Itās just after midnight mountain standard time in the US on 13 August when Elon Musk makes his first post of the day on X, the platform he bought for $44bn when it was known as Twitter. Musk has been tweeting for hours about his interview with Donald Trump, and he will continue into the night before taking a few hoursā break ā presumably to sleep ā and then logging back on to tweet dozens more times.
Over the next 24 hours, Musk will post over 145 times about a range of obsessions, projects and grievances to his 195 million followers. He will share anti-immigrant content, election conspiracies and attacks against the media. He will exchange tweets with far-right politicians, conservative media influencers and sycophantic admirers. He will send a litany of one-word replies that say āyeahā, āinterestingā or simply feature a cry-laughing emoji.
As a means of showing what Musk promotes online and who he interacts with, the Guardian has taken a granular look at one day of the Tesla and SpaceX CEOās posts on X. Musk posted a photo of himself at a āfriendās ranch in Wyomingā on the day in question, and as a result all timestamps of his tweets are assumed to have taken place in that stateās timezone, mountain standard time.
The 24-hour snapshot of Muskās posts, which are largely representative of his average daily output, are a revealing look into how the worldās richest man spends a large part of his day, almost every day. Though Musk receives huge amounts of media coverage for his various legal battles and business ventures, it can be easy for people who are not constantly online to miss just how prolific his output is on X and how extreme the content is that he promotes there. He tweets so often that his own bot scanners have flagged his account in the past. He has replaced Donald Trump as the tweeter-in-chief.
If billionaires of the past like Richard Branson and Steve Jobs have projected images of yachting in the Caribbean or standing on stage brandishing their latest tech creation, a review of Muskās tweets paints a contrasting picture: his default status is staring at a screen, posting. Much as Trumpās vindictive speeches must be heard in full to be believed, Muskās whiplashing mix of aggrieved political trolling, memes and company hype must be read in sequence to understand the worldās most privileged tweeter.
Midnight to 1.18am: Friends of Elon
Muskās first post on 13 August is a 12.14am reply to the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk, founder of the conservative group Turning Point USA, who opposes trans rights and advocates for Christian nationalism. Musk wants to clarify a point from the previous dayās interview with Trump, whom he is backing for president, and tells Kirk that he believes the climate crisis is real but that sustainable energy technology is on pace to solve it.
The exchange is one of multiple times during the day that Musk will have cozy, public exchanges with Kirk and other figures of the international right wing. The billionaire has in recent years formed a sort of symbiotic relationship with conservative media influencers, basking in their praise and in turn amplifying their talking points. Within 30 minutes of Muskās first post of the day, he will have replied to three separate posts from Kirk with claims suggesting the media is rewriting Kamala Harrisās political history, the government should deregulate industries and that street crime in the US is out of control.
By 1am, Musk will have already tweeted 14 times, mostly in exchanges with these kinds of rightwing activists or deferential media influencers like Mario Nawfal ā a serial entrepreneur who left behind a series of aggrieved business associates to gain a following hosting live streams on X. Before apparently logging off at around 1.18am, Musk will also respond to the all-beef diet advocate and anti-trans ex-psychology professor Jordan Peterson, who claimed that the initial streaming failure of Muskās interview with Trump was the result of ātraitors at workā. Muskās response is that, given the prominence of the interview, there was a ā100% probabilityā of an attack.
Though Musk has claimed that X is a place for all politics and viewpoints, the Tesla CEO has little to no interaction with leftwing activists or critical journalists. His replies and reposts reflect both his own personal echo chamber on the platform, as well as the broader rightwing ecosystem that he has cultivated as owner of X.
Since Musk took over the company in late 2022, far-right and conservative voices have grown on the platform while advertisers and more mainstream A-list users have fled. Republicans are now far more likely to believe that their views are welcomed on the platform and that it has a positive impact on democracy than Democrats, according to a Pew Research Center study from earlier this year, while Democratic voters report far higher levels of harassment.
8am to noon: Attacks on the media and far-right anti-immigration posts
Musk is tweeting again by 8am, this time thanking the former UK prime minister Liz Truss for her support. Truss, after being memorably ousted from power in less than the time it took for a head of lettuce to go bad, has recently embarked on the rightwing speaking circuit as a Trump supporter, also aligning with Musk. The X owner has established a history of courting rightwing leaders, and later in the day will reply āGrazie!ā to the far-right Italian deputy prime minister Matteo Salviniās praise of Muskās opposition to European Union regulations.
As the morning begins, it becomes clear that Musk has discovered that news outletsā coverage of his interview with Trump the night before is largely critical ā focusing on the live streamās technical issues, Trumpās falsehoods and Muskās generally fawning approach toward the former president. Muskās reaction throughout the day will be to claim that legacy media outlets are liars and financial failures, referring to them as unthinking ānonplayer charactersā ā a longstanding meme that grew out of 4chan before becoming mainstream among conservatives.
āA wall of negative headlines was so predictable. Theyāre such NPCs š¤£š¤£,ā Musk says at 8.36am while quote-tweeting the crypto influencer and political shitpost account āAutism Capitalā. Three minutes later he will respond to Autism Capital again, claiming that Google only shows leftwing press in its search results.
One particular fixation of Muskās is promoting misleading claims and conspiracies about election fraud, a common conservative talking point in the Trump era. At 9.26am, Musk makes a demand for paper ballots instead of electronic voting machines, echoing a popular rightwing narrative that such machines are used to perpetrate voting fraud. Musk has made dozens of misleading or debunked claims about voting, which have been viewed hundreds of millions of times on the platform and election officials say have begun to spill over into the real world.
Musk will continue tweeting at a rapid rate throughout the morning ā 19 times over the next 30 minutes alone. These will include separate attacks on CNBC, CNN and other legacy media outlets he accuses of spreading lies. Musk will meanwhile reply with an exclamation mark to a tweet featuring a blogpost called āDid women in academia cause wokeness?ā. The blogās author is a former professor who was ousted from Cambridge University in 2019 after more than 500 academics signed an open letter condemning his work as āracist pseudoscienceā and a university investigation found he collaborated with far-right extremists.
