It's hard to find a political operator as chaotic as Donald Trump. But in Elon Musk, he might just have met his match.
As his private jet landed in Palm Beach, Florida to spend election night at Trump's private resort on Tuesday evening, the Tesla and SpaceX boss – who also owns the social network X – couldn't have known whether he has backed a winner or a loser (though he did proclaim “game, set, and match” for Kamala Harris as early voting data turned against her).
But he can at least rest assured that he has made the 2024 election stranger, more confusing, and more clogged with false information.
His $1m sweepstake for registered voters is under investigation as an "illegal lottery scheme". His Michigan door-knocking operation is accused of badly mistreating its workers. And his fundraising group America PAC, which was put in charge of a big chunk of Trump's canvassing operation, has reportedly suffered from dodgy data and other dysfunctions.
Meanwhile, Musk himself has spent election day making and spreading false claims about voter fraud – though he later deleted or corrected some of them.
"I'm headed to Florida, to Mar-a-Lago, and I'll be there with President Trump, and JD [Vance], and a bunch of other cool people," Musk said in an audio discussion on X on
"The Trump team, I think they're good people. But they're also just – they're fun. They've got a great sense of humour, they're making jokes. Trump actually has a quite a bit of self-deprecating humour."
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 5, 2024
‘All hell has broken loose’
Since fully endorsing Donald Trump in the wake of his first assassination attempt this July, Musk – estimated to be the world's richest person – has become a centerpiece of his campaign.
As well as donating more than $130m to Trump and other Republican politicians, he has regularly appeared at rallies and taken charge of door-knocking operations in crucial swing states including Nevada, Michigan, and Arizona.
However, according to an investigation by NBC News, that project has been missing some of its targets and has suffered from high levels of suspected fraudulent activity by canvassers on the ground, such as activity reports that were geotagged as being more than 100 feet away from the door they were supposedly knocking on.
“You would never ask a political consultant to build rocket ships. I don’t think you should be asking someone that builds rocket ships to manage political operations," said one former member.
Insiders described the project as overpopulated with "broccoli-cut Zoomers" with little experience in "get out the vote" operations, with one claiming: "All hell has broken loose."
Spokespeople for America PAC's subcontractors called these claims "lies peddled by anonymous sources with agendas and a lack of knowledge of the facts".
Then there is Musk's much-ballyhooed sweepstake, in which he promised a $1m prize every day for one registered voter in seven swing states who signed a pledge supporting the First and Second Amendments.
Pennsylvania officials have accused it of being an illegal lottery scheme under state law, and in court, a lawyer for America PAC admitted that winners were not actually "randomly" selected but were specifically chosen to be paid "spokespeople".
That disclosure in turn attracted a class action lawsuit from people who 'competed' in the program, alleging that it broke laws against deceptive trading practices.
‘Musk has transformed X into a political operation’
Just to be clear, Google is not intentionally manipulating search results to help Kamala Harris get more votes than Donald Trump. Rather, according to the company, it was showing maps of voting locations to people who googled “where to vote for 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 for Donald Trump.
But those are both claims that Musk approvingly shared with his 203m followers on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Tuesday – in addition to a video featuring references to QAnon, an extremist millenarian cult that wants Trump to round up his political opponents with a military coup.
That’s nothing new for Musk. By now he has a long history of sharing misinformation and bigoted material. In this case, he deleted some of his posts and thanked Google for its clarification.
Thanks for the clarification https://t.co/JReZUGiWF8
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 5, 2024
What’s worse is that Musk has been accused of tweaking X’s algorithms to promote his own posts shortly after he came out in support of Trump. In other words, he is allegedly using the entire social network as a pro-Trump megaphone.
Indeed, the respected tech journalist Casey Newton – who has been reporting on X and claims of biased social networks for years – said on Monday that Musk has “transformed X into a political operation designed to get Trump elected at all costs”.
Even so, his attempt to hold a town hall event on X on Monday night was thwarted by the endemic technical problems that have dogged the site since his takeover in 2022. “Let’s cancel this,” he eventually said. Not a brilliant omen for how Musk could impact the federal government if he is given a government position by a second Trump administration.
Either way, expect Musk‘s role in politics to stick around. “America PAC is going to keep going after this election – and preparing for the midterms and any intermediate elections, as well as looking at elections at the district attorney and sort of judicial levels,” he said in Tuesday’s X discussion.
