That Musk is polarizing is important, but what allows him to attract attention is this change of context. A far-right influencer like Charlie Kirk or Alex Jones is expected to spread vile racist conspiracies—that is what they’ve always done to earn their living. But as with Trump in his 2016 campaign, there is still a lingering novelty to Musk’s role as MAGA’s minister of propaganda. Many people, for example, still don’t understand why a man with unlimited resources might want to spend most of his time acting as a political party’s in-house social-media team. Musk has been a troll for a while, but his popular image as a savvy entrepreneur stayed intact until only recently. He was the subject of a largely flattering, best-selling biography as recently as last year. He appeared on the cover of this magazine in 2013 as a contender for the world’s greatest living inventor. In fact, even when Musk muses about how strange it is that no one has tried to shoot Harris, popular news outlets still cover it as a departure from an imagined status quo. On Monday, a New York Times article described Musk, a man who recently hosted a fawning interview with Donald Trump on X and has amplified conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate, as “the world’s richest man,” who “has established a reputation as an edgy plutocrat not bound by social conventions when it comes to expressing his opinions.”
Read: Demon mode activated
That nearly every one of Musk’s utterances is deemed newsworthy makes him a perfect vector for right-wing propaganda. Take Musk’s role in spreading the nonsense about Haitian residents in Springfield, Ohio. According to an analysis delivered by the journalist Gaby Del Valle on Vox’s Today, Explained podcast, Musk replied to a tweet by Kirk on September 8, in which the influencer had shared a screenshot from a Springfield resident on Facebook claiming that Haitians in the area were eating ducks, geese, and pets. Musk’s reply served to amplify the claim to his followers and admirers just two days before the presidential debate, where it was directly referenced by Trump onstage. The lies “left the ecosystem of right-wing Twitter partially because Elon Musk got involved,” Del Valle said. Like Trump before him, Musk is able to act as a clearinghouse for the fringier ideas coming from the far-right fever swamps.
Musk is the most followed account on X and, as its owner, he has reportedly asked engineers to algorithmically boost his posts on the platform. (Musk has denied that his tweets were deliberately amplified, but the platform shows them even to people who don’t follow him.) The architecture of the site, most notably the platform’s algorithmically sorted “For You” feed, routinely features Musk and news about Musk, which increases the likelihood that anything the billionaire shares will reach a wider audience on a service that is still at least somewhat influential in shaping American political discourse. It sounds conspiratorial to suggest that Musk is tweaking the algorithmic dials on his site or using X as a political weapon, but the truth is that Musk doesn’t even need to demand that his company boost a specific message. Musk has spent nearly two years installing his own account as X’s main character and shaping the platform’s architecture in his own image. The politics of X are inextricably linked to Musk’s own politics.