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      How Elon Musk became Donald Trump’s shadow vice-president

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      As Donald Trump watched election results roll in from a party at his Mar-a-Lago compound, Elon Musk sat arm’s length away, basking in the impending victory he had helped secure. In less than five months, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO had gone from not endorsing a candidate to becoming a fixture of the president-elect’s inner circle.“The future is gonna be so 🔥 🇺🇸🇺🇸,” Musk posted to his social media platform, X, just after midnight, along with a photo of himself leaning over to talk with Trump at the Mar-a-Lago dinner.Musk’s place at the head table was the result of months of political efforts by the world’s richest man, and an injection of at least $130m of his own money. Musk campaigned for Trump both online and offline, funded advertising and get-out-the-vote operations for a campaign at a severe financial disadvantage to its opponent. He even temporarily decamped from his home in Texas to the swing state of Pennsylvania, where he appeared at town hall events and held a $1m daily giveaway for voters.Musk wasn’t the only billionaire rooting for Trump. But unlike some of his peers, who preferred operating in the shadows, shielded by Super Pacs and meetings behind closed doors, he became Trump’s most visible surrogate. As so often with his endeavors, Musk was all in. And now, gambling on becoming one of Trump’s most vocal and deep-pocketed supporters has won Musk direct influence and access to the nation’s highest office, making him not only the world’s richest man but also one of its most politically powerful.Musk’s exact role in the coming administration is still unclear. Trump has previously said that the CEO would lead a full audit of the federal government, and make drastic reforms as “secretary of cost-cutting”. Any such position would create immense conflicts of interest, as Musk’s companies hold billions in contracts with the government and are also facing investigations from federal agencies. Under Trump, who has long opposed regulators and ignored ethical conflicts, that may not matter. Musk’s fortune soared by $26bn just two days after the election.Beyond any potential formal government role, Musk has also ingratiated himself as a close ally of the president-elect – who adopted some of Musk’s policy suggestions during the campaign and praised him as a “super genius” during his victory speech. He reportedly joined Trump’s call with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, on Wednesday, signaling broad influence.That same day, Trump’s granddaughter posted a family photo of “the whole squad” taken at the previous evening’s watch party. Standing among three generations of smiling family members, just in front of Eric Trump and Jared Kushner, was Musk.Musk emerges as Trump’s most prominent backerMusk’s ascent to a key player in Trump’s campaign happened rapidly. Back in March, the CEO was adamant he would not endorse a candidate for president. As late as May, he said he was still weighing his options. Then, in July, on the same day that Trump was injured in a failed assassination attempt, he told the world he had changed his mind. He was all in immediately and called on others in the tech industry to throw their weight behind the Republican party. “I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery,” Musk posted alongside footage of Trump throwing his fist in the air after the shooting.Musk’s vow of support was in keeping with his increasingly public embrace of rightwing leaders, and his promotion of far-right views on issues like immigration. In recent years, the billionaire had become convinced of the rightwing conspiracy theory that Democrats were planning to bring in millions of undocumented immigrants to tilt elections in their favor, with the New York Times reporting that he told a group of conservative billionaires in the spring of this year that if Biden won, it would be the end of American democracy. He has since repeated the claim publicly, warning of “the last election” if Trump lost.What would quickly become clear following Musk’s endorsement was that he was planning to do far more than just provide words of support. Behind the scenes, Musk had already begun offering his input into the campaign with a phone call to Trump advising him to select JD Vance as his running mate. When Musk’s preferred choice was confirmed – and the nomination drew criticism over Vance’s fervent anti-abortion stance and ties to extreme Christian nationalists – Musk immediately posted that the ticket “resounds with victory”.Musk would soon go even further, becoming one of Trump’s largest financial backers and ardent cheerleaders..On the campaign trailAfter announcing his endorsement in July, Musk immediately began contributing millions of dollars to the pro-Trump America Pac – which was set up the month prior and functioned as Musk’s personal political organization and war chest for the Trump campaign. Musk donated $15m in July and exponentially increased his funding each month, ultimately contributing more than $118m by election day.Over the next several months, Musk took on the role of a secondary running mate, accompanying Trump at speeches, giving policy ideas and handling campaign strategy.America Pac largely took over the Trump campaign’s ground game in key swing states, hiring hundreds of people across the country to canvass voters. The organization knocked on about 11m doors, according to the New York Times, while also spending millions on digital advertisements and mailers targeting voters.The operations faced numerous allegations of employee mistreatment and labor law violations. In one case first reported by Wired, a subcontractor for Musk’s America Pac allegedly flew in paid door-knockers who had no idea they would be canvassing for Trump and piled them into the back of a rented U-Haul without seatbelts or rear seating. Other canvassers allegedly falsely claimed to have visited homes in Nevada and Arizona, with a Guardian review of leaked data finding that nearly a quarter of door-knocks were flagged as fraudulent on the canvassing app.View image in fullscreenOutside of his financial contributions, Musk also made in-person appearances to support Trump. He appeared on stage in a black Maga hat at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, captured