Trump, Musk, and the Limits of Attention

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A Nazi salute. Not a Nazi salute. A Roman salute. “What appeared to be a fascist salute.” A “straight-arm gesture.” “An awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm.” A “horrific Sieg Heil.” “A socially awkward autistic man’s wave to the crowd where he says ‘my heart goes out to you.’” “Ein Hitlergruß ist ein Hitlergruß ist ein Hitlergruß.” These were among the reactions that cascaded forth in the media—in both the traditional and new senses of that word—earlier this week, after Elon Musk took to the stage at an Inauguration Day celebration of Donald Trump, and… well, you’ve probably seen it by now.

In many ways, whether or not Musk intended to do a Nazi salute is extremely the point. (For whatever it’s worth, a video of the address that Musk posted to X, the social network that he owns, did not show the offending moment; he has since suggested that the Nazi claims are a “dirty trick” on the part of his critics, adding, “The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired.”) In a few ways, though, Musk’s intentions are not the point; not entirely, anyway. This is, in part, because of Musk’s well-documented flirtations (if that’s even the right word anymore) with the far right—both in the US and abroad—which leave no comparable room for ambiguity; it is also, in part, because various white supremacists and neo-Nazis were thrilled by the gesture, whatever he meant by it. Also, though, the ambiguity itself is kinda the point—Musk, and many others on the right, have long traded in forms of offensive speech dressed in a winking veneer of plausible deniability. “Above all else, Musk is a troll, an edgelord. He delights in ‘triggering’ his ideological enemies, which includes the media,” The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel wrote this week. The reaction to the salute has been “a fitting spectacle to begin the second Trump administration: a bunch of people arguing endlessly over something everyone can see with their own eyes.”

These dynamics play into a much broader debate about the flow of attention in the Trump era and Trump’s own centrality to it; if he is not quite an “edgelord” in the Very Online sense of the term (he has been known to consume social media posts in print form), he has clearly harnessed the idea—novel in high-level modern politics—that all attention is basically good, and that you can dominate a political era by making people talk about you and you alone, even if they hate you. Throughout the Trump era, but especially during his first term, those seeking to hold Trump accountable have debated what to do about this dynamic—not least the news media, which has had to reckon with the uncomfortable fact that the scrutiny it applies to Trump is ultimately a form of attention that Trump can co-opt and weaponize. 

The current moment is different from Trump’s first term in several important respects. Since the election in November, the news media has spiraled into a crisis of confidence, seeming to doubt that it controls attention much at all these days, at least compared with the new-media pioneers—TikTok stars, YouTubers, podcasters—who have cultivated huge audiences, especially among young people, and helped Trump bypass the press on his way to his latest victory. And—if the attention of the press is clearly still important to Trump personally (see: his two lengthy press conferences earlier this week and interview with Fox’s Sean Hannity last night)—his second term already feels less than his first like an exercise in pure attention domination: government by radical, planned executive order, and less so by tweet. 

All this opens up an interesting conversation about the relationship between attention and power in 2025, the news media’s place in relation to it, what has and hasn’t changed since Trump first rode our collective attention to the White House—and what the limits of this sort of attention politics might be, even if its grip currently feels limitless. In many ways, it’s a conversation that is most interestingly accessed not through Trump but through Musk—a figure who wasn’t in Trump’s orbit the last time he was in power and embodies many of the attentional incentives of both this specific moment and our wider era..

In the days before the inauguration, Ezra Klein recorded a thought-provoking episode of his New York Times opinion podcast with Chris Hayes, the MSNBC host and author of a new book on attention, and described Musk as “probably the most attentionally rich person in the world alongside Donald Trump” right now; in narrow business terms, Musk overpaid when he acquired X (then still called Twitter) for forty-four billion dollars in 2022, but by Klein’s estimation he has converted the purchase into “attentional riches” that are worth much more than he paid and “might be more important now than his financial riches” (even as Musk remains, on the latter score, the richest person on earth). Hayes agreed. “What Trump and Musk figured out is that what matters is the total attentional atmosphere,” he said. The latter’s acquisition of X ended up being “an enormous, almost Archimedean, lever on the electorate.”

