The Musk Rat

A stark warning over Elon Musk’s huge campaign contributions and his finger on the social media scales for Trump

This image is AI generated and does not actually depict Elon Musk’s real head.

The New York Times reported this morning that the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, who owns Tesla, Space X and Twitter, spent a whopping $250 million to help elect Donald Trump.

He did this primarily through his America PAC, which spent $239 million in cash and in-kind contributions. These kinds of sums are hard to put into context, given their size and the fact that they come from a single source. But the figure still comprises only a small fraction of Musk’s net worth, estimated at over $300 billion.

Given how close the election was, especially in the key Blue Wall battleground states, we shouldn’t dismiss the idea that Musk’s support for Trump may have been outcome determinative, especially when we take a closer look at how the money was deployed and what other things Musk apparently did to tip the scales.

In today’s piece, I take a look at four aspects of Musk’s election strategy that are best (and rather colorfully) described as “ratfucking”—defined as “the art of carrying out dirty tricks and crafty maneuvers, usually in the name of winning an election.”

One of these is well known, when Musk began handing out million dollar checks lottery-style to people who provided their personal voter info.

A second was less well-publicized. A dark money group called “Building America’s Future,” which Musk has funded for some $100 million, ran highly deceptive, micro targeted ads to push down Harris’s numbers among her base of voters.

A third was Musk’s 11th hour, $20 million, secret contribution to the “RBG PAC,” which falsely yet effectively claimed that Trump and the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg saw eye to eye on the question of a federal right to abortion.

Finally, according to two reports, after buying Twitter, Musk put his finger on the scale for Trump. The investigations found that Musk’s platform disproportionately amplified right-wing messaging by increasing the virality of tweets by Republican politicians and influencers.

Let’s look at each of these in turn.

Buying the vote

We’d never seen anything like it before. To boost flagging interest in his petition drives that were designed to help the GOP identify persuadable voters, Musk brazenly began to offer a lottery: If you signed his PAC’s petition, you were entered into a drawing to win a million dollars.

There was an immediate outcry from the public and from election law experts. In order to be eligible to win that money, the person signing had to be a registered swing state voter. And per Vox, that

raised concerns that Musk may be in violation of a federal law that makes it illegal to pay people (or offer them an incentive) to either register to vote or cast a ballot.

“I think there’s a strong argument that there’s potential criminal liability here, so at the very least [the Department of Justice] should be investigating and should be warning people not to be doing this,” Richard Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA Law School, told Vox.

Philadelphia’s District Attorney sued to stop the practice, but a judge there allowed it to continue after Musk’s attorney argued that the winners are not actually subject to random chance and were instead paid to be “spokespeople” for America PAC. The sweepstakes style giveaway ended on Election Day, but not before Musk doled out over $40 million in prizes.

Litigation isn’t over, however. A group known as Public Citizen also filed a federal complaint alleging that the scheme violated campaign finance laws because “the purpose of the $1 million reward for signing the petition appears to be to motivate voter registration and voting at the polls by those sympathetic with the candidacy of Donald Trump in the key swing states for the 2024 presidential election.” Similarly, the Justice Department (under Biden) sent a letter to Musk’s PAC warning of possible legal violations.

But under Trump’s incoming AG, and with a politically divided Federal Elections Commission, it is highly unlikely that any further action will be taken to investigate or charge America PAC with any wrongdoing.

Playing the Dems

A second Musk-associated effort targeted Harris voters who might be softest in their support. Musk-associated advisors, through a dark money effort funded in part by him, created a false flag campaign designed to peel off support for Harris among wavering sections of the base, including Muslims, Jews and racial minorities.

The starkest examples were wedge ads designed to suppress support from key constituencies. Per the Washington Post,

Muslims in Michigan began seeing pro-Israel ads this fall praising Vice President Kamala Harris for marrying a Jewish man and backing the Jewish state. Jews in Pennsylvania, meanwhile, saw ads from the same group with the opposite message: Harris wanted to stop U.S. arms shipments to Israel.

Another group promoted “Kamala’s bold progressive agenda” to conservative-leaning Donald Trump voters, while a third filled the phones of young liberals with videos about how Harris had abandoned the progressive dream. Black voters in North Carolina were told Democrats wanted to take away their menthol cigarettes, while working-class White men in the Midwest were warned that Harris would support quotas for minorities and deny them Zyn nicotine pouches.

