Lies, Damned Lies, And Elon Musk

What do you do when the misinformation is coming from inside the house?

In the recent book Character Limit, about Musk’s takeover of Twitter, there’s an anecdote that is in the introduction. A data scientist who worked at the company (and had survived the early purge), who was horrified at how Musk had fallen for a blatantly obvious made up conspiracy theory, decided that he’d take the opportunity Musk had offered to talk to anyone personally to explain just how gullible Musk seemed:

Musk’s assistant peeked back the muttered and said he had another meeting. “Do you have any final thoughts?” she asked.

“Yes, I want to say one thing.” the data scientist said. He took a deep breath and turned to Musk.

“I’m resigning today. I was feeling excited about the takeover, but I was really disappointed by your Paul Pelosi tweet. It’s really such obvious partisan misinformation and it makes me worry about you and what kind of friends you’re getting information from. It’s only really like the tenth percentile of the adult population who’d be gullible enough to fall for this.”

The color drained from Musk’s already pale face. He leaned forward in his chair. No one spoke to him like this. And no one, least of all someone who worked for him, would dare to question his intellect or his tweets. His darting eyes focused for a second directly on the data scientist.

“Fuck you!” Musk growled.

This is a pattern. Musk has all the money in the world. He has the ability to be one of the best informed people in the world. And he’s built for himself a snowglobe of confirmation bias, making sure that a randomly floating combination of grifters and morons continue to feed him the dumbest shit imaginable, rather than take the slightest effort to actually inform himself of reality.

We just recently had a post contrasting how science educator Hank Green approached some possibly damning information about voting, compared to how Elon Musk handled it. Green was concerned, but spent the time researching it, and realized his original concerns were misplaced, and the institutions had actually done things in a smart way. Elon does no research, and assumes the worst, and simply will retweet any nonsense he comes across so long as it confirms his (very, very confused) biases.

This keeps playing out day after day on ExTwitter, the website that Elon owns. Just recently, I saw Elon post a tweet that was so egregiously wrong, it got Community Noted twice, not that Elon ever acknowledged it was false. As I write this a few days later, the tweet is still up:

That’s a quote tweet from Elon Musk saying “They are literally foaming at their mouth” in response to a tweet from some rando saying “Completely insane story in The Atlantic today” with a faked screenshot of an Atlantic piece with the false headline “Trump is Literally Hitler.” Both the original tweet and Elon’s tweet have a Community Note on it saying “this is not a real article.”

But millions of people saw the original, without the Community Note, and seem to think it’s true.

The original tweeter later admitted that he faked the headline. But because Elon wanted to believe it was true and had to retweet it, giving it a bunch of attention, even The Atlantic was forced to put out a statement noting they never published any such article.

The Atlantic concludes that statement with the following rather straightforward point:

Anyone encountering these images can quickly verify whether something is real––or not––by visiting The Atlantic and searching our site.

The bare minimum effort, which Elon couldn’t be bothered with.

Amusingly, the same day my piece comparing how Green and Musk deal with such information came out, Green released another video, this time talking about how he looked at one day’s worth of Elon tweets and was shocked to see how blatantly and easily Musk publishes easily disproven false information with the implication that Musk believes it’s true. Green found six outright lies posted in just 24 hours.

Again, this is not a one-off thing. Recently, the NY Times looked at five days’ worth of Elon’s tweets and found almost one-third of them “were false, misleading, or missing vital context.”

Nearly a third of his posts last week were false, misleading or missing vital context. They included misleading posts claiming Democrats were making memes “illegal” and falsehoods that they want to “open the border” to gain votes from illegal immigrants. His misleading posts were seen more than 800 million times on X, underscoring Mr. Musk’s unique role as the platform’s most-followed account and a significant source of its misleading content.

[….]

His most-viewed post, seen more than 100 million times, was a misleading projection of the presidential race that showed Mr. Trump winning most battleground states. The data was based on an outdated forecast from Nate Silver, an election modeler. By the time Mr. Musk shared the data, Mr. Silver’s forecast had shifted, suggesting instead that Vice President Kamala Harris was faring better than Mr. Trump. Some users quickly noted that the data was wrong, but Mr. Musk did not remove the post or make a correction.

