Two weeks after making a stunning $44 billion bid to buy Twitter in April 2022, Elon Musk began to lay out a vision for his ownership of the social network. The company’s management had become biased in favor of left-wing values, Mr. Musk argued, and he would stamp out political partisanship.
“For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral,” tweeted Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man.
More than two years later, the network, now known as X, is anything but. Ahead of next week’s presidential election, the platform’s algorithmically curated feeds and trending topics have become overtly political, echoing the biases of Mr. Musk, the platform’s most followed account and one of former President Donald J. Trump’s most notable supporters. Mr. Musk’s posts are a stream of grievances, conspiracy theories and partisan misinformation.
The about-face is one of many Mr. Musk has undertaken in recent years as he has increasingly embraced Mr. Trump and his allies.
He’s met with fellow billionaires and businessmen to strategize on how to elect Mr. Trump, despite criticizing similar elite gatherings last year as akin to “an unelected world government.” He has poured nearly $120 million into a fierce effort to support Mr. Trump, after criticizing other social media billionaires for getting involved in elections. And his platform has suppressed news stories from outlets he sees as biased against Mr. Trump, despite his stated commitment to free speech.
In the business world, Mr. Musk is prone to hyperbole and product predictions that sometimes fall short. But his public political turnaround — which began as he made his offer to buy Twitter — has revealed something else: a willingness to completely reverse himself on beliefs he said he held strongly and posted publicly.
Mr. Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In purchasing Twitter, Mr. Musk has argued that he did so on the grounds of protecting free expression. As one of his first moves as the platform’s owner, he oversaw the “Twitter Files,” allowing a handful of friendly journalists to comb through old internal communications to determine whether Twitter had worked to suppress a New York Post story about Hunter Biden, the son of President Biden, ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
The company did prevent the story’s circulation, but under the impression that the material had been obtained via a foreign hack-and-leak operation. While there was no definitive link showing political motivation on Twitter’s behalf, Mr. Musk and his supporters decried what they saw as the company putting its finger on the scale to influence public opinion.
But Mr. Musk’s X has done the same. Last year, the company was found to have been slowing down access to the sites of competitors like Substack and news outlets including Reuters and The New York Times, in a process known as throttling.
Last month, after the independent journalist Ken Klippenstein published an article with reportedly hacked material about the Republican vice presidential candidate, JD Vance, X moved to stop the circulation of Mr. Klippenstein’s article and suspended his account. It was reversed only after a user on X asked Mr. Musk why the reporter had been suspended.
“I’ve asked X to unsuspend him, even though I think he is an awful human being,” Mr. Musk said in private messages seen by The Times. “Important to stay true to free speech principles.”
Mr. Klippenstein’s account was reinstated shortly thereafter, though links to his article, which was published on Substack, remain blocked on X.
As X has become more political, its owner has continued to contradict himself on his own role in the presidential election. In March, after The Times reported that he had met with Mr. Trump, Mr. Musk posted that he was “not donating money to either candidate for US President.” (More reporting from The Times showed that by the time of that statement, Mr. Musk had already been meeting with other billionaire Republican donors and businessmen to strategize on how to elect Mr. Trump.)
Last year, in a wide-ranging interview with the then Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Mr. Musk spoke out about a series of donations that Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, had made during the 2020 election.
“My understanding is that Zuckerberg spent $400 million in the last election, nominally in a get-out-the-vote campaign, but really fundamentally in support of Democrats,” Mr. Musk said during the interview, echoing a misleading right-wing talking point. The money — derided by critics including Mr. Trump as “Zuckerbucks” — went to two nonprofit organizations that disbursed aid to more than 2,500 election departments dealing with budget shortfalls as they adopted new voting practices during the coronavirus pandemic. The money did not support Democratic candidates.
Since his statement, Mr. Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, started his own political action committee, the America PAC, into which he has poured nearly $120 million. Much of that has gone toward funding a canvassing operation to support Mr. Trump’s campaign in battleground states as well as cash giveaways and a $1 million lottery for potential voters that has come under criticism.
Mr. Musk has targeted his efforts at voters themselves, offering those in swing states the chance to win a million dollars every day until Election Day if they sign a petition and provide his PAC with their personal information. On Monday, the district attorney of Philadelphia sued Mr. Musk and the America PAC for running an “unlawful lottery” to extract a political pledge. The case since has been moved to federal court, where it is pending.
Other critics of Mr. Zuckerberg have remained silent on Mr. Musk’s efforts. Among them is Mr. Vance, who slammed Mr. Zuckerberg’s 2020 donations as “election meddling.”
“The simple truth is that in 2020 our oligarchs used their power and money to do everything they could to steal an election,” Mr. Vance said in a 2021 op-ed he co-wrote in The New York Post.
A spokesman for Mr. Vance declined to comment.
Mr. Musk has kept up his lottery, on Thursday congratulating a winner from North Carolina. The day before, he shared a message from his PAC, which had also been paying supporters anywhere from $47 to $100 for each potential voter they referred to sign its petition. So far, the PAC said it had doled out 87,000 checks.
“Thanks for signing our petition in support of the Constitution!” Mr. Musk wrote on X.
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