Musk’s full-throated backing of Trump is uncharted territory for a tech boss
Minutes after Donald Trump announced that he had selected JD Vance as his running mate, Elon Musk rushed to endorse the two Republican candidates to his 190 million followers on the social network that he owns. The tech billionaire proclaimed on X, formerly Twitter, that the ticket “resounds with victory”.
Since the assassination attempt on Trump this past weekend, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX has thrown his support behind the Republican party and positioned himself as the herald of Silicon Valley’s shift rightward. He wrote on X the day of Trump’s near-fatal shooting: “I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery” and called on others in the industry to join him. Musk, in contention for the title of the world’s richest man, will reportedly pledge $45m a month to a pro-Trump political action committee backed by other wealthy tech elites.
Musk’s open support for one presidential candidate is a break from the role that major social media heads and big tech leaders have traditionally played in US politics. His wholehearted embrace of Trump and the Republican party is more the continuation of a rightward shift than an abrupt about-face, but endorsing Trump while steering one of the world’s most influential sites for political discourse and advertising represents an unprecedented position. Mark Zuckerberg, Musk’s rival in the social networking industry, has shied away from taking sides in elections while running Meta, parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Jack Dorsey, former Twitter CEO, donated to the long-shot 2020 campaigns of Tulsi Gabbard and Andrew Yang but did not advocate for either candidate in the general election.
Related: What we know about the shooting at a Donald Trump rally
Musk’s willingness to openly promote his political beliefs is a shift from how other social media leaders have strained to appear only as apolitical, pro-democracy stewards. Dorsey and Zuckerberg previously defended themselves in front of congressional committees over allegations of anti-conservative bias, and the latter has since backed away from making political donations to election security following rightwing backlash. Zuckerberg has been especially quiet this election cycle, mostly posting PR-friendly content of him celebrating a birthday or wakesurfing on the Fourth of July.
The Meta CEO and his deputies have asserted that their newest network, the X imitator Threads, is not a place to find news or political discussion online. The YouTube CEO, Neal Mohan, and Snap CEO, Evan Spiegel, have rarely dipped their toes into politics and have not endorsed candidates in this election. TikTok’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, finds himself caught between political enemies past and present. Trump tried to ban the app in 2020 but now says he’s “for TikTok”; Joe Biden signed a bill banning the app if it did not sell to an American parent company in 2024.
Musk, by contrast, has become consistently, overtly political. He frequently engages with and posts anti-immigrant content, declares his opposition to trans rights and attacks diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. During the 2022 midterms, he stated that for the first time he would be voting Republican – casting his ballot for a congressional candidate who posted support for the QAnon conspiracy theory.
Although Musk stated on Wednesday that X will remain a “free speech” platform and he will not ban leftwing accounts, it remains to be seen whether the platform will remain entirely neutral. Already, he has used his pulpit to advocate for Trump and amplify other conservative tech billionaires while pushing rightwing narratives around the assassination attempt. The opaque nature of Twitter’s recommendation algorithm also means that Musk could decide to boost certain types of content over others if he chooses, promoting his preferred political narratives over others. The social network previously throttled traffic and slowed down loading times to sites that were critical of Musk, a Washington Post analysis found last year, and X’s hollowed-out content moderation teams frequently allow online abuse and misinformation to spread.
The composition of users’ feeds may change due to his influence even if they don’t follow him. Musk’s ownership of the platform has resulted in the platform becoming generally more popular among conservatives, with a Pew Research poll earlier this year finding that the share of Republican users who view the platform as good for democracy roughly tripled in the past three years. In the same time, Democrats’ support for the platform has plummeted, per Pew.
The owner of X has also become fervently anti-media in recent years as Journalists have reported on him secretly having children with one of his executives, his associates’ concerns over ongoing alleged drug use, his rumored affair with another tech billionaire’s wife who is now RFK Jr’s running mate, declining profits at his companies, the sexual harassment and retaliation lawsuits against him, his other secret child with one of his executives, his decision to reinstate the Twitter account of not only Donald Trump but also a prominent white nationalist Holocaust denier, the heap of lawsuits claiming that he illegally fired workers, monkeys dying horrifically at his labs, his obsession with demographic change and promotion of racist conspiracy theories, his promotion of potentially harmful misinformation and his embrace of anti-democratic leaders. Musk has denied almost all of the reports and told his followers to no longer read legacy news outlets. In late 2022, he suspended the accounts of 10 journalists who had published stories about him and his companies.
As Musk has bashed news outlets reporting critically on his personal and professional life, he has promoted conservative and libertarian-leaning commentators who agree with him. He has frequently interacted with accounts on X that espouse rightwing misinformation and reinstated accounts banned for a variety of reasons, from violating Twitter’s previous rules on hate speech to spreading election denialism.
Musk’s wholehearted endorsement of Trump is also reflective of his embrace of other rightwing leaders around the world, especially in countries with resources and supply chains that interact with his various companies. Musk is one of the most vocal online supports of Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, and gave him a personal tour of a Tesla factory in Texas earlier this year. Argentina has one of the world’s largest reserves of lithium, a rare mineral needed for producing electric cars. Musk developed similar symbiotic relationships with leaders like India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, and, while he was still in power, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro.
The stakes are highest for Musk in the US, however, where he has relied on billions in government subsidies for companies such as SpaceX and Tesla. That fact is apparently not lost on Trump, who in 2022 posted a photo of Musk’s visit to the White House and claimed that Musk had pleaded with Trump for help on his various subsidized projects and expressed his support for the Republican party.
“I could have said ‘drop to your knees and beg,’ and he would have done it,” Trump wrote.
