It was barely an hour after Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt last summer when Elon Musk declared his full support. The post on X, his social media platform, landed fast and took off like one of Musk’s rockets: “I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery.”

Musk—once ridiculed by Trump for leading companies that made “driverless cars that crash” and “rocketships to nowhere”— slapped a red MAGA hat on his profile photo, lit up X with pro-Trump memes, and used his platform’s reach to carpet-bomb swing states with political propaganda dressed as engagement. By sundown, Trump’s digital war room was headquartered on X, and Musk looked like the unofficial campaign manager.

Ten months later, he detonated that alliance in real time.

Every political strategist in Washington could see it coming. Musk, the richest man in the world, doesn’t share power. Trump, the most unrelenting figure in American politics, doesn’t forgive disloyalty. Their mutual dependency—money for clout, platform for power—was a high-speed arrangement that seemed destined for a crash.

For almost three years, Musk used X, formerly Twitter, to help rebuild Donald Trump’s public image and support his 2024 presidential run. He reinstated Trump’s account that had been banned after January 6, shared meme after meme mocking Democrats, chatted with MAGA influencers and hosted live conversations with Trump and others. Within months, Musk had reshaped the platform’s algorithms to favor a content ecosystem that amplified Trump’s message, according to social media researchers.

“A lot of the far right returned to Twitter because all of a sudden it looked like a safe space,” said Giulio Corsi, a researcher at the University of Cambridge in Britain who has been studying X’s recommendation system.

His findings were blunt: inflammatory posts, particularly those containing false or misleading links, surged in reach. “Tweets expressing right-leaning political bias see heightened amplification compared to the baseline model,” Corsi wrote in a case study examining 2.7 million posts on X in early 2023.

But the platform’s bias wasn’t just anecdotal. A Wall Street Journal analysis found that new users interested only in non-political topics were still bombarded with Trump-aligned content, and that pro-Trump accounts appeared twice as often as those favoring Vice President Kamala Harris during last year’s presidential election.

The Washington Post also reported that Republican congressional accounts received billions more views than their Democratic counterparts, further illustrating Musk’s platform as a potent, asymmetric political tool.

Blurred Lines

Musk’s hands-on management of X’s internal mechanics blurred the line between owner and political actor. During the 2024 election cycle, Musk took his control to new political heights, according to Hamed Qahri-Saremi, associate professor of information systems at Cleveland State University.

“We are seeing social media platform owners as active political actors, not just neutral hosts that used to be the norm,” Qahri-Saremi told Newsweek. “Musk’s influence on social media primarily stems from two channels: his structural control as the owner of X, which gives him gatekeeping power over policies, algorithms, and norms—and his personal activity, where he promotes specific narratives and amplifies particular users.”

It worked—for a while. After Musk endorsed Trump on X last summer, the platform’s energy shifted almost immediately in MAGA’s favor. Posts praising Trump surged. Once Joe Biden bowed out, content attacking Kamala Harris—including a viral AI-generated image of her in communist regalia—wasn’t just allowed; it was spread by Musk himself.

That shift was reinforced by Musk’s overhaul of how information is verified on the platform. He ended Twitter’s partnerships with professional fact-checkers, replaced them with “Community Notes”—a crowdsourced system run by anonymous users and algorithms—and removed the traditional verification badges that once signaled a user was who they claimed to be. As a result, misinformation and political propaganda spread more easily, especially from verified accounts who could pay for reach.

“Other major platforms, such as Meta, subsequently adopted similar practices earlier this year, resulting in significant shifts in fact-checking content on social media platforms,” Qahri-Saremi said. “Third-party, professional fact-checking does not exist on these platforms as it once did.”

Pull The Plug?

He hasn’t muted Trump—not yet. But if Elon Musk wanted to, he could do it with a keystroke.

As the biggest account on X, with more than 220 million followers, Musk’s reach is immediate and absolute. His posts fill the feeds of users who do not follow him. Some who have actively blocked him report that they still see his musings. His Thursday barrage of attacks on Trump—accusing him of lying, reposting calls for impeachment, and floating a Jeffrey Epstein connection over the course of about 40 posts—racked up tens of millions of impressions in a matter of minutes. On X, that means they were likely seen by the majority of active users, whether they followed him or not.

That scale matters. According to a recent Pew Research Center study, 59 percent of X users say they rely on the platform as their primary source of news. With a global user base exceeding 500 million, that gives Musk a direct pipeline to shaping how vast swaths of the internet experience political reality.

And unlike Trump—who posts mainly on Truth Social, where the reach is narrower and engagement smaller—Musk controls not just the content, but the code. He can dial engagement up or down, signal boosts with a single retweet, or let critics vanish into algorithmic limbo without ever banning them outright.

“He has structural control,” said Qahri-Saremi. “That gives him gatekeeping power over speech norms, algorithms, and who gets seen.”

It wouldn’t be the first time Musk reprogrammed the ground beneath his rivals’ feet. Kamala Harris began her sprint toward the general election last fall, her campaign claimed posts supporting her began vanishing from timelines. Pro-Harris accounts reported sudden drops in engagement, unexplained suspensions and disappearing trending topics.

Musk did not answer their questions at the time. He has denied manipulating the algorithm for political reasons, but now that X is a private company under his full control, that algorithm is a black box visible only to him and the coders who work for him. The code itself remains perhaps Musk’s most potent weapon for control of the modern attention economy — should he decide to use it against the sitting president.