Will Elon Musk Tip the Election for Trump?

You might know him from Tesla and SpaceX, but now Elon Musk spends a lot of his time campaigning for former president Donald Trump. WIRED’s David Gilbert and Vittoria Elliott join Leah to talk about what Musk gets from going all in on Trump—and whether he’ll win Trump the White House.

Leah Feiger is @LeahFeiger.  David Gilbert is @DaithaiGilbert. Vittoria Elliott is @telliotter. Write to us at [email protected]. Be sure to subscribe to the WIRED Politics Lab newsletter here.

Mentioned this week:
Elon Musk Spoke at a Trump Rally, Referenced ‘Dark MAGA,’ and Urged Supporters to Vote by Vittoria Elliott and Tess Owen
Right-Wing Influencers Claim ‘They’ Defeated Physics, Geoengineered Hurricane Milton by Tess Owen

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Transcript

Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.

Leah Feiger: This is WIRED Politics Lab, a show about how tech is changing politics. I’m Leah Feiger, the senior politics editor at WIRED. Last weekend, Donald Trump returned to Butler, Pennsylvania to hold a rally in the same place he was shot nearly three months ago.

Donald Trump [Archival audio]: Our movement to make America great again stands stronger, prouder, more united, more determined and nearer to victory than ever before. We’re going to make America great again, going to win the election, going to win the election.

Leah Feiger: During his hour and a half long speech, Trump rattled off some of the hits. The borders aren’t safe, the Democrats will cheat in the election. But Trump also had something new to offer at this rally, a special guest.

Donald Trump [Archival audio]: He created the first major American car company in generations, and his rocket company is the only reason we can now send American astronauts into space.

Leah Feiger: Elon Musk.

Donald Trump [Archival audio]: Take over, Elon. Yes, take over.

Leah Feiger: Over the last few weeks, Musk has become the most important Trump supporter there is. From his donations totaling millions of dollars to his promotion of conspiracy theories on X, the social platform he owns.

Elon Musk [Archival audio]: This is no ordinary election. The other side wants to take away your freedom of speech, they want to take away your right to bear arms, they want to take away your right to vote, effectively.

Leah Feiger: We’ve wanted to do a Musk episode for a long time, and it’s finally here. Why has Musk thrown himself into presidential politics? What does he get out of it, and is he going to help win Trump the Oval Office? Joining me today from Cork, Ireland, to talk about all of this is WIRED senior reporter David Gilbert. Hey, David.

David Gilbert: Hey, Leah.

Leah Feiger: And WIRED reporter Victoria Elliott, who was in Butler to see the rally up close.

Vittoria Elliott: Hey, Leah.

Leah Feiger: Tori, what was the rally like? What did people tell you? What were you seeing?

Vittoria Elliott: The vibe that you got once you were in was like a fusion of an outdoor concert and church.

Leah Feiger: Fun, that’s a combo.

Vittoria Elliott: There were people who had picnic blankets, there was hot dogs for sale, and people came there from other places. There was one person who spoke to me who had driven there from Eastern Pennsylvania, which is about a five-hour drive. There were people there who had come from Ohio, the way that you would travel to go to a concert of someone you were really excited to see. And the reason I say it feels church-like, and I’m not the first person to say this, NPR earlier this week made that analogy as well, particularly with the idea that Trump was saved from assassination by the hand of God, was this feeling where you go in where everyone knows the lyrics to the song, everyone knows the call and response. And I think the thing that really hammered that home for me was there was a moment when Trump was speaking and somebody passed out in the stands, seemingly because they were maybe dehydrated. People started passing their water bottles forward to that person, and while they were waiting for a medic everyone spontaneously started singing the national anthem.

Leah Feiger: So Trump brings Musk out, he calls him a truly incredible guy. Musk literally jumps into the air on stage, in what was captured in honestly one of the cringiest photos that I’ve seen online maybe this year, and then Musk talks to the crowd for a couple of minutes. What does he say? Talk us through that.

Vittoria Elliott: It’s such a turn from 2020 when there’s all this suspicion around mail-in ballots, around early voting. Now suddenly we’re hearing, “Make sure you’re registered to vote, vote early, do this, do that, get everyone you know to vote.” There’s this really, really big get-out-the-vote push, and that is what Elon was on. When the assassin’s bullet grazed Trump’s ear, he got up and said, “Fight, fight, fight.” And Musk very consciously said, “Vote, vote, vote.” And everyone in the crowd immediately saw that parallel that—

Leah Feiger: I mean, he drew it. Yeah.