Musk has long described himself as politically independent, but in 2022 announced that he would no longer support the Democratic party. He has framed his conservative shift as the result of Democrats becoming too far left while his positions remain centrist, but his social media feed instead shows that he frequently promotes and interacts with members of the extreme right.
At 9.47am and 10.27am, Musk sends replies to Peter Imanuelsen, a far-right influencer whom the Anti-Defamation League has previously described as being ānotorious for his extreme racist, anti-Semitic, Christian fundamentalist, homophobic, Islamophobic, anti-feminist and conspiracist commentaryā. Although Imanuelsen has in recent years disavowed Holocaust denial, he continues to promote far-right, anti-immigrant views.
Musk replied āmadnessā to both of Imanuelsenās tweets, which were about two British citizens jailed for violating UK laws against posting offensive or menacing material online. The arrests targeted people posting anti-migrant invectives during Britainās far-right riots, in which masked rioters tried to set fire to a hotel housing asylum seekers.
Sometimes Muskās interactions with rightwing influencers are banal, but they also have the effect of amplifying their accounts to the billionaireās nearly 200 million followers. Musk will reply at 9.08am to a post about how Europe doesnāt use air conditioning from Richard Hanania, a conservative thinker popular among tech moguls who wrote for white supremacist publications in the early 2010s under a pseudonym to argue in support of eugenics and the forced sterilization of ālow IQā people.
Musk also replies with a cry-laughing emoji to a tweet criticizing the media from the early alt-right influencer Lauren Southern. A Canadian activist who has promoted the āgreat replacementā white nationalist conspiracy theory, Southern was a member of the ātalent teamā for Tenet Media until early September. A Department of Justice investigation unsealed around the same time as her exit accused Tenet Media of being a Russian-backed propaganda operation that used $10m in foreign money to bankroll rightwing media influencers. Southern and others on the talent team deny having any knowledge that the money was coming from Russia.
All of this is before 1pm, by which time Musk will have tweeted about 89 times.
While these interactions represent some of the most extreme people that Musk exchanges tweets with, they are by no means aberrations. His most mainstream interaction of the morning comes in a reply to the author Stephen King, in which Musk claims the Guardian canāt be considered objective because it is āutterly incapable of writing anything positiveā. He will attack the Guardian at least two other times in the day, telling the rightwing commentator Ian Miles Cheong that it is a āmouthpiece for the stateā.
One of the reasons that Musk may gravitate towards the crypto influencers, rightwing activists and Tesla fan accounts that fill his feed is that they are some of the few users who can match his prolific output and time spent on the platform. Most people do not have the desire or time to be extremely online, and those that do are often there to pursue some political or financial gain. Almost everyone that Musk interacts with falls into one of those categories, and their accounts function like remoras on the side of Muskās 195 million-follower shark.
Musk will continue tweeting every few minutes until taking a two-hour break between around noon and 2pm. Then heās back at it, sending a few more sporadic tweets at Nawfal about his Neuralink plans and responding to a thread from the Utah Republican senator Mike Lee. Two oāclock to 4pm is his least prolific time period for posting.
4pm to 10pm: Election conspiracies and cries of ācensorshipā
Itās 4.12pm, and Musk has tweeted over 100 times since midnight. His latest is a quote tweet of the cryptocurrency account āDoge Designerā, who claims that āthe entire media is running a misinformation campaign against Elon Muskā. Musk replies āItās wild,ā adding a cry-laughing face that has become his go-to emoji.
Muskās content production slows somewhat in the evening, but he is still posting multiple times an hour. His attention turns to Brazil, where he has found a nemesis in a supreme court judge who is threatening to block access to X in the country if the platform does not appoint a local legal representative to deal with disinformation takedown requests. Musk describes the judgeās ruling as an act of censorship in a tweet at 6.17pm, and will call the judge an āevil dictatorā in weeks to come. Brazilās supreme court will uphold a ban on X in early September, blocking access to the platform for millions in the country.
The Brazil saga reflects a central part of Muskās online persona, in which he has cast himself as a warrior for free speech against liberal censorship. While this framing ignores that Musk has suspended journalists who criticized him from the platform, complied with censorship requests from governments such as India and throttled traffic to websites he dislikes, Muskās narrative pervades his Twitter feed. Throughout the day he will attack regulators and anti-disinformation efforts in Brazil, the UK and the European Union.
Interspersed among Muskās various political posts are retweets of people offering support for his business ventures, like @TeslaBoomerMama, whose profile describes herself as a āfierce Tesla retail shareholder advocateā and āfangirl of Elonā. These retweets and interactions with his fans have the effect of a commercial break, and are some of the only posts that donāt have an explicit political message.
10pm to midnight: š
As Musk begins to wind down his day, the frequency of his posts goes back up and he returns to some of the subjects he tweeted about in the morning. He responds with cry-laughing emojis to online influencers, replies to multiple posts about a Haitian migrant accused of rape and sends more anti-media tweets.
Analysis
A day in Elon Muskās mind: 145 tweets with election conspiracies and emojis
Nick Robins-Early
A controversial tweet may make it to the news, but reading every post from the worldās richest man shows how frenzied and extreme he really is
Sat 14 Sep 2024 03.30 EDT
Itās just after midnight mountain standard time in the US on 13 August when Elon Musk makes his first post of the day on X, the platform he bought for $44bn when it was known as Twitter. Musk has been tweeting for hours about his interview with Donald Trump, and he will continue into the night before taking a few hoursā break ā presumably to sleep ā and then logging back on to tweet dozens more times.
Over the next 24 hours, Musk will post over 145 times about a range of obsessions, projects and grievances to his 195 million followers. He will share anti-immigrant content, election conspiracies and attacks against the media. He will exchange tweets with far-right politicians, conservative media influencers and sycophantic admirers. He will send a litany of one-word replies that say āyeahā, āinterestingā or simply feature a cry-laughing emoji.