The basic premises here seem to me uncontroversial: that hijacking attention is good in modern politics, that it can have greater electoral value than traditional campaign spending, that Trump being an attention monster was essential to his winning office not once but twice, and that Musk wouldn’t be so powerful now if he hadn’t become an attention monster too. The X purchase was clearly the key event in the latter timeline. He was a prolific troll and attention-seeker on the platform even before taking it over (when Musk first invested in the company, the tech journalist Casey Newton likened the move to “Loki buying an ant farm”); his outright purchase was widely derided at the time as poor business sense—“This is one of the dumbest acquisitions since AOL Time Warner,” Jeremy Owens, of MarketWatch, said—but there was little doubt even then that he was doing it in large part for attention. (“He just wants the spotlight on him, and he finds ways to get the spotlight on him,” Owens said.) Since then, his increasingly absurd behavior—proposing to fight Mark Zuckerberg; telling fleeing advertisers to “go fuck yourself”; threatening to sue the Anti-Defamation League, a group that aims to fight anti-Jewish hatred, for scaring away advertisers—has been viewed through much the same lens. (Incidentally, it was the ADL that described Musk’s salute this week as “an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm,” drawing widespread ire online.) This week, Musk made headlines not only for the salute, but for a post on X trashing a major private investment in AI that Trump had touted from the White House. Speaking on CNN, the tech journalist Kara Swisher suggested that Musk was annoyed not to be involved in the initiative, and went public with his complaint because “he’s a look-at-me kinda fella.”  

Since Musk became one of Trump’s most vocal backers and closest advisers last year—and especially since Trump won the election—his business sense in purchasing X has been reevaluated on similar lines to those posited by Klein: without parlaying a seemingly poor investment into attention, he wouldn’t have wormed into Trump’s inner circle, without which he wouldn’t now be entering the very same government that has immense influence over his businesses that are highly lucrative. (Following the election, Axios concluded that Musk “may be responsible for the worst tech buyout of all time,” but “only when considered in a vacuum,” while suggesting that it has made Musk “the most powerful unelected American ever.”) Even beyond Trump, X has remained a key hub for public discourse—despite predictions of its quick and total Musk-era demise—and continued to offer Musk personally a big bullhorn: he has 214 million followers, and even non-followers struggle to avoid his posts.

In Musk’s case, however, I also see limits, or at least caveats, to the power conferred by attention. Not only is X one of numerous actors in the online attention marketplace, but it isn’t necessarily all that powerful compared with, say, Facebook or TikTok, even if journalists and newsmakers (at least until recently) like to talk about it more. On the subject of journalists: for all the protestations that it has lost its power, I still see the traditional media as a key amplifier of whatever attention hogs say online; this was true of Trump’s first term, when reporters rushed to write up every Trump tweet, and is true of Musk now. Both men have benefited attentionally from news coverage, in attracting people’s attention but also in turning the media into a foil (which in turns attracts more attention, and so on).

And people—be they journalists or ordinary members of the public—ultimately have to pay attention to attention-seekers; as Hayes noted to Klein, our attention is pretty worthless on the individual level, but in the aggregate, it’s hugely valuable. (Hayes likened this dynamic to labor during the Industrial Revolution.) Even before the election, a not inconsiderable number of users, journalists included, left X for alternatives like Bluesky and Threads; since the election, a number of major news organizations—albeit, for now, mostly outside of the US—have said that they will stop posting on the platform, a move that starves X of the attention their posts might generate, if not of the news organizations’ attention per se. (They will all surely continue to cover Musk.) In the wake of Musk’s salute this week, hundreds of pages on Reddit banned, or started to consider banning, links out to X. Musk, of course, can continue to use X to spout off, but the more the platform becomes an echo chamber for his brand of politics, the fewer people are left to be triggered, the less attention he ultimately generates.

And, as Klein and Hayes also discussed, while Musk’s control of X has produced “a kind of vibe shift and cultural influence for reactionary ideas” (as Hayes put it), it’s not clear that creating an echo chamber will be good for the Trumpian right electorally in the long run. (The old Twitter, famously, was not real life for Democrats.) Part of the problem with echo chambers is that attention can bounce around them unpredictably, rather than being commanded and manipulated by one dominant figure. Musk’s recent dabbling in British politics—earlier this month, he spent days spreading inflammatory and often bizarre claims about “grooming gangs” and supposed official malfeasance in the country—is a case in point. At the time, Klein and others likened Musk to Rupert Murdoch, an old-media mogul who has sought to implant right-wing ideas on either side of the Atlantic and beyond. Musk’s input certainly set the agenda in the UK for a while. And yet, as the Financial Times documented, Musk himself was responding to smaller accounts, some of them very fringe indeed, that captured his attention. The question of who drove this attentional episode is thus complicated. Bruce Daisley, a former senior Twitter executive, argued to the FT that “Musk has seemingly become the first tech leader to fall down the rabbit hole of radicalisation by his own product.”

At the very least, Musk acted as an amplifier during this episode, on his own platform but also in the realm of politics, the news media, and beyond. But he is still one actor in what is ultimately a broader attention ecosystem. And he might not even be the most powerful—which brings us back to Trump. Since he rode down the escalator in 2015, it can feel like Trump has commanded public and media attention almost ceaselessly, with no end in sight. But Trump, too, has been subject to some of the same attentional limits as Musk. It’s not clear that being an attention monster has always benefited him—he arguably lost in 2020 because people were fed up with his chaos—and even now, at the apparent height of his power, he isn’t necessarily commanding the attention he once was. As I suggested above, his second term—while still in its early days—feels less like the always-on attention factory that his first was. Attention, this time, does not seem to be the entire point.

