Elon Musk Is the Steve Bannon of 2024

In 2011, political provocateur Andrew Breitbart warned a panel of Fox Information anchors that if America wasn’t cautious, Donald Trump might develop into President sometime. A yr later, Breitbart died, and his longtime affiliate, billionaire handmaiden Steve Bannon, took over the rightwinger’s cherished web site. He would use the location to assist Trump do exactly that.

When Bannon took over Breitbart in 2012, Trump was simply starting to toy with operating for President, inspired by conversations he’d had with David Bossie, the president of Residents United (the group that efficiently sued the FEC to unleash dark money on the U.S. political system). Bossie was additionally a friend of Bannon, and Residents United had obtained massive financial donations from Bannon’s affiliate, billionaire Bob Mercer. Certainly, Bannon met Trump for the primary time, in 2011, through Bossie. As Trump readied a presidential run that may be partially funded by Mercer and coordinated by Bannon, Breitbart (which was additionally receiving funding from Mercer) started to churn out a gradual stream of rightwing content material, the likes of which, commentators would claim, helped pave the best way for the MAGA motion.

Ultimately, Breitbart’s personal journalists denounced the location, describing it—because the Los Angeles Occasions once put it—as having sacrificed its “editorial independence and develop into a mouthpiece for Trump.” Certainly, in 2016, within the wake of Trump’s electoral victory, Kurt Bardella, a former Breitbart spokesman, told journalists: “It is going to be the propaganda arm of the administration.” He added that the location’s mandate was to “create battle, controversy and divisiveness” and that it will be used to prop up Trump. Ben Shapiro, himself now a pro-Trump apologist, as soon as claimed Bannon had turned Breitbart “into Trump’s personal Pravda,” a reference to the Soviet Union’s once-prominent propaganda publication.

Almost ten years later, as Bannon emerges from a federal prison and Trump readies himself to return to the White Home, it seems that one thing similar to what transpired in 2016 has occurred once more.

In 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter. The deal was contentious, dramatic, and, from the skin, largely inscrutable. Why did the world’s richest man—a person who already owned half a dozen companies—wish to purchase one of many world’s largest social media platforms? Public hypothesis ran the gamut however got here up with no actual solutions. Not lengthy after the acquisition was completed, Musk fired a majority of the site’s staff and renamed it “X.” Since then, it has grown increasingly more rightwing and, within the lead as much as the presidential election, allowed Musk to algorithmically promote a number of unhinged conspiracy theories and misinformation that proved auxiliary to the Trump marketing campaign’s messaging. The issue for Musk has been that X is not profitable. The positioning seems to don’t have any long-term enterprise technique besides dropping metric fucktons of cash.

But throughout the context of the 2024 presidential election, Musk’s Twitter deal lastly appears to make a sure type of sense. Certainly, if one of many core functions of the acquisition was to transform the platform right into a globally-scaled propaganda megaphone for the Trump marketing campaign, then Musk’s different selections whereas operating the location (the majority of which defy all basic business logic) appear extra affordable. The payoff wasn’t the platform’s precise income (which has plummeted 80 percent since Musk took over) however a Trump political victory, which might hand Musk unparalleled entry to the most important branches of American authorities. It additionally explains Musk’s increasingly dramatic antics, as they are often learn as half and parcel of an total propagandistic effort. From a enterprise standpoint, telling your website’s advertisers to “go fuck” themselves is senseless. From the standpoint of somebody who desires to symbolize himself as an avatar of “free speech,” nonetheless, (and thus win a good portion of the general public to your political trigger) it does make sense. Within the days since Trump gained the election, Musk’s private net worth increased by $20 billion.

Elon is such a dumbass. He spent $44 billion on Twitter and all he received was management of all 3 branches of the federal authorities.

— Complete Mars Catalog (@WholeMarsBlog) November 6, 2024

In each 2016 and 2024, the play by the rightwing political motion seems markedly comparable. From this author’s perspective, the play is that this: organized cash, backed by rightwing billionaires, hijack a media platform, the likes of which then proceeds to churn out a deluge of hard-right content material. In lots of instances, the content material appears designed to rile up specific segments of the voters, thus compelling them to assist a most well-liked political candidate (in each instances, Donald Trump). In Breitbart’s case, the location nonetheless ostensibly produced information. Within the case of X, Musk distributed with even the trimmings of official information content material and proceeded to unleash a veritable firehose of propagandistic dogshit into what had as soon as been thought of America’s digital “public commons.”

Whereas there isn’t any concrete proof that Musk’s motivation for the Twitter acquisition was to assist Donald Trump get elected, there’s little disputing that that’s what Musk did with the platform as soon as he was operating it.

Very similar to in 2016, the 2024 Trump marketing campaign turned on its potential to rile up its base with a mix of anger, resentment, and paranoia. To that finish, Musk’s X helped promulgate a close to incessant deluge of cartoonishly racist conspiracy theories associated to immigration and the present administration. Trump additionally leaned closely into the choice media ecosystem of podcasts and social media which are closely weighted in direction of younger males—a core constituency that helped him win. A lot of these podcasts even received a shoutout within the instant aftermath of Trump’s victory earlier this week.

There may be actually just one conclusion that may be drawn from the previous, which is that the political rightwing is extremely adept at leveraging media and expertise in direction of its electoral benefit. Certainly, most of the media methods pioneered by Bannon throughout Trump’s 2016 marketing campaign really feel as in the event that they have been refined or drastically amplified by Musk throughout this election cycle.

It ought to be remembered that, in 2016, Bannon’s Trump-related efforts additionally used his ties to Cambridge Analytica, an organization shaped by the SCL Group, a longstanding protection contractor (with ties to the U.S. State Department) that specialized in psychological warfare.

One might argue that Twitter, as a platform, provided Musk the mixed powers of what Breitbart and Cambridge Analytica had beforehand provided Bannon: It functioned as each a media megaphone and a technique to gather and centralize knowledge on the American public, each of which might then be used to reinforce an total electoral technique. (There’s no technique to say whether or not any of that knowledge was helpful or not, after all.) In 2016, Fb was central to Bannon’s effort. Cambridge Analytica collected data on segments of the American population from Fb for the needs of political advertising, in a infamous case that resulted in Congressional hearings. In Musk’s case, he purchased a platform that’s just like Fb and took it personal, thus avoiding any kind of exterior scrutiny.

Late final yr, I argued that Twitter wasn’t markedly different beneath Musk than it had been beneath Jack Dorsey. After all, that was a very long time in the past, and issues are very totally different now. I nonetheless keep that Twitter was by no means a very good web site—and that the unique model of it shouldn’t be glorified as some ideally suited public platform. On the similar time, its clear that Musk took a website that had significant guardrails, distributed with them, and proceeded to mould the location in his personal picture (that picture, apparently, is a mean-spirited douche bag).

The actual query is what Musk will do subsequent. Bannon left Breitbart in 2018, shortly after Trump had ascended to the White Home, and by no means seemed again. It stays to be seen whether or not Musk continues his tenure at X, or whether or not he’ll half methods with the platform. As a way of distributing scaled messaging, X would clearly proceed to be helpful to Musk and different Trump acolytes throughout the upcoming administration. That mentioned, how do you proceed to prop up a media operation that’s hemorrhaging cash? The financials of the location are what should be handled within the coming years, if the propaganda is to proceed.