jumping for joy in what has become one of the enduring images of the campaign. He opened for Trump at the Madison Square Garden rally that was maligned for its racist and extremist rhetoric.As the campaign neared its end, Musk’s America Pac also began directly giving money to prospective voters, doling out $1m a day to a selected voter who signed a petition linked to the Pac. At one giveaway in Pittsburgh, he appeared on stage in front of a giant American flag to hand an oversized check to a woman and tell the crowd that he loved them.Musk’s giveaway, which Philadelphia’s district attorney sued to block, has now become the subject of multiple lawsuits and disputes about whether it was really a lottery at all. Lawyers for Musk claimed in a Pennsylvania court hearing earlier this week that the winners were not random but chosen by the organization, an admission that has resulted in a proposed class-action suit from voters who claimed they were falsely led to believe they had a chance at the cash prize.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOn TwitterWhile some of Musk’s ground operations and electioneering ran into legal challenges, on his own platform, he had carte blanche to promote Trump however he wanted.Viewed purely in financial terms, Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is an obvious failure. Mainstream advertisers have fled the platform en masse as it has further entrenched itself as a haven for far-right influencers, white supremacists and conspiracy theorists. Its algorithm has shifted to promote viral videos, as well as bots spreading pornography, over fact-based news outlets and reliable sources of information. Musk and his investment partners, which include the Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal, have lost billions in value, according to a Washington Post analysis, and the company is now worth less than half of its purchase price.What Musk gained from his purchase, however, is control over one of the world’s most influential communications platforms and the ability to make himself its loudest voice there. Musk has tweaked the platform’s algorithm to ensure that his posts reach its users regardless of whether they are among his more than 200 million followers. During the campaign, he turned his account, and by extension the entire platform, into a relentless pro-Trump megaphone.In August, Musk hosted a two-hour audio interview with Trump on X in which the men discussed anti-immigration policies and Musk called Trump the “path to prosperity”. While the interview provided little that hadn’t been said before, it was a sign of how much had changed since Trump was permanently suspended from Twitter in 2021. Not only was Trump back, he was being feted as the future of the country by the head of the platform.Musk’s promotion of Trump, as well as his attacks on Democrats, media and Kamala Harris, became a dominant part of the platform’s user experience. He tweeted over 145 times in a single 24-hour period on the day following his Trump interview, according to a Guardian analysis. His feed in the lead-up to the vote was a near-constant string of invective and misinformation, along with retweets of far-right influencers promoting conspiracy theories about undocumented immigrants committing voter fraud.View image in fullscreenMusk’s influence on the Trump campaign extended beyond policy into the visual representation of the candidate as well. His release of an AI image generator named Grok in August heavily influenced the visuals of the campaign. Lacking the safety guardrails of competitors such as ChatGPT, Grok could be used to create images of public figures and political leaders. Almost immediately, social media platforms became rife with AI images of Trump, Harris and other celebrities – often featuring misogynistic imagery like Harris pregnant with Trump’s baby. Trump reposted AI images from rightwing influencers falsely showing Taylor Swift supporting his campaign, while Musk posted an image depicting Harris as a communist.Along with his own posts, Musk’s America Pac also set up a community on X dedicated to “election integrity”. The community allowed users to share any evidence they found of voter fraud, but without any moderation, it effectively and immediately became a clearing house for false or unverified claims including a fake video of Haitians illegally voting for Harris.While Musk has frequently described himself as a “free speech absolutist”, he also oversaw the suppression of information that would have potentially harmed the Trump campaign. When an independent reporter published a dossier of background research on Vance that was obtained through an alleged Iranian cyber-attack on the Trump campaign, Musk’s X blocked all links to the article and suspended the reporter from that platform.Musk at the White HouseMusk’s bet on Trump has already made him over $26bn richer, as Tesla’s share price surged following the Republican election victory. If Musk remains in Trump’s good graces – not a given for two men with a history of imploding business relationships – he may stand to benefit even further through deregulation policies and the gutting of federal agencies tasked with overseeing his companies.Musk’s profile picture on X now features him in a black Maga hat, with a new bio that declares “the people voted for major government reform”.Musk’s companies such as SpaceX and Starlink, which are already government contractors deeply intertwined with various agencies, may also find even deeper influence. Musk has requested that Trump hire employees from SpaceX to serve in top government roles including at the Department of Defense, according to the New York Times.Trump as of now appears amenable to Musk’s business interests and requests. During his victory speech, he repeatedly praised Musk, saying that he loved him and touting his ability to do what government agencies could not.“A star is born. Elon, he’s an amazing guy,” Trump said on Wednesday.As it became clear late into election night that Trump would win a decisive victory, Musk shared a meme of himself holding a large porcelain sink while standing in the Oval Office. The image was a callback to when he bought Twitter and physically carried a sink into headquarters in order to make a pun, shortly before laying off most of the staff and turning the platform into a largely unregulated space where extremism thrives.“Let that sink in,” Musk posted. More

