Just a few years ago, Elon Musk seemed to be just another Silicon Valley billionaire with no true political compass. He once described himself as “half-Republican, half-Democrat” and often donated money to candidates from both parties. But all that seemed to change during the Covid-19 pandemic when Musk started taking much more right-wing stances about lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and many other divisive political issues, often spreading misinformation in the process.
Today, Musk has donated almost $120 million of his own money to get Donald Trump reelected. He recently campaigned with Trump at New York’s Madison Square Garden, where he said he wasn’t just MAGA, he was “dark, gothic MAGA.” Musk is using both his financial resources as the world’s richest person along with the soft power he wields on X, the social media platform he bought two years ago, where he routinely posts to his 200 million followers about why they should vote for Trump.
In this Reveal podcast extra, host Al Letson talks about Musk’s political evolution with Mother Jones senior reporter Anna Merlan, who’s been covering the many ways Musk has tried to influence the 2024 election.
“There have always been billionaires and titans of industry who get involved in politics,” Merlan says. “But I think the scale of Musk’s involvement is really different because it’s not just that he’s a billionaire. It’s not just that he’s endorsing Trump. It’s also that he controls a powerful and widespread communication medium.”
Dig Deeper
Read: Elon Musk’s Lawyers Quietly Subpoena Public Interest Groups (Mother Jones)
Read: How Elon Musk Is Tying His Love for Trump to His Fight in Brazil (Mother Jones)
Read: What Elon Musk Really Wants (The Atlantic)
Read: US Agencies Fund, and Fight With, Elon Musk. A Trump Presidency Could Give Him Power Over Them. (The New York Times)
Credits
Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Production managers: Steven Rascón and Zulema Cobb | Digital producer: Nikki Frick | Music and mastering: Jim Briggs and Fernando Arruda | Interim executive producers: Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis | Host: Al Letson
Transcript
Reveal transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for Reveal’s radio stories is the audio.
| Al Letson: | From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson, and I’m back again midweek to drop our final bonus episode before the election. An election in which one person, in particular, has played an outsized role. |
| Speaker 2: | Elon Musk. |
| Elon Musk: | I’m not just MAGA, I’m dark, gothic MAGA. There’s a lot of people out there who need to vote for President Trump. America’s just not going to be great, America is going to reach heights that it is never seen before. The future is going to be amazing. |
| Al Letson: | That was Elon Musk this weekend at a Trump rally inside Madison Square Garden. Dark, gothic MAGA Musk is all-in on Donald Trump. Over the last few months, the world’s richest person has put tens of millions of dollars of his own money into the race. And Musk isn’t just providing the Trump campaign with much-needed financial support, on X, the social media platform he bought two years ago, Musk routinely posts to his 200 million followers about why they should support Trump and the Republican Party, while also often spreading misinformation about the election itself. |
| For example, he recently shared a post that Michigan has more registered voters than eligible citizens. It’s not true. He also said that electronic voting machines and mail-in ballots should not be trusted, another claim that has no factual basis. And while working to get Trump back into the White House, Musk is also reportedly in touch with one of America’s adversaries, Russian President Vladimir Putin. According to a recent report in The Wall Street Journal, Musk has been in regular contact with Putin since late 2022. They’ve reportedly discussed issues of geopolitics that have raised national security concerns here in the US. But I remember not too long ago when Musk was just another Silicon Valley billionaire who seemed to hold no true political compass. | |
| So how did this happen? How did Musk go from tech bro to dark MAGA? To help me make sense of Musk’s rightward drift over the last few years and the influence he’s having on this election, I brought on my colleague, senior reporter Anna Merlan from Mother Jones. | |
| Anna, I have to say, I’ve been following your work and I’ve been a fan of yours forever. | |
| Anna Merlan: | Likewise. |
| Al Letson: | So you have a really interesting beat. Can you describe it for the audience? |
| Anna Merlan: | So yeah, for the last 10 years, I have been pretty focused on conspiracy theories in American life. And of course, the common definition of a conspiracy theory is a belief that a group of people are working together to hide a consequential secret or to seize power, for instance. So I spend a lot of time covering conspiracy communities, what they believe and how it drives them to make the decisions that they make about how to live their lives. |
| Al Letson: | So Elon Musk has been in our lives for a long time, and my first remembrance of Elon Musk is basically Tesla electric cars. The first time he came on my radar, he was a tech bro. He was working in tech. Everyone was saying he was a founder of this great new company, which he wasn’t actually the founder, he just bought the company. |
| Anna Merlan: | Right, yeah. |