As a means of showing what Musk promotes online and who he interacts with, the Guardian has taken a granular look at one day of the Tesla and SpaceX CEOās posts on X. Musk posted a photo of himself at a āfriendās ranch in Wyomingā on the day in question, and as a result all timestamps of his tweets are assumed to have taken place in that stateās timezone, mountain standard time.
The 24-hour snapshot of Muskās posts, which are largely representative of his average daily output, are a revealing look into how the worldās richest man spends a large part of his day, almost every day. Though Musk receives huge amounts of media coverage for his various legal battles and business ventures, it can be easy for people who are not constantly online to miss just how prolific his output is on X and how extreme the content is that he promotes there. He tweets so often that his own bot scanners have flagged his account in the past. He has replaced Donald Trump as the tweeter-in-chief.
If billionaires of the past like Richard Branson and Steve Jobs have projected images of yachting in the Caribbean or standing on stage brandishing their latest tech creation, a review of Muskās tweets paints a contrasting picture: his default status is staring at a screen, posting. Much as Trumpās vindictive speeches must be heard in full to be believed, Muskās whiplashing mix of aggrieved political trolling, memes and company hype must be read in sequence to understand the worldās most privileged tweeter.
Man in tux smiling with both arms raised.
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Midnight to 1.18am: Friends of Elon
Muskās first post on 13 August is a 12.14am reply to the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk, founder of the conservative group Turning Point USA, who opposes trans rights and advocates for Christian nationalism. Musk wants to clarify a point from the previous dayās interview with Trump, whom he is backing for president, and tells Kirk that he believes the climate crisis is real but that sustainable energy technology is on pace to solve it.
The exchange is one of multiple times during the day that Musk will have cozy, public exchanges with Kirk and other figures of the international right wing. The billionaire has in recent years formed a sort of symbiotic relationship with conservative media influencers, basking in their praise and in turn amplifying their talking points. Within 30 minutes of Muskās first post of the day, he will have replied to three separate posts from Kirk with claims suggesting the media is rewriting Kamala Harrisās political history, the government should deregulate industries and that street crime in the US is out of control.
By 1am, Musk will have already tweeted 14 times, mostly in exchanges with these kinds of rightwing activists or deferential media influencers like Mario Nawfal ā a serial entrepreneur who left behind a series of aggrieved business associates to gain a following hosting live streams on X. Before apparently logging off at around 1.18am, Musk will also respond to the all-beef diet advocate and anti-trans ex-psychology professor Jordan Peterson, who claimed that the initial streaming failure of Muskās interview with Trump was the result of ātraitors at workā. Muskās response is that, given the prominence of the interview, there was a ā100% probabilityā of an attack.
Though Musk has claimed that X is a place for all politics and viewpoints, the Tesla CEO has little to no interaction with leftwing activists or critical journalists. His replies and reposts reflect both his own personal echo chamber on the platform, as well as the broader rightwing ecosystem that he has cultivated as owner of X.
Since Musk took over the company in late 2022, far-right and conservative voices have grown on the platform while advertisers and more mainstream A-list users have fled. Republicans are now far more likely to believe that their views are welcomed on the platform and that it has a positive impact on democracy than Democrats, according to a Pew Research Center study from earlier this year, while Democratic voters report far higher levels of harassment.
8am to noon: Attacks on the media and far-right anti-immigration posts
Musk is tweeting again by 8am, this time thanking the former UK prime minister Liz Truss for her support. Truss, after being memorably ousted from power in less than the time it took for a head of lettuce to go bad, has recently embarked on the rightwing speaking circuit as a Trump supporter, also aligning with Musk. The X owner has established a history of courting rightwing leaders, and later in the day will reply āGrazie!ā to the far-right Italian deputy prime minister Matteo Salviniās praise of Muskās opposition to European Union regulations.
As the morning begins, it becomes clear that Musk has discovered that news outletsā coverage of his interview with Trump the night before is largely critical ā focusing on the live streamās technical issues, Trumpās falsehoods and Muskās generally fawning approach toward the former president. Muskās reaction throughout the day will be to claim that legacy media outlets are liars and financial failures, referring to them as unthinking ānonplayer charactersā ā a longstanding meme that grew out of 4chan before becoming mainstream among conservatives.
āA wall of negative headlines was so predictable. Theyāre such NPCs š¤£š¤£,ā Musk says at 8.36am while quote-tweeting the crypto influencer and political shitpost account āAutism Capitalā. Three minutes later he will respond to Autism Capital again, claiming that Google only shows leftwing press in its search results.
One particular fixation of Muskās is promoting misleading claims and conspiracies about election fraud, a common conservative talking point in the Trump era. At 9.26am, Musk makes a demand for paper ballots instead of electronic voting machines, echoing a popular rightwing narrative that such machines are used to perpetrate voting fraud. Musk has made dozens of misleading or debunked claims about voting, which have been viewed hundreds of millions of times on the platform and election officials say have begun to spill over into the real world.
Musk will continue tweeting at a rapid rate throughout the morning ā 19 times over the next 30 minutes alone. These will include separate attacks on CNBC, CNN and other legacy media outlets he accuses of spreading lies. Musk will meanwhile reply with an exclamation mark to a tweet featuring a blogpost called āDid women in academia cause wokeness?ā. The blogās author is a former professor who was ousted from Cambridge University in 2019 after more than 500 academics signed an open letter condemning his work as āracist pseudoscienceā and a university investigation found he collaborated with far-right extremists.
Musk has long described himself as politically independent, but in 2022 announced that he would no longer support the Democratic party. He has framed his conservative shift as the result of Democrats becoming too far left while his positions remain centrist, but his social media feed instead shows that he frequently promotes and interacts with members of the extreme right.
At 9.47am and 10.27am, Musk sends replies to Peter Imanuelsen, a far-right influencer whom the Anti-Defamation League has previously described as being ānotorious for his extreme racist, anti-Semitic, Christian fundamentalist, homophobic, Islamophobic, anti-feminist and conspiracist commentaryā. Although Imanuelsen has in recent years disavowed Holocaust denial, he continues to promote far-right, anti-immigrant views.
