The Ballad of Twitter and that Billionaire Bumpkin, Elon Musk

A little over two months ago, Elon Musk found himself at Montsorrel, the palatial Palm Beach compound of Nelson Peltz, the famed activist investor. Mr. Musk knew the sprawling grounds well, having stayed in the guesthouse.

The topic of conversation was a bit different than usual, though: Mr. Peltz had brought together a group of billionaire conservative financiers — including Steve Wynn, the Las Vegas casino magnate, and the hedge-funder John Paulson — to dive into concerns about whether Republicans could seize Senate control, as well as the party’s weak ground game, according to a person with direct knowledge of what transpired.

But Mr. Musk had a darker message that spring day. He told the group that this would be the last free election in America — because if President Biden won, millions of undocumented immigrants would be legalized and democracy would be finished, according to the person.

Mr. Trump had to win, Mr. Musk said. He dispensed some advice for the veteran financiers, who had decades more experience in Republican politics than he did: Their emphasis on political advertising was misplaced, he said. Tesla, his electric car company, barely advertises, he said, but had still built a cult following through word of mouth. Why couldn’t Republicans do the same?

The most important thing that the financiers could do, Mr. Musk said, was ask two people to support Mr. Trump, and urge them to ask two more. Two people by two people — that’s how the former president would win.

Mr. Musk has transformed himself from an idealistic supporter of Democrats like Barack Obama into a fierce ally of Mr. Trump, whom he flirted with for months and endorsed last weekend roughly 30 minutes after the former president survived an assassination attempt.

In fact, Mr. Trump’s campaign at one point had talked with Mr. Musk about him delivering remarks at this week’s Republican National Convention. Mr. Musk said on Thursday he was not speaking.

Mr. Musk is more comfortable than ever revealing his conservative sympathies. But the role that he has played in supporting Republicans financially is not widely known, in part because he has tried to avoid making public donations.

He has emerged as a central character in the presidential race, targeted by the Biden campaign and celebrated as an almost mythical figure by Mr. Trump’s advisers. Angry at liberals over immigration, transgender rights and the Biden administration’s perceived treatment of Tesla, the mercurial Mr. Musk has undergone a midlife reinvention that has many Republicans salivating about him as the party’s moneymaker — if only he will deliver.

This article is based on interviews with about two dozen of Mr. Musk’s political associates, friends and Republican Party allies, many of whom insisted on anonymity to disclose private conversations. Mr. Musk and his aides did not respond to requests for comment.

Woody Johnson, a pre-eminent Republican fund-raiser and Mr. Trump’s former ambassador to Britain, said he welcomed Mr. Musk into the party as an ideological convert.

“Explore all ideas — and come up with the best one,” Mr. Johnson quipped in an interview. “There’s nobody in the world like Musk. We’re lucky as Americans to have him. He is the most innovative — besides Trump.”

Dismissing Trump as a ‘stone-cold loser’
Mr. Musk was once allergic to Washington. He maintained a decent relationship with Mr. Obama and made several White House visits to build support for Tesla and SpaceX, his rocket manufacturer. But he generally disliked meeting with other politicians and saw political donations as a necessary evil, according to four people who worked with him.

Days before the 2016 election, he told CNBC that Mr. Trump did not “seem to have the sort of character that reflects well on the United States.” After Mr. Trump won, Mr. Musk told some associates that the outcome was proof that they were living in a simulation, according to one person close to him. In 2020, Mr. Musk, in a private conversation with another associate, called Mr. Trump a “stone-cold loser.”

In 2022, the former president, for his part, used an expletive to describe the Tesla chief executive at a rally.

Mr. Musk also predicted that Mr. Trump’s days as a political force were finished, according to a private message that was viewed by The New York Times, as he prepared to voice support for Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, whose campaign he helped kick off in 2023.