| Al Letson: | But I think back then I thought of him as leaning a little bit left, and then he buys Twitter. And even before he bought Twitter, you could see the gradual shift in who the person that we know as Elon Musk became. |
| Anna Merlan: | Yes. |
| Al Letson: | I’m curious if you have any idea what his red pill moment was. |
| Anna Merlan: | Yeah, there’s been a lot of reporting about this because it has been so consequential. Like a lot of very rich people, Musk always went back and forth in who he supported and who he made campaign donations to. He made donations to Hillary Clinton. He and President Trump feuded for years. But there has been a pretty noticeable rightward shift in his politics. And for a lot of very wealthy people, it seems like it accelerated during the pandemic. A lot of these folks were sort of faced with a level of government, what they saw as intrusion in their lives that they were not used to, and became openly skeptical about things like vaccines, which Musk has tweeted skeptically about quite a bit. |
| So we saw not just Musk, but a lot of other people in the tech space accelerate a skepticism about government and, to some degree, a skepticism about liberal democracy. So there have been a bunch of moments like this for Musk. One was around Covid, another was around what he calls illegal immigration, which he is increasingly concerned with. And a third is about trans people, gender-affirming care, gender-affirming medication. These are all things that he has expressed an increasing amount of concern about over the years, and that has found him a lot of new supporters on the right, both in politics and sort of elsewhere. | |
| Al Letson: | So as he’s beginning this rightward shift, where does the acquisition of Twitter fit in all that? |
| Anna Merlan: | Yeah, so Musk ended up buying Twitter in, I believe, October of 2022. And this was a pretty big surprise. It didn’t actually seem like he could pull it off. He had to get a lot of financing to do it. And Musk has said many times that one of his interests in buying Twitter was that he believed that it was no longer a free speech platform and that it was suppressing disfavored views of conservative people and players. And of course, this is something that Republican politicians have claimed for years. And so he spoke a lot about wanting to make Twitter into a free speech platform again, as he put it. |
| And in practice, what that’s meant is bringing back folks who were banned previously for doing things like spreading misinformation, fomenting threats. A lot of those users have been brought back en masse, people like Alex Jones, who were expected to stay off the platform forever. And then, of course, as we’ve seen accelerate recently, becoming a huge spreader himself of what most people would agree is mis- and disinformation, especially around immigration and now around election fraud. He’s become very, very concerned about election fraud. | |
| Al Letson: | It’s striking to me that right before he bought Twitter, he was talking a lot about free speech and how he was the free speech guy and he just wanted to buy the platform to restore free speech. And then he got the platform and started banning people that said anything negative about him, essentially trampling down on free speech. |
| Anna Merlan: | The irony of those bans has been noted. Though, to be fair, a lot of those people end up getting to come back ultimately, like a recent one was the journalist Ken Klippenstein, who was briefly banned and then eventually brought back. But all of this kind of points to the same thing, which is that Twitter under Elon Musk, or X, as he now calls it, is his platform. His rules go, his decisions. They do not have to be consistent. They just have to be his, which, of course, has concerned free speech advocates, federal regulators. There’s been a lot of concern about a very, very powerful platform controlled by the whims of one guy. |
| Al Letson: | So now that we are in this political season and we’re moving towards a presidential election, Musk isn’t on the sidelines tweeting his political support. He is actually on the field playing. What is he doing to help Donald Trump become the president again? |
| Anna Merlan: | Yeah, so he endorsed Donald Trump following the first assassination attempt against President Trump in July. He appeared recently at a Trump rally, but the biggest thing is that he founded a political action committee called America PAC. He founded it relatively recently, and he sent it something like $75 million. So there’s that. |
| Al Letson: | Right. And not just that because in the first half of October, he spent even more, about $44 million. So in all, Musk has put down around $120 million to try and get Trump elected. It’s so much money, and I know that’s not all he’s doing, right? |
| Anna Merlan: | Yeah. There’s also something that’s happening on the platform, which is that Twitter created something called an election integrity community, which is a hub on Twitter where people can report instances of what they view as “voter fraud or irregularities” you see while voting in the 2024 election. So this is totally user-generated content, and as our colleague Julianne McShane noted the other day, it is already full of false allegations of voter fraud. So it’s pretty easy to see where this is going. |
| Al Letson: | It sounds like what he’s created is a conspiracy theory generator, like an engine of conspiracy theory. |
