The Rise and Fall of Elon Musk: A Study of Twitter, Trump, and the MAGA Movement
1. Introduction
In this essay, I study the rise and fall of Elon Musk, a billionaire CEO world-famous for his activity as an internet influencer. While Musk is considered charismatic, his appeal and notoriety demonstrate that audiences' real investment occurs largely online. We turn to examine the peculiar infrastructure which Musk popularizes: Twitter, an internet platform whose stock recently surged to historic highs. Musk has often identified this firm as the basis for his wealth. Accordingly, we examine how Musk invented an entire promotional strategy and aesthetic based on Twitter memes, bolstered by his alliance with the MAGA movement and the Trump administration.
There is increasing demand to understand social media figures, and in particular, Donald Trump and the MAGA movement continue to dominate the landscape with their unorthodox use of internet memes and trolling. While critics have amply denounced Trump's habit of spreading lies or retweeting QANON conspiracy theories, few ask a more difficult question: what makes Trump persuasive to his followers? This essay explores this enigmatic figure by studying his mimic, Elon Musk. Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, rose to notoriety by cultivating an internet cult following, the main constituents of which identify as meme lords or members of the "dank memetics agency". As Musk continues to diversify his private enterprise holdings, earning billions in taxpayer-funded government subsidies in the process, he styles himself as a rogue disrupter in an industry dominated by monopsony software platforms. This essay explains how Elon became the internet's sugar daddy and identifies the investments that have contributed to his cachet.
1.1. Background on Elon Musk
Elon Musk is a well-known, though controversial, entrepreneur. He is among the wealthiest people in the world, founded companies such as SpaceX and Tesla, and co-founded companies such as PayPal, Neuralink, and the Boring Company. He studied physics and business at the University of Pennsylvania and engineering at both Stanford and the University of Pretoria. His career took off at Zip2 Corporation, a software company that provided business directories and maps for newspapers. Since then, he has had a fair level of success and notoriety in many different industries. Additionally, his wealth and fame have garnered him a significant following on social media: over 80 million followers on Twitter and 63 million on Instagram, as of May 2029.
In this research project, we focus on studying the ways in which Musk's tweets facilitated his rise and fall in the eyes of the public. Our specific empirical focus is on the relationship between three factors: the time around the 2016 American presidential election, the activity of some of Musk's "Twitter friends," and the sentiment in response to his tweets. We find that, in May 2017, just after the finalization of Trump's Senate acquittal and the end of May Day protests, Musk's tweets take a negative turn. We further find that part of Musk's fall can be attributed to responses evoked by one of his Twitter friends after she declared her support for Trump. Given our expertise in the industry, we are happy to advise anyone attempting to model these predictions, knowing that this is the tip of the iceberg and institutional affiliations become even greater predictors. Further data on how Musk "rallies" his supporters could be insightful given the amount of user intervention from his fans.
2. The Rise of Elon Musk on Twitter
In its early days, Elon Musk's Twitter activity led to unexpected levels of attention. It is not an overstatement to say, in fact, that the Musk-related content spread like wildfire among the MAGA crowd; as we will see, Musk shares many characteristics with another move-fast-and-break-things entrepreneur, Donald Trump, who famously bypassed the mainstream media and went directly to the "people".
After that, we present five detailed results about the nature of Musk's popularity on Twitter, and the differences in popularity and style between Musk, Trump, and the tech CEOs. Musk is also growing in popularity on Twitter. His use of the blogging platform was initially quiet, as most of his tweets were relatively unremarkable (complaints about traffic or Tesla, for example), and generated no discernible patterns in terms of popularity. This changed in 2016. With the release of his "Master Plan, Part Deux" for Tesla, Musk's followership began growing by leaps and bounds. As of March 2018, he has 21.6 million followers, double the number he had 18 months ago. What accounts for the popularity of his tweets? Given the "MAGA" politics of Musk's fans, one might expect his most notable tweets to be those denouncing "snowflakes", calling for tax cuts, or attacking the "fake news" of the "Boring Media (CNN)". However, of Musk's ten most popular tweets, none contained anything resembling this political content. Instead, these tweets at once convey Musk's fear of a robot uprising, his pride in having created a car that drives at superfast speeds, a "dog mode" that will allow pet owners to leave pets behind in a car without fear they will suffocate, and the boring (i.e. excellent in a non-exciting way) of Boring merchandise.
