Donald Trump may be the next president, but the person who defined the 2024 election was never even a candidate. Centibillionaire Elon Musk all but shut down the US government via X post before Trump, behind whom Musk threw his full support, was even in office. How the political system can adapt to such a figure is unclear.
What is clear is that Musk’s particular blend of superwealth, celebrity, and influence in the world of the Silicon Valley has already made him a key player in shaping the incoming second Trump administration and that his use of X to support Trump’s bid for leadership of the free world is a key component of his power.
“I think Musk is very similar to Trump,” says João Vieira Magalhaes, assistant professor of media, politics, and democracy at the University of Groningen. “He really turned Twitter into a political tool.”
Over the course of the campaign, Musk became one of Trump’s most significant supporters. After endorsing Trump following the assassination attempt against him in Butler, Pennsylvania, Musk pledged to donate $45 million a month to America PAC, a pro-Trump political action committee. By the election, America PAC had shelled out nearly $200 million in support of the Trump campaign, making Musk, its primary funder, one of Trump’s biggest financial backers. In addition to helping bankroll Trump’s bid for the presidency, Musk hit the campaign trail himself, joining Trump at a rally and crisscrossing the key swing state of Pennsylvania to host a series of town halls in support of the former president.
Questions remain about exactly how effective America PAC’s get-out-the-vote effort was. Reporting from WIRED found that workers alleged that those associated with the group's subcontractor, Blitz Canvassing, had tricked and threatened them. Other reporting found the group had issues with canvassers faking the number of reach-outs during the campaign. In all, there were few signs the much-touted effort was effective at all.
Online, though, it was another story. Musk put the full weight of X, the social media platform he owns, behind Trump, using his own account to boost conspiracy theories and pro-Trump propaganda to his more than 200 million followers. Researchers also found good reason to wonder whether X changed its algorithm after July 2024, when Musk endorsed Trump, to boost his account and other conservative accounts. X did not immediately respond to a request for comment. And this was all after he gutted the organization formerly known as Twitter of the people and policies meant to keep the platform safe, leading many other tech companies to follow suit.
“I think he realized that what big tech companies spent decades concerned about, which is essentially how to moderate or how to organize speech on this crazy scale, is that's not a problem,” says Magalhaes. “That's an opportunity for him.”
Since the election, Musk has not faded into the shadows, content with backroom meetings and covert influence. Instead, he has joined calls with foreign leaders, weighed in on staffing picks for the new administration, and threatened to use America PAC to fund primary challenges against lawmakers who don’t support Trump’s (and his) agenda.
In November, Trump announced that Musk would colead a new federal advisory committee called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE, like the memecoin), responsible for cutting $2 trillion from the federal budget. (Eliminating all discretionary federal spending, including on defense, would not achieve this aim.) The committee doesn’t yet exist, but already Musk has used his presence on X and this new government-adjacent, if nebulous, position to dictate policy. Perhaps not coincidentally, on paper, his estimated wealth reportedly increased by about $170 billion following the election.
“He's parlayed [his ownership of X] into a governmental position where his ability to influence policy that affects all of his business interests is just tremendous. And that could pay huge financial dividends,” says Phil Napoli, a professor of public policy at Duke University. “I think that would be the scariest thing that could happen, is if a lot of these platforms take that signal from Musk.”
The early returns suggest that other tech leaders are likely to follow suit. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos have visited Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring. Meta officials say Zuckerberg wants to take an “active role” in helping shape the Trump administration’s tech policies.
“Every time there's a new government, big capitalism, big money, tries to put themselves in a position to benefit from it. And I think that's what they're doing,” says Magalhaes. And Musk’s use of X for explicitly political purposes could induce the Trump administration to expect similar behaviors from other companies, he says. “I think in that sense it is a blueprint.”
Musk’s ambitions are clearly not limited to the US. Since the election he has visited the UK to meet with far-right politicians there and posted about his support for the far-right Germany party, Alternative for Germany. Earlier this year he attempted to defy a court order in Brazil that required X to remove certain far-right accounts that the court said were undermining the integrity of the country’s elections.
All of this means that Musk’s control over politics isn’t just a matter of his closeness to Trump. Even should the two titanic egos have a much-predicted blowup, Musk’s influence will be felt in the new coziness between Silicon Valley and the MAGA movement, and in whatever parts of the world on which he chooses to cast an eye.
In a way, it’s a return to familiar ground. Even before buying Twitter in 2022, Musk was a super user, one of the platform’s most followed people. His Tweets could affect stock prices for his other companies, particularly Tesla, and his favored memecoin, Dogecoin. Trump, similarly, was an active Twitter user before becoming president, and during his first presidency he was notorious for making policy by tweet. It now appears that the next four years, at least, could see more governance by social media post—now just by a different shitposter.