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      in US Politics

      Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and other business leaders congratulate Trump

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      Business leaders were swift to offer their congratulations to Donald Trump on his election victory, less than four years after they criticized him for his role in the January 6 insurrection.Some of tech’s business leaders, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Apple’s Tim Cook all publicly congratulated Trump for his win.“Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory,” Bezos said in a statement. “No nation has bigger opportunities.”“Congratulations to President Trump on a decisive victory. We have great opportunities ahead of us as a country,” Zuckerberg wrote on Threads. “Looking forward to working with you and your administration.”“Congratulations President Trump on your victory! We look forward to engaging with you and your administration,” Cook wrote on Twitter/X.The influential Business Roundtable, a powerful lobbying group with more than 200 members, who are the chief executives of companies such as JPMorgan, Walmart, Google and Pepsi, said in a statement: “Business Roundtable congratulates President-elect Donald Trump on his election as the 47th President of the United States.”“We look forward to working with the incoming Trump Administration and all federal and state policymakers,” the group said.Billionaire Mark Cuban, who endorsed Kamala Harris, was one of the first to congratulate Trump just after 1am ET.“Congrats @realDonaldTrump. You won fair and square,” Cuban wrote. “Congrats to @elonmusk as well.”Elon Musk, Trump’s highest-profile business backer, celebrated with a post on X declaring victory for himself. “It is morning in America again,” he wrote. Trump has floated giving Musk an influential role in his administration.The reaction presents a stark contrast to how the leaders responded to Trump after the 2020 election. Cook had called the insurrection “a shameful chapter in our nation’s history”, while Zuckerberg said: “I believe the former president should be responsible for his words.”Bezos, meanwhile, had congratulated Joe Biden for his victory four years ago with a post. “Unity, empathy and decency are not characteristics of a bygone era,” he said on Instagram, posting a picture of Biden and Kamala Harris.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt’s something of an about-face that was seen leading up to the election. Trump had started to brag that executives such as Google’s Sundar Pichai and Zuckerberg were calling him, seemingly trying to rebuild relationships that had been strained during Biden’s presidency.Bezos has had a particularly fraught relationship with Trump. But in October the Bezos-owned Washington Post chose not to endorse any candidate in the US presidential election. The Post had planned to endorse the vice-president.While coalitions of former executives had endorsed Harris, and said that many CEOs were probably going to vote in support of her, the business community appears poised to transition to a second Trump term. By Wednesday afternoon, US stock markets were soaring on news of Trump’s victory.Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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      Can democracy survive now the world’s richest man has it in his sights? | George Monbiot

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      This is what happens when successive US governments fail to tackle inequality. While millions of people live in poverty, a handful grow unimaginably rich. Wealth begets wealth, and they acquire political power to match. It was inevitable that one of them – now the richest man on Earth – would launch what looks like a bid for world domination.A vote for Donald Trump next week is a vote for Elon Musk. Just as Trump is using Musk, Musk could be using Trump as a springboard to perhaps even greater power than the US president can wield. Musk’s secret conversations with Vladimir Putin, reported by the Wall Street Journal last week, and his contacts with other extremist world leaders, suggest a pattern of power-seeking that could be even more alarming than the prospect of a second Trump presidency.Trump, if he wins, will do to the nation what Musk did to Twitter: the US will be e-Muskulated. What this means is that those with the power to swarm, harass and crush people who do not share their noxious ideology will be unleashed.Elon Musk claims to be a “free speech absolutist”. But his absolutism seems to extend only to his allies. Since he bought Twitter and renamed it X, the platform has complied with 83% of requests by governments for the censorship or surveillance of accounts. When the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, demanded the censorship of his opponents before the last general election, the platform obliged. When Indian government officials asked it to remove a hostile BBC documentary, X did as they asked, and later deleted the accounts of many critics of the prime minister, Narendra Modi.Last month, X blocked links to a dossier about Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, and suspended the account of the journalist who revealed it. Musk has sued organisations that criticise him. Because the most vicious and antisocial people – racists, antisemites, misogynists, homophobes, even outright Nazis – have been reinstated and often boosted, millions of other users have been driven from the platform, their own free speech diminished. Musk’s own posts are reportedly amplified a thousandfold by a boutique algorithm. Free speech absolutism? My left foot.Now he has bent his immense wealth, power and blatant double standards to a frantic effort to get Trump elected. Some of his tactics – cash rewards and cash prizes – look to me like attempts to buy votes and interfere in an election. His lawyers were able to prevent him having to attend court this week for a hearing challenging these tactics: another privilege of wealth. He has used his X account to spread rampant misinformation on Trump’s behalf, giving him many millions of dollars’ worth of advertising. He has poured $118m into his pro-Trump super Pac (political action committee).What would the world’s richest man gain from the e-Muskulation of US – and perhaps global – politics? He would gain what capital has sought since workers acquired the vote: the truncation of democracy. Democracy is the problem capital keeps trying to solve. Why? Because it ensures that workers have rights and fair wages; that the living world has some (though never enough) protections; that we cannot be ripped off, poisoned and robbed without restraint.Capitalism has used two powerful tools to try to solve its problem: fascism and neoliberalism. But now, though drawing on both those ideologies, it reverts to an older and cruder mode: oligarchy. Why, the billionaires might wonder, should they rely on intermediaries to wield political power? After all, in every other sphere, the world bows to them, not to their concierges. This, I think, is where Musk and some of his fellow tech authoritarians have been heading.A Trump victory would allow Musk to escape the regulators with which he is often in conflict. In fact, if he takes up Trump’s offer of running a government efficiency commission, Musk becomes his own regulator, able to erase the rules that make the difference between a good society and barbarism.But Trump’s election might also permit even greater opportunities. Musk controls key strategic and military assets, such as SpaceX satellite launchers and the Starlink internet system. As Ukraine discovered to its cost last year, he can switch them off at whim. The kind of decision-making powerful states deploy has been privatised. The Kremlin is reported to have asked him to withhold Starlink access from Taiwan, as a favour to the Chinese government. Terrestrial broadband operators claim that Starlink could interfere with and degrade their own systems. Starlink has refuted this. It is not hard to see how his power could grow to the point at which governments feel obliged to do as he demands.He might not look the part. Villains bent on world domination are meant to be suave, laconic, self-possessed. Musk dresses like an attention-hungry teenager and behaves accordingly. Yet he has been equipped with the means to multiply his power beyond any that a plutocrat has wielded in the democratic era.For decades now, the centrist pact with capital has worked as follows: we might seek half-heartedly to improve the lives of people at the bottom, but we will do almost nothing to hold down those at the top. As a short-term tactic it worked: Rupert Murdoch and other members of the plutocrats’ trade union struck an uneasy truce with Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and their ilk. But the long-term result is that the ultra-rich became so wealthy that they could present a direct threat to sovereign nations, even to the most powerful nation of all. Some of us have spent decades warning that this was the likely outcome: appeasement makes your opponents more powerful. But our governments claimed they were simply being “pragmatic”: it didn’t matter how rich some people became, as long as the lot of the poor improved.Decades of studies, some of which were summarised 15 years ago in The Spirit Level by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, show what nonsense this is. A highly unequal society, whatever its absolute levels of wealth and poverty, is devastating for social outcomes, for wellbeing, cohesion and democracy. But “pragmatism” prevailed, and turned out not to be pragmatic at all. The slippage from democracy to oligarchy should surprise no one.So now we face a generalised e-Muskulation: of public life, of trust, of kindness, of mutual aid, of a world in which the poor could aspire to something better, and in which all of us could aspire to a healthy living planet. Governments that have not yet fully succumbed must do what should have been done long ago: make the poor richer, and the very rich poorer.

