Elon Musk and the Consequences of Conspiracy

Two new landmark defamation cases should expose how the US billionaire has put rocket fuel inside an increasingly dangerous right-wing echo chamber

How did one of the most powerful men in the world end up falling for dangerous neo-Nazi conspiracy theories on his own social media platform?

Elon Musk, the third richest person on Earth and holder of the most followed account on today’s “X”, has been subsumed into a toxic media bubble of his own creation. After opening Twitter’s floodgates to droves of anonymous extremists, Musk exposed himself to a deluge of disinformation.

The evidence of this is clear, from his promotion of the anti-semitic Great Replacement Theory to his attempt to revive Q-anon’s “PizzaGate” insanity, to his endorsement of a tinfoil-hat conspiracy related to a brutal attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband.

This online radicalisation didn’t begin with Musk. Originating in what Bari Weiss famously called the “Intellectual Dark Web”, an army of right-wing culture war commandos has been slowly capturing the digital space. However, Musk’s takeover of Twitter was a major landmark victory for the radicals.