Elon Musk, the owner of X, has become a powerful voice in the Trump administration, using his social media platform to promote the president’s agenda and attack his detractors.
The emergence of X owner Elon Musk as the most influential figure around President Donald Trump has created an extraordinary dynamic — a White House adviser who's using one of the world’s most powerful information platforms to sell the government’s talking points while intimidating its detractors.
In recent days, Musk has used X to promote Trump's positions to his 215 million followers, attack an agency he's trying to shut down as “evil” and claim a Treasury employee who resigned under pressure over payment system access committed a crime. His use of the social media platform he owns has become both a cudgel and a megaphone for the Republican administration at a time that his power to shape the electorate’s perspective is only growing, as more Americans turn to social media and influencers to get their news.Musk isn’t bound to all the same ethics and financial disclosures as some other federal workers because he is classified as a special government employee. Trump earlier this week dismissed concerns about Musk’s conflicts of interest, saying, “Where we think there’s a conflict or there’s a problem, we won’t let him go near it.” Yet for the world’s richest man to single-handedly control the levers of one of the most influential online communication channels while holding an office in the White House complex is “unthinkable” in our current system of government, said Steven Levitsky, a political scientist at Harvard University and the author of “How Democracies Die.” “This is a combination of economic, media and political power that I believe has never been seen before in any democracy on Earth,” he said.The close link between Musk’s X account and Trump’s administration has been criticized not only because it gives Trump an unusually large mouthpiece. Musk’s ownership of X also could give him financial incentive to use his own platform instead of other pathways to disseminate the most urgent and vital government information. In the first two weeks of Trump's term, Musk has used his long-held celebrity cachet to amplify the president's talking points on California's wildfires, federal spending, Cabinet picks and more to his enormous following. He used X to criticize and intimidate those who spoke out against his far-reaching takeover of government agencies as the head of DOGE. He also held a livestream on X featuring entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and two Republican senators to discuss DOGE’s work, inviting users to listen in live. Twelve hours later, DOGE posted it to Facebook for non-X-users to hear the recording. Trump’s stake in the much smaller social platform Truth Social — which he transferred last year into a revocable trust of which he is the sole beneficiary — is another example of such a consolidation of power. Musk insists his X postings about DOGE and other government business are to benefit the public, as a transparency measure. Supporters say he deserves credit for sharing his unfiltered thoughts and strategies, and they view his style as a breath of fresh air after years of government obfuscation. He has pledged that DOGE, tasked with slashing federal spending, will post all its actions online — though its official government website is currently blank, with only the tagline, “The people voted for major reform.”Since it became clear Musk would join the administration, he has repeatedly amplified Trump's narratives on X, where the platform’s owner is the most followed user and is reportedly often recommended as a new user’s first account to follow. Sometimes those narratives include misleading information. After wildfires blazed through Los Angeles last month, Musk shared another user’s post declaring that “TRUMP UNLEASHES CALIFORNIA’S WATER” while “BIDEN AND NEWSOM LET WILDFIRES BURN.' The Army Corps of Engineers did start releasing large flows of water from two California reservoirs on Friday and continued to do so through the weekend, the Los Angeles Times reported. But that federally controlled water flows to farmland in California’s crop-rich Central Valley, not the Los Angeles County neighborhoods coping with the aftermath of last month’s deadly fires. It also was released at a time it was not needed by farmers. In December, before Trump took office, Musk helped him temporarily sink a government funding deal, whipping up outrage with a torrent of X posts attacking the legislation for what he described as excessive spending. More recently, Musk has taken to X to advance DOGE’s efforts to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, posting Sunday to label the agency as “evil” and a “criminal organization.”Musk also has used the platform to insinuate that others may have committed crime
ELON MUSK DONALD TRUMP SOCIAL MEDIA GOVERNMENT USA WHITE HOUSE TWITTER DOGE USAID
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