      George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist More

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      Elon Musk’s ‘election integrity community’ on X is full of baseless claims

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      While Elon Musk faces his own election integrity questions offline, the X owner has deputized his followers to spot and report any “potential instances of voter fraud and irregularities”. The community he spawned is rife with unfounded claims passed off as evidence of voter fraud.Musk opted not to show up to a required court appearance Thursday in Philadelphia to respond to a lawsuit challenging his political action committee’s daily $1m voter giveaway. Meanwhile, online, he has started a dedicated community space on X, formerly Twitter, where he’s asked users to share any issues they see while voting. Users posting on the self-contained feed, the “election integrity community”, quickly began pointing out what they deemed as evidence of fraud and election interference.Tweets showing everything from ballots that arrived ripped, an ABC news system test, a postal worker doing his job and dropping off mail-in ballots were all presented as evidence that the upcoming presidential election had been compromised. Some users posted videos of individuals they deemed suspicious, despite providing little or no proof of suspicious activity and asked others in the community to help identify them.Among the tweets are attempts at doxxing and identifying people who users falsely accuse of ballot box stuffing or preventing Trump supporters from voting. In one case, a post with 14,000 shares and 31,000 likes includes a video of a postal worker bringing ballots into a polling location in Northampton county, Pennsylvania.The same video had been shared throughout X and other forums and retweeted by rightwing influencers like Alex Jones. The user asks for help identifying the man. “He says he’s with the post office but idk if I buy that,” the post reads. “He wouldn’t talk to us and was acting very suspect.” The man in question was the acting postmaster and a 25-year-veteran of the US Postal Service, the Northampton county executive Lamont McClure confirmed to NBC News. McClure told NBC News that the postal worker was already being harassed over the video.Experts say the community, which has more than 50,000 members, follows the same playbook used in feverish online forums after the 2020 election to fuel claims that votes were stolen. In 2020, it was the “Stop the Steal” Facebook group, Telegram groups and message boards on alt-right social media firm Parler.These groups amassed hundreds of thousands of followers who perpetuated the baseless claim that the election was being stolen from Donald Trump. Much of the anecdotal and often unfounded stories shared in these groups by individuals were leveraged by rightwing influencers and other figures to create the narrative that the election was compromised, according to a report by the Election Integrity Partnership.“These are real rumors by real people that are being picked up and used by a propaganda machine that really wants to get that view out there,” said Renee DiResta, an associate professor at Georgetown University and former research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory. “That’s what happened in 2020. [It was the same] process of ‘stop the steal.’ The slogan came from the top but it was ordinary people who provided the ‘evidence’ to back up the idea that the election was stolen.”Before anyone can determine whether the claims are true or false, users seize on the posts and assume the often unsuspecting person being shown are guilty or doing something bad, said DiResta. “Unfortunately the people who bear the costs are the random people whose photographs they take.”

