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It’s hard to find a political operator as chaotic as Donald Trump. But in Elon Musk, they may have met their match.
When his private jet landed in Palm Beach, Florida to spend election night at Trump’s private resort on Tuesday evening, the boss of Tesla and SpaceX – which also owns the X social network – did not know whether he had backed the winner or the loser. .
But they can at least be sure that they have made the 2024 election stranger, more confusing, and more disinformation.
A $1m raffle for registered voters is being investigated as an “illegal lottery scheme”. A door-knocking operation in Michigan has been accused of mistreating workers. And the fundraising group America PAC, which is responsible for a large part of Trump’s canvassing operation, is reportedly suffering from dodgy data and other dysfunctions.
Meanwhile, Musk himself had spent election day making and spreading false claims about voter fraud — though he later deleted or corrected some of them.
“I’m going to Florida, to Mar-a-Lago, and I’m going to be there with President Trump, and JD (Vance), and a lot of cool people,” Musk said in an audio discussion at X on
“Tim Trump, I think he’s a good guy. But he’s also just — he’s fun. He’s got a great sense of humor, he makes jokes. Trump really has his own. — humor is devastating.”
‘All hell has broken loose’
Since fully endorsing Donald Trump after his first assassination attempt this July, Musk – who is believed to be the world’s richest man – has been at the center of his campaign.
As well as donating more than $130m to Trump and other Republican politicians, he regularly appeared at rallies and ran door-knocking operations in key swing states including Nevada, Michigan, and Arizona.
However, according to an investigation by NBC News, the project has missed several targets and has experienced a high level of suspected fraudulent activity by canvassers in the field, such as reports of activity that is geotagged as more than 100 feet from the door they are supposed to be knocking on.
“You wouldn’t ask a political consultant to build a rocket ship. I don’t think you should ask someone who builds a rocket ship to manage political operations,” said one former member.
Insiders describe the project as overpopulated with “Broccoli-cut Zoomers” with little experience in operating “sound out”, with one claiming: “All hell broke loose.”
A spokesperson for subcontractor PAC America called the claims “lies peddled by anonymous sources with an agenda and a lack of knowledge of the facts”.
Then there’s Musk’s much-ballyhooed sweepstakes, which promises a $1m prize per day to one registered voter in seven swing states who pledges to support the First and Second Amendments.
Pennsylvania officials have been accused of being an illegal lottery scheme under state law, and in court, the lawyer for the American PAC admitted that the winners were not actually “randomly” chosen but they were specifically chosen to pay “spokespeople”.
The disclosure later drew a class-action lawsuit from the program’s ‘competitors’, alleging that they violated laws against deceptive trade practices.
‘Musk has turned X into a political operation’
To be clear, Google did not intentionally manipulate search results to help Kamala Harris get more votes than Donald Trump. However, according to the company, it shows a map of voting locations to people searching for “where to vote in Harris” because there is a county in Texas called Harris County.
Moreover, there is no evidence that ChatGPT is only willing to persuade Americans to vote for Harris and not Donald Trump.
But both sides claim that Musk agrees with his 203m followers on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Tuesday – in addition to a video showing a reference to QAnon, an extremist millenarian cult that wants Trump to surround his political opponents with the military. coup.
It’s nothing new for Musk. Now they have a long history of sharing misinformation and offensive material. In this case, they deleted some of the posts and thanked Google for the clarification.
To make matters worse Musk was accused of altering the X algorithm to promote his own posts shortly after he endorsed Trump. In other words, he allegedly used the entire social network as a pro-Trump megaphone.
Indeed, respected tech journalist Casey Newton – who has been reporting on X and the claims of biased social networks for years – said on Monday that Musk had “turned X into a political operation designed to elect Trump at all costs”.
Even so, efforts to hold a town hall event at X on Monday night were thwarted by endemic technical problems that have plagued the site since its takeover in 2022. “Let’s cancel this,” he finally said. It does not bode well for how Musk might impact the federal government if he is given a government position by the Trump administration for the second time.
Either way, expect Musk’s role in politics to remain. “America PAC will continue after this election – and prepare for the midterms and any intermediate elections, as well as looking at the elections at the district attorney general and sort of court level,” he said in Tuesday’s discussion X.
