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.
Requests for comment from Musk’s special commission, the Department of Government Efficiency, and X were not returned.
The close link between Musk’s X account and Trump’s administration has been criticised 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 crimes. It’s finger-pointing that, from Musk’s office adjacent to the West Wing, could be seen as having the approval of the administration and thus the Justice Department.
The day after the Treasury Department’s acting deputy secretary, David Lebryk, resigned under pressure over payment system access, Musk posted that Lebryk had committed “crime on a scale that makes the mafia look like preschoolers stealing cookies.” It’s unclear what law, if any, could have been broken.
At least one Trump-appointed prosecutor seems ready to listen to tips that come from Musk’s platform. Interim U.S. Attorney Ed Martin recently thanked an anonymous pro-Trump X account when it recommended he “look into” another user who posted criticizing DOGE.
On Monday, Musk posted that he had “deleted” 18F, a government agency that worked on technology projects such as the IRS’ Direct File program. The news, which was not shared elsewhere, led to confusion about whether Direct File is still available to taxpayers, but the free filing program is still available, at least for the coming tax season.
Critics say that instead of complete transparency, Musk is showing only what he wants to reveal about the commission he leads. The X owner has suspended the accounts of some X users who posted the names of his DOGE team members. And many details of the commission’s work have been left vague as it has rapidly taken control of agency databases, slashed costs and gained access to the U.S. Treasury payment system without congressional approval.
Musk’s influence in the Trump administration comes as other CEOs who run the world’s biggest social media companies have shown deference to the president and even changed policies to align with his worldview.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew all attended Trump’s inauguration. Zuckerberg, whom Trump threatened to imprison last year, recently shifted his platforms’ policies to do away with fact-checking and echoed Trump’s concerns that the government harassed social media companies to “censor” lawful speech.
Meanwhile, TikTok’s future in the U.S. depends on the app finding new ownership. Trump has taken a lead role in brokering that deal and suggested the government might explore an ownership stake.
Steven Livingston, the founding director of the Institute for Data, Democracy & Politics at George Washington University, said Musk’s role shows how American democracy is already faltering.
“It’s bending to the will and the whim of a billionaire and not to Congress,” he said. “Where does X and Elon Musk end and the government begin? I’m not sure where that line is anymore.”
Published – February 07, 2025 08:55 am IST