Musk replied āmadnessā to both of Imanuelsenās tweets, which were about two British citizens jailed for violating UK laws against posting offensive or menacing material online. The arrests targeted people posting anti-migrant invectives during Britainās far-right riots, in which masked rioters tried to set fire to a hotel housing asylum seekers.
Sometimes Muskās interactions with rightwing influencers are banal, but they also have the effect of amplifying their accounts to the billionaireās nearly 200 million followers. Musk will reply at 9.08am to a post about how Europe doesnāt use air conditioning from Richard Hanania, a conservative thinker popular among tech moguls who wrote for white supremacist publications in the early 2010s under a pseudonym to argue in support of eugenics and the forced sterilization of ālow IQā people.
Musk also replies with a cry-laughing emoji to a tweet criticizing the media from the early alt-right influencer Lauren Southern. A Canadian activist who has promoted the āgreat replacementā white nationalist conspiracy theory, Southern was a member of the ātalent teamā for Tenet Media until early September. A Department of Justice investigation unsealed around the same time as her exit accused Tenet Media of being a Russian-backed propaganda operation that used $10m in foreign money to bankroll rightwing media influencers. Southern and others on the talent team deny having any knowledge that the money was coming from Russia.
All of this is before 1pm, by which time Musk will have tweeted about 89 times.
While these interactions represent some of the most extreme people that Musk exchanges tweets with, they are by no means aberrations. His most mainstream interaction of the morning comes in a reply to the author Stephen King, in which Musk claims the Guardian canāt be considered objective because it is āutterly incapable of writing anything positiveā. He will attack the Guardian at least two other times in the day, telling the rightwing commentator Ian Miles Cheong that it is a āmouthpiece for the stateā.
One of the reasons that Musk may gravitate towards the crypto influencers, rightwing activists and Tesla fan accounts that fill his feed is that they are some of the few users who can match his prolific output and time spent on the platform. Most people do not have the desire or time to be extremely online, and those that do are often there to pursue some political or financial gain. Almost everyone that Musk interacts with falls into one of those categories, and their accounts function like remoras on the side of Muskās 195 million-follower shark.
Musk will continue tweeting every few minutes until taking a two-hour break between around noon and 2pm. Then heās back at it, sending a few more sporadic tweets at Nawfal about his Neuralink plans and responding to a thread from the Utah Republican senator Mike Lee. Two oāclock to 4pm is his least prolific time period for posting.
4pm to 10pm: Election conspiracies and cries of ācensorshipā
Itās 4.12pm, and Musk has tweeted over 100 times since midnight. His latest is a quote tweet of the cryptocurrency account āDoge Designerā, who claims that āthe entire media is running a misinformation campaign against Elon Muskā. Musk replies āItās wild,ā adding a cry-laughing face that has become his go-to emoji.
Muskās content production slows somewhat in the evening, but he is still posting multiple times an hour. His attention turns to Brazil, where he has found a nemesis in a supreme court judge who is threatening to block access to X in the country if the platform does not appoint a local legal representative to deal with disinformation takedown requests. Musk describes the judgeās ruling as an act of censorship in a tweet at 6.17pm, and will call the judge an āevil dictatorā in weeks to come. Brazilās supreme court will uphold a ban on X in early September, blocking access to the platform for millions in the country.
The Brazil saga reflects a central part of Muskās online persona, in which he has cast himself as a warrior for free speech against liberal censorship. While this framing ignores that Musk has suspended journalists who criticized him from the platform, complied with censorship requests from governments such as India and throttled traffic to websites he dislikes, Muskās narrative pervades his Twitter feed. Throughout the day he will attack regulators and anti-disinformation efforts in Brazil, the UK and the European Union.
Interspersed among Muskās various political posts are retweets of people offering support for his business ventures, like @TeslaBoomerMama, whose profile describes herself as a āfierce Tesla retail shareholder advocateā and āfangirl of Elonā. These retweets and interactions with his fans have the effect of a commercial break, and are some of the only posts that donāt have an explicit political message.
10pm to midnight: š
As Musk begins to wind down his day, the frequency of his posts goes back up and he returns to some of the subjects he tweeted about in the morning. He responds with cry-laughing emojis to online influencers, replies to multiple posts about a Haitian migrant accused of rape and sends more anti-media tweets.
Musk revisits not only the same themes, but some of the exact same posts and news items that he tweeted about earlier. At 11.12pm he responds with another cry-laughing emoji to the same picture of negative headlines about his Trump interview that he sent a cry-laughing emoji about at 8.36am.
Before the day ends, X debuts a beta version of its new AI image generator. Almost immediately, people begin to discover that it will generate images of public figures or sexualized content, unlike other popular image generators. Musk begins using cry-laughing emojis to egg on supporters creating images using the tool ā in one case an image with the prompt āmake an image of a half cat half woman with boobsā.
A phone screen shows a Grok sign up page that prompts verified X users to āparticipate in the early access programā
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Over the next few days Grok will be used to generate a range of political content, sexualized depictions of celebrities and violent images. After rightwing influencer accounts use the tool to create images of Taylor Swift and her fans supporting Trumpās candidacy, Trump will cause a wave of controversy by posting the AI images on his Truth Social account. Swift will later cite the incident in an Instagram post throwing her support behind the Harris presidential campaign.
Muskās last post before midnight is celebrating his new image generator, tweeting āRate of progress of Grok is š ššā. He will continue to post into the night, sending almost 50 more tweets over the next three hours.
At 3.11am, Musk responds with heart-eyes emoji to an image of him and a shiba inu dog dressed as ancient Roman soldiers generated by Grok. The flurry of replies and posts then goes silent. At 8.01am, he starts posting again.
Itās just after midnight mountain standard time in the US on 13 August when Elon Musk makes his first post of the day on X, the platform he bought for $44bn when it was known as Twitter. Musk has been tweeting for hours about his interview with Donald Trump, and he will continue into the night before taking a few hoursā break ā presumably to sleep ā and then logging back on to tweet dozens more times.