It wasn’t just one bad week. Bloomberg just came out with an even bigger report, looking at all of Elon Musk’s tweets from 2011 through this week. It’s a really fascinating piece of data-based journalism, showing how he was a pretty ordinary tweeter in the early days, but obviously things changed after he took over Twitter.

As the report notes, in recent weeks, Musk has become obsessed with false and disproven conspiracy theories about the election and immigration.

Musk’s posts about immigration primarily promote misleading narratives: that the election will be unfair because of migrants; that migrants are dangerous, and flooding unchecked into the country; that the vast majority of immigrants have not settled into the US in the “right” way; that migrants have gotten unreasonable, special treatment from the government; and that Democrats are responsible for ushering in large numbers of migrants who go on to commit crimes in the US.

Bloomberg ran a machine learning model on the posts to identify subjects that Musk most often discusses on X, and found that about 1,300 of Musk’s posts in 2024 revolved around immigration and voter fraud. Reporters then manually reviewed hundreds of them to ensure they were properly categorized. Posts were provided by researchers at Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub and the data platform Bright Data.

Musk’s commentary on noncitizens voting is based on a “weak to non-existent” understanding of election law, said David Schultz, a professor of political science at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. Federal law bars non-US citizens from voting in presidential elections, and voters must legally swear, under penalty of criminal prosecution, that they’re eligible to cast a ballot.

In order to become a US citizen and vote, undocumented immigrants have only a few viable paths, some which take years, such as securing asylum or successfully challenging a deportation order. Meanwhile, state-led investigations by both Republican and Democratic officials have repeatedly found that noncitizen voting is extraordinarily rare — and it’s never been shown to affect the outcome of any election. “Given what we know about how infrequently voter fraud has occurred over the last two or three elections in the US, the odds of drawing a random ballot, and that ballot being fraudulent, approach that of winning the Powerball,” Schultz said.

It also appears that there’s some element of “audience capture” going on. Musk appears to track closely what sort of response his posts get (which is partly why he ordered the company to make his tweets get more attention) and then responds accordingly:

Any time Musk talks about immigration on X, the reposts, replies and views reliably roll in. Though Musk has written about immigration and voter fraud issues in 2024 with about the same frequency as he’s written about Tesla, the automaker he is chief executive of, his immigration-related posts have amassed more than six times the number of reposts.

The article includes a lot more, like the reporters talking to some Trump supporters who are praising Musk while repeating the easily debunked nonsense that he regularly tweets, retweets, or engages with.

There is nothing illegal in what he’s doing, though presenting potentially harmful misinformation about elections, specifically around where and how to vote, can cross the line. But it’s quite striking how Musk, driven by his insatiable desire to be “liked” on his own platform, has shown that he has zero interest in actual truth, and is happy to push any lie that works for his current support for Donald Trump’s campaign.

It’s not new that greedy, disconnected billionaires will often use the media to push lies to support their favored candidates. Yellow journalism is a thing that existed throughout American history. However, it’s pretty shocking just how frequently and how often Elon will directly promote baseless claims or outright falsehoods, never ever taking responsibility or admitting to having promoted bullshit.

This is why, though, it’s important to call it out and for people to recognize what’s happening. Musk is actively miseducating people. And people are believing what he’s posting.

People can argue over why he’s doing this. Some say that he knows he’s spreading lies to idiots and cultists who follow him, because he knows he can get away with it. However, I don’t think that’s true. Having followed the guy and his statements for a while, I honestly think he believes the shit he’s tweeting, and believes the likes and the cultists cheering him on prove that he’s correct.

That he could easily find out the truth is not particularly important to him. It’s not about the truth. It’s about the truthiness of the world he wants to inhabit, where he is the only person who matters.

Whether or not this actually has an impact on the election or other important events in the future is impossible to predict. But it hardly seems like a good state of affairs.