Produced by ElevenLabs and Information Over Audio (NOA) utilizing AI narration.
Yesterday, Elon Musk informed me that he’ll settle for the outcomes of the 2024 presidential election. “In fact” he would, he mentioned after I requested him as a lot by e mail. Ever the gentleman, he added, in obvious haste, “Don’t be jackass.”
I can think about why he needed to get that dig in. In years previous, asking somebody whether or not they imagine within the primary actuality of America’s electoral course of could be just a little bit like asking them to acknowledge that they need to pay for groceries. However anybody who fears for the steadiness of American democracy would possibly fear about how Musk—the richest man on this planet, a newly vocal supporter of Donald Trump, and the proprietor of X, some of the influential social platforms for political discourse—would reply this straightforward query. He has an incredible following and management over an internet site on which (and from which) misinformation and radical messaging can rapidly unfold. These days, he has been spreading lots of misinformation and radical messaging himself.
Musk has turn into preoccupied with posting conspiracy theories on X, claiming this week, for instance, that “the legacy media engages within the mass synchronization of emotion for political functions” on behalf of the Democratic Nationwide Committee, and that “the Biden-Harris Administration is importing huge numbers of voters.” (He has repeated that second declare, which facilities on the concept that foreigners are being flown into the USA illegally to commit voter fraud, a few instances.) He just lately shared a bogus marketing campaign video for Kamala Harris through which a pretend model of the candidate’s voice, maybe AI-generated, says, “I’m the last word range rent,” amongst different insulting issues. Musk’s take: “That is superb 😂”
Musk is amongst a rarefied cohort of highly effective individuals who, as my colleague Adrienne LaFrance just lately wrote, “stoke contempt for his or her political adversaries, actual and perceived, and encourage legions of followers to mistrust the unbiased sources of knowledge that attempt to maintain them accountable.” Or as my colleague Charlie Warzel put it in 2022: Elon Musk is a far-right activist.
Studying an excessive amount of into Musk’s provocations will be folly. In lots of circumstances, Musk would most likely argue that he’s joking round—a protection he’s mounted earlier than. He’s a prolific troll who continuously posts for the lulz. As his biographer Walter Isaacson informed me final 12 months, “He’s addicted in a harmful option to the darkish, impulsive tweets which are dangerous to his legacy but additionally dangerous to society.” And it appears unlikely that he’s influencing very many individuals’s politics; he performs to a crowd of yes-men who discover their opinions mirrored in his posts slightly than formed by them.
Shitposting or not, nonetheless, Musk’s outright embrace of extremism must be taken significantly. Within the context of this presidential election, the stakes are too excessive to easily brush it away. Social media will be like a poisonous fuel that slowly fills a room: seemingly innocent till it turns into catastrophic. A easy tweet from Trump inspired folks to collect on the Capitol on January 6, in accordance with the Home committee’s investigation. (On the day of the riot, Trump was quickly barred from Twitter and Fb for utilizing the platforms to incite violence and unfold election misinformation.) And conspiracy theories fomented on the web can result in violence: Shortly after Election Day 2020, two males with handguns and a rifle had been arrested close to a vote-counting location in Philadelphia; they had been later convicted on gun costs. Their automotive had a sticker on its again window, captured in a {photograph} by the Related Press: It learn #WWG1WGA above a giant crimson Q, overt references to the QAnon conspiracy concept, which originated on 4chan. The hashtag—an acronym for “The place we go one, we go all”—is in use on X to today. After President Joe Biden bowed out of the race, Musk elevated a publish from a distinguished QAnon persona stating that “Democrats destroy democracy in pursuit of energy.”
The tech billionaire’s assist of Trump and canine whistles about interference—all these imagined imported voters—invitations the chance that he might be an influential voice in resisting a Harris victory. His posts make it simple to assume he would possibly take part encouraging open revolt, even violence, if MAGA supporters are as soon as once more egged on by Trump—he may additionally actively suppress counter-perspectives via his management of the X platform, if he so needs. “The need of the folks have to be acknowledged,” Musk insisted after I requested him how he would reply if folks referred to as for violence after the election or unfold denial in regards to the outcomes. “If there are questions of election integrity, they need to be correctly investigated and neither be dismissed out of hand nor unreasonably questioned. If, after overview of the election outcomes, it seems that Kamala wins, that win needs to be acknowledged and never disputed.”
I don’t know learn how to take this. Possibly the response is as simple because it seems: If Harris wins, then Harris wins. However Musk’s caveat—“if, after overview”—echoes Trump’s personal logic: The previous president has maintained that the 2020 election was stolen and that he’ll settle for the end result this 12 months provided that the proceedings are “truthful and authorized and good.” If nothing else, Musk has definitely in-built some wiggle room. We will be unable to dismiss any suspicion or push apart the people who find themselves simply asking questions. This slipperiness is a trademark of on-line trolling, the place every part’s a joke until it’s critical, and it’s your fault for getting the mistaken impression.
Musk is capricious and mentioned as a lot in his second e mail to me. He adopted his notion about election integrity with a defensive posture: “I supported each Clintons, Obama and Biden,” he mentioned. “That is the primary time I’m supporting a Republican candidate and, sooner or later, I could return to supporting Democrat candidates.” After which: “Why are you not questioning Google’s apparent political bias? I simply did a Google seek for ‘Trump rally’ and the highest result’s Kamala.”
Musk, together with different right-wing personalities, has been posting nonstop a couple of perceived left-leaning bias from Google, based mostly partially on the search engine’s failure to robotically fill in sure search queries about Donald Trump. (Basically, the notion that Google would fiddle with its algorithms to account for politics just isn’t completely unreasonable; earlier this 12 months, for instance, the corporate introduced that its Gemini chatbot won’t reply sure queries associated to the election.) In his second e mail, Musk hooked up a screenshot exhibiting that, in response to the question Trump rally, Google’s “High tales” part was surfacing articles a couple of Kamala Harris rally. I did ask Google about this: Meghann Farnsworth, a spokesperson for the corporate, pointed me to a sequence of X posts from Google’s comms workforce claiming that bugs and algorithmic quirks prompted these points. You’ll be able to nonetheless discover details about Trump on the search engine.
Musk stopped responding to my emails after this. He didn’t inform me whether or not he believed that the earlier election was truthful and bonafide, nor did he outline what a “overview of the election outcomes” would imply. We all know he’s supporting Trump, a convicted felon who tried to remain in energy when he misplaced. We all know that Musk says he’ll settle for a Harris election, below the proper situations. However within the meantime, he appears to be doing no matter he can to undermine that end result. This morning, he was again to posting about voter fraud, leaving us with a moment-defining phrase: “Extraordinarily disturbing!”
