Opinion | Elon Musk's QAnon signaling is a disturbing new low
X owner Elon Musk spends a lot of time posting extreme right-wing talking points and misinformation on his social media platform. But on the eve of Election Day, shortly before NBC News projected Donald Trump's re-election , Musk posted a pro-Trump video arguably more concerning than pretty much anything he's shared before. The video features messaging tied to QAnon, one of the most noxious, brain-corroding conspiracy theories circulating among the MAGA faithful. And, once again, one has to wonder how we've ended up in a situation where a man with so much power believes such backward things.
The video Musk reposted is a manic mash-up of footage of Donald Trump's campaign, military aircraft, mid-20th century domestic family life scenes and miscellaneous images symbolizing violent strength and a return to the past. The video is set to clips of the former president promising vengeance and eternal victory: "If you do something bad to us, we are going to do things to you that have never been done before," Trump warns in one clip. "2024 is our final battle," he says in another. At one point in the video, as Trump says, "The future belongs to patriots," the word "PATRIQTS" flashes across the screen. Then all the letters except Q disappear. That's a clear reference to QAnon.
QAnon is a web of outlandish pro-Trump conspiracy theories that holds that Democrats and Hollywood are running Satan-worshipping pedophilic sex trafficking rings and that Trump's political rise is part of a covert mission to root them out and execute many of them . Among other things, many who subscribe to the tenets of QAnon believe that members of this secret cabal "kill and eat their victims to extract a life-extending chemical called adrenochrome," according to The New York Times. One branch of the QAnon movement believed that John F. Kennedy Jr. wasn't killed in a plane crash in 1999 and would emerge at a Dallas rally in 2021.
Musk's decision to share the video isn't definitive proof that he subscribes to QAnon thinking, but at the very least it indicates that he's fine propagating it. And it's conceivable he buys into it. Musk's posts telegraphs total immersion in MAGA thinking; he constantly traffics in evidence-free conspiracy theories about election fraud and preposterous racist theories about Democrats importing migrants to wrest control of the country from Republicans. He has endorsed white supremacist conspiracy theories that Jewish communities push "hatred against Whites." (He later apologized .) Backing QAnon thinking is another rung on that ladder.
Musk's spread of QAnon messaging marks his entry into a categorically more alarming mode of political activism. QAnon proponents not only believe things for which there is no evidence, but they believe things that are so far afield from possible truth that their overall grasp of reality is questionable. If Musk were your average person, then this would be a sad story, but not a huge deal for the rest of us. But he leads several companies that have tremendous influence on American life and international affairs. It should concern us that a man who controls satellites that have the capacity to change the tide of major wars is willing to co-sign the idea that Trump is a messianic warrior against the deep state. It should concern us that a man who sells more electric vehicles in America than every other automaker combined is OK signal-boosting a worldview that Hillary Clinton is a satanist who should be executed.
Most urgent of all is how a possible alignment with QAnon could shape how Musk sees and uses his power as the owner of X. How is someone with such an impoverished understanding of what is real and what's not — or at least comfortable being in league with those who don't understand — fit to oversee one of the most important pockets of civil society on the Internet?
And if Musk is a true believer in QAnon, if he really thinks Trump is locked in a battle against an evil cult, then it's not hard to see him further setting aside his already inconsistent and arbitrary commitment to "free speech" and fairness principles to amplify more nonsense and more propagandistic content to support the extreme right in the future. The case against billionaire ownership of our most vital information infrastructure grows stronger by the day.
