This Was The Year Elon Musk Took On Politics

“I think he realized that the things that big tech companies have been worried about for decades, which is how to manage or organize speech on this crazy scale, is not a problem,” Magalhaes said. “This is an opportunity for him.”

Since the election, Musk has not remained in the shadows, content with backroom meetings and secret influence. Instead, he joined the calls foreign leaderswas taken on personnel choices for the new administrationand threatened to use the American PAC Fund major issues against lawmakers who don’t support Trump (and his) agenda.

In November, Trump announced that Musk would lead a new federal advisory committee Department of Government Efficiency (like DOGE, memecoin)responsible for cutting $2 trillion from the federal budget. (Repeal all discretionary federal spending, including defense, could not achieve this goal.) The committee doesn’t exist yet, but already Musk has used his presence at X and his adjacent, if murky, position with this new government to dictate policy. Maybe not by chance, but on paper its estimated wealth after the elections, it is reported to have increased by approximately 170 billion dollars.

“He (his ownership of X) has moved into a government position where his ability to influence policy that affects all business interests is tremendous. And that can pay big financial dividends,” says Phil Napoli, a professor of public policy at Duke University. “I think that would be the scariest thing that could happen if a lot of these platforms take that signal from Musk.”

Early earnings suggest other tech leaders will follow suit. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos of Amazon there is Visited Mar-a-Lago kiss the ring. Meta officials say Zuckerberg wants it take an “active role”. Helping shape the Trump administration’s technology policies.

“Every time a new government is formed, big capitalism, big money tries to position themselves to benefit from it. I think that’s what they did,” Magalhaes says. Musk’s clearly political use of X could lead the Trump administration to expect similar behavior from other companies, he says. “I think it’s a plan in that sense.”

Musk’s ambitions are clearly not limited to the United States. He has since the election He traveled to meet far-right politicians in England and “Alternative for Germany” wrote about its support for the far-right German party. Earlier this year he tried to violate the court order X., who demanded that the court in Brazil delete some far-right accounts that he said undermined the integrity of the country’s elections.

All of this means that Musk’s control over politics is not just a matter of his proximity to Trump. Even if the two titanic egos have a long-awaited blowout, Musk’s impact will be felt in the new comfort between Silicon Valley and the MAGA movement, and no matter where in the world he chooses to look.

In a way, 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 can affect the stock prices of his other companies. especially Teslaand his favorite memecoin, Dogecoin. Trump was similarly an active Twitter user before and during his first presidency he was famous for tweeting politics. Now it looks like the next four years, at least, may see more governance with social media posts – just by a different bad poster now.