A day in Elon Musk’s thoughts: 145 tweets with election conspiracies and emojis

It’s simply after midnight mountain customary time within the US on 13 August when Elon Musk makes his first put up of the day on X, the platform he purchased for $44bn when it was referred to as Twitter. Musk has been tweeting for hours about his interview with Donald Trump, and he’ll proceed into the night time earlier than taking a couple of hours’ break – presumably to sleep – after which logging again on to tweet dozens extra occasions.

Over the subsequent 24 hours, Musk will put up over 145 occasions a few vary of obsessions, tasks and grievances to his 195 million followers. He’ll share anti-immigrant content material, election conspiracies and assaults towards the media. He’ll trade tweets with far-right politicians, conservative media influencers and sycophantic admirers. He’ll ship a litany of one-word replies that say “yeah”, “attention-grabbing” or just characteristic a cry-laughing emoji.

As a method of exhibiting what Musk promotes on-line and who he interacts with, the Guardian has taken a granular have a look at at some point of the Tesla and SpaceX CEO’s posts on X. Musk posted a photograph of himself at a “good friend’s ranch in Wyoming” on the day in query, and because of this all timestamps of his tweets are assumed to have taken place in that state’s timezone, mountain customary time.

The 24-hour snapshot of Musk’s posts, that are largely consultant of his common each day output, are a revealing look into how the world’s richest man spends a big a part of his day, nearly each day. Although Musk receives enormous quantities of media protection for his numerous authorized battles and enterprise ventures, it may be straightforward for people who find themselves not continually on-line to overlook simply how prolific his output is on X and the way excessive the content material is that he promotes there. He tweets so typically that his personal bot scanners have flagged his account up to now. He has changed Donald Trump because the tweeter-in-chief.

If billionaires of the previous like Richard Branson and Steve Jobs have projected pictures of yachting within the Caribbean or standing on stage brandishing their newest tech creation, a evaluate of Musk’s tweets paints a contrasting image: his default standing is looking at a display screen, posting. A lot as Trump’s vindictive speeches have to be heard in full to be believed, Musk’s whiplashing mixture of aggrieved political trolling, memes and firm hype have to be learn in sequence to know the world’s most privileged tweeter.

Midnight to 1.18am: Mates of Elon

Musk’s first put up on 13 August is a 12.14am reply to the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk, founding father of the conservative group Turning Level USA, who opposes trans rights and advocates for Christian nationalism. Musk desires to make clear a degree from the day prior to this’s interview with Trump, whom he’s backing for president, and tells Kirk that he believes the local weather disaster is actual however that sustainable vitality know-how is on tempo to unravel it.

The trade is one in all a number of occasions through the day that Musk may have cozy, public exchanges with Kirk and different figures of the worldwide proper wing. The billionaire has lately fashioned a kind of symbiotic relationship with conservative media influencers, basking of their reward and in flip amplifying their speaking factors. Inside half-hour of Musk’s first put up of the day, he may have replied to a few separate posts from Kirk with claims suggesting the media is rewriting Kamala Harris’s political historical past, the federal government ought to decontrol industries and that road crime within the US is uncontrolled.

By 1am, Musk may have already tweeted 14 occasions, principally in exchanges with these sorts of rightwing activists or deferential media influencers like Mario Nawfal – a serial entrepreneur who left behind a sequence of aggrieved enterprise associates to achieve a following internet hosting reside streams on X. Earlier than apparently logging off at round 1.18am, Musk may even reply to the all-beef food plan advocate and anti-trans ex-psychology professor Jordan Peterson, who claimed that the preliminary streaming failure of Musk’s interview with Trump was the results of “traitors at work”. Musk’s response is that, given the prominence of the interview, there was a “100% likelihood” of an assault.

Although Musk has claimed that X is a spot for all politics and viewpoints, the Tesla CEO has little to no interplay with leftwing activists or vital journalists. His replies and reposts replicate each his personal private echo chamber on the platform, in addition to the broader rightwing ecosystem that he has cultivated as proprietor of X.

Since Musk took over the corporate in late 2022, far-right and conservative voices have grown on the platform whereas advertisers and extra mainstream A-list customers have fled. Republicans at the moment are way more prone to imagine that their views are welcomed on the platform and that it has a optimistic impression on democracy than Democrats, in line with a Pew Analysis Middle research from earlier this yr, whereas Democratic voters report far larger ranges of harassment.

