Elon Musk Is Going All-Out To Elect Donald Trump

A few days after Elon Musk first offered to buy what was then called Twitter and is now X, he wrote that the website “must be politically neutral” in order to deserve the public’s trust — “which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally.”

Two years later, with a significant presidential election fast approaching, Musk has thrown neutrality out the window and spent millions to boost former President Donald Trump’s campaign, raising concerns that he’ll use the platform to help Trump as well.

And if Trump loses and once again contests the election result, Musk could wield a massive social media platform weaponized to boost conspiracy theories about the November vote. X did not respond to HuffPost questions for this story.

Earlier this year, Musk said he wasn’t donating money to either presidential candidate. In July, he denied a Wall Street Journal report that Musk said he planned on donating “around $45 million a month” to a super PAC he helped create, America PAC, that has aggressively supported Trump’s campaign in key states throughout the country.

On Tuesday, however, the first federal campaign finance records were published since the Journal’s report – showing Musk’s seven donations to the PAC between July 3 and Sept. 5. In total, the records show Musk has given just under $75 million to the PAC.

Musk’s donations grew over time, starting in $5 million increments in July (meaning he’d given $10 million to the PAC before the Journal story published) and culminating in a single $30 million donation on Sept. 5. The America PAC money will be used to pay hourly wages for door-to-door canvassers, and for direct mail and advertisements. In addition to spending heavily on the presidential race and reportedly becoming a crucial part of Trump’s ground game, the super PAC is also backing Republicans in several key congressional districts.

Like Musk himself, the PAC has resorted to outrageous rhetoric to boost Trump. One America PAC ad on X refers to an undefined “they,” an apparent reference to Donald Trump’s political enemies collectively, with a narrator saying, “They tried to kick Trump off your ballot. They even tried to end his campaign and take him out for good.” During that dialogue, pictures of Vice President Kamala Harris and then a bloodied Trump at his first Butler, Pennsylvania, rally flash on screen. The ad closes with the written text, “Vote for President Trump like your life depends on it…”

“If you sit this election out, Kamala and the crazies will win,” another America PAC ad declares. “You will be stuck with higher costs and more illegals invading our country.”

Musk has reportedly also used the levers of power at X to help the pro-Trump PAC.

Earlier this month, Musk seized the “@America” username from a longtime user of the website who in the past had criticized both Musk and Trump, journalist Matt Binder reported. Musk had previously done the same with the “@X” account — but this time, the seizure had nothing to do with the company’s interests, Binder observed. It was about helping Musk’s political organization help Trump.

Now, Musk’s PAC is effectively paying for information about energized right-leaning voters in key swing states. A pro-First and Second Amendment petition on the America PAC website promises a $47 reward for every new referral. The offer’s fine print says it only applies to referrers and registered voters in seven swing states.

As HuffPost reported Tuesday, Musk has also funded one of the most cynical super PACs of the election cycle, Future Coalition PAC.

In areas of Michigan with large numbers of Muslim and Arab voters, the group is running advertisements highlighting Harris’ support for Israel, and sending mailers saying she “leans on Jewish husband Doug Emhoff to advise on high-level pro-Israel policies.” At the same time, it’s also running ads targeted at Jewish voters in Pennsylvania with dialogue like, “Why did Harris show sympathy for college protesters who are rabidly antisemitic?”

Musk’s influence goes well beyond his money. His ownership of X provides a powerful platform for him to amplify certain perspectives and minimize others.

He has amplified himself most of all: Musk is the most-followed account on X, and on top of that, in response to Musk’s own demands, X engineers have artificially boosted the audience for his posts in the past, the Platformer newsletter reported last year. That means Musk isn’t just a power X user, but a tone-setter for the entire website.

In an August analysis of tens of thousands of Musk tweets, the Wall Street Journal showed that 2024 had been an unusually prolific posting year for Musk — and an unusually political one. In July, when Musk formally endorsed Trump’s candidacy, his posts mentioning Trump or President Joe Biden skyrocketed, the Journal showed.

As opposed to other tech CEOs, who generally keep their politics to back rooms — or to themselves — Musk has used his platform to push Trump talking points daily. This necessarily means lying for Trump, who has promised Musk a government job if he wins.

