“I think he realized that what big tech companies have been worried about for decades, which is essentially how to moderate or how to organize speech at this crazy scale, is that that’s not a problem,” Magalhaes says. “That’s an opportunity for him.”
Since the election, Musk has not disappeared into the shadows, content with clandestine meetings and covert influence. Instead, it has joined calls with foreign leadersheavy on the selection of personnel for the new administrationand threatened to use America’s PAC to fund primary challenges against legislators who do not support Trump’s agenda (and yours).
In November, Trump announced that Musk will co-lead a new federal advisory committee called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE, like the memecoin), responsible for cutting $2 trillion from the federal budget. (Eliminate all discretionary federal spending, including defense, would not achieve this goal.) The committee doesn’t exist yet, but Musk has already used his presence at X and this new, albeit nebulous, government-adjacent position to dictate policy. Perhaps it is no coincidence that, on paper, his estimated wealth It reportedly increased by about $170 billion after the election.
“He has turned (his ownership of X) into a government position where his ability to influence policies that affect all of his business interests is simply tremendous. And that could pay huge financial dividends,” says Phil Napoli, a professor of public policy at Duke University. “I think the scariest thing that could happen would be if a lot of these platforms picked up that signal from Musk.”
Early results suggest that other tech leaders are likely to follow suit. Mark Zuckerberg of Meta and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos have visited Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring. Meta officials say Zuckerberg wants take an “active role” to help shape the Trump administration’s technology policies.
“Every time there is a new government, big capitalism, big money, tries to put itself in a position to benefit from it. And I think that’s what they’re doing,” says Magalhaes. And Musk’s use of X for explicitly political purposes could lead the Trump administration to expect similar behavior from other companies, he says. “I think in that sense he is a model.”
It is clear that Musk’s ambitions are not limited to the United States. Since the elections it has visited the UK to meet far-right politicians thereand posted about his support for Germany’s far-right party, Alternative for Germany (AfD).. Earlier this year, he attempted to challenge a court order in Brazil requiring X to remove certain far-right accounts that the court said were undermining the integrity of the country’s elections.
All of this means that Musk’s control over politics is not just a matter of his closeness to Trump. Even if the two titanic egos were to have a much-anticipated explosion, Musk’s influence will be felt in the new intimacy between Silicon Valley and the MAGA movement, and wherever in the world he decides to take a look.
In some ways, it’s a return to familiar ground. Even before buying Twitter in 2022, Musk was a superuser, one of the most followed people on the platform. His tweets could affect the stock prices of his other companies. particularly teslaand your favorite memecoin, Dogecoin. Trump, similarly, was an active Twitter user before becoming president, and during his first presidency, He was known for making policies through tweets. Now it looks like the next four years at least could see more governance through social media posts, now just through a different bullshit poster.