Right-wing conspiracy theories about the election being stolen largely dried up after Trump emerged the victor in the 2024 election — but some liberal ones have arisen in response, even if not with the same planned and calculated violence that arose on Jan. 6.
According to Molly Olmstead in Slate, one of those theories concerns tech billionaire Elon Musk, who poured tens of millions of dollars into the election to help Trump through his America PAC — but the thinking goes, without any basis, that he might have directly altered votes.
Specifically, a handful of Harris voters "have fixated on a theory that Elon Musk changed massive numbers of votes to swing the election for Trump using his company SpaceX’s Starlink internet satellites," wrote Olmstead. "On Nov. 10, a decommissioned Starlink satellite fell to earth and burned up on reentry — something it is designed to do. But to the suspicious, the satellite had been purposefully destroyed to cover evidence of election interference."
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In reality, she noted, there are strict safeguards on voting machines that prevent them ever directly connecting to the internet, and there's no way that satellites from Musk or anyone else could have remotely flipped votes. It is, ironically, a redux of "Italygate," the MAGA conspiracy theory from 2020 that Italian satellites were used to hack voting machines for President Joe Biden.
Nonetheless, she wrote, the "theory is potent because it takes its cues from some of the very real, powerful influences that did shape the outcome of the 2024 election. Musk was heavily involved in Trump’s win; he’s the richest man on Earth, and he poured funding into the Trump campaign. His political advisers spearheaded a deceptive, dark-money campaign to microtarget already disaffected Democratic voters. Plus, Musk controls one of the largest social media platforms in the world and has no problem pushing vile rumors and misinformation, which is also out of control (even without his help) in our modern political environment. But his actions, experts say, did not add up to active interference in the election outcome."
Ultimately, Olmstead concluded, there's another reason this round of conspiracy theories is different from Trump's "Stop the Steal" shenanigans: it's not coming from Democratic leadership.
"What matters ... is that no one in any kind of leadership position has seized on the doubt," she wrote. "Unlike Trump, Harris conceded. And neither journalistic institutions nor Democratic leaders are fanning the flames by alleging that these conspiracy theories are real."
