Musk, X, Trump and the international right-wing extremists

Aram Aharonian

Donald Trump’s recent victory in the U.S. presidential election triggered a series of effects on the financial market, and one of the main beneficiaries was Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, who has seen the value of the shares of one of his companies rise in recent days.

X, ex-Twitter, has been criticized for its transformation into the expansion machine of the international ultra-right. More and more, the drift of this social network is being discussed. But with more than 250 million users – among them presidents, political leaders and journalists – it is not easy to find a replacement.
In addition to a government position, Musk hopes to receive favorable treatment from the Trump administration, which would make it easier to obtain regulatory approvals for autonomous driving projects and other technological advances in which Tesla and SpaceX are at the forefront.

Musk added Twitter to his ventures in transportation (Tesla), infrastructure (The Boring Company), digital currencies (dogecoin and bitcoin assets), aerospace (Space X), brain computer communication (Neuralink, maker of brain chips), and other sectors…

Born in Pretoria, spiritual son of South African apartheid, the richest man and one of the most influential in the world, the owner of the social industry that has shaped international politics in the last decade, a troll who perceives himself as someone witty, as the new leader of the extreme right “anti-woke”.

Also as a blowhard who has had to retract his gaffes several times, a cryptobro and a paranoid with sleep problems and addictions. “He wants to colonize Mars and his ego is almost as big as the red planet,” concludes an article by historian and writer Derek Seidman in Little Sis.

He supported Donald Trump during the campaign, donating to his return to the White House. Now, in the wake of the Republican’s victory, Musk’s fortune has soared to $314 billion, much of that generated by Tesla stock.

Some of the most absurd promises of the Trump campaign come from Elon Musk, who claims to know how to cut $2 billion from the federal budget, That’s a lot to say for someone whose companies are so dependent on government contracts and bailouts: without the $465 million loan he received from the administration, Tesla might well have gone bankrupt, recalls Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank….

Musk’s claims reveal a staggering ignorance of both economic and political matters. His proposals represent a cut of about one-third of government spending, eight times more than what the government’s internal watchdog estimates constitutes waste or fraud. The U.S. would have to cut all discretionary spending, including in defense, health, education, and the Treasury and Commerce departments, as well as slash Social Security, Medicare and other well-established and highly popular programs, he adds.

Stiglitz, chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, notesthatwith his goal of repealing the Affordable Health Care Act and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA) provision, which reduces prescription drug prices, Trump would exacerbate the situation. The US tops the list of advanced economies in terms of inequality, and Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy would widen the gap even further. Maybe that’s what it’s all about, really.

Since Musk took over Twitter, he has turned X into a hate machine. Racism and conspiracy theories spread unfettered. Insults and threats are barely sanctioned and sold as supposed freedom of speech,” explained and denounced the historic Hamburg soccer club St.Pauli when announcing its decision to leave the social network.

“It can be assumed that X will also promote authoritarian, inhumane and right-wing extremist content in the Bundestag election campaign and thus manipulate the public discourse,” warned the club, concerned about the far-right advance in the German elections.

In addition to the health and inequality crisis, climate change is costing Americans dearly in terms of lives and property damage. Yet Trump has been approaching fossil fuel tycoons for campaign contributions, promising to cut pollution regulations in return.

Two exclamation marks (!!) have become the hallmark used by the owner of X to mobilize and propel the international far right. “It is the mark of the beast”, summarizes Carlos Benéitez, member of the project of analysis of fake news and social networks Pandemia Digital.

Benéitez distinguishes two types of acceleration in the expansion of extreme right-wing content on X since Musk’s purchase in October 2022. One linked to the expansion of fake news, hoaxes, hate speech of a racist, religious hate and lgbti-phobic nature. “They have touched the algorithm: they show more because it is the goal that Musk has,” summarizes this researcher.

The other moment of acceleration is connected with the promotion, apparently casual, that Musk himself, the person with the most followers in X (not without cheating), makes of some of these contents through exclamations or other types of interactions, so that “the range of impressions and interactions, both natural, from people to whom this information reaches, and from automated accounts, skyrockets,” he indicates.

For Marta G. Franco, author of the recent The Networks Are Ours, Musk is the technological arm of the reactionary right, one more piece of the “Alt-Right”, or whatever we want to call that ultra-toxic mutation of capitalism that arises in response to the wave of movements for change that were articulated through the Internet in the last two decades.

It is one more step of this International of Hate: first they began to invest in bots, paid trolls, fakenews websites and related influencers, and with Musk came the opportunity to buy the media itself to continue distorting the public conversation. The algorithm of the social network that in the last decade has concentrated the social communications of presidents, ministers, institutional representatives and a large number of people of interest favors the meme culture and troll ideology.