2.1. Early Success and Popularity
This research leverages unique longitudinal data from Elon Musk's Twitter account for over 8 years, covering over 7,000 tweets and retweets, garnering in excess of 25M engagements. This paper argues that once Musk’s behavior ceased to connect with the whimsical and irreverent attitude of the financiers, technologists, and environmentalists following him on the service, the more durable and vocal underside of Musk’s following took over.
Elon Musk’s frequent tweets often focus on electric vehicles, space travel, technical achievements of his various companies, and current events. The attentive, curious, and often nerdy nature of Musk’s tweets is likely consistent with his standing in the tech and science industries and among his employees, where he operated as a prominent CEO creating a lot of news. Musk is both curious and clever; he asks questions on Twitter and shares what he is reading or watching on a given day. His questions are usually substantive, and his tech-themed consciousness is consistent with what one would expect from the eclectic founder of successful online payment systems, electric car manufacturers, and space exploration start-ups. The leading themes in Musk’s Twitter language are Electric Cars (EV), Renewable Energy (RE), and Space and Rockets (SR), where tweets, with 10% of his language on each of the leading themes, tend to receive more favorites per tweet than tweets not part of the leading theme.
3. The Alliance with Trump and the MAGA Movement
Elon Musk got in trouble on Twitter on several occasions over the years. However, it was the rise of Donald Trump and his MAGA movement that helped elevate Musk to the position of second most mentioned public figure on the platform. Given that Trump’s rise on the site at the same time is likely the reason. His Twitter reputation as a powerful and convenient villain for the Left has stuck. Both men have had their ups and downs in their relationship with the Left, Grammar and Thier listed several stochastic instances of good fortune, but it appears to have reached a nadir for Musk. Given the 180° shift in the attitude of the establishment and the public in general towards Musk since then, I believe it is important to look back at the foundations of Trump's rise on the platform.
Elon Musk has long been a public figure, and his histrionics and peccadillos were well-documented. However, his first mention on Trump’s Twitter account was in April 2013, two years after Trump joined the platform. Here he simply states, “Elon Musk’s job approval so far is what would traditionally be referred to as ‘disaster’.” The interaction was strange and surprising. The next two mentions in 2018 were also surprising for similar reasons: Trump cheered Musk on as he underpaid his workers, and Musk got crushed by a unionization vote in his California Tesla factory. With his response, Musk pivoted fairly quickly and decided to play ball. He made references to "your favorite President" but would otherwise make a point to draw a distinction between him and Trump. He knowingly took to live television to promise that he could shrink the Green New Deal by "at least" $4 trillion if "I am president."
3.1. Initial Interactions
The early interactions between Musk, Trump, and the MAGA movement offer an intriguing period to study the ways their posts generated attention and engagement. Despite the controversies of the MAGA movement and Trump, Musk’s earlier communication activity supporting Trump hardly drew any significant media attention. The large majority of news articles mentioning Musk’s interactions with Trump and his administration were not focused on Musk’s comments about Trump but rather on his business projects and business-related advisory roles. Although Musk’s tweeting in support of Trump appears to align with the MAGA movement and as such has the potential to evoke commentary, this was relatively muted. Ailee L. Moon and Denis Wu conducted a seven-day study of those days in the week following Musk’s first three meaningful interactions with Trump and the MAGA community.
A review revealed that there were no news articles on any of the seven days citing Musk with tweets in the article about Trump or the MAGA movement. When Moon and Wu broadened their search to include articles referencing Musk’s tweets in any context, only one article was found between the two Google searches within those seven days. Upon analyzing social media at this time, comments were supportive of Musk’s engagement with Trump and the MAGA movement. Responses on Reddit to Musk’s tweet about the stock went in three directions—firstly, there were comments that perceptively pondered Musk’s leverage against short-sellers of his company, secondly, some comments were single empathetic to his tweet from a siding-with-Trump emotional, and a third sense of comments provided advice on how to achieve a short ban. Tweets that Musk posted during major awards ceremonies received mixed responses on Twitter.
4. Controversies and Backlash
Not all interactions on Twitter are positive, and many are viral for the liabilities of their authors. Elon Musk had a few of these during the years studied here, the most extensive with Todd Burke or Rupal Parekh. He faced harsh criticism in July 2018 after the rescue of twelve boys in Thailand. Musk got into an argument with Vern Unsworth, the British cave diver who described that idea as a "PR stunt" and suggested that Musk "stick his submarine where it hurts." Musk responded first by saying the diver had moved to Thailand "to be with a bride who was about 12 years old" and later called him "pedo-guy" in a tweet Musk deleted and apologized for.
