Elon Musk: Selling Division and Sowing Confusion
Exploring what Musk has done with Twitter/X, and how his partisan turn affects our information ecosystem.
Elon Musk took Twitter private and plunged headfirst into the partisan and cultural wars, both personally and with the platform. The site is now awash in vile, divisive content with little to no policy in place to prevent its proliferation. The signal here is the legitimization of fringe and far-right culture and policies and a hard partisan bend to one of our largest social media platforms. The noise is a massive injection of confusion, disinformation, and divisiveness into one of the world’s most influential social media feeds. While the signal is scary, the noise is far more damaging.
Why He’s Doing This
Elon’s power and influence stem from his position as the wealthiest man in the world. For years, that wealth seemed limitless as Tesla stock soared and SpaceX thrived without competition. But things have changed. Tesla is rapidly losing market share to legacy automakers while its product quality declines. Its stock price is half of what it was in 2021. Elon’s financial power now comes almost entirely from leveraging his 13% stake in the now $670 billion company. His ownership share dropped from 22% after buying Twitter, which has more than halved in value.
SpaceX remains a cash cow, but its future is murkier than it seems. The private company makes billions annually in defense contracts, using its reusable rockets to launch NASA missions and spy satellites for the U.S. government. These contracts are believed to be the majority of SpaceX’s revenue. Given Elon’s increasingly antagonistic stance towards the Biden administration and concerningly erratic behavior, there’s no guarantee these contracts will continue when a real competitor steps in.
With Tesla losing market share, SpaceX’s vulnerability, and Twitter/X’s rapid decline in value alongside high debt, Elon is feeling the heat. Investors believe the company has lost more than 70% of its value since Musk’s acquisition, which would be one of the biggest and fastest destructions of corporate enterprise value in history. The deal is now considered the worst merger-acquisition buyout for banks since the 2008 financial crisis.
Tesla and SpaceX also rely heavily on federal policies through EV tax credits and defense contracts; crucial context to understanding his recent political pivots. His endorsement and financial support of Trump and the GOP may stem from genuine ideological agreement, but it’s likely more of a desperate financial and social investment. Musk sees a second Trump administration as his best hope for protecting his business interests, despite the GOP’s attacks on electric vehicles and Trump’s long history of reneging on deals.
Elon’s Partisan Turn
The absence of clear moderation means the platform is essentially governed by Musk’s whims. Lately, those whims have leaned toward promoting fringe far-right content.
In just the past month, Musk has reposted tweets about links between race and IQ, defended a Hitler apologist, accused Kamala Harris of being a communist with a secret plan for a Stalinist regime, and shared opinions about what it means to be a “high testosterone male” today—in short, it revolves around questioning authority and practicing Jiu Jitsu.
It’s easy to dismiss Musk’s antics as those of an eccentric billionaire with too much screen time, but the reality is far more serious. Musk isn’t just some podcast host; he’s one of the most powerful figures in the world. He owns a social media platform that he alone directs. His words carry weight, especially with young men. To many, he’s a role model—a successful entrepreneur who shirks norms, speaks his mind, and protects free speech.
Is Musk really swaying that many young men? Probably not alone, but he adds a loud voice to a chorus of right-wing influencers targeting our nation’s most disaffected population. He joins them in normalizing fringe political views, subtly shifting the Overton window for what society considers acceptable. As that window shifts right, the center of gravity in our political apparatus moves with it. This is the power of coordinated information operations.
Disinformation on X: It’s a Feature, Not a Bug
Given Musk’s political investments and motivations, Twitter/X has become his personal propaganda machine. The first major change after his acquisition was the removal of nearly all content moderation and the firing of those previously involved. Musk effectively turned off auto-moderation and made himself the judge, jury, and executioner. Journalists critical of Musk have been shadowbanned or removed, while Alex Jones, Richard Spencer, and Nick Fuentes have had their accounts reinstated. Advertisers have fled and will continue to flee, wary of posting ads beside comments supporting white nationalism or political violence, which are now common. There is seemingly no coherent content moderation policy beyond whatever Musk wants in the moment.