Vittoria Elliott: People were very into that, and one of the things that Musk said that got a lot of reaction from the people that I was directly around was he said, “The Second—”

Elon Musk [Archival audio]: The Second Amendment is there to ensure that we have the First Amendment.

Vittoria Elliott: He was there to whip up the troops, to really speak to the true believers, to push, push, push for voter turnout, because I think my sense with the way that the MAGA movement is right now is that they understand what the Biden team understood in 2020 where it’s not about converting new people, it’s about getting the people that are already on your team mobilized. He said, “This election is the most important election of our lifetime.” Quite normal. I think I’ve heard every politician say that for the last 20 years, but then he says, “You have to bring everyone you know to vote. If they don’t, this will be—”

Elon Musk [Archival audio]: This will be the last election. That’s my prediction. Nothing’s more important, nothing’s more important.

Vittoria Elliott: I even had some people repeat that to me on the way out of the rally, and that is also something he has been very public about saying on X, even before coming to this rally. A lot of times when Musk is speaking publicly or when he’s interviewed, he will tamp back some of the rhetoric that he spreads online. If we think back to the Don Lemon interview, where he was confronted about the great replacement theory, he hedged a little bit on that.

Elon Musk [Archival audio]: I’m not buying some great replacement theory. I’m simply saying there appears to be a very clear incentive for Democrats to have to maximize the number of illegals, because it helps him win an election.

Vittoria Elliott: But that was not what was happening in this space. It definitely felt like you could have copied and pasted some of his posts on X into that speech.

David Gilbert: Tori, one thing I’m really interested in, because I’ve never actually seen Elon Musk speak in person. Obviously I’ve seen him in interviews on TV and on X. Trump, when he’s speaking at rallies, has this very specific way of speaking and way of relating to the crowd that’s just unique to him. Obviously everyone saw that picture that Leah talked about, but was Musk able to connect with the audience there? Was he able to tap into that whatever it is that Trump has with his audiences?

Vittoria Elliott: I wouldn’t say that he could tap into that without Trump leading him in. There was a guy behind me when Musk was speaking where he just went, “He’s so awkward, it’s so funny.” He’s still himself. But I think one of the things the Democrats were really able to capitalize on in August was Tim Walz coming out and saying, “These guys are weird,” and Musk is weird, and it didn’t bother people.

Leah Feiger: When we got on our call after this rally, one of the big things you said to me was, “These supporters do not care that Elon Musk used to not like Trump. These supporters do not care that JD Vance has tweeted some rough things about Trump. This is a open church, this is an open tent, and if you now all of a sudden are taking in the word of the gospel, you are welcome here.”

Vittoria Elliott: Yeah, totally. Put on your red hat, get on the train, let’s go. And I think that’s something that was also really apparent to me was that people see Musk moving to the right, supporting Donald Trump, from being much more supportive of Democrats even a decade ago, as a win for their team. They’re like, “Wow, he has come to the light. He is on our team. Isn’t this great?” There isn’t that suspicion of, “Why is he here, why did he change? Why didn’t he support him from the beginning?” None of that.

Leah Feiger: Absolutely. This is probably a good moment to get into Musk’s past a little bit. Musk seems like he’s all in on Trump now, but just two years ago he posted that “Trump should hang up his hat and sail into the sunset.” And The Wall Street Journal reported last week that he gave $10 million to Ron DeSantis when he was running for president. Why this sudden change of heart for Musk?

David Gilbert: It’s not really a sudden change of heart for Musk. If you look back at how he has gotten to this point, it started quite a long while ago, and he’s always been this figure who’s been contrarian, and while he was for a long time held up as this tech genius who was going to change the world—

Leah Feiger: Founder of Tesla and SpaceX, big dreamer over here.

