Musk, Trump and the digital steamroller

By: Carlos Cortés

This text originally appeared in the Network of Experts on Democracy and Technology in alliance with La Silla Vacía.

On Tuesday at Mara-a-Lago, Donald Trump's party started without waiting for the official announcement. But this time it was not a preemptive strategy to feed fraud conspiracies and declare himself a winner without being a winner. This time the MAGA machine was moving at cruising speed towards an epic comeback that before midnight became inexorable.

"Apparently Elon created an app and knew who had won four hours before the results," said a couple of days later Joe Rogan, who had announced his support for Trump in the run-up to the election. As part of the successful tour of the libertarian-conservative ecosystem of influencers, gamers, streamers and podcasters, the now president-elect stopped by Rogan's microphone, one of the most influential. Days later there was Elon Musk. Both conversations, which total almost six hours, have now reached 65 million reproductions.

It doesn't matter if Musk actually had an app to anticipate the verdict of the polls. Since 2022 he has something more powerful: a social network where he is the biggest node; a universe he bought to become the sun. As research after research has shown, on X, the Twitter zombie, he dominates the conversation and the partisan content he shares is the most viral.

"Game, set and match," Musk wrote on X at 10:30 p.m. Tuesday night. With Trump's win, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, who is also plating the planet's rooftops with his satellites, won not a game of tennis but the poker world cup. He returned X a campaign megaphone, brought in more than $100 million and put Trump back in the Oval Office. In passing, he pulled out a set of keys for him. That Musk was on Wednesday's phone call between the president-elect and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is just a taste of what's to come.

"A star is born - Elon!" exclaimed Trump in his early morning Trump speech. He wasn't the only one on the thank-you list. Dana White, president of the multinational mixed martial arts company UFC, took to the stage, celebrated and acknowledged by name several influencers who furthered the Trump cause: Nelk Boys, Adin Ross, Theo Von, Bussin' With The Boys and, of course, Joe Rogan. Even Tucker Carlson, the former Fox commentator who once said he hated Trump "passionately," did a special broadcast from Mar-a-Lago that included an impromptu appearance by one of Musk's young sons, also named X.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump and Melania's son Barron, now an 18-year-old teenager over six feet tall, was his dad's guide on the map of content creators who speak in the ear of a key niche of Generation Z: men between 18 and 30 years old dedicated to video games, UFC fights and avid provocation against political correctness and feminism. Names Trump had never heard before, such as Ross, Von or Logan Paul, became a reference and a platform for the campaign.

At the beginning of the race, it was considered that TikTok would play a key role in the elections. However, it was the long-form formats that had the most traction. Since 2016 there has been significant growth in podcast consumption. In 2023, a Pew Research survey found that nearly half of Americans had listened to podcasts in the previous year and that 31% of them trusted the news they accessed through that medium more than other sources.

For analyst Taylor Lorenz, this network of influence that catapulted Trump helps to understand not only his victory, but the limitations Kamala Harris and the Democrats had in competing: "While the right has spent years fostering a symbiotic relationship with alternative media, the left has failed to replicate something similar. There are simply no progressive content creators with Rogan's cultural impact and online following, and a quick glance at podcast lists or trending YouTube channels shows the disparity between the reach of conservative versus progressive creators."

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The right-wing influencer ecosystem also has a financial advantage, as it has resources from Republican donors, political action committees and private sector players who strategically invest in militant channels and support young people to promote their vision. There are also economic incentives in niche platforms -such as Rumble or DLive-, where creators can monetize radical content, as happened with the live broadcasts of the Capitol assault in 2021.

Even though on the other side the panorama is very different, today the Kamala Harris campaign is being singled out for not having shown a greater interest in reaching the megaphones of the influencers: they set conditions to appear or asked for shorter or edited versions of the interviews. They wanted to set the rules without understanding that they were the ones who had to adapt. Even the Democrats' own soapboxes - like Crooked Media - were never visited by Harris or Walz.

"It may sound overly simplistic, and perhaps it is, but the best antidote to right-wing populism is left-wing populism. And part of that project needs to include building our own media infrastructure," wrote scholar Victor Pickard this week.

To think that a robust influence infrastructure would have been sufficient is, of course, to confuse form with substance. Joe Biden's administration is unpopular and dissatisfaction with the economy-as perception and reality-sealed the fate of his vice president. Either way, Trump's landslide victory revealed the enormous power that the libertarian-conservative project has thanks to the discipline in the articulation of its habitat and the relentless deployment of emotional and manipulative narratives.

Adding the alliance of Elon Musk and X, and the support - express and increasingly less hesitant - of Silicon Valley and the technology industry, this political project was recharged to nuclear levels. Although neither Trump nor J.D. Vance have at other times hidden their animus for companies in the sector, the deregulation agenda will favor them. For starters, the antitrust and other investigations pushed by the Biden administration are expected to be stopped dead in their tracks.

A couple of years ago the news was that Elon Musk had bought an unviable social network for $44 billion. By early Wednesday morning it was clear that he got off cheap.