Over the next 24 hours, Musk will post over 145 times about a range of obsessions, projects and grievances to his 195 million followers. He will share anti-immigrant content, election conspiracies and attacks against the media. He will exchange tweets with far-right politicians, conservative media influencers and sycophantic admirers. He will send a litany of one-word replies that say āyeahā, āinterestingā or simply feature a cry-laughing emoji.
As a means of showing what Musk promotes online and who he interacts with, the Guardian has taken a granular look at one day of the Tesla and SpaceX CEOās posts on X. Musk posted a photo of himself at a āfriendās ranch in Wyomingā on the day in question, and as a result all timestamps of his tweets are assumed to have taken place in that stateās timezone, mountain standard time.
The 24-hour snapshot of Muskās posts, which are largely representative of his average daily output, are a revealing look into how the worldās richest man spends a large part of his day, almost every day. Though Musk receives huge amounts of media coverage for his various legal battles and business ventures, it can be easy for people who are not constantly online to miss just how prolific his output is on X and how extreme the content is that he promotes there. He tweets so often that his own bot scanners have flagged his account in the past. He has replaced Donald Trump as the tweeter-in-chief.
If billionaires of the past like Richard Branson and Steve Jobs have projected images of yachting in the Caribbean or standing on stage brandishing their latest tech creation, a review of Muskās tweets paints a contrasting picture: his default status is staring at a screen, posting. Much as Trumpās vindictive speeches must be heard in full to be believed, Muskās whiplashing mix of aggrieved political trolling, memes and company hype must be read in sequence to understand the worldās most privileged tweeter.
Midnight to 1.18am: Friends of Elon
Muskās first post on 13 August is a 12.14am reply to the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk, founder of the conservative group Turning Point USA, who opposes trans rights and advocates for Christian nationalism. Musk wants to clarify a point from the previous dayās interview with Trump, whom he is backing for president, and tells Kirk that he believes the climate crisis is real but that sustainable energy technology is on pace to solve it.
The exchange is one of multiple times during the day that Musk will have cozy, public exchanges with Kirk and other figures of the international right wing. The billionaire has in recent years formed a sort of symbiotic relationship with conservative media influencers, basking in their praise and in turn amplifying their talking points. Within 30 minutes of Muskās first post of the day, he will have replied to three separate posts from Kirk with claims suggesting the media is rewriting Kamala Harrisās political history, the government should deregulate industries and that street crime in the US is out of control.
By 1am, Musk will have already tweeted 14 times, mostly in exchanges with these kinds of rightwing activists or deferential media influencers like Mario Nawfal ā a serial entrepreneur who left behind a series of aggrieved business associates to gain a following hosting live streams on X. Before apparently logging off at around 1.18am, Musk will also respond to the all-beef diet advocate and anti-trans ex-psychology professor Jordan Peterson, who claimed that the initial streaming failure of Muskās interview with Trump was the result of ātraitors at workā. Muskās response is that, given the prominence of the interview, there was a ā100% probabilityā of an attack.
Though Musk has claimed that X is a place for all politics and viewpoints, the Tesla CEO has little to no interaction with leftwing activists or critical journalists. His replies and reposts reflect both his own personal echo chamber on the platform, as well as the broader rightwing ecosystem that he has cultivated as owner of X.
Since Musk took over the company in late 2022, far-right and conservative voices have grown on the platform while advertisers and more mainstream A-list users have fled. Republicans are now far more likely to believe that their views are welcomed on the platform and that it has a positive impact on democracy than Democrats, according to a Pew Research Center study from earlier this year, while Democratic voters report far higher levels of harassment.
8am to noon: Attacks on the media and far-right anti-immigration posts
Musk is tweeting again by 8am, this time thanking the former UK prime minister Liz Truss for her support. Truss, after being memorably ousted from power in less than the time it took for a head of lettuce to go bad, has recently embarked on the rightwing speaking circuit as a Trump supporter, also aligning with Musk. The X owner has established a history of courting rightwing leaders, and later in the day will reply āGrazie!ā to the far-right Italian deputy prime minister Matteo Salviniās praise of Muskās opposition to European Union regulations.
As the morning begins, it becomes clear that Musk has discovered that news outletsā coverage of his interview with Trump the night before is largely critical ā focusing on the live streamās technical issues, Trumpās falsehoods and Muskās generally fawning approach toward the former president. Muskās reaction throughout the day will be to claim that legacy media outlets are liars and financial failures, referring to them as unthinking ānonplayer charactersā ā a longstanding meme that grew out of 4chan before becoming mainstream among conservatives.
āA wall of negative headlines was so predictable. Theyāre such NPCs š¤£š¤£,ā Musk says at 8.36am while quote-tweeting the crypto influencer and political shitpost account āAutism Capitalā. Three minutes later he will respond to Autism Capital again, claiming that Google only shows leftwing press in its search results.
One particular fixation of Muskās is promoting misleading claims and conspiracies about election fraud, a common conservative talking point in the Trump era. At 9.26am, Musk makes a demand for paper ballots instead of electronic voting machines, echoing a popular rightwing narrative that such machines are used to perpetrate voting fraud. Musk has made dozens of misleading or debunked claims about voting, which have been viewed hundreds of millions of times on the platform and election officials say have begun to spill over into the real world.
Musk will continue tweeting at a rapid rate throughout the morning ā 19 times over the next 30 minutes alone. These will include separate attacks on CNBC, CNN and other legacy media outlets he accuses of spreading lies. Musk will meanwhile reply with an exclamation mark to a tweet featuring a blogpost called āDid women in academia cause wokeness?ā. The blogās author is a former professor who was ousted from Cambridge University in 2019 after more than 500 academics signed an open letter condemning his work as āracist pseudoscienceā and a university investigation found he collaborated with far-right extremists.