David Gilbert: Yeah, but throughout it all there was always these little things that happened that signaled that something was a bit different. His willingness to come out and say things that are just completely false, and do it boldly and not back down from it has been there for a long time. And so, I think the reason now that he has fully embraced Trump is that since he bought Twitter and became a full-time troll on the platform, and seems to do pretty much nothing else than post tweets, he’s seen that his credibility and his reputation from a huge cohort, of people in the U.S. especially, especially in Silicon Valley has waned because people have moved away from him because of what’s happened on the platform, and now he is leaning fully into the people who do support him. The people who do support him and back what he’s doing there are for a large part, Trump supporters who are boosting his posts and telling him he’s brilliant, and Trump is saying it as well. So, that’s why he’s leaning in because he needs that confirmation, and he needs that admiration from those people.

Leah Feiger: I think all of that is true. I still have a little bit of a hard time squaring this with the person who was previously an Obama, Clinton and Biden supporter. He told CNBC that he thought that Trump didn’t have the sort of character that reflects well on the United States, he supported Hillary Clinton’s policy platforms. In 2017 though, he did start to donate large sums to Republicans signaling this rightward shift. In the article that I mentioned from the Wall Street Journal, they said that starting in 2022 he spent $50 million on Conservative issues. This is just a ton of money to be throwing around. Is it strange that a guy who runs an electric car company is endorsing Donald Trump, who doesn’t really appear to believe in climate change? Does this hurt Musk’s bottom line in the long run?

Vittoria Elliott: At the end of the day, the Republican Party, especially the Republican Party under Trump, is the party of no taxes and no responsibility for big businesses, and even if Tesla itself has benefited from the support of the environmental movement from government contracts and support meant to transition us to clean energy, the reality is at the end of the day Musk is a billionaire with a lot of different businesses who doesn’t want to pay taxes and doesn’t want to be regulated. And so, whatever boost he may have gotten from Democratic administrations seeing Tesla as the standard-bearer for this one form of green energy transition, I think the reality is he is pretty cognizant of the fact that a Republican administration that deregulates many, many other things is fundamentally better for him overall. Let’s not forget that Tesla has faced lawsuits against the way it’s treated its employees, they’ve come under a lot of scrutiny, and Musk wants to help dismantle the NLRB, the National Labor Relations Board. So, even if a Republican administration might more hostile to something like-

Leah Feiger: Carbon credits et al.

Vittoria Elliott: Yeah. The reality is he will still benefit from all these other forms of deregulation.

David Gilbert: The biggest threat to Tesla isn’t from culling carbon credits or anything like that, it’s from China, because the Chinese electric car industry is hugely popular in China and they’re trying to export around the world. And who’s going to be the person who’s going to stop them coming to the U.S. and putting the most taxes on any imports from China? That’s Donald Trump.

Leah Feiger: I want to bring up the infamous X space where Elon Musk interviewed Donald Trump back in August, and Musk was very open about this, is very clear about the fact that him and Trump disagree on these environmental issues, but very clearly also did not really seem to care. This one quote that Musk said during that interview, right after Trump suggested the need for additional US oil drilling, he said, “My views on climate change and oil and gas probably differ from what most people would assume, because my views are actually pretty moderate in this regard.” Then he says, “I don’t think we should vilify the”—

Elon Musk [Archival audio]: I don’t think we should vilify oil and gas industry and the people that have worked very hard in those industries to provide the necessary energy to support the economy, and if we were to stop using oil and gas right now we’d all be starving and the economy would collapse.

Leah Feiger: A bit of a rollover. But then he goes on to ask if Trump will start a government efficiency body that Musk would be invited to join if the former president were reelected. What a quick pivot from, “These are my beliefs. You don’t agree with my beliefs. Also, can you give me a job in government?”

Vittoria Elliott: Yeah. And I mean again, I think going back to the difference, we’ve seen a lot of, on the Democrat and left side of the political spectrum, there’s a lot of nitpicking over policy. “Oh, I don’t agree with Kamala’s stance on this. I don’t like her record as a prosecutor,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Whereas I think the MAGA movement, because they have this “as long as you’re on Team Trump, we can sort out the other stuff later” energy, people aren’t bothered by that.

Leah Feiger: We’re going to take a quick break, but first we want to thank our friends at Amazon Music for naming WIRED Politics Lab one of the best podcasts this week. If you’re new to the show, we’re so excited you’re here. And when we’re back, we’re going to talk more with David and Tori about whether they think must can really influence the election. Welcome back to WIRED Politics Lab. Musk showing up in Butler, Pennsylvania wasn’t coincidental. Though the assassination attempt was initially what led Musk to outwardly endorsing Trump, which he alluded to in his speech.