8am to midday: Assaults on the media and far-right anti-immigration posts

Musk is tweeting once more by 8am, this time thanking the previous UK prime minister Liz Truss for her assist. Truss, after being memorably ousted from energy in lower than the time it took for a head of lettuce to go dangerous, has not too long ago launched into the rightwing talking circuit as a Trump supporter, additionally aligning with Musk. The X proprietor has established a historical past of courting rightwing leaders, and later within the day will reply “Grazie!” to the far-right Italian deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini’s reward of Musk’s opposition to European Union rules.

Because the morning begins, it turns into clear that Musk has found that information shops’ protection of his interview with Trump the night time earlier than is essentially vital – specializing in the reside stream’s technical points, Trump’s falsehoods and Musk’s usually fawning method towards the previous president. Musk’s response all through the day will probably be to assert that legacy media shops are liars and monetary failures, referring to them as unthinking “nonplayer characters” – a longstanding meme that grew out of 4chan earlier than turning into mainstream amongst conservatives.

“A wall of detrimental headlines was so predictable. They’re such NPCs 🤣🤣,” Musk says at 8.36am whereas quote-tweeting the crypto influencer and political shitpost account “Autism Capital”. Three minutes later he’ll reply to Autism Capital once more, claiming that Google solely exhibits leftwing press in its search outcomes.

One specific fixation of Musk’s is selling deceptive claims and conspiracies about election fraud, a standard conservative speaking level within the Trump period. At 9.26am, Musk makes a requirement for paper ballots as an alternative of digital voting machines, echoing a well-liked rightwing narrative that such machines are used to perpetrate voting fraud. Musk has made dozens of deceptive or debunked claims about voting, which have been seen a whole bunch of hundreds of thousands of occasions on the platform and election officers say have begun to spill over into the actual world.

Musk will proceed tweeting at a fast charge all through the morning – 19 occasions over the subsequent half-hour alone. These will embody separate assaults on CNBC, CNN and different legacy media shops he accuses of spreading lies. Musk will in the meantime reply with an exclamation mark to a tweet that includes a blogpost referred to as “Did ladies in academia trigger wokeness?”. The weblog’s creator is a former professor who was ousted from Cambridge College in 2019 after greater than 500 lecturers signed an open letter condemning his work as “racist pseudoscience” and a college investigation discovered he collaborated with far-right extremists.

Musk has lengthy described himself as politically impartial, however in 2022 introduced that he would not assist the Democratic occasion. He has framed his conservative shift as the results of Democrats turning into too far left whereas his positions stay centrist, however his social media feed as an alternative exhibits that he regularly promotes and interacts with members of the intense proper.

At 9.47am and 10.27am, Musk sends replies to Peter Imanuelsen, a far-right influencer whom the Anti-Defamation League has beforehand described as being “infamous for his excessive racist, anti-Semitic, Christian fundamentalist, homophobic, Islamophobic, anti-feminist and conspiracist commentary”. Though Imanuelsen has lately disavowed Holocaust denial, he continues to advertise far-right, anti-immigrant views.

Musk replied “insanity” to each of Imanuelsen’s tweets, which had been about two British residents jailed for violating UK legal guidelines towards posting offensive or menacing materials on-line. The arrests focused folks posting anti-migrant invectives throughout Britain’s far-right riots, through which masked rioters tried to set fireplace to a lodge housing asylum seekers.

Typically Musk’s interactions with rightwing influencers are banal, however in addition they have the impact of amplifying their accounts to the billionaire’s practically 200 million followers. Musk will reply at 9.08am to a put up about how Europe doesn’t use air-con from Richard Hanania, a conservative thinker common amongst tech moguls who wrote for white supremacist publications within the early 2010s beneath a pseudonym to argue in assist of eugenics and the compelled sterilization of “low IQ” folks.

Musk additionally replies with a cry-laughing emoji to a tweet criticizing the media from the early alt-right influencer Lauren Southern. A Canadian activist who has promoted the “nice alternative” white nationalist conspiracy concept, Southern was a member of the “expertise workforce” for Tenet Media till early September. A Division of Justice investigation unsealed across the identical time as her exit accused Tenet Media of being a Russian-backed propaganda operation that used $10m in overseas cash to bankroll rightwing media influencers. Southern and others on the expertise workforce deny having any information that the cash was coming from Russia.

All of that is earlier than 1pm, by which period Musk may have tweeted about 89 occasions.

Whereas these interactions signify a number of the most excessive those who Musk exchanges tweets with, they’re certainly not aberrations. His most mainstream interplay of the morning is available in a reply to the creator Stephen King, through which Musk claims the Guardian can’t be thought of goal as a result of it’s “totally incapable of writing something optimistic”. He’ll assault the Guardian a minimum of two different occasions within the day, telling the rightwing commentator Ian Miles Cheong that it’s a “mouthpiece for the state”.

