Newsmax spent a good part of 2024 wavering over Elon Musk’s involvement in right-wing politics in general and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in particular. As the election neared, the wavering continued. An Oct. 3 wire article, for example, touted Musk’s “quiet financial support for right-wing causes” before hooking up with Trump. An Oct. 15 article by Sam Barron gushed that “Elon Musk’s new PAC has been working to turn out voters for former President Donald Trump in battleground states, though he did concede there were issues with workers getting paid.
One of Newsmax’s resident talking heads portrayed Musk as a victim in an Oct. 18 TV appearance:
SpaceX owner Elon Musk’s struggles with a California panel that blocked his company from increasing how many rockets it launches from a U.S. air base in the state is a clear example of “how perilous free speech is,” retired Judge Andrew Napolitano said on Newsmax Friday.
“If the government can suppress the free speech of the richest man on the planet” and potentially that of Donald Trump, “the former and probably future president of the United States, they can suppress anybody’s speech,” Napolitano told Newsmax’s “National Report.” “And that is contrary to the First Amendment. That is un-American.”
Musk’s SpaceX this week sued the California Coastal Commission in federal court, seeking an order barring the agency from regulating the company’s Falcon 9 rocket launch program at Vandenberg Space Force Base.
The lawsuit claims that the commission, which oversees the use of land and water within the state’s more than 1,000 miles of coastline, unfairly asserted its regulatory powers over launches because of Musk’s conservative political views.
Napolitano didn’t explain why Musk should be immune from scrutiny.
Then the wavering kicked in again. An Oct. 25 article by the apparently unironically named Charlie McCarthy repeated a Wall Street Journal story detailing how “Elon Musk reportedly has been in regular contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin since late 2022.” That was joined by an article by Barron stating that “NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said Friday that the report of phone calls between Elon Musk and Russian President Vladmir Putin should be investigated.”
Solange Reyner detailed Musk’s X spreads fake news in an Oct. 26 article:
X, the social media platform owned by Donald Trump supporter Elon Musk, has been boosting election conspiracy theories with artificial intelligence-powered trending topics, reported NBC News.
The news outlet identified false stories pushed on X’s “stories for you” feature, including debunked allegations of wrongdoing related in Maricopa County, Arizona; an unsupported claim that a voting machine in Tarrant County, Texas, was “flipping” votes; and unfounded allegations by X users that Vice President Kamala Harris used cocaine in the White House and that she attended parties hosted by Sean “Diddy” Combs.
The posts were in X’s “explore” section, which uses Musk’s AI software, Grok.
Musk has shared some of the conspiracy theories.
Newsmax also published an Oct. 29 wire article claiming that “Donald Trump’s Truth Social is now worth more than Elon Musk’s X, thanks to a recent run-up in the shares of the parent company of the former president’s social media platform.”
Just before election day, however, Newsmax returned to the pro-Trump fold: A paywalled Oct. 29 article by Carly Mayberry, for example, touted the “celebrities whose previous support of Donald Trump has remained stalwart with some new A-listers recently going public as part of the Trump train,” and a Nov. 4 column by Scot Faulkner insisted that “Elon Musk will succeed in cutting trillions in federal government waste, but only if he moves boldly and learns from the past.” A Nov. 9 article by Jim Thomas cheered how Musk injected right-wing bias into X:
Elon Musk, owner of X, has repositioned the social media platform as a fervent supporter of President-elect Donald J. Trump, leveraging his influence to push a conservative agenda, The New York Times reported.
Musk, who has posted about Trump hundreds of times since the election, is increasingly promoting X as the central platform for Trump’s presidency and conservative voices. He has emerged as a vocal supporter of Trump, transforming the social media platform into a rallying point for the incoming administration and its supporters.
Musk’s recent flurry of posts — over 400 between Tuesday and Friday — celebrates Trump’s victory and magnifies causes the president-elect might prioritize.
X CEO Linda Yaccarino underscored the platform’s political alignment, commenting “Reporting for duty” on a post about X’s role in political discourse.
A Nov. 10 article by Eric Mack gushed that Musk “tweeted a screen shot of a Newsmax broadcast this week showing that “nearly all of the states that chose Vice President Kamala Harris were ones that have no voter ID on the books” — though no election fraud was documented. And a Nov. 11 wire article cheered that “Elon Musk’s super PAC spent around $200 million to help elect Donald Trump.”