Big promises, little follow-through
Mr. Musk has become an obsession of many Trump officials and Republican fund-raisers, who see him as the party’s next great hope — or a meal ticket for themselves. But over the years, he has acquired a reputation in political circles as something of a flake.

Some conservative activists said they wished that Mr. Musk had followed through more on promises to fund free-speech lawsuits by people who believed that they had been censored on social media.

Mr. Musk can be hard to pin down, and rumors fly about him in Republican circles. In 2023, when Kevin McCarthy was elected as House speaker, the California politician gave a party at the Library of Congress, and some aides were told until shortly beforehand to expect Mr. Musk to show up and speak. But he didn’t, disappointing some in the crowd, a person involved in the event recalled.

Mr. Musk has also been unreliable in local politics. He wrote last year on X that he planned to donate $100,000 to GrowSF, a centrist group in San Francisco, so it could help defeat a progressive city official. But Mr. Musk did not donate or even contact the group, said Steven Buss, one of GrowSF’s founders.

An embrace of dark money
Mr. Musk has said that he tries to stay out of politics, and he has not donated to a federal political group since the 2020 cycle, according to campaign finance records. He has gone to great lengths to avoid leaving a public footprint of the contributions he does make.

Indeed, he learned a tough lesson when he made his largest disclosed gift ever, a $50,000 donation in 2017, to the McCarthy Victory Fund, a group aligned with Mr. McCarthy. The disclosure of that donation angered liberals. He learned from that experience to prioritize giving to dark-money organizations, a person familiar with his thinking recalled.

In recent communications with Republicans, Mr. Musk and his associates have expressed a desire not to make political contributions to groups whose donations must be legally disclosed. He told a friend a few months ago that he wanted to find a way to support Trump but didn’t want to do it publicly, the friend recalled.

During the Republican presidential primary race, Mr. Musk’s team had detailed talks with allies of Vivek Ramaswamy about making a major donation to a dark-money group backing the entrepreneur’s candidacy, according to a person briefed on the talks. Mr. Musk attended two fund-raisers for Mr. Ramaswamy, in California and Texas, two people briefed said, but he ultimately declined to cut a check.

In 2023, he strongly considered making a significant political donation to the American Action Network, a 501(c) (4) dark-money group steered by Mr. McCarthy’s political operation, according to a person with knowledge of the discussions. It’s not clear if he gave.

The tug of war
As Mr. Musk sought help on politics, the people he turned to sought to influence him.

He had gotten to know Mr. McCarthy over the last decade thanks to the former speaker’s advocacy for SpaceX. They now text frequently, and Mr. Musk has often relied on Mr. McCarthy over the years for advice on politics and lobbying.

Mr. McCarthy has been eager to highlight his relationship with Mr. Musk, and has gone to great lengths to cultivate him, according to people familiar with their relationship.

He interviewed the billionaire at an exclusive conference in Sea Island, Ga., hosted by the conservative American Enterprise Institute, and invited Mr. Musk to headline a fund-raising retreat for Mr. McCarthy’s donors in Wyoming. Mr. Musk also flew to Washington for the congressman’s birthday last year.

Mr. McCarthy has helped develop Mr. Musk’s relationship with Mr. Trump, but he has not been alone. Three close friends of the former president — Mr. Peltz, Mr. Wynn and Steve Witkoff, whose firm invested in the billionaire’s Twitter takeover — plus Mr. Musk’s emerging confidant, Diesel Peltz, a son of Nelson Peltz — have played a role in encouraging Mr. Musk to draw close to Mr. Trump, according to people familiar with the relationships. Mr. Musk also talks frequently with Mr. Ramaswamy, who has become a Trump surrogate, another person said.

Some of Mr. Musk’s friends in Silicon Valley have also bent his ear, including members of the so-called PayPal Mafia, a group of early executives at the payments company that includes the Trump donors David Sacks and Ken Howery, the people said.