Elon Musk [Archival audio]: We had one president who couldn’t climb a flight of stairs, and another who was fist pumping after getting shot. “Fight, fight, fight,” blood coming down the face.

Leah Feiger: I actually want to talk about what Musk has been doing since July that brought him so deeply into Trump’s circle, and of course the biggest thing is that he’s spending a ton of money. Tori, David, how much is he spending? How is he spending it? Where is it going?

David Gilbert: Well, I suppose straight after the first Butler rally, he announced that he was fully behind Trump, he was going to start donating, and that triggered other people in Silicon Valley to decide to row in behind Trump and donate money to him as well. He was never as strong as he was at that point when Musk endorsed him. Since then, obviously the race has tightened considerably, but Musk hasn’t tried to equivocate, he hasn’t tried to back down. He’s put money into it, but he’s also put effectively the weight of his full platform behind Trump by promoting Trump’s policies, by promoting Trump’s conspiracies, and most recently by pushing this get out to vote effort where he’s offering people cash money, $47 for each registered voter who they refer in a swing state that signs this petition in favor of free speech and the right to bear arms, and they’re hoping to get one million voters signed up before the election.

Vittoria Elliott: Wow.

Leah Feiger: And I mean, through the America PAC, which he founded, he’s funneling millions of dollars to Republican candidates, right?

Vittoria Elliott: Yeah. He’s sending about $8.2 million to 18 different districts where house races for the GOP are competitive right now.

Leah Feiger: Wow. So, he’s at the top of the ticket, he’s at the bottom of the ticket. Musk is all over this.

Vittoria Elliott: Yeah, there was some really interesting reporting in August about how people were getting ads on Google and other platforms that looked like they were encouraging them to register to vote, and if you were in a state like California or Wyoming, where you have a solid dominance of one party or the other, it would just send you to an email sign up, but if you were in a swing state like Michigan or Pennsylvania, you would be urged to enter all of this data that the PAC has then funneled into helping Republican candidates campaigning in those states to identify possible likely voters with this real precision targeting in a way that maybe would’ve not been possible without Musk’s backing, and without the ability to collect and collate that data.

Leah Feiger: I mean, let’s compare and contrast the Trump campaign and the Harris campaign a little bit right now. Dems are working with David Plouffe, an Obama-era adviser, their focus is very much on ground game, and being physically in person and getting out the votes. They had a few weeks of winning the internet those weeks after that Harris was announced as the Democratic nominee, but now it feels like they might be a bit behind. They’re up against Elon Musk.

Vittoria Elliott: Yeah. When you had someone like David Plouffe doing Get Out The Vote, everyone was on Facebook. Even if Facebook was weird, it was a shared reality for young people-

Leah Feiger: It was 2008, it was a different world.

Vittoria Elliott: …you know what I mean? But now the internet is really fractured. The people who are on X are not necessarily the people who are on TikTok, and all these platforms also have way different rules about how you advertise, what kind of politics and stuff can be on there, their algorithms are inscrutable. We’re dealing with a much more fractured internet space, and I would never say that getting out the vote, being in person is bad, but what I noticed with this Trump rally is that again, going back to the fusion of church rock concert vibe, is that that’s a thing to do. You know what I mean? That’s community in a way, it’s people spending time with people who they agree with, who they share at least this major interest with. There was a real excitement about that, and I think door knocking is obviously very important, but I do think there is that level of community that is somewhat different than what you would get from door knocking one-on-one.

Leah Feiger: But what I will say to that is that Musk, and the GOP, and Trump are getting a lot of heat right now for having a terrible ground game, that is tons of GOP strategists have been coming out being like, “Their campaigns right now are absolute messes. This is a huge issue.” On the other hand, you have Musk literally just last week tweeting out links to register in Arizona, register in Pennsylvania. These tweets are getting over 100 million views, these links are getting clicks. There’s some combination here that perhaps they’re not doing this 2008 era thing, but they’re doing the 2024 Get Out The Vote online thing, and maybe that’s going to be enough.