Numerous analyses of Musk’s posts show the pattern: One analysis of Musk’s posts from January through July 30 found that false or misleading claims on election-related posts from him had generated 1.2 billion views. None of the posts had earned a “Community Note” fact-checking label, the analysis from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which Musk has unsuccessfully sued in the past, noted.

And over a five-day period just last month, more than half of Musk’s posts were focused on politics, and nearly a third of his posts were “false, misleading or missing vital context,” The New York Times reported.

Some posts are blatant: A few days after Biden dropped his reelection bid in July, for example, Musk shared a fake political advertisement — he didn’t acknowledge it was satire until later — that featured a realistic-sounding AI-generated Harris voice. The “Harris” voice called herself “the ultimate diversity hire” and a “deep state puppet” who did not “know the first thing about running the country.” Last month, Musk posted an AI-generated image of Harris wearing a hammer-and-sickle hat and a red military-style coat, lying that “Kamala vows to be a communist dictator on day one.” CNN noted the image “appeared to violate X’s policy on manipulated content.” But it remains unlabeled and visible on Musk’s account.

“It’s staggering hypocrisy,” one unnamed former Twitter employee told Wired in August, referring to Musk’s partisan behavior. “Musk is smart enough to know social media is media, and it’s a way to control the narrative.” An unnamed former member of the site’s policy team added, “He has a very obvious political agenda.”

Then there are the day-to-day lies and propaganda.

Musk has referred to electronic voting machines and mail voting as “too risky,” echoing Trump’s own claims that those methods are used for widespread voter fraud — even though this is false, and even though Musk himself has voted by mail in the past, just like Trump has.

And Musk has also repeatedly shared “Great Replacement Theory”-style lies that Democrats are “importing” “vast numbers” of voters, a reference to people who cross the border without authorization and are allowed — pursuant to U.S. law – to stay in the country as their asylum cases proceed through the courts. He has separately, falsely, said Democrats are “fast-tracking them to citizenship.” Last month, responding to an X user who said Democrats were doing everything they can to cheat in the swing states, Musk wrote, “absolutely.”

Some of his false posts have a staggering reach.

In April, before he endorsed Trump, Musk amplified a wildly false claim that millions of new voters had registered without providing proof of citizenship. Musk’s post has been viewed nearly 60 million times, according to X’s public-facing metrics, and the post he amplified has millions more views than that. The claim was “extremely false. 2 minutes of research required,” Stephen Richer, the Republican recorder of Maricopa County, Arizona, told Musk.

Not only does it take years to become a citizen, criminal voting by noncitizens is almost non-existent. More broadly, naturalized citizens are not a political monolith — as Musk himself, a Trump supporter and immigrant who became a U.S. citizen in 2002, ought to know. August polling from the National Partnership for New Americans, which surveyed 2,678 naturalized citizens who are registered to vote, found that 43.3% of respondents considered themselves Democrats, 30.3% considered themselves Republicans, and 26.3% considered themselves independents.

Other false posts from Musk echo Trump’s campaign talking points, including about Haitian immigrants. Musk has even shared a projected 2024 Electoral College map shared by a well-known fake news organization that claimed, “according to Nate Silver,” that Trump was projected to win the Electoral College in a blowout. Silver, the election forecaster who has in reality called the race a “toss-up,” did not actually make the map, CNN reported.

Katie Harbath, the former public policy director at Facebook, said Musk’s own tweets have been the primary way he’s used X to help Trump — in addition to the two-hour interview Musk hosted with Trump in August.

“It’s almost a little bit less about using the Twitter platform itself, and more about Musk using his own cult of personality, and his own following,” Harbath said.

That comes with perils for the next few weeks: Though Musk has said he will accept the results of the election, it doesn’t seem far-fetched to worry that Musk could manipulate his platform even more in Trump’s favor in the event of a contested election result, or a Trump loss that Trump refuses to accept.

“I don’t think Musk is going to persuade anybody to vote one way or the other,” Harbath said. “But I am worried about him persuading people to shift from just being online to actually taking physical action and going somewhere,” including for potentially violent protests in the event of a contested election.