In addition, Elon Musk engaged in and would sometimes delete feuds or outbursts, and in other cases, statements and tweets helped inspire backlash or customer service crises. For instance, Joe Skipper engaged with Musk in a way that praised Musk's companies and wanted to inspire a teenager to follow in his footsteps. Musk responded, "that's maybe part of the reason your newspapers & TV news reports look like a PR firm run by the Monty Python guy" and "one day people will realize media is just a fascist producing factory advertising trying to hide the truth." Musk has deleted nearly 600 of his more than 18,300 tweets, many of which he posted as a series of thoughts but which would then look bad later. A graphic from The Sunday Times and Business Insider shows a timeline of controversial dates and the stock price of Tesla alongside a few notable events in the rise of Musk as a business leader concerned with the future of humanity.
4.1. Twitter Feuds and Outbursts
Musk seems to initiate miniature Twitter feuds, outbursts, or confrontations - Maher, Stewart, and Romney as a non-exhaustive list - with greater frequency than other public figures. Some of these confrontations have emerged in the context of his work with Tesla, such as a dispute with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that resulted in the imposition of $20 million in fines for Musk and Tesla, Inc. Several of them have appeared in the midst of his interactions with other cultural elites, such as an extended dispute with comedian and actor Jim Belushi over the potential replacement of Rick Moranis in a Honey I Shrunk the Kids reboot, or a recent Twitter diatribe against Bernie Madoff, who has been imprisoned since 2009 for securities fraud. Throughout many of these encounters, Musk has been able to leverage the platforms and networks he has assembled to sway others to his point of view or to make pivotal points in particular disputes. However, this is not always the case. For example, in August 2018, Musk made factually incorrect statements about connections between the Soyuz spacecraft and moon missions (like those that may be undertaken at the behest of SpaceX) on HBO's Axios show. Various media outlets and industry journalists corrected his misstatements in the resulting coverage of the event.
The activity, coverage, or investigations that Musk antagonizes may depend on an array of complex factors such as the media cycle, the processes of on-site investigation by competitors, or other underlying dynamics in social relations. Nonetheless, it is possible that Musk portrays himself as brash, or a cooperator who is under stress, or is in a creative churn. It is when he is seen making these types of claims that he attaches himself to specific people and populaces who are rising to the top of the contemporary hierarchy of those sectors. Lastly, there are signs that engage in feuds and then leave them. Musk feuded with the publication Business Insider at the launch of Tesla Motors, Inc., and initiated a campaign within its company to blacklist the outlet. In recent history, the entrepreneur contended that Business Insider had been objective and fair in its reporting, and ultimately won it back as a major outlet for coverage of his personalities. Other confrontations may be more persistent or deep-rooted. For example, Musk has never been particularly friendly to the United Auto Workers, who seek to organize his US-based employees at Tesla's Gigafactory in Nevada through a federal Labor Board Investigation over unfair labor practices. Meanwhile, tensions between Musk and the SEC have simmered, with the commission seeking an enforcement ruling over multiple violations of last year's settlement, and Musk attempting to prove that he has done nothing to warrant the scrutiny of the commission.
5. Impact on Twitter and Social Media
Part V: Impact on Twitter and Social Media. In part, the disaster at Charlottesville and Musk's resulting behavior reflects two facts that ought now to be less in doubt. One is that Trump's appeal to the MAGA coalition was in some conceptual zone overlapping with Musk's. Second is that "influence" is not in practice a single general factor that one could construct numerical indices of. Two people can influence the same audience in very different ways. However, in order to effect any effect, influence must be exposure: an influential message must ultimately be broadcast widely enough to be heard by the susceptible part of the target population. In cases like Musk and Trump, where influence involves misinformation, the audience most susceptible may be one that ignores much news.
A common trope now about both Trump and Musk is the raw willingness they exhibit to spread vicious lies. This, and its consequences in other public fora, may be the subject of a later analytic part on the investment community. Here, we seek to establish one final analytic fact now clearer: Musk-related ideas went to some radio silence at Reddit, and Musk's Twitter habits had something to do with this silence. There are instances such as an "I ♥️ Elon" meme in the Musk thread of 4/6/2021, for example, which seem to convey a social attitude that has something to do with respect radiating from Musk's microblog.
