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Soon after a bullet grazed Donald Trump’s ear at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July, Elon Musk took to X, which he owns, to issue his first public endorsement of Trump. Last weekend, Trump returned to the stage in Butler—this time accompanied by Musk, who wore a much-discussed T-shirt with the slogan “Occupy Mars.” Musk walked onto the stage, jumped around, and threw his hands into the air—a meme-perfect moment that duly began to circulate on social media. “I’m not just MAGA, I’m Dark MAGA,” Musk said from the stage, referring to a Terminator-like meme aesthetic popular on the right. He also encouraged people to vote and ended with the dire prediction that, if they don’t, “this will be the last election.” (He later told Tucker Carlson that the speech was somewhat improvised.)
Many users of X were quick to note the irony of Musk wholeheartedly endorsing a political candidate after previously stating that his platform must be politically neutral. And Musk hasn’t always been so enthusiastic about Trump—far from it, actually. After Trump pulled out of the Paris climate accord during his presidency, Musk resigned from an advisory council that Trump had established, according to Business Insider; in 2022, Musk tweeted, “I don’t hate the man, but it’s time for Trump to hang up his hat & sail into the sunset.” Clearly, something changed. In June, Musk helped set up a pro-Trump political action committee, called America PAC, in order “to promote the principles that make America great in the first place.” Earlier this week, Musk declared that the PAC is offering forty-seven dollars (Trump would become the forty-seventh president if he returns to office, in addition to being the forty-fifth) to anyone who successfully gets a registered swing-state voter to sign a petition supporting the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution. “Easy money!” he posted.
Musk and Trump seem to have realized that they are stronger together than they are apart; as the BBC put it, they have at least “put aside their differences.” Under a Trump presidency, Musk’s companies may escape some of the regulatory scrutiny currently imposed by the White House, according to the Washington Post—especially if Trump taps Musk to serve on a mooted “government efficiency commission” (though various outlets have noted that the current administration has hardly been unfavorable toward Musk’s companies Tesla and SpaceX, which are major government contractors). The pair are also aligned over their stated views on free speech and disdain for Democrats who want to moderate social media platforms. The fact that Musk would likely benefit from tax cuts under a second Trump administration doesn’t hurt either. Trump, in turn, gains the support of the world’s wealthiest individual, who has over two hundred million followers on X—at a time when he needs support the most.
If Musk is diving headfirst into partisan politics, another tech titan, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, appears to be taking three steps back. A New York Times article published last month described how Zuckerberg has grown frustrated with Washington and the blowback to some of his politically touchy philanthropic efforts; according to the article, Zuckerberg has stopped funding causes that could be seen as partisan and has scaled back employee activism within Meta. (The piece notes that Meta’s lead HR employee introduced a policy that forbids employees from raising issues such as abortion, racial justice movements, and wars in the workplace).
Tim Murphy, of Mother Jones, offered a slightly different take on Zuckerberg’s political backpedaling—namely, that it isn’t backpedaling at all, but a change of course. “Zuckerberg isn’t done with politics. His politics have simply changed,” Murphy writes, adding that Zuckerberg’s decision to no longer advocate for immigration reform and to cultivate a closer relationship with conservative politicians is a political tactic in itself. (Per the Times, Zuckerberg twice spoke with Trump on the phone over the summer.) “When [Zuckerberg] puts his foot down, you notice it,” Murphy writes. “But when he lifts his foot up, you notice that too.”
Regardless of whether Zuckerberg is truly over politics, a similar shift is mirrored in Meta’s platforms. Earlier this year, the company announced that Instagram and Threads would stop proactively recommending political content from accounts that users don’t follow—a shift that put distance between Meta and criticism that its platforms exacerbate polarization and spread misinformation. “I’ve made the decision that, for me and for the company, the best thing to do is to try to be as nonpartisan and neutral as possible in all of this,” Zuckerberg said during an interview with The Verge’s Decoder podcast last month. In August, he wrote, in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee, that he regrets being “pressured” by the government to “censor” certain content related to the COVID pandemic. As I wrote previously, this was considered a big win for Republicans, who have insisted that tech companies’ content decisions have been tilted by an anti-conservative bias.