| Anna Merlan: | Specifically around voter fraud. And of course, allegations of voter fraud are becoming more and more common every single time we have an election, especially from powerful people, especially from powerful people who lose. So what he’s done, really, is turbocharge that dynamic for this particular election well ahead of any votes taking place. |
| Al Letson: | Which we should say that in all the cases where voter fraud has been investigated, and it’s been investigated a lot, there’s very little evidence that it is actually happening, especially there’s no evidence that it’s happening on a massive scale. |
| Anna Merlan: | Right, there’s none. But it’s one of those things where having somebody like Elon Musk make these claims to a massive platform over and over and over again has ill effects, and it can probably change what people think about voter fraud. I should also mention that he recently appeared at a rally in support of Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, and he seemed to refer to false conspiracy theories that Dominion voting machines were part of a plot to rig US elections. |
| Al Letson: | Yeah. I mean, it feels like he is begging to get into a fight with Dominion. |
| Anna Merlan: | Yeah. |
| Al Letson: | Dominion got almost $800 million in a settlement after it sued Fox News over defamation. So I mean, good luck. |
| Anna Merlan: | Yeah, it’s a very interesting choice, and I’m curious to see if he continues making these particular claims. |
| Al Letson: | In the past, someone with Musk’s stature and wealth making false claims about election security still might not break through to the public, but Elon Musk isn’t your typical billionaire. |
| Anna Merlan: | There have always been billionaires and titans of industry who get involved in politics, but I think the scale of Musk’s involvement is really different, because it’s not just that he’s a billionaire, it’s not just that he’s endorsing Trump, it’s also that he controls a powerful and widespread communication medium, which is Twitter. |
| Al Letson: | When we come back, Anna and I talk about whether Musk’s money and soft power could actually tip the election. That’s coming up next. You’re listening to Reveal. |
| This is Reveal. I’m Al Letson and I’m talking to Mother Jones senior reporter Anna Merlan about how the richest person in the world, Elon Musk, is using his wealth to affect the presidential race and why Musk has gone all in for Donald Trump. | |
| Anna, how would you define Musk’s politics? | |
| Anna Merlan: | So this is a really interesting question because like a lot of very wealthy people who own businesses, he’s complained bitterly about federal regulation. He’s gotten in fights with the FCC. He’s just seemed really sort of critical of government as a concept. But at the same time, two of his companies have billions of dollars in federal contracts, that would be SpaceX, his rocket company, and then Tesla, his car company. They have incredibly lucrative and really consequential contracts with the federal government. So he’s in this interesting position where he’s both very critical of government and pretty involved in it. No matter who wins, he will still be pretty involved in it through his companies. |
| Al Letson: | Yeah, I think it’s safe to say that even though his companies will still do work with the government regardless of who wins, he’s probably seeing a larger windfall if Donald Trump wins. |
| Anna Merlan: | Yeah, that’s accurate. Donald Trump has actually said that if he is elected, he will make Musk the head of a new government efficiency commission with the power to recommend wide-ranging cuts, to change federal rules, to roll back regulations, including things like safety regulations that he’s complained about affecting Tesla and SpaceX. So it’s fair to say that this is going to be pretty consequential for him and his companies, both sort of personally and financially, if Donald Trump takes office. |
| Al Letson: | Speaking of Donald Trump, I just have to say that when he took the stage with Musk in Butler, Pennsylvania, back in early October, I cannot know what was in the former president’s mind, but I would say that while Elon was jumping on stage, the look that Trump gave him was kind of like, buddy. |
| Anna Merlan: | A really indelible photo. |
| Al Letson: | So what comes to mind when I saw that photo was that these men are very much the opposite in some ways and very much alike in a lot of ways, and they’re lockstep. Can you talk to me a little bit about that? How are they alike? |
| Anna Merlan: | Well, they’ve feuded a lot over the years, and in a way, they’ve feuded because they are so similar. They’re both people with, one might almost say messianic beliefs in their own abilities and their own importance in the history of the country and the world. They are both people who believe very strongly in unfounded ideas about voter fraud. They both like to talk a lot about things like illegal immigration at length. But we could probably say that Elon Musk is a more successful businessman than Donald Trump. But again, there both of them have inflated and kind of mythologized their claims about how they run their businesses over the years. I guess there are more similarities than there are differences now that I think about it. |
| Al Letson: | Yeah, I will say Elon may be the better businessman, and if you just go by financial value, obviously, Elon is worth more than Donald Trump. But I would say that when Trump was in his prime, there aren’t many people that know how to connect and work an audience the way Trump could, like, let’s say 2016. I don’t think right now, but 2016, he was masterful in how he worked his audience and how he worked his message. And every time you see Elon in public, it’s just really awkward. So going back to Musk and the election, and Trump, The New York Times has reported that he’s effectively moved his base of operations to Pennsylvania to support Trump’s campaign. Why Pennsylvania? |
