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2 years in, Trump surrogate Elon Musk has remade X as a conservative megaphone
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On the eve of Election Day in 2022, Elon Musk took to Twitter to urge Americans to choose Republicans in the midterm elections.
"Shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties, therefore I recommend voting for a Republican Congress, given that the Presidency is Democratic," he wrote.
Since the pandemic, Musk's personal politics have grown more conservative, fueled by his frustrations over how COVID-19 restrictions affected Tesla's factory operations and his belief that free speech is under attack in the United States.
But his explicit endorsement of Republicans on Twitter came less than two weeks after he closed his fraught $44 billion purchase of the social networking site on Oct. 27, 2022.
For the owner of one of the internet’s most influential public squares to openly endorse one political party shocked many observers — especially since only six months earlier, as Musk agreed to buy the company, he declared that "For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally."
Now, as both the 2024 election and the second anniversary of Musk's takeover of Twitter loom, the billionaire has completely evaporated any notion of political neutrality on the platform he's renamed X because his influence on it remains outsized.
Musk has put his money and mouth behind returning Donald Trump to the White House, pouring $75 million into a super PAC he created to turn out voters in battleground states and using X to cheerlead for Trump, smear Vice President Kamala Harris, and amplify rumors and conspiracy theories to his 202 million followers.
"This is a textbook example of the influence that I think it's fair to say an oligarch can have in a way that really is impactful to the entire body politic," said Eddie Perez, who directed Twitter's election integrity work before Musk took over. He's now a board member at the OSET Institute, a nonprofit focused on election infrastructure.
"And it is purely by virtue of that money, visibility and the control of a social media platform that he's able to behave in such a way," Perez said.
Musk and X didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Musk taps his fortune for Trump
Musk's most tangible support for Trump has come from his wallet and his newfound side gig as a MAGA rally hype man. He created — and is the largest donor to — America PAC, which has emerged as a key part of the Trump campaign's get-out-the-vote efforts, thanks to new rules allowing political candidates to coordinate canvassing with outside groups. The super PAC is also funding Republican House races and offering $1 million prizes to registered voters in battleground states who sign a petition supporting the First and Second Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Election law experts and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro have raised questions about whether the sweepstakes may violate federal law against paying people to register to vote.
Since endorsing the former president after the July assassination attempt, Musk has ramped up his public promotion: interviewing Trump live on X, appearing with him at a rally in Butler, Pa., at the site of the first attempt on Trump’s life, and conducting his own town halls in Pennsylvania.
Never known for his subtlety, Musk has portrayed the stakes of the presidential election in dire terms, saying "the fate of Western civilization" is on the line.
Business executives, including longtime tech investor Marc Andreessen and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, have long raised money and backed political candidates from both parties. But executives typically separate those efforts from their public roles at their companies, said Katie Harbath, CEO of tech consulting firm Anchor Change, who spent a decade working on public policy and elections at Facebook.
"Before, CEOs would do fundraisers in the privacy of their own home with their friends," she said, "because oftentimes they knew from a business standpoint they needed to be careful about maintaining relationships with both sides of the aisle."
In contrast, she said, "Elon acting as a surrogate, going to the rallies, being onstage, doing his own events, doing that town hall, being that public during an election season … it is definitely bigger and bolder and a lot more in-your-face."
Musk is not the first media owner to use his platform to push his own political views. Rupert Murdoch created modern conservative media with Fox News; William Randolph Hearst used his newspapers to rally support for the Spanish-American War.
But Musk's outspoken advocacy for Trump stands out given what X is and the role he plays there, Harbath said. Even though the social network has lost users and advertisers since Musk's purchase, it remains a political and cultural force around the world. Musk is the most followed account on the platform, and his posts are regularly suggested by X's algorithm to users who don't follow him.
To some former Twitter employees, Musk's name change is a convenient way to mark the end of an era.
"I'm glad he changed the name," said Erik Berlin, a former X engineering manager who left last year. "Because I can still refer to Twitter, which refers to the entity that existed before Elon took over."
Pro-Trump posts and Musk's every thought
Regardless of who users follow, both posts by Musk and pro-Trump content have become unavoidable on X.
Twitter’s previous leadership banned Trump in 2021 after his supporters breached the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, saying his tweets broke its rules against glorifying violence. One of Musk’s first big changes after taking control was to reinstate Trump after an unscientific poll of the site’s users. However, Trump has not posted as much as he did before the ban and uses his own Truth Social platform as his primary outlet.
While Musk has in the past instructed engineers to figure out ways to turn up the reach of his own posts, it's not clear he has also done so for pro-Trump content, though Musk has drastically ramped up his own posts about Trump in recent months.
"There's no doubt that Elon has a political bent. I don't know if that is encoded into the algorithm," said ex-Twitter manager Berlin. "Largely I just think it's a reflection of the user base, all the Elon fans and Trump fans."
Indeed, Musk taking up the Trump mantle has made the platform a more welcome place for the former president's supporters. But any theory about exactly how Musk and his deputies could be tinkering with X's algorithm is hard to prove, since studying the site has become more difficult under Musk.