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      The “election integrity community” provides another glimpse into the echo chamber of individuals across the country who believe the election will be or has already been rigged against Trump. Though the space is separate from the normal X feed, Musk has also shared some of the concerns posted in the community on his own page.Among the narratives being pushed in the community is one that has become a pet conspiracy theory of Musk’s. The SpaceX CEO has loudly and often made the false claim that the Biden administration was “importing voters” in the form of “unvetted illegal immigrants”. In the last few days, a Musk-funded super Pac has been pushing a fake pro-Kamala Harris initiative called Project 2028. The initiative has posted fake pro-Harris ads and sent texts to voters that include claims that Harris will be opening the country’s borders and is pushing for undocumented immigrants to be able to vote. Non-citizens are not allowed to vote in the US, and there is no available evidence they are voting in droves as claimed. Users in the community are sharing videos they say provides evidence that Democrats are “bussing” undocumented immigrants to cast votes in their favor. More

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      Elon Musk skips hearing as $1m election giveaway case moves to federal court

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      Elon Musk failed to show up to a required hearing in a Philadelphia case challenging his $1m-a-day sweepstakes. His absence would have risked contempt of court had the case continued in Pennsylvania court, but it was moved to federal court in response to a motion filed by Musk’s attorneys, who did attend the hearing. No hearings were immediately scheduled in the federal case.Judge Angelo Foglietta agreed that Musk, as a named defendant in the lawsuit filed by the district attorney, Larry Krasner, should have attended the hearing in person, but he declined to immediately sanction the tech mogul. Musk’s attorney said his client could not “materialize” in the courtroom with notice only given the night before.Krasner’s team challenged the notion that the founder of SpaceX could not make it to Philadelphia, prompting a quick retort from the judge.“Counsel, he’s not going to get in a rocket ship and land on the building,” Foglietta replied.On Wednesday, the judge had ordered all parties to attend the Thursday morning hearing, including Musk. Musk’s attorneys had filed a motion to shift the suit from Pennsylvania state court to federal court in a filing late that day, which was granted shortly after Musk did not appear.Lawyers for the Philadelphia district attorney’s office requested the case be returned to state court, calling the move to the higher court a “cowardly” delay tactic meant to “run the clock until election day”. The federal judge assigned to the case ordered Musk’s attorneys to respond by Friday morning. Musk’s counsel had argued that state court was not the proper venue and that the Philadelphia district attorney was engaging in thinly veiled electioneering.“Rather, although disguised as state law claims, the complaint’s focus is to prevent defendants’ purported ‘interference’ with the forthcoming federal presidential election by any means,” the Tesla CEO’s attorneys wrote.In the original suit, Krasner argued that Musk’s petition and associated contest were “indisputably violating” specific Pennsylvania laws against illegal lotteries. Musk’s attorneys said he was engaging in legally protected political speech and spending.John Summers, an attorney for the DA’s office, told the judge on Thursday that Musk’s Pac had “brazenly” continued the sweepstakes despite the lawsuit, awarding about 13 checks of $1m since the contest began, including one the day of the hearing.“They’re doing things in the dark. We don’t know the rules being followed. We don’t know how they’re supposedly picking people at random,” Summers said. “It’s an outrage.”The cash giveaways come from Musk’s political organization, which aims to boost Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in the vital swing state, which is seen as a key to victory by both Trump and his opponent, Kamala Harris.Krasner, a Democrat, filed suit on Monday to stop the America Pac sweepstakes, which is set to run through election day and is open to registered voters in swing states who sign a petition supporting the constitution. Musk has been tweeting photographs of the winners holding novelty checks.Krasner has said he could still consider criminal charges, saying he is tasked with protecting the public from both illegal lotteries and “interference with the integrity of elections”.Election law experts have raised questions about whether Musk’s drawing violates a federal law barring someone from paying others to vote. Musk has cast the money as both a prize as well as earnings for work as a spokesperson for the group. More

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      The Washington Post is a reminder of the dangers of billionaire ownership | Siva Vaidhyanathan