The rapid proliferation of bots on X has made it even messier. Bot traffic is at an all-time high, which seems to be Musk’s intent after announcing a profit-sharing program giving top users a cut of X’s ad revenue. Accounts with premium paid X subscriptions receive an undisclosed amount monthly based on engagement metrics. Some larger accounts have shown five-digit monthly payouts, though without itemization or explanation. As the platform hemorrhaged advertisers, this was likely an attempt to boost metrics like daily active users and quantifiable engagement measurements.
While those metrics have technically improved, so has the number of AI bot accounts on the platform. X doesn’t release data on bots, but countless examples show real users tricking suspected bot accounts into revealing themselves and, quite frankly, it’s obvious when you look at the comments on any high-traffic tweet. Why the increase in AI-generated content? Tech-savvy users realized they could profit by creating bot accounts, paying for their X subscriptions, and having them comment on high-visibility posts, generating views and likes. X’s payout mechanics consider them premium accounts with high engagement, giving bot farmers a nice monthly stipend. It floods the platform with nonsense, but X gets more daily active users, and the bot farmers get paid. You, the user, suffer.
The Consequences of a Noisy Platform
Musk’s signal is one thing, but the deafening noise he spreads is more important. By flooding the platform with nonsensical and divisive content, he’s injecting confusion and distrust into the information ecosystem. The result is a social media feed where fact and fiction blur, and the loudest, most polarizing voices dominate. For every sane, informed political post, there are hundreds of frantic, angry tweets highlighting the worst of our political reality, from livid partisans to literal neo-Nazis. Many bots post innocuous replies like “Wow, so interesting! [insert emoji]” to Musk’s tweets, but some post hardline and angry partisan content, fueling the perpetual culture war online. They’re in the comment sections of politicians, world leaders, and bombshell news articles, all worsened by the platform’s lack of moderation and its subsidies to these bots.
The platform is a disaster. What many once considered our best source of real-time news and the open blog for journalists and academics has become a glorified digital tabloid at best and “Nazi Porn Bar” to its critics. If you want information on the war in Gaza, X will show you posts explicitly supportive of Hamas alongside posts that objectively dehumanize Palestinian lives, all sandwiched between bots shilling OnlyFans accounts and cryptocurrency scams.
That reality is Musk’s intended one. The bots give him better platform metrics and the enraging content keeps users engaged. He gets to promote right-wing content while funding his pro-Trump super PAC, and users drown in confusion.
The Power of Information Warfare
At its core, Musk’s transformation of Twitter is an information operation. By controlling what people see and hear on one of the world’s most influential platforms, he shapes the narratives that define our reality. While the discourse may push some toward the intended political side, it also creates confusion and cynicism when people already feel angry, divided, and distrustful of media and democracy.
This is the real danger of Musk’s platform. It’s not just the amplification of Nick Fuentes; it’s that he’s ruining another source of information we use to make sense of the world. It adds more disorienting noise to our lives. For some, the far-right content will shift their politics. For most, the divisive, conflict-oriented content will make them apathetic and cynical.
That’s the consequence of noise in information warfare. Musk’s version drives some toward dangerous fringe beliefs (Biden wants to turn your children transgender; white people are scientifically more intelligent) or makes others so cynical they disengage from the political process altogether. Either way, division wins, as does Elon’s preferred political party. This is the power of information operations. You turn some into supporters and scramble the brains of others. It’s a win-win for Musk and Trump: You turn on a few thousand young men and turn off hundreds of thousands more, not toward you but away from civic discourse. You make it harder for them to see a signal. You make them angry and upset but too cynical to fight back. You grow your numbers while shrinking your opponent’s pool.
There are ways to push back. Some are trying - including the country of Brazil, which last week banned X - but, such efforts often reinforce the conflict. Successful mitigation requires more coordination, more amplification, and, most importantly, more positivity. Fighting divisive information operations is like quicksand—the more you fight, the quicker you sink. You have to offer a real alternative to disarm the divisiveness. Until then, Musk and others go unopposed.