Musk has long described himself as politically independent, but in 2022 announced that he would no longer support the Democratic party. He has framed his conservative shift as the result of Democrats becoming too far left while his positions remain centrist, but his social media feed instead shows that he frequently promotes and interacts with members of the extreme right.
At 9.47am and 10.27am, Musk sends replies to Peter Imanuelsen, a far-right influencer whom the Anti-Defamation League has previously described as being ānotorious for his extreme racist, anti-Semitic, Christian fundamentalist, homophobic, Islamophobic, anti-feminist and conspiracist commentaryā. Although Imanuelsen has in recent years disavowed Holocaust denial, he continues to promote far-right, anti-immigrant views.
Musk replied āmadnessā to both of Imanuelsenās tweets, which were about two British citizens jailed for violating UK laws against posting offensive or menacing material online. The arrests targeted people posting anti-migrant invectives during Britainās far-right riots, in which masked rioters tried to set fire to a hotel housing asylum seekers.
Sometimes Muskās interactions with rightwing influencers are banal, but they also have the effect of amplifying their accounts to the billionaireās nearly 200 million followers. Musk will reply at 9.08am to a post about how Europe doesnāt use air conditioning from Richard Hanania, a conservative thinker popular among tech moguls who wrote for white supremacist publications in the early 2010s under a pseudonym to argue in support of eugenics and the forced sterilization of ālow IQā people.
Musk also replies with a cry-laughing emoji to a tweet criticizing the media from the early alt-right influencer Lauren Southern. A Canadian activist who has promoted the āgreat replacementā white nationalist conspiracy theory, Southern was a member of the ātalent teamā for Tenet Media until early September. A Department of Justice investigation unsealed around the same time as her exit accused Tenet Media of being a Russian-backed propaganda operation that used $10m in foreign money to bankroll rightwing media influencers. Southern and others on the talent team deny having any knowledge that the money was coming from Russia.
All of this is before 1pm, by which time Musk will have tweeted about 89 times.
While these interactions represent some of the most extreme people that Musk exchanges tweets with, they are by no means aberrations. His most mainstream interaction of the morning comes in a reply to the author Stephen King, in which Musk claims the Guardian canāt be considered objective because it is āutterly incapable of writing anything positiveā. He will attack the Guardian at least two other times in the day, telling the rightwing commentator Ian Miles Cheong that it is a āmouthpiece for the stateā.
One of the reasons that Musk may gravitate towards the crypto influencers, rightwing activists and Tesla fan accounts that fill his feed is that they are some of the few users who can match his prolific output and time spent on the platform. Most people do not have the desire or time to be extremely online, and those that do are often there to pursue some political or financial gain. Almost everyone that Musk interacts with falls into one of those categories, and their accounts function like remoras on the side of Muskās 195 million-follower shark.
Musk will continue tweeting every few minutes until taking a two-hour break between around noon and 2pm. Then heās back at it, sending a few more sporadic tweets at Nawfal about his Neuralink plans and responding to a thread from the Utah Republican senator Mike Lee. Two oāclock to 4pm is his least prolific time period for posting.
4pm to 10pm: Election conspiracies and cries of ācensorshipā
Itās 4.12pm, and Musk has tweeted over 100 times since midnight. His latest is a quote tweet of the cryptocurrency account āDoge Designerā, who claims that āthe entire media is running a misinformation campaign against Elon Muskā. Musk replies āItās wild,ā adding a cry-laughing face that has become his go-to emoji.
Muskās content production slows somewhat in the evening, but he is still posting multiple times an hour. His attention turns to Brazil, where he has found a nemesis in a supreme court judge who is threatening to block access to X in the country if the platform does not appoint a local legal representative to deal with disinformation takedown requests. Musk describes the judgeās ruling as an act of censorship in a tweet at 6.17pm, and will call the judge an āevil dictatorā in weeks to come. Brazilās supreme court will uphold a ban on X in early September, blocking access to the platform for millions in the country.
The Brazil saga reflects a central part of Muskās online persona, in which he has cast himself as a warrior for free speech against liberal censorship. While this framing ignores that Musk has suspended journalists who criticized him from the platform, complied with censorship requests from governments such as India and throttled traffic to websites he dislikes, Muskās narrative pervades his Twitter feed. Throughout the day he will attack regulators and anti-disinformation efforts in Brazil, the UK and the European Union.
Interspersed among Muskās various political posts are retweets of people offering support for his business ventures, like @TeslaBoomerMama, whose profile describes herself as a āfierce Tesla retail shareholder advocateā and āfangirl of Elonā. These retweets and interactions with his fans have the effect of a commercial break, and are some of the only posts that donāt have an explicit political message. 10pm to midnight: š
As Musk begins to wind down his day, the frequency of his posts goes back up and he returns to some of the subjects he tweeted about in the morning. He responds with cry-laughing emojis to online influencers, replies to multiple posts about a Haitian migrant accused of rape and sends more anti-media tweets.
Analysis A day in Elon Muskās mind: 145 tweets with election conspiracies and emojis Nick Robins-Early
A controversial tweet may make it to the news, but reading every post from the worldās richest man shows how frenzied and extreme he really is Sat 14 Sep 2024 03.30 EDT
Itās just after midnight mountain standard time in the US on 13 August when Elon Musk makes his first post of the day on X, the platform he bought for $44bn when it was known as Twitter. Musk has been tweeting for hours about his interview with Donald Trump, and he will continue into the night before taking a few hoursā break ā presumably to sleep ā and then logging back on to tweet dozens more times.
Over the next 24 hours, Musk will post over 145 times about a range of obsessions, projects and grievances to his 195 million followers. He will share anti-immigrant content, election conspiracies and attacks against the media. He will exchange tweets with far-right politicians, conservative media influencers and sycophantic admirers. He will send a litany of one-word replies that say āyeahā, āinterestingā or simply feature a cry-laughing emoji.
As a means of showing what Musk promotes online and who he interacts with, the Guardian has taken a granular look at one day of the Tesla and SpaceX CEOās posts on X. Musk posted a photo of himself at a āfriendās ranch in Wyomingā on the day in question, and as a result all timestamps of his tweets are assumed to have taken place in that stateās timezone, mountain standard time.
