Tech bros are becoming politically radicalized into right-wing thinking at an unprecedented scale.
Elon Musk, the South African multi-billionaire owner of companies like Tesla and SpaceX, has documented his entire alt-right radicalization on social media and it serves a valuable lesson that no one is safe from misinformation and propaganda.
Musk bought X, formerly known as Twitter, in 2022 for $44 billion, according to a Oct. 27, 2022 New York Times article.
His reasoning was that as a “free speech absolutist,” he couldn’t stand what he deemed as partisan censorship by the existing owners, according to the same article.
He purged the company of 80% of its staff, unbanned white supremacists like Nick Fuentes and loosened the policies on hate speech and “permabanning.”
Musk’s cybercoup was fully underway and the main winners were the far-right.
Another one of his first acts was creating Twitter Blue, a monthly subscription that mimics verification, all while promoting the tweets and paying users based on post impressions.
Two years later, X has become a cesspool of users having paid incentives to produce content that garners as much attention as possible while the guardrails against misinformation are completely gutted.
Instead of dissuading or removing the accounts doing this, Musk actively promotes and boosts them to his 200 million followers, spreading extremist ideology and radicalizing himself.
For example, Twitter user @iamyesyouareno mainly posts sensationalized news stories that involve people of color and immigrants as the perpetrators of crimes.
Elon Musk has been following that account since at least Oct. 4, and has interacted with the account numerous times. The account has posted a myriad of white nationalist and neo-Nazi content.
For example, they posted an AI-generated image of a white man with roots for legs next to a man of Middle Eastern descent with the overlaid text “Blood and Soil.” The caption reads “Remember who you are” in the Oct. 11 Tweet.
“Blood and soil” is a key slogan of Nazi ideology. On Elon Musk’s Twitter, they’re no longer using dog whistles—they’ve been empowered with megaphones.
The account also posted an image of a white background and black text reading: “If white people had ‘privilege,’ wouldn’t they have the ‘privilege’ of keeping their countries white?” reads an Oct. 13 Tweet.
Musk’s politics were drastically different just a few years ago in 2018. In response to a homophobic tweet, he proudly tweeted “Tesla scored 100/100 four years in a row on LGBTQ equality.”
“People should be free to live their lives where their hearts take them,” he stated in the same thread, according to a June 27, 2018 Tweet.
Over the course of the past few years, he’s abandoned those values.
In response to a Trump anti-immigration ad with the tagline “End the Occupation, Liberate America!” Musk replied, “If it looks like an invasion, sounds like an invasion and uses guns like an invasion, then […] it is an invasion.” in an Oct. 12 Tweet with a combined 130 million impressions.
Ironically, Musk worked in the U.S. illegally in the 90s, according to an Oct. 27 Washington Post article.
With the 2024 election just inches away, Musk has pledged full support behind the Trump-Vance ticket, founding a $75 million PAC dubbed “America,” whose mission statement is to “champion secure borders, sensible spending, safe cities, fair justice system, free speech and self-protection.”
Musk is using this PAC to give away $1 million everyday to random swing state voters who complete a petition declaring their support for the First and Second Amendments. He has subsequently been warned by the Justice Department that his actions might be illegal, according to an Oct. 23 CNN article.
This is not the first time Musk has interfered in a democratic election; his response to U.S. intervention in the election crisis of lithium-rich Bolivia was “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it,” according to a July 25, 2020 Tweet.
When Musk went on Joe Rogan in 2018, smoking weed and sipping whiskey, TSLA stock dropped 9%, according to a Sept. 7, 2018 NBC News article.
With Musk’s new adoption of a hardline anti-immigration stance and platforming of white supremacists on X, TSLA stock has been up 50% over the past six months.
Recently, it’s been revealed that Elon Musk and Russian President Vladimir Putin have been in regular contact since late 2022, according to a Oct. 25 Wall Street Journal article.
Musk’s immense wealth and position at the forefront of electric cars, space travel and satellite technology makes me feel lucky that most Fox News-watching divorced dads don’t have billions to spend toward their political pursuits.
Despite his boosting of white supremacists on X, Musk is not the chief architect of this rise in the tolerance and acceptance of far-right ideology.
He is, however, one of the most wealthy and powerful figures to promote white nationalist thinking in my lifetime.
As we see more figures at the forefront of the future being radicalized by half-truths and sensationalized media, the world has to take notice, hold them accountable and prevent the spread of this hateful disinformation.