Elon Musk: MAGA money man
by 
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Four years after MAGAworld howled that the liberal political leanings of Silicon Valley executives were proof of a plot to use social media to “steal” the election, Elon Musk is openly using the platform formerly known as twitter to put Trump back in the White House.
“Unless Trump is elected, America will fall to tyranny. Trump must win,” he tweeted last month, in a post which got almost 84 million views.
Musk’s personal feed is a cacophony of rightwing conspiracies and apocalyptic predictions about the effects of a Harris victory.
“Very few Americans realize that, if Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election. Far from being a threat to democracy, he is the only way to save it!” Musk tweeted three weeks ago, in a 210-word post full of disgraceful lies about immigrants.
“[The] Biden/Harris administration has been flying ‘asylum seekers’, who are fast-tracked to citizenship, directly into swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Arizona,” the South African-born billionaire wrote ominously, adding that “the only thing holding California back from extreme socialism and suffocating government policies is that people can leave California and still remain in America. Once the whole country is controlled by one party, there will be no escape.” This is false.
And because Musk requires constant attention and adulation, his minions algorithmically foist his lies into everyone’s feed, ensuring that tens of millions of people are bombarded by his every word.
Musk is even suppressing links to hacked campaign documents about JD Vance and deplatforming people who link to them.
It’s a remarkable act of hypocrisy from a guy who spent months hyping the so-called election interference he’d uncovered because the platform censored a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop for 24 hours.
Musk and his ex-twitter platform has become one of the main vectors of election disinformation in the 2024 cycle, even as he bankrolls Trump’s campaign and serves as a major Trump surrogate.
It’s almost impossible to convey the hypocrisy of Trump and his supporters. The avalanche overwhelms; we become inured, and the outrageous becomes banal. But Musk, who trumpeted the so-called “Twitter Files” allegedly detailing liberal bias on the platform, uses his giant megaphone to spread every lunatic conspiracy theory, from Haitian immigrants eating pets to manipulated video of Vice President Harris, from which he removed the community note flagging it as fake news.
Musk even hosted a Twitter livestream with Trump in August. The event began with a tech glitch which Musk blamed on a likely non-existent DDOS attack. But when it finally went live, the broadcast was functionally an extended campaign spot, with Musk fear-mongering about illegal immigration and fawning over Trump for his “courage.”
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Last Friday night, in the midst of an extended recitation of every conspiracy whispered into his credulous ears, Musk even dared one of the most litigious companies in the world to sue him.
“When you have mail-in ballots and no proof of citizenship, it’s almost impossible to prove cheating,” he told a crowd in Folsom, Pennsylvania. “Statistically there are some very strange things that happen that are statistically incredibly unlikely. There’s always this question of, say, the Dominion voting machines. It is weird that, I think, they were used in Philadelphia and in Maricopa County but not in a lot of other places. Doesn’t that seem like a heck of a coincidence?” (Watch below.)
Musk went on to suggest that American elections are broadly unsafe because of voting machines and absentee balloting: “In my opinion, we should have paper ballots only. It should be in-person voting with ID. End of story.”
“The last thing I would do is trust a computer program,” added the CEO currently trying to sell America on driverless cars.
In reality, the vast majority of votes cast in this country are “paper ballots” which leave an auditable trail. Perennial candidate Kari Lake’s lawyers (including Alan Dershowitz) got sanctioned for filing a lawsuit demanding that Arizona use all-paper ballots in the 2022 midterms, something the state already does. And Dominion Voting Systems does not provide machines to Philadelphia and did not in 2020. It did, however, provide machines “in a lot of other places,” with a market share of approximately 40 percent in the US and contracts in 28 states.
After airing the exact same debunked conspiracy theories Musk and his MAGA pals are stirring up now, Fox News paid Dominion a $787 million settlement for damage to its reputation. But Musk remains undeterred by the possibility that he may have just painted a target on his very wealthy back.
