As my colleague Franklin Foer wrote this past weekend, “If Trump wins, it will likely be by a narrow margin that can be attributed to turnout. Musk can tout himself as the single variable of success.”
Musk is far from the only major donor in this race. Bill Gates has reportedly given $50 million to Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, and various billionaires publicly support Harris or Trump. What distinguishes Musk though, beyond his on-the-ground efforts, is his ownership of X. He can spread information (and disinformation) with ease, and stifle views he doesn’t like….

22 October
Ignore Musk’s giant checks — and his effort to sow election doubts
The billionaire’s claims of voter fraud, however unfounded, seem poised to go viral.
(WaPo) Elon Musk’s daily giveaway of million-dollar checks to swing-state voters is generating the buzz he no doubt hoped for. But Mr. Musk’s oversize checks are distracting from a less-visible campaign the world’s richest man is conducting: laying the groundwork to cast doubt on the election results if his favored candidate, former president Donald Trump, loses.
He used in-person rallies across Pennsylvania over the weekend to peddle lies about the integrity of the election. Even though no voting machines in the United States are directly connected to the internet, Mr. Musk repeatedly claimed that they can be easily hacked and that artificial intelligence makes it simpler to do so. “We should not allow voting machines of any kind,” he said in Pittsburgh. “We want paper ballots, in person, with I.D.” In fact, every battleground state in the presidential race already has fully auditable paper trails.

18 October
One big thing Donald Trump and Elon Musk have in common
They both want to crush Tesla’s competition
(The Economist) The bromance between Donald Trump and Elon Musk is, on its face, odd: one man seems terminally stuck in the past, the other is a ceaseless inventor. When it comes to the car industry, Mr Trump has no appreciation for or interest in electrification—the raison d’être of Tesla. Yet on another level their pairing makes sense. By levying huge tariffs on Chinese EVs, Mr Trump would crush Tesla’s biggest competition.

Donald Trump Can’t Stop Talking About Elon Musk
(Bloomberg) Since Musk’s “beautiful endorsement,” Trump’s tone on EVs has become more positive too, underscoring the outsized influence of the Tesla and SpaceX CEO.

17 October
Meet the Candidate: Elon Musk
The billionaire is spending a fortune to support former President Donald J. Trump. But at a town hall event in Pennsylvania, he looked an awful lot like a politician himself.
(NYT) Elon Musk held a town hall on Thursday before an enthusiastic crowd at a suburban high school in Pennsylvania, a state that Mr. Musk has told confidants is the linchpin to former President Donald J. Trump’s re-election hopes.
Is Elon Musk running for president?
Of course not. A South African-born billionaire, Mr. Musk cannot legally run and, anyway, he has invested over $75 million in trying to get Donald J. Trump elected.

16 October
Elon Musk commits $70 million to boost Donald Trump
(AP) — Elon Musk, a tech mogul who is the world’s richest person, plunged more than $70 million into helping Donald Trump and other Republicans win in November’s election, making him one of the biggest donors to GOP causes this campaign season, according to campaign finance disclosures released this week.

7 October
The Phony Populism of Trump and Musk
They are plutocrats masquerading as ordinary Americans.
By Tom Nichols
(The Atlantic) … Trump’s rally on Saturday in Butler, Pennsylvania, was a hall-of-fame entry in political weirdness: Few survivors of an attempted assassination hold a giant lawn party on the spot where they were wounded and someone in the crowd was killed.
… Trump then welcomed the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, to the stage. Things got weirder from there, as Musk—who, it should be noted, is 53 years old—jumped around the stage like a concertgoing teenager who got picked out of the audience to meet the band. Musk then proceeded to explain how democracy is in danger—this, from a man who has turned the platform once known as Twitter into an open zone for foreign propaganda and has amplified various hoaxes. Musk has presented himself on his own platform as a champion of the voiceless and the oppressed, but his behavior reveals him as an enemy of speech that isn’t in his own interest.

6 October
Elon Musk Bends the Knee to Donald Trump
The alliance between the billionaire and the politician is pure strongman politics.
By Helen Lewis
(The Atlantic) … The pact between Musk and Trump gives both men something they want—a megaphone for their ideas, a conduit to their fans, an ability to shape the political conversation. Yesterday was supposed to be a celebration of the former president’s miraculous survival and a tribute to the brave Americans who risked their lives to help others in the shooting. Instead it marked an unpredictable alliance between the world’s richest man and the politician who has successfully bullied and flattered him into bending the knee.
19 September
Elon Musk Has Reached a New Low
Welcome to the darkest timeline.
By Charlie Warzel
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

Heather Cox Richardson October 4, 2024
MAGA Republicans are now lying about the federal response to Hurricane Helene in much the same way they lied about Haitian migrants bringing chaos and disease to Springfield, Ohio. Both disinformation efforts are flat-out lies, and both are designed to demonize immigrants. Immigration was the issue Trump was so eager to run on that he demanded Republican lawmakers reject the strong border bill a bipartisan group of lawmakers had hammered out.
But on Sunday, September 29, two days after the hurricane hit, the right-wing organization started by anti-immigrant Trump loyalist Stephen Miller posted: “Billions for Ukraine. Billions for illegal aliens. And what for the Americans? Reprogram every single dollar that FEMA has dedicated to support illegal aliens to go towards Americans who are facing unprecedented devastation!”
Yesterday, in Saginaw, Michigan, Trump echoed Miller, claiming that the Biden administration is botching the hurricane response because it has spent all the money appropriated for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) on “illegal immigrants.”
Early this morning, X owner Elon Musk posted to his more than 200 million followers: “Yes, they are literally using YOUR tax dollars to import voters and disenfranchise you! It is happening right in front of your eyes. And FEMA used up its budget ferrying illegals into the country instead of saving American lives. Treason.” On Wednesday, Dana Mattioli, Joe Palazzolo, and Khadeeja Safdar of the Wall Street Journal broke the story that Musk has been financing groups with ties to Miller since 2022.

25 September
Why Do People Like Elon Musk Love Donald Trump? It’s Not Just About Money.
By Chris Hughes, chair of the Economic Security Project and the author of the forthcoming book “Marketcrafters: The 100-Year Struggle to Shape the American Economy.” He is a co-founder of Facebook.
(NYT) It would be easy to write off tech’s rightward drift as nothing more than the rich acting in their economic self-interest, but Silicon Valley has always been driven by profit, and it hasn’t tilted Republican since the 1980s. Even now, it remains largely Democratic, even though even some of Kamala Harris’s strongest Valley supporters worry about how she might approach tech policy.
… More than any other administration in the internet era, President Biden and Ms. Harris have pushed tech companies toward serving the public interest. Key to their approach is the support of start-ups to counterbalance the dominance of tech giants, whose combined market value eclipses the G.D.P. of many countries. Brian Deese, the former director of Mr. Biden’s National Economic Council, has made clear that “big” companies are not inherently bad. But when they wield their market power, they can unfairly increase prices, narrow consumer choice, lower wages and impede the innovation that comes from fruitful competition.
Over the past three years, the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice have taken on some of the largest tech companies — Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple — arguing that they’ve stifled competition and harmed consumers. They’ve already made progress, including a major antitrust ruling against Google that could create momentum for other cases.

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.

5-6 September
Trump announces horrifying new job for Elon Musk if elected
Trump said Musk has agreed to run an agency focused on government “efficiency,” continuing his transactional relationship with donors ahead of a potential second term.
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.