Mr. Musk used to live primarily in Los Angeles, but people close to him said his politics had been shaped by his more conservative social circle in his new home state of Texas. Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of Palantir who lives in Texas, and his aides have spent considerable time with Mr. Musk talking about politics, and Mr. Musk has told others that he is worried about what would happen to his businesses if Texas went blue, the people said.

But some of Mr. Musk’s more liberal friends and associates, have expressed unhappiness to him about his rightward drift, according to three people familiar with the situation. Some said they have received private assurances from Mr. Musk that he is not donating to support Mr. Trump.

The extremist direction of Mr. Musk has bothered his own high-profile, celebrity lawyer, Alex Spiro, according to two people who have spoken to him. Mr. Spiro, who declined to comment, has encouraged Mr. Musk not to alienate Democrats from his businesses, citing the famous quip from Michael Jordan that “Republicans buy sneakers, too,” one of the people said.

The final turn to Trump
It appears those liberal friends are losing the tug of war. Mr. Musk met with Mr. Trump in March and now talks with him directly on occasion, according to people familiar with the relationship. The two have spoken about electric vehicles, as well as technology like so-called deepfake videos, the former president has told donors who relayed his remarks.

During the Trump term, Mr. Musk once asked his top executives at Tesla how many of them had voted for Mr. Trump, and was alarmed to hear that none of them had, according to a person with knowledge of the meeting.

“I have had some conversations with him, and he does call me out of the blue for no reason,” Mr. Musk said last month at Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting.

Mr. Musk and Mr. Sacks organized a private dinner this spring in Los Angeles with several other anti-Biden billionaires, who talked about ways to oppose Mr. Biden’s re-election.

Whether Mr. Musk might financially support the Republican ticket has flummoxed Mr. Trump’s aides. For much of this year, Mr. Musk entertained to friends the notion of an endorsement, or at least urging his followers explicitly not to vote for Mr. Biden, according to two people who spoke directly with Mr. Musk. The billionaire told these people that he wanted to wait until the president formally captured the Democratic nomination before he made a proclamation.

Then came the assassination attempt.

Within an hour of the shooting, Mr. Musk went on X and endorsed Mr. Trump.

Mr. Lonsdale has helped start a new super PAC that its donors say will fund an aggressive field program to aid Mr. Trump, and several of Mr. Musk’s close friends have pooled their millions behind the group. The Wall Street Journal reported that Mr. Musk had spoken of donating $45 million per month to the group — energizing both the Trump and Biden teams. But Mr. Musk has told people close to him that the figure is false, and while people close to the group said that while they expect him to give, they don’t know how much.

In recent weeks, Mr. Musk privately lobbied Mr. Trump to choose Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio as his running mate. He celebrated vociferously on Monday after Mr. Vance was announced as the pick.

Trevor Traina, a Republican fund-raiser in San Francisco who served in the Trump administration and knows Mr. Musk socially, said he saw parallels between the two men.

“He has had to walk the same road as Trump — silenced, targeted, canceled — and within the last couple weeks,” Mr. Traina said of Mr. Musk, “he has decided it’s time to take action.”

For some, AmericaPAC offers your state’s registration website; others, however, simply get a blank page after entering their personal information. And that could be a problem when it comes to laws prohibiting voter suppression.

What happens when you visit AmericaPAC
After entering your email address and zip code, AmericaPAC takes you to one of two pages: If you are located in a state that leans solidly Republican or Democrat, it simply provides a link to your state’s official voter registration portal. If you enter a zip code within a swing state such as Arizona or Georgia, however, you then encounter a form requesting personal data like full name, address, and phone number. Filling this out subsequently sends you to a page that simply reads, “Thank you for taking the first step to register to vote… Please complete the form below and we will help you complete your registration.” At the time of writing, there is no actual form underneath that message. Popular Science confirmed these results using dummy accounts for Pennsylvania (swing state) and Mississippi (solidly Republican).

