Was it Musk Wot Won It?

As an add-on to TIP's regular newsletter, Liam McLoughlin asks if Elon Musk helped with Trump a second term in office.

We’re going to be talking about the influence of Elon Musk for years I suspect. But right now, the debate on this is still up in the air on the effect Musk had in the election. It’s a debate currently filled with conjecture, and we probably won’t really know until the data comes in. But we’ve some interesting indications in three key areas: Ownership of X; financial clout; and personal fandom.

The first is a pre-print paper by Graham and Andrejevic looking at the algorithmic bias on X during the 2024 US election. From their dataset of 56,184 posts by prominent Republication and Democrat X users, they find evidence of platform-level changes which influence engagement metrics. Of course, Musk saw a huge increase of engagement (increasing his average engagement by 237%) due to these changes, but so too did prominent Republicans as part of a wider group-specific boost to the visibility of their posts (increasing their engagements by an average of 152%).

They go on to say “We speculate that the view count findings suggest possible recommendation algorithm bias for visibility that privileges pro-Republican accounts, warranting further investigation to understand the mechanisms driving these algorithmic shifts.” Or in other words Musk has used his power as the platform owner to give preferential treatment to the Republicans.

Interestingly the researchers find that this change in the platform happened on July 13, 2024. The same day Musk officially endorsed Donald Trump.

The second is finances. Prospect have argued that the direct involvement by one of the world’s richest men has resulted in the 2024 Presidential Election being the most expensive in US history as a percentage of GDP, beating a record set in 1896. Now Prospect are partly counting the purchase of Twitter into this figure, however, Musk did put over a hundred million dollars into supporting the Trump campaign, and there’s probably more disclosures to come. This went towards typical campaign spend, ad-time, and a controversial million dollar a day election giveaway. Tim Marchman, WIRED's director of science, politics, and security ultimately argues that this financial contribution may not have been that influential – arguing that the money was “basically set on fire”. With reports of paid canvassers faking work. Alternatively, it has been claimed by James Blair, Trump’s political director, that this campaign ultimately did well as part of a wider Get out the Vote campaign by the Republicans. I think it’s best we sit on this and wait for the data.

The third lesser spoken about element is Elon Musk’s personal appeal. For whatever worth you’d put on his brand, it’s hard to say that he doesn’t have a strong fan base online. Measuring is popularity is hard – but YouGov’s surveys has 94% of respondents aware of him, with 42% of people giving him a positive opinion. And filtering out the bots on X, it’s easy to see that he certainly still has some fans in his replies discussing him as a hands-on-the-deck visionary and innovator. To at least some voters, they’d probably view Musk as an influencer.

If you were in this group of people who follows Musk, you’d be potentially inclined to view his support for Trump as authentic. $100m might be small fry to a man who on paper is worth $318bn, but it’s still putting your money where your mouth is territory. That amount of money sends a message regardless of who is spending it – and it’s a message which may have strongly resonated with a particular online group – the Elon Fanclub, which some might assume makes up a large part of his 205 million followers on X. But does that personal appeal turn to votes?

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