"You just have less ability for independent researchers to even try to get a sense of what might be happening on the platform and what's getting boosted," Harbath said.
For instance, accessing the site's backend data used to be easy and free, allowing academics, researchers and journalists to study how messages flow on the platform. Now, such access is behind a paywall. And some researchers fear undertaking independent examinations of content on X, since Musk has a record of suing advocacy groups and watchdogs who publicize reports critical of the site. In sum, it is just hard to definitively know what is happening on X.
"Is there more of it now or less of it now? These questions are just hard to quantify on Musk's Twitter," Berlin said.
And not everybody sees the same thing on X; the mix of posts a person encounters is based on their own past interactions with the site. It's easy to accidentally reinforce content by watching a video, or clicking through to an account, or trying to determine how and why something is appearing on your timeline. Those kinds of actions, Berlin said, are likely to result in the user seeing even more of that type of content, be it pro-Trump posts or anything else.
"This is how Twitter has always worked: The longer you linger on it because you're curious about what you're seeing, the more the algorithm will think you want more of it," he said.
Distortions, falsehoods, conspiracy theories
Musk is increasingly using his own feed on X as a megaphone for his political views. In addition to support for Trump and attacks on Harris and Democrats, he regularly traffics in unverified rumors, misleading claims and outright falsehoods, through what he posts himself and what he reshares or replies to from others.
This year he has become one of the leading boosters of baseless claims that Democrats are bringing in immigrants to illegally vote for them — a conspiracy theory that Trump and other Republicans have made core to their narratives about the 2024 election.
He has amplified the falsehood that Haitian migrants are eating pets and spread debunked claims that the federal government is failing to help victims of hurricanes Helene and Milton. He also shared an anti-Ukraine meme that was created by a Russian intelligence operation, according to leaked documents obtained by a consortium of European news outlets.
In the wake of two assassination attempts against Trump, he has repeatedly questioned why no one is trying to assassinate Harris. He's posted an AI-generated image of Harris dressed as a "communist dictator" and reshared a manipulated parody video purporting to show Harris calling herself "the ultimate diversity hire," without any disclosure that it was a parody.
"There has been a real distortion and acceleration and almost a radicalization of the views that he is willing to amplify," said Perez, the former Twitter election integrity director.
"If he were not the person doing it with 200 million followers, these are voices, pernicious voices, that cause division, polarization and harm, that otherwise might not be getting so much attention," Perez said.
Harbath says that despite his large following, Musk may not actually be changing people's minds with his political posts. But she worries that he might use his megaphone in the period after Election Day to incite harassment of election workers or even violence.
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson told CBS News that she and her staff received threats and harassing messages after Musk posted false claims about the state’s voter rolls and called her a liar when she fact-checked him.
When far-right anti-immigrant protests erupted in the United Kingdom this summer, Musk repeated conspiracy theories and posted "civil war is inevitable," earning a rebuke from the British government.
"That just purely comes from the fact that there are people that listen to him," Harbath said of her concerns that Musk could stoke post-election violence. "There's also the mob mentality of once he starts posting it on [X], other people start posting it on the platform. They also start posting it across other platforms. And so, you know, does that cause these people to get more mobilized?"
X's financial outlook: Value down nearly 80%
When Musk bought Twitter, he loaded the company up with $13 billion in debt — loans extended by a collection of banks optimistic that the mercurial tech mogul could turn the long-struggling social media site into a moneymaking machine.
In the time since Musk began his hostile takeover of the platform, just the opposite has come true.
Fidelity, which was a major investor in Musk's Twitter takeover, estimated in September that the value of its stake in the site has plummeted by nearly 80%, suggesting that the entire value of X could now stand around $9 billion.
Usage also appears to be down since Musk's purchase. Market intelligence firm Sensor Tower estimated that X's daily active users globally were 28% lower in September this year compared to the same time before Musk's purchase.
At the same time, Musk has drastically cut the company's expenses, with the total staff size now about 20% what it was before his purchase. That included gutting content moderation teams that policed the site for hate speech, harassment and other content that turns off advertisers and many users.
"I think it's unmistakable that the brand equity of Twitter and now X has been seriously damaged," Perez said. Ultimately, Perez sees Musk's willingness to "slash and burn" as evidence he's motivated less by traditional business concerns than by "this idea that I want the values and the narratives and the messages that I like to be heard."
"I think that Musk's purchase of X, of Twitter, and the manner in which he has transformed X into what it is today is [because], fundamentally, he is a culture warrior," he said.
Still, Musk's goal of making money from sources beyond advertising appears to have hit a snag.
He hoped subscriptions for verified badges and other tools would make up more than half of the company's revenue, but an analysis published last week by TechCrunch estimated that about 1.3 million people are paying users, representing less than 1% of the app's total global users.
The failure to figure out new ways of making money is exacerbated by the struggles of X's core advertising business, which also has been suffering since an advertiser boycott took hold late last year.
"Most companies in this situation would not make it," said a former X executive who worked in the company's advertising division who would not speak publicly for fear of reprisal. "But this guy has all the money in the world to keep it going, so why won't he?"
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