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Elon Musk, the innovator of space exploration, electric vehicles, and renewable energy, has become quite the provocateur. He has increasingly used his enormous social media platform, X, to express his worldviews and to boost certain politicians, including Donald Trump.
Musk’s influence is unique among his billionaire peers, as his power lies in technologies vital to lucrative enterprise, domestic safety, and populist sentiment. He also has a very large following on social media and more of a “pop culture” connection and appeal. However, he may be his own worst enemy, starting with his delight for eccentric, starry-eyed products. Unconventionality wouldn’t necessarily make him dangerous; however, as he writes on social media and bundles his pursuit of radicalism and derision under the banner of free speech, Musk weakens his own companies’ values and threatens to undermine democratic power.
We live in the era of the billionaire. In 2010, Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission ignited the role of money in politics, as it gave unfettered permission for Big Money to contribute to election campaigns, via Political Action Campaigns (PACs). As the Milken Institute muses, Citizens United raised the question of “whether it was possible for a country to sustain a thriving democracy in the face of massive concentrations of wealth.”
Inaction on healthcare and minimum wage and tax giveaways to the ultra-rich are part-and-parcel of the billionaires’ broad plan. Forget environmental laws, too — they’re not beneficial for capitalism.
As a billionaire, Musk’s influence on elections cannot be overlooked. Musk pledged, then walked back, a promise to donate $45 million per month to elect Trump and his allies in 2024. Musk has offered his services to Trump (whether real or a joke) for the Department of Government Efficiency (read: reduce workers’ rights, restrict government business regulations, reward billionaires with business-friendly allowances).
Already, the UAW has filed federal labor charges against what it calls “disgraced billionaires Donald Trump and Elon Musk” due to their illegal attempts to threaten and intimidate workers.
Not convinced that Musk’s influence on the upcoming US presidential election is all that fierce? Not sure that Musk the billionaire can directly influence the outcome of the election and exert control on Trump, who aligns with his interests? Here is some background that may persuade you otherwise.
Online campaign persuasion: Wired says US presidential candidate and current Vice President Kamala Harris leads a “Democratic Party that is a little bit more agile, that is not afraid of leaning into a certain level of humor and culture and onlineness, for lack of a better word, to get their point across and to find new audiences.” The Harris–Walz campaign has been doing things that the Biden campaign just couldn’t have even dreamed of with social media.
Then again, Elon Musk has his own giant following on social media, especially X, and he controls the levers of how different content is promoted or diminished. Because online spaces are fragmented, we have to, as the Guardian admonishes in an expose about Elon Musk, be quite attentive “to lies amplified and spread by algorithms long before the facts have been reported, laundered, and whitewashed by politicians and professional media grifters.”
Social media mis/ disinformation: Just last week, Facebook eliminated one of its last remaining transparency tools, CrowdTangle, a tool that was crucial in understanding what was happening online during the dark days before and after the 2020 inauguration. It did this despite the pleas of researchers and academics.
According to reports out of Wired, Elon Musk has been one of Donald Trump’s Big Supporters from finance and Silicon Valley who have tried to advocate with the former president to “whitewash” some of the comments he made about the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017. The most damning of that discourse occurred when Trump stated there were “very fine people on both sides” of the neo-Nazi rally. It will take a lot of revisionist history to erase that memory — as they walked down the street, the white-nationalist protesters chanted “blood and soil,” the English translation of a Nazi saying. They repeated anti-Semitic slogans and burned tiki torches.
Musk shared multiple posts related to this Charlottesville rally recently, including those by David Marcus, the crypto entrepreneur and CEO of Lightspark. Marcus tried to recontextualize Trump’s remark, insisting that Trump cited the crowd’s diversity. Musk also shared posts from Mark Pincus, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, and David Sacks, an influential tech investor who is closely allied with Musk. Musk’s total posts devoted to the Charlottesville rewriting have been cumulatively viewed almost 80 million times.
Fact check: The crowd was made up of extremists.
Fact check: Claims that the video of Trump’s remarks has been edited and compressed don’t bear out, as the full video is widely available on any number of platforms.
Musk’s influence in Brazil: Brazil does not allow social network posts that spread content threatening to the country’s democracy. Musk has revealed that he closed the Brazilian X office last week, although the X platform remains up and accessible for Brazilian users. The closure decision meant that Musk didn’t have to suspend certain accounts or face the arrest of its legal representative in Brazil.
Musk has accused the Brazilian Supreme Court Judge Alexandre de Moraes of silencing conservative voices online. X’s official government affairs account posted that “to protect the safety of our staff, we have made the decision to close our operation in Brazil, effective immediately.” The account suggested that “the people of Brazil have a choice to make — democracy, or Alexandre de Moraes.”
Moraes said that he had always acted within the law against accounts that spread anti-democratic messages, hate speech, and attacks on Brazil’s Supreme Court, including death threats. According to the New York Times, the restrictions have largely affected right-wingers. On the left, Moraes is considered a hero; on the right, a villain. “Freedom of speech is not freedom of aggression,” he said. Musk countered with more than two dozen tweets, calling the judge a dictator and comparing him to Darth Vader. Brazilian magazines and newspapers put Musk and Moraes on their covers, and the issue was debated in Brazil’s Congress.
A tit-for-tat with the British PM: Musk is also dismissive of many other politicians and has openly inserted himself in the UK’s politics in recent criticism of Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Musk used X to challenge Starmer’s leadership in the face of right-wing violence. The British public has a long memory, according to Carole Cadwalladr in the Guardian; they are keenly conscious that tech platforms in 2016 spread lies and mis/disinformation. To counter such claims these eight years later, researchers, academics, and trust and safety teams have been introduced — yet tech billionaires now label such watchdogs part of a “censorship industrial complex.”
Musk’s influence is grounded in X, and he has fired at least half of its trust and safety team. “The same transatlantic patterns, the same playbook, the same figures,” Cadwalladr analyzes. “But this time with a whole new set of dangerous, unchecked technological vulnerabilities to be exploited.”
Knowing which way the profitability wind blows: The Biden–Harris administration’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law grant program has greatly supported Tesla. That translated into more revenue for Tesla and increased brand allure.
In the “what have you done for me lately?” approach, now Musk sees additional profit from a relationship with Trump, and, by extension, Big Oil. How is that going to work? During the X chat with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump earlier this summer, Musk questioned the existential risk of climate pollution, saying, “I think it’s not, the risk is not as high as, you know, a lot of people say it is with respect to global warming.” Flip-flopping, thy name is Musk.
Image: “Elon Musk in the Eazy-E chair… Straight Outta Hawthorne” by jurvetson (CC BY 2.0 license).
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