While many people online are already arguing this likely amounts to voter fraud—along with offering links for anyone to file an FEC complaint against AmericaPAC—it’s probably as good a time as any to make sure you really are registered to vote ahead of this year’s historic election. Luckily, the actual US government has a website specifically dedicated to doing just that—no Musk-backed super PAC necessary.

As an ex-Twitter boss, I have a way to grab Elon Musk’s attention. If he keeps stirring unrest, get an arrest warrant

It cannot be right that Musk can sow discord without personal risk. He’s a jetsetter: perhaps fear of unexpected detention will concentrate his mind

he way social media is making headlines currently is not without precedent: a fragile narcissist posting relentlessly on a social network he’s made his own. We know well how this has ended in the past; Donald Trump’s furious posts after his election defeat led to the assault on the Capitol on 6 January 2021. The aftermath of that episode saw the then president suspended from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and even, to the dismay of those hoping to mood-board the Mar-a-Lago aesthetic, Pinterest.

This time is likely to be different, not least because the person agitating the social media furore, Elon Musk, owns the platform he is using.

On Monday, the two men meet. Musk is having a live conversation with the former president, promising “entertainment guaranteed”.

I worked at Twitter for most of Trump’s presidential term, serving as the most senior executive outside the US. It was clear from my eight years at the platform that there is something lost in translation between British interpretations of free speech and the arguments parroted by those who adopt a US libertarian interpretation of the concept.

Being the British office of a US operation gave us a daily insight into the almost religious rat-a-tat repetition defence of free speech. The founding general counsel of Twitter, Alex Macgillivray, once described the business as being the “free speech wing of the Free Speech party”. In the US, there’s often a myopic sense that its freedoms don’t exist in the rest of the world, but in the UK 1998 Human Rights Act, article 10 enshrines freedom of speech. Critically, there is a recognition that free expression carries with it a duty of responsibility. The UK law requires that such free speech is not used to incite criminality or spread hatred.

For US-based tech firms, the concept of “free speech” is perceived somewhat differently. In my time working under a significantly more enlightened regime at Twitter, it was quickly clear to the team in London that the notion of “free speech” espoused in San Francisco wasn’t always focused on creating the kind of utopian world you might casually imagine. We’d regularly see that there was a dark side to the idea that anyone could say anything; time and time again, it led to a minority group (a subset of straight white males) being able to aggressively target large portions of the rest of society, including women, the LBGTQ+ community and ethnic minorities.

The worst part was that, left unchecked, this group ruined the experience of the platform for everyone else. It’s hard to convince people now who didn’t use the product during happier days, through events such as the London 2012 Olympics or early X Factor, but Twitter used to be joyously good fun to use. A laissez-faire approach to abuse sadly allowed much of the carefree humour to be scared off. As much as X/Twitter loves framing itself as the “global town square”, such common spaces only thrive when everyone knows antisocial behaviour isn’t going to be tolerated.

Working in the UK office was a little like working in a parliamentary system without a written constitution. There was a vague sense that, rather than rules and regulations holding the organisation to account, the platform would be constrained by outside expectations.

For example, during flare-ups in 2013 when prominent female users were being aggressively subjected to rape threats and threats of violence, the only thing that helped the UK office get the attention of our San Francisco HQ was the mention that advertisers were contemplating boycotting the platform. Democracies shouldn’t be left looking at leveraging the soft power of boycotts, not least because in the case of X, most advertisers have long gone.

As someone who worked not only at Twitter but also at YouTube as it came to terms with dealing with its horrible abuse problems, I remain convinced that a social media platform can create behavioural norms that enable polite discussion. Instagram is certainly significantly more civil, and TikTok creators regularly tell their audience that they’ve just served a time-out because the content they posted crossed a line. But to operate a nicer place requires resources – you need to create systems and you need to staff that infrastructure. Whether it was politicians receiving personal threats, footballers having racism spat at them, or users saying they’d been called “a Jewish ****”, the resources were never given to prove the promise of something better. The government can hold platforms accountable for this – for instance, asking them to confirm the number of UK-based employees in areas like user safety and enforcement.