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      Last week the Washington Post refrained from endorsing a candidate in the presidential race for the first time in 36 years. The decision was reportedly ordered by Jeff Bezos, the Post’s owner and one of the richest men in the world. The Seattle billionaire, who owns Amazon, purchased the flailing newspaper in 2013 in a rare fit of civic duty.The blowback was immediate and substantial. Within 48 hours of the announcement as many as 200,000 paying readers cancelled their subscriptions to the already money-losing news organization, according to reporting by NPR.Such withholding of revenue is usually more a symbolic message than a real threat to the viability of a company. But for the Post, which has been teetering for decades, any loss in subscribers is threatening. Hundreds of good journalists who had no influence on Bezos’s decision remain unsure of the viability of their employer. Residents of the District of Columbia and much of Virginia and Maryland also rely on the Post for coverage of state and local issues, culture and sports. All of this is threatened by Bezos’s decision and the public uprising against it.Some angry citizens also cancelled their subscriptions to Amazon Prime, the service that provides free shipping for many Amazon products and access to video and music streaming.While a widespread Prime resignation would not damage the public sphere or the prospects for democracy and good government the way that hurting the Washington Post does, it’s still a futile gesture that probably will not alarm or injure Bezos in the slightest.That’s because Prime is a classic loss-leader feature: Amazon uses the service to crush competitors by offering cheaper goods and services while the company makes its money elsewhere. Prime has about 180 million members in the United States, so if a few thousand quit, Amazon would hardly notice and Bezos hardly care.Amazon and Bezos are far more powerful than most people realize. The company’s power is deep, broad and largely invisible. The books and dog toys we buy through Amazon remind us of its public face and original mission. But it’s not 2004 any more.Amazon is not a normal retail company or a normal company in any way; it’s a sprawling leviathan wrapped around the essential processes of major governments, commerce and culture of most of the world.Amazon’s major source of revenue and profit, Amazon Web Services (AWS), is the leading provider of computing and data services in the world, ahead of Microsoft and Alphabet. AWS hosts the sites and data of more than 7,500 governmental agencies and offices in the US alone, including those of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Reserve.Just about everything a 21st-century state or firm might want to do probably goes through Amazon and makes Bezos wealthier and more powerful in the process. All of this happened over the past 20 years as we enthusiastically chose convenience and mobility over all other human values. We clicked Bezos into power – and not by buying things through Amazon retail; we did it by choosing the internet again and again.In blocking the Washington Post endorsement, Bezos is not acting cowardly as much as slyly. Secure in his fortune and status regardless of the potential rise of fascism in the US, he has some more selfish concerns about the nature of the next administration.One potential Bezos-centric consequence of the election on 5 November is that Donald Trump will prevail over a bacchanal of greed and corruption, potentially opening federal contracts to all sorts of favored players and – more importantly – stifling investigations and prosecutions into firms and people Trump might favor.The other possible consequence is that a Kamala Harris administration would continue the aggressive and much-needed investigations into the ways internet companies like Amazon have restrained trade, concentrated wealth and solidified power by leveraging networks and scale.Bezos also founded and owns Blue Origin, a rocket and space technology firm that has many government contracts. Limiting the government’s regulatory oversight over space technology or contracting is in Bezos’s interest, which might explain why Blue Origin staff met with Trump around the same time as the Post announced its decision not to endorse. It’s also likely Bezos would like to muscle out Trump’s pal Elon Musk and his company, SpaceX, for what is to come.Given all this, it makes sense that Bezos, who is generally liberal and supports Democratic candidates, would try to limit how much Trump hates him (and Trump has long hated Bezos – a lot), if there is a small chance to curry favor with the once and future president. Perhaps Bezos figures his newspaper should not help Harris more than it already has by reporting the basic news.So there are many reasons to fear a Bezos-Trump rapprochement. Still, it does not make much sense to cancel a Post subscription or Prime membership. Neither would hurt Bezos at all.Most boycotts, especially when they are tiny, disorganized, ad-hoc, emotional and aimed at enormous, global companies, are mere expressions of self-righteousness. They have no significant influence on the world but they can make the boycotter feel a bit better for a few days. What’s worse, they often distract energy from real political action that might curb the excesses of the companies in question.Here is the problem: billionaires are mostly immune to consumer pressure. That’s how they became and remain billionaires.So how do we solve a problem like a billionaire? First, we must be blunt about the nature and scope of their power. It’s not a matter of describing their wealth, which flashes before us in numbers we can’t properly grasp or feel. We must describe their influence and how they control things in the world.Second, we must find ways to limit their wealth by taxing the various ways they accumulate and hide it.Third, we must be enthusiastic about breaking up big companies that do too many things in too many markets and thus crush or purchase potential competitors and insurgents. It’s not about prices. It’s about power.Most of all, we should do our best to elect leaders who are not beholden to billionaires, but actively seek to turn them back into millionaires.

      Siva Vaidhyanathan is a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia and the author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy More

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      US warns Musk’s Super Pac $1m-a-day giveaways may be illegal, reports say

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      The US justice department has sent a letter to Elon Musk’s Super Pac warning that the billionaire Tesla CEO’s $1m-a-day giveaways may violate federal law, according to multiple reports.A letter from the department’s public integrity section, which investigates potential election-related law violations, went to the Pac, reports in CNN and the New York Times said. The justice department and Musk’s America Pac did not immediately respond to a request for comment.South African-born Musk, who has thrown his support behind Donald Trump in advance of the 5 November election, announced on Saturday while speaking before a crowd in Pennsylvania that he was giving away $1m each day until election day to someone who signs his online petition supporting the US constitution.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe handed $1m checks to two separate people over the weekend: one to a man in Harrisburg on Saturday and another to a women in Pittsburgh on Sunday. Another voter in North Carolina has won $1m. Between in-person campaign events in support of the Republican presidential candidate, Musk has tweeted his congratulations to the winners and urged other registered voters in swing states to sign his petition and enter the lottery.Election law experts had called the sweepstakes potentially illegal. The Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro, had called on law enforcement to investigate.Musk, ranked by Forbes as the world’s richest person, so far has supplied at least $75m to America Pac, according to federal disclosures, making the group a crucial part of Trump’s bid to regain the White House. More

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      Elon Musk is Trump’s biggest cheerleader. How could he affect election results?