David Gilbert: It’s not necessarily about getting new voters to vote for Trump, it’s about getting the people who are sympathetic to Trump already to actually vote. And when you look at what they’re doing, we saw obviously what Musk is doing on X and getting huge numbers of people clicking on those links, we’re also seeing groups like Turning Point USA having conferences, and trainings, and-

Leah Feiger: Concerts.

David Gilbert: …concerts, and Get Out The Vote efforts. We’re seeing the Courage Tour, which is this Christian nationalist tour going around the country to swing states only, it’s only going to swing states, where they are talking to evangelical communities. They are reaching out directly to pastors so that the pastors will speak again to their own congregations, and they’re activating these people who are traditionally Trump supporters but who may not actually vote. And there’s, in the Turning Point USA, it’s definitely more skewed towards a younger voter who in 2020 may not have turned out to vote for Trump, but they are trying to get those people there. They’re in the communities that they know they can get people to vote for Trump, they’re not trying to convert people who have spent the last eight years being angry at Trump and deciding that they don’t want to vote for him. So, I think that idea of community that Tori spoke about at the rally, is something they’re tapping into across the country at all these different types of events.

Vittoria Elliott: Community in person and online.

David Gilbert: Exactly.

Vittoria Elliott: And that to me is slightly what I’m not seeing from the Harris campaign.

David Gilbert: Because the online part of it is that X is a community, but it’s a community of mostly—

Vittoria Elliott: Shit posters.

David Gilbert: … shit posters and Trump supporters. And you know the Venn diagram of the two is mostly a circle.

Vittoria Elliott: I too, look to my community for the very best conspiracies about the latest humanitarian environmental disaster in the United States, talking of course about all of the hurricane conspiracies that Musk himself is promoting right now. This is such a trash fire.

David Gilbert: Where does the Harris campaign go for its community? Because OK, we saw, as you said, the Brat summer stuff. There was a lot of success on TikTok and Instagram, but TikTok and Instagram aren’t as partisan as X is, so they have to work harder to find their communities on those platforms. So, I think what the Trump campaign is doing in terms of targeting very specific types of voters is very clever, and could at least work to increase the number of people who are going to turn out to actually vote for Trump compared to 2020.

Leah Feiger: He hasn’t just been spending on the presidential race, he’s been pouring money into congressional races too, which to me raises the question, is this about belief for him or more about extending his reach?

Vittoria Elliott: Who can know the inside of Elon Musk’s heart? But if you think about it, this is someone who fundamentally believes that his mission in life is to send humanity to Mars. If that doesn’t tell you the kind of reach that he wants to have, that it’s not just about the U.S., it’s not just about particular elections, he’s thinking about this on a not even a whole world scale, on an interplanetary scale. Query whether there’s a corner of public, or civic, or government or business life that he believes he shouldn’t be touching.

David Gilbert: I just fundamentally cannot take him seriously when he says anything about that this is a fight for our democracy, this is going to be the last election ever. All he’s doing is he’s built a platform where in order to succeed you need to be incrementally more extreme in your viewpoint than the next person. And because he has over the last two years just gone completely down this rabbit hole where he is parroting what Trump says in terms of immigrants coming into the country and they’re going to steal the election, and the fact that this will be the last vote ever if Kamala Harris wins, all he’s trying to do is to get it to the point where Trump wins and he continues to have some sort of influence over what happens at government level. Because as he said himself this week in an interview with Tucker Carlson, if Trump doesn’t win he’s screwed.

Elon Musk [Archival audio]: If he loses, I’m fucked.

Tucker Carlson [Archival audio]: It does seem that way.

David Gilbert: He knows that if this happens, that he’s put all his eggs in one basket and he needs it to work. For the next four weeks until the election, that he’s just going to get worse, and worse, and worse in terms of pushing conspiracies and scaring people, because that’s what he’s doing. He’s trying to scare people into voting.

Leah Feiger: And he’s not doing this in a vacuum. We’ve been kind of talking about this, but probably time for us to outright say it. Musk is the biggest political influencer around. He has 200 million followers on X, and not just that, he has total control over the social media platform’s algorithm. People will see his posts no matter what. Let’s get into some of the conspiracies and extremist ideas he’s pushing with all of this. What’s he saying right now? What’s out there?