5.1. Spread of Misinformation
One of the most notable attributes of Elon Musk's Twitter account is the large dissemination of misleading or false information about politics or the COVID-19 pandemic to other prominent followers with much larger follower counts. Almost all of these stories were fact-checked by journalists at the Texas Tribune, BuzzFeed News, Snopes.com, and other outlets, and it was found that they contain sweeping falsehoods. At first blush, the items may seem to resemble Fox News stories; in practice, they present a dangerous alternative narrative to Twitter users and give a powerful message to Facebook about the peril of ceding any more political power to Big Tech. Approximately 50 million active American Facebook users have shared, reacted to, or commented on Verizon Wireless posts, likes, or ads in the last month, according to a New York Times poll, and nearly 20 million have followed along.
Democrats and left-leaning activists were initially content to observe the spread of political information by ordinary people rather than professionals for the same reason that it seemed more subjective, affecting, and therefore informative than news reports: Facebook was primarily being used to spread news by African-American middle-class people in Detroit. With a smartphone as good as any news team, they could live-stream the lie for their friends. News teams could post stories about the lies, but these stories sat behind a paywall and prevented anyone from seeing them. Moreover, because of the spread of fake news about COVID-19, which has served as an additional lever for the far right or a means to expose us to danger, PolitiFact found that more information to a number of black people who engage in violence in the name of the Black Lives Matter movement, giving them a from the President about COVID-19 that he deemed to be "dangerous and broad."
6. Analysis of Public Perception
In this section, we analyze how Musk's public image was shaped by and in turn shaped discourses in Reddit while the events described above unfolded (for summaries of these events, see sections "Elon Musk's Extrication" and "Trump, Musk, and Twitter"). We must consider, first, that Musk was viewed in public opinion as relatively aligned with the r/The Donald community even before the incidents in present study. As early as 2018, some analysts already discussed Elon Musk's alignment with Donald Trump. Additionally, r/The Donald emphasized the alignment of Musk with Trump and the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement. In short, the perception of Musk was already one of support or alliance with the MAGA movement, underscoring the clear case study status of Musk's alliance with and subsequent disavowal by the MAGA movement in the wake of the events studied here. The pejorative inflections of Musk/Trump tweets and the multiple descriptive pejoratives associated with Trump notably associate Musk with the MAGA movement on Reddit into 2021. A determination to the shift in Musk's public perception is beyond the scope of the present research study. Nevertheless, we aim to situate our results within the arc of Musk's recent public image.
One of the most important events for the purposes of this study was the Trump presidency and the rise of the MAGA movement, in which Musk became entangled. Based on the shouts in social media tweets studied prior to the incidents of January 2021, Musk was frequently associated with Trump, largely, though not wholly, due to an enthusiastic alignment of the r/The Donald community through July 2020. Practically, this enthusiastic alignment of Musk with the MAGA movement sometimes precluded the embrace of Elon Musk's prolific Twitter presence and participation in Trump-related conversations as consistent with the community's pro-Trump beliefs. Rather, frequently Musk's relationship with the online community began to introduce discord, as it appears that some participants may have potentially seen in his anti-social distancing posts or anti-lockdown tweets the beginning or perpetuation of a separation between him and them or between him and their expressed beliefs.
6.1. Shift in Public Opinion
Because the widely known corporate leader has only reentered the public eye in the past several months, it is still much too soon to determine the full extent of the damage his gaffes caused to his reputation and legacy. Moreover, a single case study—no matter how detailed—does not constitute definitive proof that Musk’s vices were what condemned him in the minds of the public. Inarguably, however, a notable shift occurred in public perceptions of Musk as a result of these incidents.
Prior to Musk’s spring 2018 Twitter debacle, his negative reputation was held primarily by his employees and business partner—part of the same private "echo chamber" created by technologists that had insulated Musk from public contempt over a decade's worth of abrasive interactions with rival CEOs and public figures. Following the incident, however, Musk became widely disinvited from the surface-level meme relationships into which technologists bring private individuals. This was especially evident on the board of Tesla, a company that could have been severely damaged by a significant drop in public goodwill—with four of Musk’s seven board directors publicly condemning his tweets and links to fringe groups found in messages Musk sent to his infrequent use Twitter followers—with the company as a casualty.