Although they employ vastly different strategies, both Musk and Zuckerberg are, ultimately, shifting politically in ways that stand to benefit their companies. For Musk, this involves hurling himself headlong into right-wing politics and potentially securing a role in a Trump administration; for Zuckerberg, it means rolling back decisions perceived as partisan to land in a safety zone of political neutrality. Musk’s political worldview is, of course, much more concerning and in-your-face than Zuckerberg’s. (He has recently spread disinformation about hurricane relief efforts and promoted the lie that Democrats are engineering demographic change for electoral benefit, as Vox’s Li Zhou has explained.) But both men have accumulated such enormous wealth and influence that any political decisions they make—whether active or passive—have serious ripple effects.
For Musk, those ripples have turned into full-blown waves. The day after joining Trump in Butler, Musk did an “off the cuff” interview with Carlson, the former Fox host; he spoke admiringly of Trump, saying that the former president has “the constitution of an ox” despite his diet of “cheeseburgers and Diet Coke and stuff,” and also addressed a tweet he posted about Kamala Harris that had drawn the attention of the Secret Service. “I made a joke, which…I deleted, which is like: ‘Nobody’s even bothering to try to kill Kamala because it’s pointless,’” Musk said. “What do you achieve? Nothing!” They both burst out laughing. Musk said that when it comes to backing Trump, he is “all in, baby”—regardless of the consequences. “You’re definitely in the deep end,” Carlson responded. “You can’t even touch the bottom.”
Other notable stories:
- Earlier this week, Al Jazeera reported that Ali Al-Attar, a cameraman, had been critically injured in an Israeli strike in Gaza; then, yesterday, the broadcaster said that another camera operator, Fadi Al Wahidi, was shot in the neck by Israeli forces while covering intense military action in the north of the territory, and is also critically hurt. Muhammad al-Tanani, a cameraman for Al-Aqsa TV, which is funded by Hamas, was killed in the same area. Al Jazeera alleged that Israeli forces are targeting its journalists. (Israel has generally denied that it does this.) Jodie Ginsberg, the CEO of the Committee to Protect Journalists, said following the injury to Al-Attar that her group was pushing for his evacuation so that he might receive treatment, adding, after the news about Al Wahidi, that “journalists are civilians,” and that deliberately targeting them is a war crime.
- Fallout continues from Tony Dokoupil’s controversial recent interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates on CBS—in which the former sharply challenged the latter on a new book in which he vehemently criticizes Israel—and network bosses’ verdict that Dokoupil’s questioning violated editorial standards. We noted in yesterday’s newsletter that Shari Redstone, the controlling shareholder of CBS’s parent company, had privately disagreed with the network’s rebuke of Dokoupil; yesterday, she did so publicly, saying that Dokoupil did nothing wrong and that the aftermath “was not handled correctly.” And, at an internal meeting, Dokoupil expressed regret for the fallout but not the interview itself—before the meeting was cut short, out of an apparent fear of leaks.
- On CJR’s podcast The Kicker, Josh Hersh spoke with Christopher Robbins, an editor and cofounder of Hell Gate, a digital publication that is providing “a fresh, voicey take on news and culture” in New York City amid an otherwise atrophying local-news scene and, recently, against the backdrop of a huge corruption scandal that is engulfing Mayor Eric Adams and his administration. Hell Gate is “scrambling around town” to cover the scandal as much as it can, Robbins said, but is also “trying to be aware that we need counterprogramming to the Eric Adams spectacle. Our readers care about it, and they should, but you can’t just read Adams, Adams, Adams, Adams nonstop.”
- The New Yorker’s Kyle Chayka profiles Taylor Lorenz—a tech journalist and internet personality who recently left the Washington Post to found an independent publication on Substack—and asks why it took her so long to make the switch away from legacy media to the creator economy, given her frequent points of friction with traditional journalism. “I don’t know what it does other than connote prestige for a shrinking amount of people,” Lorenz told Chayka, of legacy media, adding that the industry “sucks, it’s crumbling, and, by the way, I’m going to dance on the grave of a lot of these places.”
- And we wrote recently in this newsletter about how Musk appeared to be backing away from a regulatory fight in Brazil, which banned X after its leaders initially refused to follow a series of court orders related to content moderation. Yesterday, X started coming back online in Brazil after it finally came into legal compliance. One expert told the Associated Press that the episode “sends a message to the world that the richest person on the planet is subject to local laws and constitutions.”
ICYMI: Reuters and CNN have put up digital paywalls. Will their audiences buy in?
Sarah Grevy Gotfredsen is a computational investigative fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. She works on a range of computational projects on the digital media landscape, including influence operations conducted through news media and the information ecosystem. She graduated from Columbia University in 2022 with an MS degree in data journalism.