As a business proposition, Elon Musk’s ownership of X, formerly known as Twitter, has so far been a disaster: since he acquired it in late 2022, the social media company, according to one estimate, has lost nearly 80% of its value.
As a political proposition, however, Musk’s purchase may turn out to be one of the shrewdest investments of all time. Every week, the platform seems to supercharge a news issue that comes to dominate conservative discourse – and often mainstream discourse, as well – with real political repercussions.
Sometimes these topics are inflammatory conspiracy theories, like a false rumor that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, had been eating cats and dogs, which became a talking point in the final days of the US presidential election and led to bomb threats and harassment against Springfield residents.
Other times, X, often aided by Musk’s own posts, elevates fact-based but contentious stories – about illegal immigration, government waste, visa fraud, population decline, youth gender transition or government crackdowns on social media speech – that the mainstream media is perceived to have ignored or downplayed.
This week, X single-handedly revived a scandal about British “grooming gangs” – groups of men of primarily, but not exclusively, Pakistani descent who are known to have sexually abused hundreds of young girls in northern England in the 1990s and 2000s while local authorities often failed to act.
On X, Musk has called for British prime minister Keir Starmer, who was the director of public prosecutions for part of the time that many of the crimes took place, to “face charges”. He was followed by American hedge-fund billionaire Bill Ackman, who joined the chorus to demand that the US place sanctions on the UK.
Musk, who has engineered the X algorithm to boost his own tweets, often drives the change in public conversation. With a single retweet, often accompanied by just a few words (“This is interesting”) or an emoji, Musk can put a post by an anonymous or relatively obscure rightwing X account in front of his 210 million followers – more than five times the population of Canada.
In recent months, he has often suggested that X is the real press. “You are the media now,” he likes to tell users of the platform.
As many as 2.7 million people have departed X since the US presidential election, with many prominent journalists, pundits and left-leaning social media users angry at Musk’s politics joining alternative platforms such as Bluesky. But X – whose political content is now almost completely rightwing and ranges from conservative-leaning centrists to literal neo-Nazis – has hardly gone away. If anything, it seems more powerful than ever.
Musk’s position in the incoming Trump administration – as co-chair, with Vivek Ramaswamy, of a new “department of government efficiency”, or Doge – started as a Twitter joke. But Musk has now used X as a platform to make aggressive interventions in not only US politics but those of other countries. He has endorsed the far-right AfD party in Germany and repeatedly hammered at the British Labour party. During anti-migrant riots in the UK last year he disparaged the prime minister as a “two-tier Keir” who protects the interests of immigrants in Britain over those of native-born citizens. Musk is also friendly with the far-right Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni.
Musk’s ideological closeness with rightwing populist parties across the world may prove beneficial to his business interests as those movements continue to win political power.
One of X’s most interesting aspects as the emerging front page of the conservative internet is its ability to turn stories that aren’t strictly news into news. A British Home Office minister’s recent refusal to open a national inquiry into grooming gangs was the ostensible news hook for that story’s sudden topicality, but a topic doesn’t really need recency for X to vault it into headlines.
If anything, the fact that the grooming story isn’t “new” isn’t as important as the fact that it is new to many of the people hearing about it, with American users of X and some British ones shocked not only at the scale of the child abuse that occurred and perceived lack of public accountability – but also at the fact that they’d never heard of it before.
“Yes, it’s true – people have gone to jail, people have lost their jobs, and recommendations for change have been published, and to some extent even implemented,” the conservative British writer Ben Sixsmith noted in a short essay about the grooming gangs. “There has not been a conspiracy of silence. There has instead been a conspiracy of murmuring. The establishment … have addressed the scandal in the most minimal terms” – making it a continued and charged issue.
Musk has seized the momentum to suggest that Britons support Nigel Farage’s hard-right Reform party. He’s also called for the far-right activist Tommy Robinson – who is currently in jail for contempt of court and whom even Farage has generally sought to distance himself from – to be freed.
Sara Rowbotham, a whistleblower who was one of the first to draw attention to the grooming gangs crisis, has questioned Musk’s “motivation for interfering”. His interest “seems very political”, she recently told the Guardian. “The person he is trying to go after is Keir Starmer – it is a political swipe that is nothing to do with the women and girls who have been abused time after time.”
Sometimes, X’s power backfires against the right: most recently, an ugly debate about H1-B foreign worker visas exposed a tension between Musk, Ramaswamy and the “Silicon Valley right” and the more nativist Maga right. For the large part, however, Musk’s bet on X seems to be paying off.
“Once [people] realize that legacy media lies, they never forget it,” Musk has said.