The 24-hour snapshot of Muskās posts, which are largely representative of his average daily output, are a revealing look into how the worldās richest man spends a large part of his day, almost every day. Though Musk receives huge amounts of media coverage for his various legal battles and business ventures, it can be easy for people who are not constantly online to miss just how prolific his output is on X and how extreme the content is that he promotes there. He tweets so often that his own bot scanners have flagged his account in the past. He has replaced Donald Trump as the tweeter-in-chief.
If billionaires of the past like Richard Branson and Steve Jobs have projected images of yachting in the Caribbean or standing on stage brandishing their latest tech creation, a review of Muskās tweets paints a contrasting picture: his default status is staring at a screen, posting. Much as Trumpās vindictive speeches must be heard in full to be believed, Muskās whiplashing mix of aggrieved political trolling, memes and company hype must be read in sequence to understand the worldās most privileged tweeter. Man in tux smiling with both arms raised. Elon Musk on pace to become worldās first trillionaire by 2027, report says Read more Midnight to 1.18am: Friends of Elon
Muskās first post on 13 August is a 12.14am reply to the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk, founder of the conservative group Turning Point USA, who opposes trans rights and advocates for Christian nationalism. Musk wants to clarify a point from the previous dayās interview with Trump, whom he is backing for president, and tells Kirk that he believes the climate crisis is real but that sustainable energy technology is on pace to solve it.
The exchange is one of multiple times during the day that Musk will have cozy, public exchanges with Kirk and other figures of the international right wing. The billionaire has in recent years formed a sort of symbiotic relationship with conservative media influencers, basking in their praise and in turn amplifying their talking points. Within 30 minutes of Muskās first post of the day, he will have replied to three separate posts from Kirk with claims suggesting the media is rewriting Kamala Harrisās political history, the government should deregulate industries and that street crime in the US is out of control.
By 1am, Musk will have already tweeted 14 times, mostly in exchanges with these kinds of rightwing activists or deferential media influencers like Mario Nawfal ā a serial entrepreneur who left behind a series of aggrieved business associates to gain a following hosting live streams on X. Before apparently logging off at around 1.18am, Musk will also respond to the all-beef diet advocate and anti-trans ex-psychology professor Jordan Peterson, who claimed that the initial streaming failure of Muskās interview with Trump was the result of ātraitors at workā. Muskās response is that, given the prominence of the interview, there was a ā100% probabilityā of an attack.
Though Musk has claimed that X is a place for all politics and viewpoints, the Tesla CEO has little to no interaction with leftwing activists or critical journalists. His replies and reposts reflect both his own personal echo chamber on the platform, as well as the broader rightwing ecosystem that he has cultivated as owner of X.
Since Musk took over the company in late 2022, far-right and conservative voices have grown on the platform while advertisers and more mainstream A-list users have fled. Republicans are now far more likely to believe that their views are welcomed on the platform and that it has a positive impact on democracy than Democrats, according to a Pew Research Center study from earlier this year, while Democratic voters report far higher levels of harassment.
8am to noon: Attacks on the media and far-right anti-immigration posts
Musk is tweeting again by 8am, this time thanking the former UK prime minister Liz Truss for her support. Truss, after being memorably ousted from power in less than the time it took for a head of lettuce to go bad, has recently embarked on the rightwing speaking circuit as a Trump supporter, also aligning with Musk. The X owner has established a history of courting rightwing leaders, and later in the day will reply āGrazie!ā to the far-right Italian deputy prime minister Matteo Salviniās praise of Muskās opposition to European Union regulations.
As the morning begins, it becomes clear that Musk has discovered that news outletsā coverage of his interview with Trump the night before is largely critical ā focusing on the live streamās technical issues, Trumpās falsehoods and Muskās generally fawning approach toward the former president. Muskās reaction throughout the day will be to claim that legacy media outlets are liars and financial failures, referring to them as unthinking ānonplayer charactersā ā a longstanding meme that grew out of 4chan before becoming mainstream among conservatives.
āA wall of negative headlines was so predictable. Theyāre such NPCs š¤£š¤£,ā Musk says at 8.36am while quote-tweeting the crypto influencer and political shitpost account āAutism Capitalā. Three minutes later he will respond to Autism Capital again, claiming that Google only shows leftwing press in its search results.
One particular fixation of Muskās is promoting misleading claims and conspiracies about election fraud, a common conservative talking point in the Trump era. At 9.26am, Musk makes a demand for paper ballots instead of electronic voting machines, echoing a popular rightwing narrative that such machines are used to perpetrate voting fraud. Musk has made dozens of misleading or debunked claims about voting, which have been viewed hundreds of millions of times on the platform and election officials say have begun to spill over into the real world.
Musk will continue tweeting at a rapid rate throughout the morning ā 19 times over the next 30 minutes alone. These will include separate attacks on CNBC, CNN and other legacy media outlets he accuses of spreading lies. Musk will meanwhile reply with an exclamation mark to a tweet featuring a blogpost called āDid women in academia cause wokeness?ā. The blogās author is a former professor who was ousted from Cambridge University in 2019 after more than 500 academics signed an open letter condemning his work as āracist pseudoscienceā and a university investigation found he collaborated with far-right extremists.
Musk has long described himself as politically independent, but in 2022 announced that he would no longer support the Democratic party. He has framed his conservative shift as the result of Democrats becoming too far left while his positions remain centrist, but his social media feed instead shows that he frequently promotes and interacts with members of the extreme right.
At 9.47am and 10.27am, Musk sends replies to Peter Imanuelsen, a far-right influencer whom the Anti-Defamation League has previously described as being ānotorious for his extreme racist, anti-Semitic, Christian fundamentalist, homophobic, Islamophobic, anti-feminist and conspiracist commentaryā. Although Imanuelsen has in recent years disavowed Holocaust denial, he continues to promote far-right, anti-immigrant views.
