Businessman, entrepreneur and increasingly a disruptive force in geopolitics.
Elon MuskOwner of X, SpaceX and Tesla, has never shied away from making controversial political posts, but in recent weeks his online trolling has had very real consequences.
Last week he shared posts on X inciting racial unrest in the UK and predicted that civil war in the country was inevitable. Today he is reportedly set to interview the former president. Donald Trump to X, a meeting that will generate hundreds of headlines in a presidential campaign in which the interviewer Musk has unashamedly taken sides.
Immediately after the attack in Pennsylvania last month, Musk used his app to support Trump’s candidacy – breaking the norm of self-declared neutrality from the heads of social media platforms. (Mark Zuckerberg, for example, is not nearly as open about his political views.) And in July, Musk announced the formation of a political action committee, America Pacthat would “overwhelmingly but not exclusively” support the Republican Party.
The South African-born investor has also signaled his disapproval of Trump’s opponents. Kamala Harrisand even spread a deep fake video allegedly shows Harris calling herself “the ultimate diversity worker.” He also blocked the “White Dudes for Harris” account on X after it ran a massive fundraiser that raised more than $4 millionfor their campaign.
Musk’s political interventions on X were particularly controversial in the UK. where his inflammatory posts have been linked to recent unrest. British officials have criticised Musk for spreading misinformation, including false claims that the killer of three British girls – which sparked protests and unrest last week – was a Muslim migrant. During the unrest, “supersharers”, or accounts like Elon Musk’s with many followers, acted as “hubs” for spreading this lie through their interaction with the far-right content.
Musk is also responsible for loosening the site’s content moderation policies and restoring many far-right accounts that acted as super-spreaders of misinformation. For example, he lifted the ban Tommy Robinsona British fringe activist and four-times imprisoned far-right activist who went viral during the riots. He also promoted Ashley Simon – Co-founder of a white supremacist group who claimed that the British Prime Minister Keir Starmer planned to send British rioters to internment camps on the Falkland Islands.
Can it be regulated? In the wake of the unrest, numerous politicians, including Starmer, EU commissioners and US senators, called for an investigation into the role of social media in spreading inflammatory misinformation.
Accordingly Scott BadeGeotechnology expert at Eurasia Group, Musk is increasingly becoming a “geopolitical agent of chaos.” But Musk is not too powerful to regulate, Bade says. “The thing is, you’re not going to regulate Elon himself. You’re going to regulate the parts of his empire.”
The Online Safety Bill is set to come into force in the UK as early as the end of the year and will require platforms to remove illegal content or face a fine of 10% of annual global turnover or £18 million, whichever is higher. Following the unrest, lawmakers are considering tightening restrictions so that companies can be sanctioned if they allow the spread of “legal but harmful” content such as misinformation.
“After the riots, a clear consensus is emerging that Musk and X are a problem, given the amount of misinformation, racist insults and incitement to violence that have been spread on the platform,” says the European expert at Eurasia Group Mujtaba Rahman. “There will be a political and policy-based response, but what form that will take remains unclear at this point.”
