Minutes after a Pennsylvania man attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump on Saturday, the owner of X, Elon Musk, posted on the platform, “I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery.” The post included a 12-second video of Trump moments after the shooting, surrounded by Secret Service agents, blood smeared across his face and mouthing the word “fight” with his fist in the air. The post was reposted more than 400,000 times.
Reports also indicate Musk is positioning himself to potentially become a colossal GOP donor. The Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the matter, reports that Musk has said he plans to "commit around $45 million a month" to a new political action committee backing Trump.
Musk’s clear favoritism raises questions about whether he could try to use his ownership of the platform X to influence the 2024 elections to tilt the race toward the GOP.
Musk’s official endorsement of Trump and his reported interest in becoming a funder underscore his rightward trajectory and evolution into an overtly partisan backer of the GOP. That he chose to make his endorsement with that specific imagery of Trump — bloodied but defiant in a moment of chaos — also implied a kind of interest in Trump’s political project that extends beyond a narrow business calculation. And Musk’s clear favoritism raises questions about whether he could try to use his ownership of the platform X to influence the 2024 elections to tilt the race toward the GOP.
Historically, Musk’s ideological views have been all over the map and defied neat explanation. He’s described himself as a moderate and a registered independent; he has expressed libertarian talking points; and he has even called himself a “socialist.” By his own account, he has skewed toward the Democratic presidential candidate in recent cycles — Musk has said that in the last three elections, he voted for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. Since the 2000s, he has mostly followed a standard businessman playbook of donating cash to both parties to hedge his bets.
But in the last few years, he has become both more vocal about his political views and swung to the right. His donations have shifted toward the GOP, and in 2022 he said he voted for a Republican candidate for the first time (former U.S. Rep. Mayra Flores of Texas, a QAnon-promoting MAGA Republican). After purchasing Twitter, which he has since renamed X, his posts on the platform have become clearly identifiable as sympathetic to right-wing nationalist ideas, including the racist “great replacement theory." Musk’s showy endorsement of Trump further crystallizes his swing to the MAGA right and suggests his views are less idiosyncratic than they used to be.
Musk also has material reasons to favor Trump. As the richest man in the world and a tech investor who complains about taxes, he’d find the tax and regulatory environment more favorable under Trump than under Biden. As someone who owns big companies and is hostile to organized labor, he has reason to oppose Biden, whose National Labor Relations Board appointments have been good for labor power. And given how his companies SpaceX and Tesla have benefited from government contracts and subsidies, it’s possible that he sees a close relationship with the nakedly transactional Trump as a potentially lucrative investment. Musk and Trump have reportedly discussed whether Musk might take on an advisory role to Trump should he re-enter the White House.
The intensity of Musk’s interest in Trump, in turn, raises questions of whether he’d try (or even has tried) to use his platform to sway the election toward Trump. Social media platforms can play a game-changing role in the political news ecosystem surrounding elections. Platforms such as X, Facebook and Instagram are constantly making decisions about what their algorithms should and shouldn’t amplify, and those decisions are underpinned by value judgments about what kind of information is valuable. All functional platforms, for example, design algorithms to detect and suppress spam and posts that violate company policies on abusive behavior. But algorithms also play a meaningful role in the kinds of content people can see, and this is a realm in which company policy could conceivably be rigged either explicitly or implicitly to favor a candidate or party.
X’s “For you” home page, its recommendations for accounts to follow and its “Explore tab” could theoretically be tweaked to nudge users toward content that skews in a specific ideological direction. While hyperpartisan users are not going to change their minds in the face of content that contradicts their political preferences, the majority of X users are not political junkies, and they could be influenced in subtle ways. Less politically engaged users could be affected, for example, by trends in posts that highlight content critical of Biden’s age or are positive about Trump’s economic policies. (It's also plausible that political journalists' views of what is salient in the race could be subtly shaped by what's in their feeds.) Additionally, given the history of Musk enacting account suspensions and reinstatements in a manner that appears to be related to his political views or interests, it’s conceivable that influential accounts could get suspended or shadow-banned because of their political orientations. And Musk has used flawed and manipulable strategies for dealing with disinformation. Given past meddling by foreign governments and social media operations designed to systematically confuse the public about things as basic as when to vote, Musk at the helm of a social media platform at this moment is worrisome.
Will Musk use X as a political weapon in favor of Trump in subtle or overt ways? It’s impossible to know. What we do know is that he increasingly views himself as a right-wing activist and that he has the power do these things. It’s a reminder of how dangerous it is that we have no regulation of social media companies and how acutely vulnerable our civil society is to being hijacked by billionaires who want to reshape the world to their liking.