Musk replied āmadnessā to both of Imanuelsenās tweets, which were about two British citizens jailed for violating UK laws against posting offensive or menacing material online. The arrests targeted people posting anti-migrant invectives during Britainās far-right riots, in which masked rioters tried to set fire to a hotel housing asylum seekers.
Sometimes Muskās interactions with rightwing influencers are banal, but they also have the effect of amplifying their accounts to the billionaireās nearly 200 million followers. Musk will reply at 9.08am to a post about how Europe doesnāt use air conditioning from Richard Hanania, a conservative thinker popular among tech moguls who wrote for white supremacist publications in the early 2010s under a pseudonym to argue in support of eugenics and the forced sterilization of ālow IQā people.
Musk also replies with a cry-laughing emoji to a tweet criticizing the media from the early alt-right influencer Lauren Southern. A Canadian activist who has promoted the āgreat replacementā white nationalist conspiracy theory, Southern was a member of the ātalent teamā for Tenet Media until early September. A Department of Justice investigation unsealed around the same time as her exit accused Tenet Media of being a Russian-backed propaganda operation that used $10m in foreign money to bankroll rightwing media influencers. Southern and others on the talent team deny having any knowledge that the money was coming from Russia.
All of this is before 1pm, by which time Musk will have tweeted about 89 times.
While these interactions represent some of the most extreme people that Musk exchanges tweets with, they are by no means aberrations. His most mainstream interaction of the morning comes in a reply to the author Stephen King, in which Musk claims the Guardian canāt be considered objective because it is āutterly incapable of writing anything positiveā. He will attack the Guardian at least two other times in the day, telling the rightwing commentator Ian Miles Cheong that it is a āmouthpiece for the stateā.
One of the reasons that Musk may gravitate towards the crypto influencers, rightwing activists and Tesla fan accounts that fill his feed is that they are some of the few users who can match his prolific output and time spent on the platform. Most people do not have the desire or time to be extremely online, and those that do are often there to pursue some political or financial gain. Almost everyone that Musk interacts with falls into one of those categories, and their accounts function like remoras on the side of Muskās 195 million-follower shark.
Musk will continue tweeting every few minutes until taking a two-hour break between around noon and 2pm. Then heās back at it, sending a few more sporadic tweets at Nawfal about his Neuralink plans and responding to a thread from the Utah Republican senator Mike Lee. Two oāclock to 4pm is his least prolific time period for posting.
4pm to 10pm: Election conspiracies and cries of ācensorshipā
Itās 4.12pm, and Musk has tweeted over 100 times since midnight. His latest is a quote tweet of the cryptocurrency account āDoge Designerā, who claims that āthe entire media is running a misinformation campaign against Elon Muskā. Musk replies āItās wild,ā adding a cry-laughing face that has become his go-to emoji.
Muskās content production slows somewhat in the evening, but he is still posting multiple times an hour. His attention turns to Brazil, where he has found a nemesis in a supreme court judge who is threatening to block access to X in the country if the platform does not appoint a local legal representative to deal with disinformation takedown requests. Musk describes the judgeās ruling as an act of censorship in a tweet at 6.17pm, and will call the judge an āevil dictatorā in weeks to come. Brazilās supreme court will uphold a ban on X in early September, blocking access to the platform for millions in the country.
The Brazil saga reflects a central part of Muskās online persona, in which he has cast himself as a warrior for free speech against liberal censorship. While this framing ignores that Musk has suspended journalists who criticized him from the platform, complied with censorship requests from governments such as India and throttled traffic to websites he dislikes, Muskās narrative pervades his Twitter feed. Throughout the day he will attack regulators and anti-disinformation efforts in Brazil, the UK and the European Union.
Interspersed among Muskās various political posts are retweets of people offering support for his business ventures, like @TeslaBoomerMama, whose profile describes herself as a āfierce Tesla retail shareholder advocateā and āfangirl of Elonā. These retweets and interactions with his fans have the effect of a commercial break, and are some of the only posts that donāt have an explicit political message. 10pm to midnight: š
As Musk begins to wind down his day, the frequency of his posts goes back up and he returns to some of the subjects he tweeted about in the morning. He responds with cry-laughing emojis to online influencers, replies to multiple posts about a Haitian migrant accused of rape and sends more anti-media tweets.
Musk revisits not only the same themes, but some of the exact same posts and news items that he tweeted about earlier. At 11.12pm he responds with another cry-laughing emoji to the same picture of negative headlines about his Trump interview that he sent a cry-laughing emoji about at 8.36am.
Before the day ends, X debuts a beta version of its new AI image generator. Almost immediately, people begin to discover that it will generate images of public figures or sexualized content, unlike other popular image generators. Musk begins using cry-laughing emojis to egg on supporters creating images using the tool ā in one case an image with the prompt āmake an image of a half cat half woman with boobsā. A phone screen shows a Grok sign up page that prompts verified X users to āparticipate in the early access programā Muskās āfunā AI image chatbot serves up Nazi Mickey Mouse and Taylor Swift deepfakes Read more
Over the next few days Grok will be used to generate a range of political content, sexualized depictions of celebrities and violent images. After rightwing influencer accounts use the tool to create images of Taylor Swift and her fans supporting Trumpās candidacy, Trump will cause a wave of controversy by posting the AI images on his Truth Social account. Swift will later cite the incident in an Instagram post throwing her support behind the Harris presidential campaign.
Muskās last post before midnight is celebrating his new image generator, tweeting āRate of progress of Grok is š ššā. He will continue to post into the night, sending almost 50 more tweets over the next three hours.
At 3.11am, Musk responds with heart-eyes emoji to an image of him and a shiba inu dog dressed as ancient Roman soldiers generated by Grok. The flurry of replies and posts then goes silent. At 8.01am, he starts posting again.
I aināt reading all that
Iām happy for you tho
Or sorry that happened
Seriously tho I feel sorry for whoever got the odious job of breaking down a day of Musk tweets. Blech!
Full confession: neither did I.
Good! Iād have concerns for your mental well-being otherwise