Elon Musk, chief executive officer of SpaceX and Tesla and owner of X. File picture: Reuters, David Swanson
By Faiz Siddiqui and Jeremy B Merrill
IF YOU followed Elon Musk on Twitter in November 2021, you would have been bombarded with posts about Tesla and SpaceX, his two most valuable companies. A third of his tweets mentioned them - such as posts about Tesla’s Cybertruck, its “Full Self-Driving” software and his frustrations with the pandemic-related “supply chain nightmare.”
Nearly three years later, with Musk at the helm of the site he renamed X, the billionaire’s feed often reads more like a right-wing activist account, with alarmist posts about immigration and missives against “woke” ideology. He still posts frequently about Tesla, but the share of his posts about the company is less than half of what it was in November 2021. This year, political tweets made up 17 percent of his feed, an analysis by The Washington Post found — skyrocketing up from 2 percent in 2021.
Musk’s openly partisan participation on the site he bought in October 2022 reflects a broader evolution in his public persona from business-minded tech prodigy to right-wing firebrand. It has also raised questions about Musk’s intentions for the social networking site, which he said he purchased to promote free speech and a more open exchange of ideas. In some ways, the site has become a personal megaphone for his provocative political views.
X recently claimed that 35 million swing voters use the platform every month. With polls nationally and in crucial swing states showing a tightening race, where people get their information and the quality of that information could well decide the next US president, as well as control of Congress.
Musk is the platform’s most followed user, with more than 193 million followers. X has at times boosted Musk’s tweets into users’ feeds, and algorithmically fed posts about causes he has promoted into users’ timelines. Neither he nor X responded to e-mailed requests for comment.
Musk has lately used his feed to promote the candidacy of former US president Donald Trump, whom he formally endorsed with an X post. Trump has said he is participating in an interview with Musk on Monday, though few details have emerged.
To quantify the shift in Musk’s X feed, The Post analysed tweets that contained at least seven words and were not reposts. The analysis classified the posts as related to politics, Tesla, Twitter (now X) or SpaceX based on keywords, but did not categorise as politics some of Musk’s posts that relate obliquely to the topic. The analysis found that his posts about Tesla, Twitter and SpaceX taken together dropped from 31 percent of his feed in 2021 to 21 percent this year. His posts about Twitter increased from 1 percent in 2021 before he purchased the company to 8 percent so far this year, while Tesla and SpaceX posts together dropped from 30 percent to 13 percent during that time.
The analysis also showed a sharp uptick in the frequency of Musk’s postings overall. He now posts five times as often as he did in 2021.
Despite a more than 30 percent drop in the number of people actively tweeting, according to figures reported last year, X remains one of the most influential platforms for disseminating information on the election. US President Joe Biden took to the platform to announce he was leaving the presidential race, minutes before news organisations reported on his departure.
Some of the key topics of Musk’s political posts at the moment are his critiques of the flow of undocumented migrants to the United States, which he claims are shifting the make-up of the electorate; what he calls the “woke mind virus”; his opposition to transgender rights; the 2024 election, and the recent riots in Britain.
Earlier this month, Musk took to X to promote posts from other users that were increasingly typical for his feed: a story about a “controversial migrant flight program” green-lighted by the Biden administration, a right-wing furore about an Algerian boxer conservatives misidentified as transgender, a podcast featuring Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance.
“This is a battle to the death with the anti-civilizational woke mind virus,” Musk declared earlier this year.
Until Musk’s purchase, owners of large mainstream US social media platforms typically refrained from publicly supporting candidates, despite accusations of left-wing bias from some conservatives who say content moderation disproportionately targeted their views. Those concerns came to a head in 2020 when multiple social media sites limited the spread of a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey later said the company had made a mistake in doing so.
When Musk pursued the site in 2022, he was fuming about the suspension of conservative satire site the Babylon Bee and took umbrage with the ban on Trump. Days after taking control of the platform, Musk endorsed Republicans in the 2022 midterm elections - an extraordinary step for the head of a mainstream social media platform.
“Shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties, therefore I recommend voting for a Republican Congress, given that the Presidency is Democratic,” he said. He later restored Trump’s account.
After Musk’s takeover, Twitter shed around 80 percent of its workers, including much of the Trust and Safety department responsible for content moderation, and adjusted features - such as its trademark blue checks - that had been geared at establishing the authority of information on the site.
Many conservatives cheered Musk’s moves, which they said have allowed greater room for dissent and promoted more open conversations.
“He bought it to restore free speech. Our suspension was just one of many egregious examples of why that was necessary. Thank you, Elon!” wrote Seth Dillon, CEO of the conservative satire website Babylon Bee, months after Musk took over the site.
Musk has said he was driven into political discussion out of a sense of obligation.
“I would prefer to have zero involvement in politics,” he said earlier this month. “HOWEVER,” he added, “There is no ‘company success’ unless civilization itself continues to progress.”
“This insane shift by the ‘left’ away from a meritocracy and personal liberties … will be the end of civilization as we know it,” he said.
Musk’s handpicked chief executive, Linda Yaccarino, has also made her right-leaning positions public, replying to a post saying Pennsylvania Gov Josh Shapiro (D) should change parties, as “Pro-Israel candidates are welcome in the GOP,” with an enthusiastic, “Absolutely!”
Yaccarino did not respond to a request for comment made through X.
Some democracy advocates have raised concerns about Musk’s behaviour.
“It’s incumbent upon the owner of a platform like this to realise that the ultimate responsibility, in addition to running a sustainable business, is to protect the quality and accuracy of the information environment of the platform precisely so that it can have a brand that people can count on,” said Eddie Perez, board member at the non-partisan OSET Institute, which aims to promote confidence in elections through trustworthy technology, and a former director for civic integrity at Twitter.
“That responsibility to foster an accurate and authoritative information environment necessarily means that you must therefore step back from using it as a personal mouthpiece — much less an inflammatory one,” he added.
For Musk’s critics, his vocal partisanship has called into question his site’s reliability a source of information for the 2024 election.
On August 2, as Musk was tweeting in support of right-wing positions, political organiser William McConnell found his group’s handle @Progs4Harris suddenly suspended as it was gaining momentum on X - days after the same thing happened to “White Dudes for Harris” and users found themselves unable to follow @KamalaHQ, the official rapid response handle of Kamala Harris’s campaign.
“Given that it happened to similar groups in similar circumstances, it’s starting look suspect and that’s a problem,” said McConnell, 32, of Sergeantsville, NJ.
The incident fuelled suspicions that the temporary throttling of pro-Harris accounts was not coincidental.
“It’s hard to know if this is just another example of how Elon Musk has functionally ruined Twitter or if it’s something more sinister,” Progressives for Harris said in a statement shortly before its account was restored and organisers were told it was flagged as spam by mistake.
Musk’s political rhetoric has alienated many - among them his daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson, a transgender woman. Wilson has become an outspoken voice against Musk, following his comments last month that the “woke mind virus” killed her.
Musk’s openly anti-trans positions have for years weighed on his product’s fans - and his one-time defenders.
Earl Banning, a Tesla shareholder who cashed out his 401(k) and placed it into Tesla stock in 2015, has become an ardent Musk critic on X. Banning, an Anchorage neuropsychologist and parent of a transgender 15-year-old, said Musk’s anti-trans postings were the last straw.
“For that reason alone I needed to speak up,” he said.
Late last month, a long-time Tesla fan took to X to lament Musk’s shift into overt and frequent political posting, urging him to “chill on posting about Politics.”
“Sure, it’s your right as an American,” the user wrote. “But as one of the world’s most powerful and influential people i think we need to hold a higher standard of discourse.”
“I hear you,” Musk replied.
In the days that followed, Musk posted a steady stream of grievances, elevating posts about the far-right riots in Britain, the supposed erosion of Western cultures and calling Harris “literally a communist.” Nothing had changed.
- THE WASHINGTON POST