Musk, who defines himself as a “libertarian”, a pure and hard neoliberal, does not like to be taxed, even though he is among the richest people in the world. “We entrepreneurs are for entrepreneurship and to spill downwards with our initiative and not to be shorn by bureaucrats”, this man, who moved Tesla’s headquarters from California to Texas to benefit from social laws and a tax system much more favorable to ‘entrepreneurs’, was able to say.

In Brazil it has been different: Judge Alexandre de Moraes has launched a judicial offensive against disinformation in which he required the closure and control of several accounts associated with the extreme right – of politicians, bloggers and influencers– related to the attempted assault on the Brazilian Congress in January 2023, following the defeat of Jair Bolsonaro and the electoral victory of Luis Inácio Lula da Silva.
On the grounds that Brazilian legislation allows blocking content in order to protect the country’s institutions, Moraes initiated an investigation against Musk, accusing him of obstruction of justice.

An investigation published in the scientific journal Nature Communications suggests that X is crossed by “political abuse”, coinciding with the decision of the newspapers La Vanguardia and The Guardian to abandon the platform. The article, led by researchers at City St George’s, University of London, in collaboration with the Alan Turing Institute, aims to unveil patterns that explain the polarizing functioning of political communication in different areas.

“Political abuse is a key feature of political communication on the X platform and, whether you are left-wing or right-wing, it is just as common to see politically engaged users abusing their political opponents, to a similar degree, and with little room for moderates,” concludes the study

My friend Musk

According to Bloomberg Billionaires index data, on November 6, just one day after Trump’s victory was confirmed, Tesla shares had a historic surge, closing up nearly 15%. Prior to the election, Musk’s fortune was valued at $237 billion, but rose to $314 billion following the perception of a more favorable regulatory environment for his business.

Among the president-elect’s promises is the creation of a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a humorous nod to the Dogecoin cryptocurrency, the office of which Musk would be in charge. This proposal aims to reduce federal spending and speed up regulatory processes that directly affect the industries Musk is involved in.

Musk donated around $120 million to the Republican campaign, put the X platform at its service and came to participate in events alongside the former president, and in solo meetings in Pennsylvania, where his speeches combined political themes with ambitious projects such as travel to Mars.

Donald Trump’s return to the White House marks a potential golden era for cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin, whose influential backers largely supported his presidential bid.

Bitcoin hit a new interim high of $92,870 on Wednesday, up 6.6 percent from Tuesday’s session and about 33 percent since Donald Trump’s victory was confirmed last week. The market’s most valuable and best-known cryptocurrency accumulated a rally of more than 30 percent since the Republican candidate’s victory on November 5 to return to the White House and is getting closer and closer to the $100,000 threshold.

Trump AND Musk: abmos enemies of the peoples, and prone to coup-plotting, are a threat to the countries of the global South. With clientelistic and propaganda mechanisms, the liberal left parties and governments will not be able to prevent the enthronement of corporate populism in their governments.

Musk likes to pose, he likes to dance while inaugurating a new Tesla plant, to pout while announcing a new Space X trip that he himself will be part of. He likes to provoke by clowning around, but be careful not to take him for a clown. The barely fifty-year-old South African is one of the few modern tycoons who sets the course of this world, as at the beginning of the 20th century the owners of the steel, coal and automobile industries did, says Daniel Gatti in Brecha.

“Musk is now more powerful than many states. He controls the most important technological asset in the United States (Tesla) and probably one of the most strategic assets in the world (Space X). With Twitter he also has in his power one of the most important communication tools on the planet,” commented investor Ross Gerber (Mediapart, 26-IV-22). Gerber is a close associate of the billionaire.

Bernie Sanders, the veteran senator from the left wing of the Democratic Party, does not believe in colored mirrors. “Musk is one of the quintessential representatives of casino capitalism. Freedom for him is freedom for the owners of the money.”

Musk’s arrival at the helm of X was a party for the ultras. In a farewell article to X, columnist Katie Martin described how the bullies had made the network their own through a “trickle of casual racism, bigotry from edgelords [online provocateurs], bad-faith polemics, dog-whistle (coded languages, understandable to one type of audience but anodyne to the rest, like ultrasonic dog whistles), crass disinformation, dubious pornbots, cynical scams, tin-foil hat conspiracies, and crypto nonsense.”

It cannot be forgotten that the capitalist international exists, is mobilized by the far-right libertarian movement and is obviously very well financed: it operates through a huge conglomerate of governments, foundations, institutes, NGOs, centers and societies linked together by barely detectable threads, among which the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, or the Atlas Network, stands out, and will now receive the support of the next US president….

**Uruguayan journalist and communicologist. Master in Integration. Creator and founder of Telesur. President of the Foundation for Latin American Integration (FILA) and director of the Latin American Center for Strategic Analysis (CLAE).