One of many causes that Musk might gravitate in direction of the crypto influencers, rightwing activists and Tesla fan accounts that fill his feed is that they’re a number of the few customers who can match his prolific output and time spent on the platform. Most individuals should not have the need or time to be extraordinarily on-line, and people who do are sometimes there to pursue some political or monetary acquire. Virtually everybody that Musk interacts with falls into a kind of classes, and their accounts operate like remoras on the aspect of Musk’s 195 million-follower shark.

Musk will proceed tweeting each jiffy till taking a two-hour break between round midday and 2pm. Then he’s again at it, sending a couple of extra sporadic tweets at Nawfal about his Neuralink plans and responding to a thread from the Utah Republican senator Mike Lee. Two o’clock to 4pm is his least prolific time interval for posting.

4pm to 10pm: Election conspiracies and cries of ‘censorship’

It’s 4.12pm, and Musk has tweeted over 100 occasions since midnight. His newest is a quote tweet of the cryptocurrency account “Doge Designer”, who claims that “your complete media is working a misinformation marketing campaign towards Elon Musk”. Musk replies “It’s wild,” including a cry-laughing face that has turn into his go-to emoji.

Musk’s content material manufacturing slows considerably within the night, however he’s nonetheless posting a number of occasions an hour. His consideration turns to Brazil, the place he has discovered a nemesis in a supreme court docket decide who’s threatening to dam entry to X within the nation if the platform doesn’t appoint a neighborhood authorized consultant to cope with disinformation takedown requests. Musk describes the decide’s ruling as an act of censorship in a tweet at 6.17pm, and can name the decide an “evil dictator” in weeks to come back. Brazil’s supreme court docket will uphold a ban on X in early September, blocking entry to the platform for hundreds of thousands within the nation.

The Brazil saga displays a central a part of Musk’s on-line persona, through which he has solid himself as a warrior free of charge speech towards liberal censorship. Whereas this framing ignores that Musk has suspended journalists who criticized him from the platform, complied with censorship requests from governments comparable to India and throttled site visitors to web sites he dislikes, Musk’s narrative pervades his Twitter feed. All through the day he’ll assault regulators and anti-disinformation efforts in Brazil, the UK and the European Union.

Interspersed amongst Musk’s numerous political posts are retweets of individuals providing assist for his enterprise ventures, like @TeslaBoomerMama, whose profile describes herself as a “fierce Tesla retail shareholder advocate” and “fangirl of Elon”. These retweets and interactions together with his followers have the impact of a industrial break, and are a number of the solely posts that don’t have an express political message.

10pm to midnight: 😂

As Musk begins to wind down his day, the frequency of his posts goes again up and he returns to a number of the topics he tweeted about within the morning. He responds with cry-laughing emojis to on-line influencers, replies to a number of posts a few Haitian migrant accused of rape and sends extra anti-media tweets.

Musk revisits not solely the identical themes, however a number of the very same posts and information objects that he tweeted about earlier. At 11.12pm he responds with one other cry-laughing emoji to the identical image of detrimental headlines about his Trump interview that he despatched a cry-laughing emoji about at 8.36am.

Earlier than the day ends, X debuts a beta model of its new AI picture generator. Virtually instantly, folks start to find that it’s going to generate pictures of public figures or sexualized content material, not like different common picture mills. Musk begins utilizing cry-laughing emojis to egg on supporters creating pictures utilizing the instrument – in a single case a picture with the immediate “make a picture of a half cat half girl with boobs”.

Over the subsequent few days Grok will probably be used to generate a spread of political content material, sexualized depictions of celebrities and violent pictures. After rightwing influencer accounts use the instrument to create pictures of Taylor Swift and her followers supporting Trump’s candidacy, Trump will trigger a wave of controversy by posting the AI pictures on his Fact Social account. Swift will later cite the incident in an Instagram put up throwing her assist behind the Harris presidential marketing campaign.

Musk’s final put up earlier than midnight is celebrating his new picture generator, tweeting “Fee of progress of Grok is 🚀 🚀🚀”. He’ll proceed to put up into the night time, sending nearly 50 extra tweets over the subsequent three hours.

At 3.11am, Musk responds with heart-eyes emoji to a picture of him and a shiba inu canine dressed as historical Roman troopers generated by Grok. The flurry of replies and posts then goes silent. At 8.01am, he begins posting once more.