And Musk isn’t only supporting Trump online. He plowed tens of millions of dollars into Trump’s campaign, making up for some of the candidate’s anemic fundraising. According to the most recent FEC disclosures, between July and September, Musk put $72 million into his America PAC, which has largely taken over the ground game for the campaign in crucial swing states. The PAC’s website (for which he seized the @America handle) is a crude scroll of seven tweets from MAGA influencers blaring pro-Trump, anti-immigrant nonsense.
With his vast wealth and power, Musk could speak to election officials about how voting actually works. He could pay briefers to compile reports on the reality of ballot fraud and safeguards for absentee balloting. He could pause for five seconds to contemplate the likelihood that hordes of undocumented immigrants are risking jail and deportation to do something that one-third of all eligible Americans can’t even get off the couch to do. Instead, he listens to Catturd and outrage merchants like Jack Posobiec and Mike Cernovitch while he fans the flames of misinformation.
Meanwhile his PAC promised to pay $47 to anyone who “referred” a registered voter in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, or North Carolina to sign a petition “pledging my support for the First and Second Amendments.” The site seems to be doing little more than collecting contact information at the moment, although it has now boosted its offer to $100. And this weekend Musk announced that he would be giving away $1 million per day to one petition-signer selected at random. The first recipient got his check on Saturday night at a rally in Harrisburg.
UCLA Law Professor Rick Hasen suggests that the $100 for signature scheme might violate election law, and that the $1 million lottery definitely does. Musk has shown nothing but contempt for laws, though, and would likely shrug off any fine as the price of doing business.
But Trump may live to regret outsourcing GOTV to Musk, as America PAC fired its primary vendor for Arizona and Nevada just seven weeks before the election and is reported to be far behind the Harris campaign in organizing. The Guardian reports that there is a high rate of potential fraud among Musk-funded door knockers. (Elon Musk getting scammed by the equivalent of campaign bots is really a little too on the nose.)
Musk is even promising to knock on doors himself in the Keystone State to get Trump over the finish line.
“Pennsylvania, I think, is the linchpin in this election,” he said last week, with all the self-awareness (but none of the charm) of Peggy Hill pronouncing that “the day after Thanksgiving is, in my opinion, the biggest shopping day of the year.”
In September, Musk appeared alongside Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania, jumping on the stage in apparent ecstasy to be at the center of the adoring crowd he thought he’d purchased when he acquired Twitter two years ago. Perhaps this is the real reason he’s all in for a 78-year-old mediocrity who has never innovated anything in his life.
Maybe Musk, who founded multiple successful tech companies, is legitimately in thrall to a rapidly decompensating executive in the oldest of old-economy professions because it allows him to be at the center of a movement.
Or perhaps the reality is more prosaic. The New York Times suggests that Musk was more or less goaded into running point for Trump by a group of billionaires who fear that a Democratic White House will enact a fairer tax code and enforce antitrust regulations. The Times also reveals that Musk and his companies are under at least 20 federal investigations, all of which would certainly end in a Trump administration.
Indeed, Trump has promised to appoint Musk the “Secretary of Cost Cutting,” charged with deciding which government programs get the axe.
“He’s a great business guy and he’s a great cost-cutter,” the former president recently babbled to Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo. “And he said, ‘I could cut costs without affecting anybody.’”
Leave aside the fact that Musk’s companies have billions of dollars in federal contracts and it would be a wild conflict of interest for him to take a “job” in the executive branch. This “great cost-cutter” just paid $44 billion for a company and decreased its revenue by 84 percent in two years. Has Trump found the one billionaire on earth even more prone to manipulation than himself?
Perhaps this is the most likely explanation of all. Musk needs to be the hero in every story. He needs to save the planet, save the country, save democracy, save the campaign. And if he’s not the savior, he tweaks the algorithm, or throws money at the problem, or simply lies. And if democracy dies because the world’s most thin-skinned billionaire has a hero complex, well, at least we’ll get to live on Mars.
Yeah, probably not that either.
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