Elon’s bully pulpit

Bloomberg

Steve Westly, a Democratic donor and CEO of the Westly Group, discusses on Bloomberg Television the state of the presidential campaign after US President Joe Biden's decision not to seek re-election.

Soon after Elon Musk agreed to buy Twitter, he said that "for Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral." The platform, which Musk renamed X, had faced years of indignation from right-leaning politicos about its suspected anti-conservative bias. Once Musk owned the social network, one of his first acts of business was to release internal emails that he thought proved that the site was doing favors for Democrats.

Now, ahead of the first major US presidential election with Musk in charge of X, no internal emails will be necessary to reveal its politics. The billionaire, who endorsed and pledged money to Trump after the former president survived an assassination attempt, spent all week posting in support of Trump and his running mate JD Vance, while engaging with speculation about the circumstances of President Joe Biden dropping out of the race.

What happens next is unprecedented — but it feels likely that Democrats may soon come forward with many of the same bias complaints that their conservative counterparts have been vocalizing for years.

"We've had CEOs before pick a side and donate a bunch of money, but we've never had it happen at this scale, when the CEO also owns a speech platform where people are getting their information and news is breaking," said Katie Harbath, a tech policy consultant who previously ran election strategy for Facebook.

Musk's tendency to engage with accounts that spread conspiracy and racist memes has already caused some of his users to decamp to Meta Platform Inc.'s Threads. But X is still the easiest way to distribute information to the masses, Harbath said. That's where Biden's team first posted that he was stepping aside and endorsing Kamala Harris for president. It'll still be a key source of facts on election day, Harbath said.

Some are approaching the information they get from X with Musk's endorsement in mind.

On Thursday, users started to notice that posts on X that used #MAGA displayed a custom emoji picture of Trump with his fist in the air. Clicking on #Trump2024 caused American flags to rain on the screen. After people speculated that Musk was giving Trump preferential treatment, an X representative told the tech news site Mashable that the emoji were part of a paid promotion.

Then on Sunday, for about 40 minutes, the rebranded @KamalaHQ account wasn't accepting new followers. Again, some users suspected Musk's involvement. X didn't respond to a request for comment.

Tech companies have glitches that affect political campaigns all the time, often for totally innocent technical reasons, said Nu Wexler, who has worked on policy communications at Twitter, Meta and Alphabet Inc.'s Google. In the past few years, Republicans have become masters at using the idea of tech company bias to inspire donors.

"If a glitch like that happened to Republicans, within minutes you'd see an email fundraising blast go out about tech censorship and it would turn into a lawsuit a couple days later," Wexler said.

Now we might see Democrats use perceived slights on X to raise money as well, he added. As Republicans have demonstrated in the past, "it's effective."—Sarah Frier

The big story


Warner Bros. and Amazon are sparring for control of NBA TV rights. The National Basketball Association is on the verge of signing a new $76 billion, 11-year deal with current broadcaster ESPN and two new partners: NBC and Amazon, leaving out longtime partner TNT, owned by Warner. Amazon has agreed to pay about $1.8 billion annually for its part of the deal, but Warner has offered to match the bid, hoping to keep a piece of the franchise anchored by its popular studio show Inside the NBA.