Tom Minear: The shameful hypocrisy of Elon Musk being all-in for Donald Trump
Twitter censoring a story about Joe Biden’s son infuriated Donald Trump in 2020. Now, Elon Musk’s X is awash with pro-Trump misinformation, and Tom Minear can’t get over the hypocrisy.
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It has been all but impossible to log on to X in the US lately without being inundated by misinformation about the Biden-Harris administration’s response to two deadly hurricanes.
And other than Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance, no one has been more influential in spreading these outrageously false claims than the platform’s owner Elon Musk.
How times change. Four years ago, in the middle of a similarly close election race, Twitter’s bosses blocked users from seeing the New York Post’s reporting on the contents of Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s laptop, a scoop that ultimately led to multiple criminal convictions.
That intervention – based on the incorrect assessment that it was Russian disinformation – rightly infuriated Trump and his allies. They saw it as Big Tech interfering in the election.
Now, the world’s richest man is pushing lies on the platform he owns, like the claim that federal authorities used up their disaster relief budget bringing illegal immigrants into the US.
While X has shed users under Mr Musk, it retains an outsized influence in setting the political agenda, so these conspiracies have inevitably seeped in among Americans deciding who to vote for while recovering from these devastating storms.
But Mr Musk’s election intervention goes far deeper. He is all-in on Mr Trump, investing tens of millions of dollars in his campaign, speaking to him multiple times a week, and even appearing with him at campaign events. Mr Musk has moved into Pennsylvania – the most critical battleground state – and is paying cash to people who register swing state voters.
Would Mr Trump accept Mark Zuckerberg putting his thumb on the scale like this for Kamala Harris? Of course not. (In 2020, the Facebook founder spent hundreds of millions of dollars on nonpartisan programs to run the election during the pandemic, prompting Mr Trump to threaten to lock him up. Mr Zuckerberg now calls him an inspiring “badass”.)
The hypocrisy is shameless and shameful. If Mr Trump wins, Mr Musk is expected to join his administration. If the former president loses, the billionaire says: “I’m f***ed.”
The truth is, however, that whoever claims victory will need Mr Musk. The US government is intensely dependent on his ventures, including Starlink providing internet everywhere from hurricane-ravaged areas to Ukraine’s battlefields, and SpaceX deploying defence satellites.
And so Ms Harris is silently watching the billionaire’s bid to tip the election. What a mess.
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Originally published as Tom Minear: The shameful hypocrisy of Elon Musk being all-in for Donald Trump
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