These comprised a micro-targeted effort across the battleground states using ads that appeared to be something they were not, a tactic the group internally called “false positives.” As the Post explained,

Ads tested better if Muslims felt they were seeing a message meant for Zionists, “Bernie bros” felt they were hearing from the far left, and “Zyn bros” felt they were hearing from activists who wanted “a world without gas-powered vehicles,” a ban on fracking and affordable housing for undocumented Americans — policies Harris did not actually support during her campaign.

The Harris campaign demanded social media platforms take down the ads. Google did take one down, but Facebook generally did not act. On that platform, the group was running ads from “Project 2028”—a ginned-up organization, again funded by Musk, that praised the Harris agenda while touting policies she did not actually support in 2024, such as mandatory gun buybacks, universal health care for undocumented immigrants and “the most progressive Green New Deal yet.”

Danielle Butterfield, the Executive Director of Priorities USA, a Harris PAC, was blunt in her assessment. “There is plenty of blame to go around for another election cycle riddled with misinformation online,” Butterfield said in a statement. “Big Tech is still unwilling to hold bad actors accountable, Congress is unwilling to step in and write new rules for the 21st century, and Republicans will continue to slander and lie to voters to make their case. Because of all of this, Democrats lose, and we need to acknowledge this reality and figure out new ways to communicate with voters on today’s internet.”

Otherwise put, the Republicans, using Musk’s money, played very dirty, and Democrats found no effective way to counter this after the platforms allowed the ads to continue.

Notorious RBG

In perhaps the most distasteful ratfuckery to emerge, public filings now reveal that Musk was the mysterious single donor behind an effort to tone down Donald Trump’s abortion record by falsely equating it to that of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

That sounds nuts, but bear with me.

A group called the RBG PAC began running $20 million in ads just before Election Day. No one knew at the time who was behind the effort. The name of the PAC was no coincidence; it ran spots falsely claiming Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg believed the federal government shouldn’t dictate state abortion laws, and then sought to claim that Trump held the same view.

The group’s website went so far as to portray Trump and Ginsburg side by side, saying “Great minds think alike.”

The ads may help explain a big disconnect in the voting patterns in key battleground states like Nevada and Arizona, where abortion rights were on the ballot in the form of a constitutional amendment. Those measures won, but many of the same voters who backed them also chose Donald Trump over Kamala Harris.

As Caroline Kitchener noted on the Fast Politics podcast this past Monday, many women voters were apparently convinced by this kind of messaging, i.e., that Trump really did intend to leave things to the states, that he would take no further federal action on abortion, and that a national abortion ban would never pass. The fact that the national right to abortion had been eviscerated due to his Supreme Court justice picks was not enough to change their support.

Rigging the algorithm

Many users (including this author) are actively fleeing Twitter in favor of Bluesky. One thing we have long suspected but have been unable on our own to prove is that Musk tweaked the Twitter algorithm to favor right-wing messaging leading up to the 2024 election.

As Vanity Fair reported in late October, Twitter has been disproportionately amplifying Republican influencers and politicians, according to two separate investigations:

One analysis, published by The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, found that the platform appears to serve new users large amounts of right-leaning political content, even if they indicate no interest in politics. A second report, this one by The Washington Post, found that Republican politicians are now vastly more likely to go viral on X, and that over the past 15 months, many Republicans have seen huge follower gains compared with Democrats.

Assuming this is true, Musk was handing Republicans an in-kind contribution of immeasurable value on one of the most important public platforms now owned by him. Indeed, his purchase of Twitter, which he now calls X, could be seen itself as a way to take over the public political dialogue and distort it to Musk’s own ends.

Never mind that Musk’s replatforming of white nationalists and hate speech has driven away advertisers, resulting in a loss of nearly 75 percent of the original $44+ billion he paid for Twitter. Musk has used his social media platform and his vast wealth to gain access to power; he now sits beside Trump on a regular basis, even awkwardly over the holidays. And he now serves as co-chair of a government commission, where he has promised to slash trillions from the federal budget including deep cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

Meanwhile, Musk’s cronies are gaining positions of power within the government that could have a direct impact on his businesses. This includes his billionaire pal Jared Isaacman, whom Trump has named to head NASA. And Trump’s threatened tariffs could wind up benefitting Tesla directly as Chinese imported electric vehicles get priced out of the U.S. market.

Seen in this light, Musk’s $250 million investment into Trump is already paying huge dividends.