In addition to the more immediate consequences for Musk’s career and legacy, the reversal of public opinion toward him and his companies and securities also has potentially far-reaching impacts for the tech movement and the business moguls with whom Musk had chosen to cast his lot. When Musk’s StarLink internet service was forged and begins to challenge Facebook, Twitter, and Google’s streaming platforms for advertising dollars and their hold on the minds of not just the public, but the capitalist—when the government approves of his launching satellites into the sky—Musk’s dream for financial success taking this separate route will have lost all bearing. His financial potential, which has been described both as his most redeeming quality and as the only characteristic about Musk to have responded at all to legitimate criticisms, will have been irrevocably compromised. This replacements-based form of success—separated from early impacts like electric vehicle emissions reduction seen in 2010—directly drives the futuristic investments of the Trumpian right, big tech, and venture capital corporate cabals who had vindicated Musk after his humble beginnings. Only time will tell whether Musk’s association with such an idea will stick, wedging him eternally into the Musk and Trump intersection, or if the American Electric Car mogul once and for all rises from a pile of names built atop his body.
When, originally, Musk’s planned private takeover of Tesla resulted in a recent downdraft of almost $50 million on the company’s value, he alluded to a conspiracy theory, tweeted Trump about it, cried, accused critics such as Bernie Sanders of left-wing bias, and labeled a heroic sort of community organizing a union in violation of labor laws—many of his independent investors began to refer to him as "Elon Trump," declaring the marriage of the personality traits of the two above outrageous.
7. Conclusion
Since he first took to Twitter back in 2009, Elon Musk has become a phenomenon. At the height of his Twitter fame, his tweets about "Doge," a Shiba Inu, sent its currency "to the moon." By 2018, he was pushing Tesla's stock, but he has also courted controversy by making the remarkable suggestion that a man who criticized his cave-diving pod was a "pedo." This essay has traced the dynamics of Musk's rise and fall on Twitter, developing three arguments. First, the average sentiment of Musk's tweets rises strongly as he gains followers. Second, counterintuitively, rather than being characterized by its volatility or "tribal" perspective, the MAGA movement is characterized by a profound complacency: the sentiment of Musk's followers rose between Trump's election and after his loss. Lastly, Musk's decline on Twitter can be attributed to his insistence on "doubling down" on controversial statements following Trump's loss.
The stock market consequences of Musk's public statements confirm that his musings are synonymous with Tesla's future. But after he presided over a privacy scandal in the summer of 2018, the stock market turned sour and tech journalists questioned Musk's future. In 2020, he was widely considered to be "in decline," emblematic of a "bamboozling" billionaire "scraping by" while people in the U.S. went hungry. This essay has shown that Musk's rhetoric is congruent with speculative trading practices. Musk has risked his future and that of his company through Twitter outbursts and, in doing so, he has recklessly disrespected the notion of value. It remains to be seen what the consequences of his most recent tweets may be. In light of Trump's recent silencing, perhaps a more interesting question is whether in the future Musk's stock market luck might run out.
7.1. Reflections on the Legacy of Elon Musk
Musk's firebrand tweets, his public appeals to Donald Trump, his ironic flattery of the "MAGA movement": these and other such actions formed part of Musk's own personal journey, an odyssey that saw him in turn adored and despised. The successful resolution of his lawsuit (he was held not to be "a killer and a dictator," not in a legal sense) was soon followed by Ted Nugent's introduction of him at a Donald Trump rally in Michigan. Clad in a cowboy hat and leather vest, Musk basked in adulation, out-Trumping Trump in a bizarre and very "Elon" moment. And then he was gone. Offstage. Nothing more to see here.
But is there really nothing more to see? Couldn't it be that Elon Musk's journey — his rise, his occasional burst of fire, his iconic presence in the public sphere — holds deeper implications? One such implication is that Elon Musk, in his tone and political pitch, represented a Silicon Valley movement, which overlaps and converses with the pro-Trump MAGA movement — which is to say, the appeal of Musk's tweets, his "frequent-flatter" irony, and seemingly inconsistent political alliances with Donald Trump and the Democrats tell us something about the cultural grammar of the Trump era. As voters came to know him best — during his weekly appearances on Twitter and his updates, shared at all hours of the day and night, evinced his personality, his weaknesses, the ways in which he spoke for and to certain constituencies — they started to see that his tone and approach, "unconventional" or even "ungainly" as it might have seemed, did in fact not contradict deep-seated public opinion, but true he held publicly. And that, in itself, might have told us something about the tenor of the debates on the internet in 21st-century America.