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      Less than a month before the presidential election, Elon Musk has made himself a near-constant presence in the race. At a rally for Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, Musk jumps with glee wearing a custom black Maga hat. On social media, he posts AI-generated images attacking Kamala Harris. Behind the scenes, he bankrolls one of the largest pro-Trump political action committees.The billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX has emerged as a unique influence on the campaign in ways that set him apart from even the most politically active billionaires and tech elite. He is all at once a vocal Trump surrogate, campaign mega-donor, informal policy adviser, media influencer and prolific source of online disinformation. At the same time, he is the world’s richest man and the owner of one of the United States’ most influential social networks, while also operating as a government defense contractor and wielding power over critical satellite communications infrastructure.On Tuesday, Federal Election Commission filings showed that Musk donated $75m in the last three months to his pro-Trump America Pac. The group has become a major ground game operative in battleground states, and Musk is its only donor.Although the ultra-wealthy have always tried to influence politics, few people in US history have possessed the mix of immense resources and intent to use them to sway an election that Musk does. He has become symbolic of the outsize power over democracy held by the ultra-wealthy and is relishing the spotlight that his unique position has awarded him, said Larry Noble, former FEC general counsel.“He clearly likes attention,” Noble said. “Unlike a lot of very wealthy people who get involved in politics who want to be in the background and want to work through dark money groups so their name isn’t attached to certain things, he’s out there. He wants his name out there. I think he wants to be adored.”Musk’s X becomes a megaphone for TrumpTrump and Musk have a contentious past: Musk called Trump “too old” to seek re-election in a series of tweets in 2022 and Trump referred to Musk as a “bullshit artist”. But the two men have become extremely intertwined during the 2024 presidential race. Musk announced his full support for Trump in July following months of telegraphing his opposition to Joe Biden and the Democratic party. In the months since, Musk has fervently committed his money and influence to the Trump campaign. The tech mogul is fond of saying this will be “the last election” if Trump doesn’t win.Musk’s most visible Trump support takes place on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter that he bought for $44bn in 2022. Musk’s account has more than 200 million followers, and he has directed the company’s engineers to improve visibility of his tweets – the algorithm now boosts Musk’s own tweets beyond that of other users so that more people have to see them. It was Musk who made the decision to restore Trump to the social network in late 2022.As election day nears, Musk’s feed has become a constant stream of praise for Trump and vitriol against Harris. A large percentage of his tweets amplify false or misleading information, and the people who Musk interacts with on the platform are often far-right accounts with a history of spreading misinformation. Musk’s AI image generator, Grok, has also become one of the most prominent sources of political deepfakes that have permeated the election.Musk has used X to help the Trump campaign, not only by echoing its talking points or amplifying the president, but by preventing the spread of material that could be harmful. Reporter Ken Klippenstein published a dossier of background information on vice-presidential candidate JD Vance in early October that was obtained through a hack of the Trump campaign allegedly by Iran. The New York Times reported last week that the campaign asked X to prevent links to the published dossier from spreading there, which X followed through on, blocking links to it and suspending Klippenstein’s account.The move stands in contrast to Musk’s frequent proclamations about being a “free speech absolutist”, and to the incessant attacks by Republicans on content moderation decisions made by social media platforms that they claim are akin to censorship. Suffocating the Vance dossier also ran contrary to his own stated reasons for buying Twitter. Musk had tweeted that he would ensure something like Twitter’s suppression of links to the initial New York Post story of Hunter Biden’s laptop would never happen again.“People like Musk, they’re the ones using their money and lawfare to try and suppress real work that’s just trying to contribute to the public discussion,” said Callum Hood, head of research at the Center for Countering Digital Hate. Musk sued CCDH after it published research that showed hate speech and extremism had risen under Musk’s ownership. He lost the case but has appealed.Musk the mega-donorWhile Musk has rallied online for Trump, he has committed large amounts of money to financing on-the-ground operations and media campaigns for the former president. His spending is an escalation of a yearslong, quiet funding of Republican groups that has turned him into one of the country’s largest rightwing donors.Musk’s America Pac, which was founded earlier this year, is currently doing get-out-the-vote work on the ground in battleground states. Musk has in effect moved his base of operations to Pennsylvania to support the effort, according to the New York Times, and he is planning a series of events in the state following his appearance at a Trump rally there earlier this month.“That is what will decide this election, especially in Pennsylvania,” Musk said at the rally in Butler. “And honestly, you want to just be a pest. Just be a pest to everyone you know, people on the street, everywhere. Vote, vote, vote. Fight, fight, fight. Vote, vote, vote.”The money is not only flowing to get-out-the-vote initiatives, though. Musk has donated to the conservative group Building America’s Future, which has set up cash awards for people who bring the group evidence of election fraud. Building America’s Future has also funneled money to a Super Pac that HuffPost reported has run targeted ads calling Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, “America’s pro-Israel power couple” in areas of Michigan with large numbers of Arab and Muslim voters. The Pac is simultaneously running ads aimed at Jewish voters in Pennsylvania that accuse Harris of being too pro-Palestinian.

