Elon Musk, who has previously supported Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, formally endorsed Donald Trump’s presidential campaign about 30 minutes after the former US President was rushed offstage in Butler, Pennsylvania, with blood dripping down his face following a shooting.
The owner of X (formerly Twitter) posted: “Last time America had a candidate this tough was Theodore Roosevelt.”
His social media platform was soon filled with unverified claims, misinformation and interpretations of what had happened in Pennsylvania. The word “staged” trended on X for hours after the shooting.
Republican Mike Collins posted on X that “Joe Biden sent the orders”, which picked up over five million views, and he called for Biden to face charges for “inciting an assassination”. Similar unverified claims came to the fore on platforms favoured by the far-Right, like Gab, Truth Social and Parler.
Musk, like Trump, craves attention and revels in controversy. But unlike Trump, he has a fortune of $264 billion, according to Bloomberg, which Trump wants access to for his presidential campaign.
The tech provocateur’s political alignment started shifting in May 2022 when he tweeted he would vote Republican because Democrats had “become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican”.
The 53-year-old’s first rodeo of working with Trump was in 2017, when he served on White House business advisory groups but he resigned soon after Trump pulled out of the Paris Agreement on climate change mitigation.
In July 2022, the Silicon Valley billionaire said Trump was “too old to be chief executive of anything, let alone the United States of America” but later that year, shortly after purchasing the controversial social media platform, he reversed X’s (then known as Twitter) ban on Trump, who had praised supporters who stormed the US Capitol.
Musk’s support for Right-wing causes has been growing in recent years, seen through his opposition to Covid-19 lockdowns and embracing anti-vaccine ideology. In April, he labelled Trump’s “hush money” trial “obviously a corruption of the law”.