| Anna Merlan: | Yeah. Pennsylvania is going to be pretty consequential, but what is interesting to me here though is that, obviously, Elon Musk has throwing tons and tons and tons of money into the Trump campaign, but at this point, while you and I are sitting here talking, Kamala Harris is still outraising Donald Trump on the whole. She still has an enormous cash advantage. So one thing that Elon Musk’s involvement here is going to do is it’s going to be an interesting case study in how much one person’s money moves the needle. You know what I mean? How much specifically Elon Musk’s involvement does something, and whether one guy can have sort of an outsize effect on the election. |
| Al Letson: | So he’s offered to give away a million dollars each day to randomly chosen registered voters in some swing states, including Pennsylvania, who agree to sign a petition supporting the First and Second Amendment. First, is that legal? It doesn’t feel like it’s legal, right? You can’t give people prizes for elections. |
| Anna Merlan: | So the Department of Justice has warned Elon Musk and America PAC that this $1 million daily giveaway might indeed be contravening federal law. America PAC is saying, no, it is perfectly legal. We’re not paying people for votes. We’re paying people who sign this pledge. We’re awarding a prize to a randomly chosen person who signs this pledge. So it’s fair to say that the DOJ is super interested in what’s going on here, and they’re paying very close attention. So I guess we’ll see what happens with that. |
| Al Letson: | Yeah. How would you characterize the kind of power that Musk has right now, the influence he has being the world’s richest man with one of the most popular social media platforms in the country? It seems unprecedented. |
| Anna Merlan: | Yeah, it certainly feels unprecedented to me in that there have always been billionaires and titans of industry who get involved in politics like Henry Ford famously ran for Senate, and then when he lost suspected voter fraud and suspected it very loudly. But I think the scale of Musk’s involvement is really different, because it’s not just that he’s a billionaire, it’s not just that he’s endorsing Trump. It’s also that he controls a powerful and widespread communication medium, which is Twitter. I think Musk’s role in this election cycle is probably going to be studied for years to come to understand, really, what it did. |
| Al Letson: | Do you think he can actually tip the balance of favor for Trump? |
| Anna Merlan: | I really wonder about this because this is such a complicated election. There’s so many things going on. It’s one of those things where if just money mattered, there would still be a question because Harris is still outraising Trump. So I think that probably in the end, his effect on the election is not going to be discernible. Though, I could be wrong. I think it’s going to have much greater effects on him and his business and his public profile, which could be good or bad. We’ll see. |
| Al Letson: | Yeah. What will you be watching from Elon Musk as the election gets nearer? |
| Anna Merlan: | I think the big thing that journalists are paying attention to is allegations of voter fraud, election interference from him, that he’s either posting himself or reposting on Twitter, and how those allegations move when he makes them. Does him making a claim cause it to spread extremely widely, for instance? So I’m going to be paying attention to that. I’m going to be paying attention to where he decides to be on the ground. And then, of course, once the election results come in, depending on how they go, I am super curious to see if he questions them, if he accepts the results of the elections or not. Because I do think that, again, somebody with a platform like the one he has, if he decides to claim that the election was illegitimate, that could be a pretty big deal. |
| Al Letson: | Anna Merlan is a senior reporter at Mother Jones covering disinformation, technology, and extremism. Anna, thank you so much for coming in to talk to me. |
| Anna Merlan: | Thank you so much for having me. |
| Al Letson: | Since I spoke with Anna, Philadelphia’s district attorney has filed a civil lawsuit against Musk and America PAC, calling the million-dollar giveaways to voters an illegal lottery scheme that violates the state’s lottery and consumer protection laws. Musk and America PAC have yet to comment on the lawsuit. For more on this story and complete coverage of this historic and monumental election, check out my colleagues reporting at motherjones.com for the latest. And for the latest from Musk, be sure to subscribe to the Reveal newsletter at revealnews.org/newsletter. |
| That story was produced by Josh Sanburn. The editor was Kara McGuirk-Allison. Our production managers are the wonder twins, Steven Rascon and Zulema Cobb. Music and engineering by the dynamic duo, Jay Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs and Fernando, My Man, Yo, Arruda. Our interim executive producers of Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis. Support for Reveal is provided in part by you, our listeners. We are a co-production of the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. | |
| I’m Al Letson, and remember, there is always more to the story. |