Despite the attempts to position “free speech” as a philosophical conviction, the reason for its popularity among tech firms is pure and simple – it is cheap. “So it was capitalism after all,” says journalist Kara Swisher, in the first line of her memoir about covering Silicon Valley. The approach taken by tech firms is less about deeply held principles and more about money – as evidenced by the growing support for Trump in the San Francisco venture capital community. We’ve hesitated from labelling tech billionaires as oligarchs because the likes of Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey wielded their political power gently. Asking oligarchs to be accountable for what their platforms permit is straightforward and entirely possible.

As for Musk’s tweeting, there’s often a tell about his personal posting. The @elonmusksjet Instagram account, which uses public flight logs to track the movements of Musk’s private jets, gives a simple opportunity to match the billionaire’s social media posts with the timezone they were posted from. It was just after 4am in Texas when Musk reshared a fake post suggesting that Keir Starmer was planning to set up “detainment camps” in the Falkland Islands. Glancing at Musk’s X feed shows him regularly staying up long into the night posting and replying. He’s been open about his use of ketamine, apparently a medical prescription. While 4am tweets can be deleted (as the one about detainment camps was), real-world consequences hang around long after the buzz has gone.

What can the UK do right now? Fortunately, it appears the immediate threat of civil disturbance has abated. Musk himself has taken on the aura of a teenager on the bus with no headphones, creating lots of noise but not exactly winning people over. Last week, Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, observed that X had become infuriating to use because the billionaire “has somehow ordered his moronic observations to be inserted at the top of every feed”, something that was confirmed last year by one of X’s engineers when Musk asked them to talk through the construction of the platform’s algorithm. Yes, Musk’s own tweets are prioritised by the app. In addition to freedom of speech, he also demands freedom of reach.

The question we are presented with is whether we’re willing to allow a billionaire oligarch to camp off the UK coastline and take potshots at our society.

The idea that a boycott – whether by high-profile users or advertisers – should be our only sanction is clearly not meaningful. Other countries have banned the app, but we probably don’t want to find ourselves in a WhatsApp group with Russia, Turkey and Venezuela, the other countries on that side of the argument.

In the short term, Musk and fellow executives should be reminded of their criminal liability for their actions under existing laws. Britain’s Online Safety Act 2023 should be beefed up with immediate effect. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his team should reflect if Ofcom – the media regulator that seems to be continuously challenged by the output and behaviour of outfits such as GB News – is fit to deal with the blurringly fast actions of the likes of Musk.

Labour MPs have begun quitting X in alarm over the platform, with one saying Elon Musk had turned it into “a megaphone for foreign adversaries and far-right fringe groups”. ...

Over the weekend, Jess Phillips, a Home Office minister who has more than 700,000 followers on X, said she wanted to scale back her use of the platform as it had become a “bit despotic” and was “a place of misery now”.

A government minister also told the Guardian they had reduced their posts on X over the summer and that Musk’s actions had made them “very reluctant to return”.

“I’ve not been very political before,” Mr. Musk said toward the end of their chat, describing himself as “moderate, if not moderate, slightly left,” and adding that listeners who categorized themselves that way should back Mr. Trump.

According to O’Connor’s most recent publicly available financial disclosures, he owns up to $50,000 in stock in Tesla, Musk’s electric vehicle company. He also invests in and has profited from Unilever, raising questions about the judge’s ability to preside over the advertiser case impartially.

"Combined views of the conversation with @realDonaldTrump and subsequent discussion by other accounts now ~1 billion," Musk said on X, calculating the total of all post views or impressions about the Space chat.

As of publishing time, the X Space between Trump and Musk has roughly 24 million views, which includes the live viewership numbers as well as replays. The post itself, however, claims 183 million views or impressions.