Elon Musk bought one of the biggest social media platforms in the world, known as Twitter, in October 2022. Musk, the wealthiest person in the world, bought the platform for $44 billion, wanting to revamp the platform into “The Internet’s Town Square”, where everyone could engage in uncensored, free speech. This caught many by surprise, as managing and running a social media site is vastly different from developing and producing spacecraft or electric vehicles, both industries in which Musk has experience. Nonetheless, Musk believed that this purchase would pay off in the end, and in some ways, it did.
Back in 2020 and 2021, with the COVID-19 pandemic and discourse surrounding the upcoming election, misinformation was rampant on the platform. This required Twitter moderators to label certain tweets as misleading, and even take down misleading tweets that got a lot of engagement. The largest moderation decision Twitter had made was after the January 6th Capitol Riots, where hundreds of rioters had broken into the United States Capitol Building following a speech of former President Donald Trump. Following this shocking event, Trump was shortly banned from Twitter for “inciting violence” after he posted a few questionable tweets.
After the dust had settled, many Republicans and those who voted for Trump in 2020, expressed their discontent with how Twitter banned the US President from a major social media platform at their whim. These bad feelings were held for a whole year until March 2022, when Musk expressed his discontent with the commitment to free speech Twitter had in a tweet. Musk wanted to start a competitor, but he knew the chances of those succeeding would be low (ex: Parler). Earlier in the year, Musk had bought shares of the company until he had the largest stake in the company, 9%, by April 2022 according to the Associated Press. Musk was offered a seat on the board by Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, but things quickly turned hostile between them and Musk wanted to make Twitter private by purchasing the website for $44 billion.
Initially, the company didn’t want to be a victim of this “hostile takeover” (AP) by Musk and wasn’t completely sure that Musk could come up with the money. However, Musk was able to raise the money by financing $46.5 billion and selling a chunk of his Tesla shares to fund his purchase. The Twitter board, under immense pressure now to take this huge sum of money, caved in and decided to go through with the deal. However, legal battles between Musk and Twitter took place after Musk believed Twitter wasn’t giving them the full picture when it came to authentic engagement. In the end, though, Musk was able to buy Twitter in October and laid off more than 75% of the company’s employees, ousting Agrawal as well. Musk set out on his plan to make Twitter the bastion of “free speech” it was meant to be.
Musk’s purchase of Twitter quickly became a financial disaster for him. Soon after he bought the platform, many major advertisers pulled out of the platform, prompting Musk to assure them that the site wouldn’t turn into a “free-for-all hellscape” (AP), and that the site would remain politically neutral. This didn’t turn out to be the case, as now that most of Twitter’s Trust and Safety team had been let go, there was nobody to moderate the massive amounts of racist, sexist, and derogatory posts that had increased in volume after Musk took over the website. Musk’s purchase restored the accounts of many bad actors, when they may have been relegated to more niche, smaller websites in the past (e.g. 4Chan). Twitter started to rack up a larger amount of debt, as advertising revenue tanked. One year later in 2023, Musk made some of the biggest changes to the website since its inception in 2006.
In July 2023, Musk announced that he would change the website’s name to X, as it reflects his vision to turn the platform into the “everything app” (X Corp). This move received backlash from many who were on the site pre-musk, saying that it makes no sense to throw away the branding that the site had gained over the last decade. This change came only a few months after Musk did away with the verification system or “check-mark system”, which identified authentic, notable accounts on the platform. Musk instead required users to pay $8 a month for the checkmark, claiming that this would enable Twitter to let smaller accounts make their voices heard and that the change would help combat spam. However, this just created a system of fake engagement that users were getting paid for. This led to the creation of Gimmick Accounts and Engagement Farmers who tried to game the system by creating fake engagement. This only added to the spam issue and made the platform even less attractive to many.
Many of these changes were in a scramble to make X profitable, as it was losing a huge amount of money every passing quarter. As of writing, the platform has lost more than 80% of its value compared to when Musk bought it two years ago (WARC Media). As the election came around, Musk knew that he needed to find a way to make the platform useful, even if it was burning money. The year 2024 came around, which practically started the election cycle for the upcoming presidential election. As Musk realized the benefits he would gain from a Trump presidency, he started to voice his support for him even more. Less regulation on his other companies, such as SpaceX, would be a major benefit to him, allowing him to profit from these ventures on a larger, faster scale. Musk, amassing more and more followers, had gained a large following on the website. As the year passed by, his posts started to mimic right-wing talking points, spreading more invalidated conspiracy theories, and reposting alt-right posts.
Musk has changed his political stance greatly in the last few years, now clearly identifying with more Conservative values. Musk, who was showing off how Tesla had scored well on LGBTQ equality in 2018 (Tweet), is now criticizing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in 2024. Meanwhile, former president Donald Trump was planning to run for his second term and needed to clear the bad optics of the mess he had made towards the end of his presidency. There were things working in his favor, however, as President Biden’s approval rating was declining sharply as immigration and inflation issues plagued his administration. Still, Republicans had to make leaps and bounds in trying to build a base of voters from the ones they had lost in 2020. They needed a spokesperson with a ton of influence who could shine a positive light on Trump, and they found that in Musk.
Musk started criticizing the Biden administration long before 2024, but he decided to ramp up his attacks and give up the farce of being politically neutral. Before President Biden dropped out after his poor performance during the CNN debate in May 2024, Musk had posted more than 30 times about the poor job Biden had done. After Biden had dropped out, he switched to attacking Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, even going to the point where he was posting deep fake videos of her in which she was saying things that would turn off voters. In mid-2024, Musk started the America PAC, which would go on to donate about $200 million to Trump’s campaign by election day according to the Associated Press. In August of 2024, he hosted a town hall with Trump on X, talking about Trump’s views and policy to millions of listeners. Musk also shared the same views with Trump on mail-in voting, enabling him to claim fraud if Election Day didn’t go the right way. X Feeds were programmed to promote Musk’s posts, indirectly spreading Musk’s posts supporting Trump. With every passing day, Musk posted more right-wing propaganda to make the next Trump presidency a reality, right up until Election Day.
On November 5th, 2024, millions of Americans around the country went to the polls to cast their votes for the 47th president of the United States. As the polls started to close and the votes came in, the decision desks started to make their projections as Trump racked up electoral votes at a much faster pace than Harris. By this point, Musk had posted thousands of tweets, donated millions of dollars, and even spoken at a Trump rally (coming out on the stage to huge cheers by the MAGA world) to reelect Trump. As Trump’s tally went up, it increasingly looked as if he would run away with the election this time. And then it happened. Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance won the 2024 presidential election in a landslide, all as Musk was right there next to him in Trump’s Florida estate of Mar-A-Lago.
During Trump’s campaign, there has been discussion on reducing the size of government, such as cutting departments that were seen as unnecessary to reduce spending. In response to this, Trump announced that he would be creating another department—not an official department as that requires Congress’s approval—to accomplish this task. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), will be led by former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and, you guessed it, Elon Musk. At the time of writing, Trump has made various cabinet picks for his second term, but this is not a cabinet position. Trump is planning to make the richest man in the world, who wasn’t elected to any position, in charge of government employees’ employment status. In any other country, this would be labeled “corruption” and an uproar would follow. Here, due to the influence Musk has been able to generate using X, he’s able to get away with it. X may be leaking cash every day, but Musk’s bigger prospects are well underway.