Despite these caveats, Trump is still clearly an attention monster. So, too, for now, is Musk. But for now might be the operative words here—if both men benefit from being the center of attention, then it’s not clear that sharing that centrality is sustainable in the long run; many journalists have already speculated that Trump will soon tire of Musk threatening to upstage him. Trump, with the institutional heft of the presidency behind him, will surely win the battle for centrality if it comes to it; indeed, it’s not hard to imagine a world in which he exiles Musk into relative irrelevance, a life of shouting into the X void as politicians and the press move on to fresher stories. Here, the operative word is relative—Musk’s wealth will always make him an attention magnet. But one could see a world in which his financial riches—which, lest we forget, allowed him to buy X and its attention potential in the first place—once again start to outstrip the value of his attentional riches. And financial power is a tale as old as time.

If Musk’s salute was intentional, it was a risky ploy on these terms—attention-grabbing in the short term, yes, but in a way that diverted focus from Trump, the attention monster in chief, on his day of glory: a dangerous thing to do. It’s possible that Musk caught us in an attention trap in that we’re all now talking about him, but it’s also possible that he caught himself in that trap inadvertently. It’s possible that both things could be true.

And—even if we, the press, did fall into a trap by getting “triggered”—we still ultimately control how we spread our share of attention, a fact that’s always been true of Trump coverage and applies to Musk, too. The headline “Ein Hitlergruß ist ein Hitlergruß ist ein Hitlergruß” (translation: “A Hitler salute is a Hitler salute is a Hitler salute”) that I cited above appeared atop a widely shared article in the German newspaper Die Zeit this week. (Subheading: “Welcome to the new attention regime.”) Just as eye-catching as the headline was the main image: it showed the moment of the salute but obscured Musk’s arm (perhaps because the Nazi salute is banned in Germany). In this, it struck me that there was, somehow, a reclamation of attention. There was, at least, a measure of control.

Other notable stories:

• In other news about Musk and the press, the independent investigative journalist Judd Legum is launching a new publication on Substack, called Musk Watch, to cover his ever-expanding influence. Caleb Ecarma, formerly a reporter at Vanity Fair, will write for the publication; NPR’s David Folkenflik has more details. Elsewhere, Sam Kuffel, a meteorologist at CBS58 in Milwaukee, was dropped by the station one day after sharply criticizing Musk’s salute on Instagram; the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has the story. And—in a very different type of media story involving Musk—Cecilia Sala, an Italian journalist who was recently jailed in Iran, gave an interview in which she credited Musk with helping to get her out. (The Times previously reported on Musk’s involvement; he has said he played a “small role.”)

• A team of journalists at Bloomberg analyzed more than two thousand videos made by nine prominent YouTubers—including Joe Rogan, Adin Ross, and Theo Von—to get a better idea of how they reached a new generation with pro-Trump messaging before the election. “None of the broadcasters style themselves as political pundits, and their conservative talking points were sandwiched between free-wheeling discussions of sports, masculinity, internet culture, gambling and pranks—making the rhetoric more palatable to an apolitical audience,” the analysis found. They are now “well-positioned to help build support for [Trump’s] political agenda, transforming grievances into policy that could have lasting effects even beyond Trump’s term in office.”

• Yesterday, Trump nominated L. Brent Bozell III—the founder and president of the Media Research Center, a group that takes aim at alleged liberal media bias—to lead the US Agency for Global Media, the body that oversees state-backed international broadcasters including Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. (Bozell’s son was convicted over his involvement in the insurrection at the Capitol in 2021; Trump pardoned him on Monday.) The agency and its broadcasters are editorially independent by law, but Trump threatened that status in his first term and seems poised to do so again. (Bozell will have to be confirmed by the Senate.)

• First in CJR: The Intercept announced today that it is appointing Ben Muessig as its editor in chief, following an interim spell in the role; Annie Chabel, The Intercept’s CEO, said that Muessig will oversee “journalism that challenges power and galvanizes support from our readers.” Elsewhere in the media business, the parent company of the Boston Globe announced that it is acquiring Boston Magazine; no jobs are expected to be lost in the transition. And major layoffs are expected at CNN today, with NBC News also reportedly making cuts; CNBC’s Alex Sherman has more.

• And before Christmas, Bill Grueskin reported for CJR on the case of Dilan Gohill, a student reporter at Stanford who was arrested while covering a pro-Palestine occupation on campus and still faced the possibility of charges, with university administrators taking an aggressive posture toward him. This week, Stanford’s president told free-speech advocates that the university won’t take disciplinary action against Gohill; per the San Francisco Chronicle, a possible prosecution remains “in flux” but no charges have now been filed in seven months.

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Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among other outlets. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.