There’s an open question hanging over the next few weeks — will Musk attempt to use X to help Trump, or hurt Harris, by changing the how political material is displayed or promoted on the app?

From the beginning of his X ownership, Musk has replatformed far-right accounts that had previously been banned, including white supremacists and conspiracy theorists. His move to offer blue “verified” checkmarks for sale — and with little actual verification — when the checks were previously used to designate reliable sources in media and government has led to a tsunami of mis- and disinformation about serious issues, like the wars in Gaza and Ukraine.

Musk has cast himself as a free speech warrior — but X under his management has actually agreed to more governmental requests to remove or restrict certain content than Twitter did under previous management, the Washington Post reported last month. Musk’s X has also suspended adversarial reporters and algorithmically marginalized its corporate competitors.

And there are some indications he’s suspended users for political reasons.

“He’s clearly tipping the scales in this election in favor of Trump,” Mike Nellis, a political consultant and Harris supporter, told HuffPost.

Nellis helped start “White Dudes for Harris,” or @dudes4harris, which was briefly suspended by the X on the same day it hosted a star-studded Zoom call that reportedly raised millions for Harris’ presidential campaign.

The stated offense, which cited a “user report” for “violating our rules against evading suspension,” didn’t make sense to Nellis, who said he’d never had any accounts suspended from the platform before. He said he wasn’t sure if Musk had specifically been involved in suspending his account, but the X owner did snark the White Dudes for Harris fundraising call on the same night, saying of the actor Mark Hamill’s remarks during the Zoom event, “his brain has been marinating in Kool-Aid for a long time.”

Then, just days ago, the independent journalist Ken Klippenstein was suspended from the platform for allegedly “violating our rules on posting unredacted private personal information,” X said, the result of Klippenstein publishing an internal Trump campaign dossier of information about Republican vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio).

Klippenstein argued he never shared any of Vance’s private information — he just linked to a leaked dossier that included some of it, including a home address and part of a Social Security number. Klippenstein argued the campaign had pulled the information from publicly available sources. Nonetheless, he changed out the document embedded in the story, replacing it with a version that redacted the supposed personal information. Still, he remained suspended.

Klippenstein’s account was restored to X several days later, however — right after The New York Times reported that the Trump campaign had “connected with X to prevent the circulation of links to the material on the platform,” unnamed people with knowledge of the events told the paper. CNN separately reported on “a conversation with X officials about the hacked materials before Klippenstein was banned and links to his newsletter were blocked,” citing a person familiar with the matter.

Even now, with Klippenstein’s account restored and the supposed personal information in the dossier redacted, users are unable to publish a link to his dossier story on X. Klippenstein’s original post linking to the story appears to still be the only link to it on the whole website.

In fairness, Facebook and other sites have also limited circulation on Klippenstein’s story — but none have taken the supposed “pro-free speech” stance that Musk has claimed as his own. Facebook blocked the link for allegedly containing “hacked sources or content leaked as part of a foreign government operation to influence US elections.” (The dossier is believed to have been hacked by an Iranian actor.) Meta’s rationale “is not about the publication of personal information,” a spokesperson for the company told HuffPost.

The apparent X ban on posting the link to Klippenstein’s reporting stands in stark contrast to Musk’s own stated opposition to Twitter’s previous management’s limiting circulation of a 2020 New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s old laptop.

Several outlets have also noted that on the day Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Harris for the presidency, multiple X users reported they were unable to follow the Harris campaign account — with a message telling them “You are unable to follow more people at this time.” House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) referred to the glitches as “apparent censorship.” It’s possible this was an example of an innocent error, caused by the sudden spike in the Harris account’s followers.

Harbath warned generally against assigning political motivations to Musk where simple technical glitches could explain various incidents. But she also pointed out that the public simply doesn’t know if Musk has weighed in on various suspensions or promoted certain ideological material — or whether he might do that in the days before or after Election Day.

“We just don’t know what changes he’s asked X to make,” she said, noting the walls Musk built around Twitter’s API, which was previously easily accessible to researchers looking into how X works. “There’s no way to actually independently verify what he is or is not doing with the platform in order to help Trump.”