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      Musk is different from other wealthy donors in recent decades who have divided their political engagement into two styles, according to Benjamin Soskis, a senior research associate at the Urban Institute who is an expert in the history of philanthropy. One is to craft a non-partisan identity and work with people in both parties, for either strategic or personal reasons. The best example of that: Bill Gates. The other is to engage directly with partisan politics, but with a level of discretion, like the Koch brothers or George Soros.Musk falls into his own category, working in a highly partisan fashion but with virtually no discretion. He’s displaying “a kind of gleeful embrace of partisanship”, Soskis said, embodying a style of politics that feels similar to Trump.“That feels unusual for the wealthiest individuals – the complete eschewal of discretion as a mode of political engagement,” Soskis said. “That seems new.”A plan to gut regulatorsIf Trump and Musk occasionally seem like an odd pair on paper – Trump has threatened to remove an electric vehicle tax credit, while Musk is CEO of perhaps the world’s most famous EV company – one point of alignment is a vehement dislike for regulators. Musk’s longstanding battles with government offices like the Environmental Protection Agency and Federal Aviation Administration could shift in his favor under a Trump administration that is likely to drastically cut their resources and weaken their authority.“I suspect on some level that this is just a pocketbook issue for him, that he also wants lower taxes,” Noble, the former FEC counsel, said. “He wants to have his companies freed from safety regulations.”Over the past several years Musk has faced investigations, fines and delays over public safety concerns on a range of his projects. The FAA alleged last month that Musk’s SpaceX broke launch safety protocols, and over the years has grounded the company multiple times for violating regulations. California officials last week cited Musk’s politics and falsehoods as they voted against a SpaceX plan to conduct launches in the state. Musk sued in response. The EPA has also launched investigations into SpaceX for complaints that it is dumping unsafe amounts of wastewater into the ecosystem, while the FDA has cited Musk’s Neuralink brain implant company for animal welfare issues.Tesla’s attempts at developing fully autonomous cars have also come under scrutiny, presenting complications for a company that has staked its future on the ability to produce a self-driving robotaxi. Tesla is facing additional investigations from federal prosecutors and the Securities and Exchange Commission over its self-driving car claims, and earlier this year came under investigation from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration related to a recall of its autopilot function.These constant fights with the full alphabet of regulatory agencies has coincided with Musk making numerous public statements in favor of deregulation, as well as calling for a full-scale audit of the federal government. That idea has found purchase with Trump, who announced in September that he would launch a Musk-led government efficiency commission that would audit federal agencies for places to cut. Musk wants to call it the Department of Government Efficiency, or Doge, invoking one of his favorite memes, an expressive shiba inu.Although the plan is vague on details and fails to address the obvious conflict of interest in Musk auditing the regulators that oversee his companies, both Trump and Musk have repeatedly brought up the idea of Musk holding some role in a potential Trump administration. During an appearance on Fox News earlier this week, Trump said he would create a new position called “secretary of cost-cutting” and appoint Musk.“He’s dying to do this,” Trump said.Musk’s Maga support goes beyond businessMusk’s public rightward shift is an extension of years of allying himself with rightwing leaders around the world. In recent years, Musk has cozied up to nationalist and nativist politicians including Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Salvini, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and India’s Narendra Modi.Some of these relationships have appeared to be in service of Musk’s business interests. He has forged a friendship with Argentina’s anti-regulation, far-right president, Javier Milei, who he brought on a personal tour of Tesla’s Texas headquarters and repeatedly endorsed on X. Argentina, meanwhile, has some of the world’s largest reserves of lithium, a key mineral used in electric vehicle batteries and one that Musk has previously demanded be processed in increasing quantities.Musk’s business empire is at risk when his relationships with governments sour, as evidenced during his recent conflict with Brazilian authorities that resulted in a judge banning access to X in the country. Musk ultimately capitulated to comply with local laws.But Musk’s promotion of far-right beliefs and support for Trump have also taken on a personal dimension that goes beyond business calculations. Musk’s rhetoric on X has fixated on conservative grievances and he has amplified racist and antisemitic narratives through his tweets. Anti-immigration and anti-trans views have become a frequent talking point.One of his 12 children is a trans woman, and Musk claims he was “tricked into” signing off on her medical treatment and that he “lost” his child in the process. He has since vowed to defeat what he calls the “woke mind virus”.This increasingly overt radicalization of Musk’s social and political views appears unlikely to abate following the campaign, leaving questions of how he may influence the country’s politics when the election ends regardless of its outcome.After the January 6 insurrection, Twitter, under its previous ownership, permanently suspended Trump’s account “due to the risk of further incitement of violence”. Under Musk, the tweets that got Trump banned seem quaint – and Trump is now back on the platform, as are a host of frequent superspreaders of election lies.A big test awaits Musk if Trump loses, something he joked would land him in either legal or bodily trouble with Democrats. Will he accept a loss? Or would he use X to keep spreading conspiracies he’s already promoted – that mail ballots are “too risky” or that non-citizens are swaying US elections, two of Trump’s pet election issues.X, under Musk, “is building now, as we speak, another fresh stolen election narrative, and we all know what the consequences could be”, Hood said. More