Yesterday, Elon Musk told me that he will accept the results of the 2024 presidential election. “Of course” he would, he said when I asked him as much by email. Ever the gentleman, he added, in apparent haste, “Don’t be jackass.”
I can imagine why he wanted to get that dig in. In years past, asking someone whether they believe in the basic reality of America’s electoral process would be a little bit like asking them to acknowledge that they have to pay for groceries. But anyone who fears for the stability of American democracy might worry about how Musk—the richest man in the world, a newly vocal supporter of Donald Trump, and the owner of X, one of the most influential social platforms for political discourse—would answer this simple question. He has a tremendous following and control over a website on which (and from which) misinformation and radical messaging can quickly spread. Lately, he has been spreading a lot of misinformation and radical messaging himself.
Musk has become preoccupied with posting conspiracy theories on X, claiming this week, for example, that “the legacy media engages in the mass synchronization of emotion for political purposes” on behalf of the Democratic National Committee, and that “the Biden-Harris Administration is importing vast numbers of voters.” (He has repeated that second claim, which centers on the idea that foreigners are being flown into the United States illegally to commit voter fraud, a few times.) He recently shared a bogus campaign video for Kamala Harris in which a fake version of the candidate’s voice, perhaps AI-generated, says, “I am the ultimate diversity hire,” among other insulting things. Musk’s take: “This is amazing ????”
Musk is among a rarefied cohort of powerful people who, as my colleague Adrienne LaFrance recently wrote, “stoke contempt for their political adversaries, real and perceived, and encourage legions of followers to distrust the independent sources of information that try to hold them accountable.” Or as my colleague Charlie Warzel put it in 2022: Elon Musk is a far-right activist.
Reading too much into Musk’s provocations can be folly. In many cases, Musk would probably argue that he’s joking around—a defense he’s mounted before. He is a prolific troll who frequently posts for the lulz. As his biographer Walter Isaacson told me last year, “He’s addicted in a destructive way to the dark, impulsive tweets that are harmful to his legacy but also harmful to society.” And it seems unlikely that he’s influencing very many people’s politics; he plays to a crowd of yes-men who find their opinions reflected in his posts rather than shaped by them.
[From the September 2024 issue: American fury]
Shitposting or not, however, Musk’s outright embrace of extremism needs to be taken seriously. In the context of this presidential election, the stakes are too high to simply brush it away. Social media can be like a toxic gas that slowly fills a room: seemingly harmless until it becomes catastrophic. A simple tweet from Trump encouraged people to gather at the Capitol on January 6, according to the House committee’s investigation. (On the day of the insurrection, Trump was temporarily barred from Twitter and Facebook for using the platforms to incite violence and spread election misinformation.) And conspiracy theories fomented on the internet can lead to violence: Shortly after Election Day 2020, two men with handguns and a rifle were arrested near a vote-counting location in Philadelphia; they were later convicted on gun charges. Their car had a sticker on its back window, captured in a photograph by the Associated Press: It read #WWG1WGA above a big red Q, overt references to the QAnon conspiracy theory, which originated on 4chan. The hashtag—an acronym for “Where we go one, we go all”—is in use on X to this day. After President Joe Biden bowed out of the race, Musk elevated a post from a prominent QAnon personality stating that “Democrats destroy democracy in pursuit of power.”
The tech billionaire’s support of Trump and dog whistles about interference—all those imagined imported voters—invites the possibility that he could be an influential voice in resisting a Harris victory. His posts make it easy to think he might join in encouraging open revolt, even violence, if MAGA supporters are once again egged on by Trump—he could also actively suppress counter-perspectives through his control of the X platform, if he so desires. “The will of the people must be recognized,” Musk insisted when I asked him how he would respond if people called for violence after the election or spread denial about the results. “If there are questions of election integrity, they should be properly investigated and neither be dismissed out of hand nor unreasonably questioned. If, after review of the election results, it turns out that Kamala wins, that win should be recognized and not disputed.”
I don’t know how to take this. Maybe the response is as straightforward as it appears: If Harris wins, then Harris wins. But Musk’s caveat—“if, after review”—echoes Trump’s own logic: The former president has maintained that the 2020 election was stolen and that he will accept the outcome this year only if the proceedings are “fair and legal and good.” If nothing else, Musk has certainly built in some wiggle room. We will not be able to dismiss any suspicion or push aside the people who are just asking questions. This slipperiness is a hallmark of online trolling, where everything’s a joke unless it’s serious, and it’s your fault for getting the wrong impression.
Musk is capricious and said as much in his second email to me. He followed his notion about election integrity with a defensive posture: “I supported both Clintons, Obama and Biden,” he said. “This is the first time I am supporting a Republican candidate and, in the future, I may return to supporting Democrat candidates.” And then: “Why are you not questioning Google’s obvious political bias? I just did a Google search for ‘Trump rally’ and the top result is Kamala.”
Musk, along with other right-wing personalities, has been posting nonstop about a perceived left-leaning bias from Google, based in part on the search engine’s failure to automatically fill in certain search queries about Donald Trump. (In general, the notion that Google would fiddle with its algorithms to account for politics is not entirely unreasonable; earlier this year, for example, the company announced that its Gemini chatbot will not answer certain queries related to the election.) In his second email, Musk attached a screenshot showing that, in response to the query Trump rally, Google’s “Top stories” section was surfacing articles about a Kamala Harris rally. I did ask Google about this: Meghann Farnsworth, a spokesperson for the company, pointed me to a series of X posts from Google’s comms team claiming that bugs and algorithmic quirks caused these issues. You can still find information about Trump on the search engine.
Musk stopped responding to my emails after this. He didn’t tell me whether he believed that the previous election was fair and legitimate, nor did he define what a “review of the election results” would mean. We know he’s supporting Trump, a convicted felon who attempted to stay in power when he lost. We know that Musk says he’ll accept a Harris election, under the right conditions. But in the meantime, he seems to be doing whatever he can to undermine that outcome. This morning, he was back to posting about voter fraud, leaving us with a moment-defining phrase: “Extremely disturbing!”
