This was the year Elon Musk took over politics

“I think he understood that what the big technology companies spent decades worrying about, which is essentially how to moderate or how to organize the speech on this crazy scale, is not a problem,” says Magalhaes. “This is an opportunity for him.”

Since the election, Musk has not slipped into the shadows, content with backroom meetings and secret influence. Instead, he combined calls with foreign leadershe weighed on staffing choices for the new administrationand threatened to use America PAC to fund primary challenges against lawmakers who don’t support Trump’s agenda (and his)..

In November, Trump announced that Musk will colead a new federal advisory committee called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE, like memecoin)responsible for cutting $2 trillion from the federal budget. (Eliminate all discretionary federal spending, including on defense, does not achieve this goal.) The committee does not yet exist, but already Musk has used his presence on X and this new adjacent, if nebulous, government position to dictate policy. Maybe not by chance, on paper, I know estimated wealth It is said to have increased by about $170 billion after the election.

“He leveraged (his ownership of X) into a government position where his ability to influence policy that affects all his business interests is just tremendous. And that could pay huge financial dividends,” says Phil Napoli, professor of politics public at Duke University. “I think that would be the scariest thing that could happen, is that a lot of these platforms would take that signal from Musk.”

Early returns suggest that other technology leaders are likely to follow suit. Mark Zuckerberg of Meta and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos to get visited Mar-à-Lago to kiss the ring. Meta officials say Zuckerberg wants it take an “active role” to help shape the Trump administration’s technology policies.

“Every time there is a new government, big capitalism, big money, it tries to put itself in a position to benefit from it. And I think that’s what they do,” says Magalhaes. And Musk’s use of X for explicitly political purposes could lead the Trump administration to expect similar behavior from other companies, he says. “I think in that sense it’s a plan.”

Musk’s ambitions are clearly not limited to the United States. Since the election has visited the United Kingdom to meet with far-right politicians and published about his support for the far-right party in Germany, Alternative for Germany. At the beginning of this year tried to defy a court order in Brazil that asked X to remove some far-right accounts that the court said undermined the integrity of the country’s elections.

All of this means that Musk’s control over politics is not just a matter of his proximity to Trump. Even if the two titanic egos have a much-anticipated explosion, Musk’s influence will be felt in the new coziness between Silicon Valley and the MAGA movement, and in every part of the world on which he chooses to look.

In a way, it’s a return to familiar ground. Even before buying Twitter in 2022, Musk was a super user, one of the most followed people on the platform. His Tweets could affect stock prices for his other companies, especially Teslaand his favorite memecoin, Dogecoin. Trump, similarly, was an active Twitter user before becoming president, and during his first presidency he was known for doing politics by tweet. Now it looks like the next four years, at least, could see more governance per social media post – now just by another shitposter.