David Gilbert: For the last couple of weeks, he’s been pushing this idea that has been seeded by Trump and others in the GOP that floods of immigrants are going to come into the country, brought in by the Biden administration, who are all going to be registered and allowed to vote-

Leah Feiger: Ridiculous.

David Gilbert: … the election. Just no basis in fact, but it’s absolutely taken hold. And then you’ve got Musk at a national level pushing it to his tens of million, or as you said, 200 million followers.

Leah Feiger: Really dangerous. Really, really dangerous.

David Gilbert: It’s extremely dangerous, because there are people who are taking it seriously and who are going to be on alert on election day to watch for any people they see as not looking like them, and therefore, “Oh, that must be an immigrant brought in by the Biden administration. I’m going to do a citizen’s arrest.”

Leah Feiger: I mean, I’m thinking of the simplest, so many very normal, have been done for a very long time, Get Out The Vote techniques of having buses take senior citizens to go vote. That is super normal, incredibly legal. I think we’re going to see a lot of tension over this in the coming weeks ahead.

David Gilbert: A sheriff said to me a couple of months ago, if he sees a bus of people that he doesn’t recognize he’s going to take action on election day.

Vittoria Elliott: I spoke to someone who was a former Twitter employee, who worked on the trust and safety team, the people who keep hate speech and disinformation off the platform, most of whom Musk fired almost immediately after taking over the platform. And this person told me that one of their major concerns is not just what he is publicly posting and what’s on the platform, but if you recall after January 6th, 2021, Twitter banned Donald Trump, and specifically because they were worried about incitement of violence, further incitement to violence after the insurrection. And what this person told me was that a lot of these sticky decisions around world leaders, around violent hate speech from public figures, that gets escalated to the top of the company. Often VPs and CEOs are the ones making those calls. And if you have a CEO, who is so clearly aligned with one party, one group of people, that’s the person who’s going to be making the call. And if you’re a rank-and-file person at the company, you might be worried about even escalating that. You might be worried about voicing concerns about how content on this platform could materialize into real-world violence because you know what the political leanings of leadership are going to be.

Leah Feiger: In addition to these anti-immigrant conspiracies, he has, God, he’s run the gambit the last couple of months, hasn’t he? I mean, promoting that the Secret Service was specifically making it so that Trump could get assassinated back in Butler, he said terrible stuff about trans people, trans rights, which obviously gets back to his daughter and just a lot of really sad, messy stuff there. He spread Springfield, it’s never ending. Which brings us to this week where Musk has gone out saying that FEMA has been defunded and is not able to get help to people in need after Hurricane Helene, because all of the funding has gone to undocumented immigrants. It’s wild.

David Gilbert: There is no conspiracy that is trending on X that Musk will not entertain, it seems. The more people react to it, the more he enjoys it. I think there was a Guardian analysis of one day of Musk tweets a couple of months ago, and he tweeted 145 times-

Leah Feiger: Oh my God.

David Gilbert: … in the space of 24 hours. And that’s including, I think—

Leah Feiger: Sign off, my guy. This is just—

David Gilbert: He did sign off for seven hours while he slept, maybe, I don’t know. He must not do any other work, because how could you have the brain space to do anything else besides what he’s doing? And it’s only going to get worse from here on in I think, because he’s—

Vittoria Elliott: Because he’s now a campaign surrogate.

Leah Feiger: He’s a campaign surrogate. Which brings me to, is he influencing Trump or is Trump influencing him?

David Gilbert: I think Trump is definitely influencing him obviously, because Trump is the one who has the power and can decide with the stroke of his pen what happens to his businesses effectively, because the project 2025 stuff shows he’s willing to do pretty much anything if he gets back into power. But I think that it should not be underestimated that this idea that Musk would become the head of Department of Government Efficiency, if that does transpire. And Trump may be just playing with, and maybe this will never happen, but if it does, the fact that Musk is inside the building rather than outside the building should be really worrying given the extremist tendencies we’ve seen him push over the last two years.

Leah Feiger: So back to the big question, and I want some real, quick, off-the-cuff answers from you both. Is Musk going to win Trump the White House?

Vittoria Elliott: I think that his Get Out The Vote efforts could definitely be a real game changer at the rally. Laura Trump actually came out before Trump and Musk got on the stage, and really emphasized the Get Out The Vote thing, and I watched the man in front of me sit down, pull up his phone, pull out his voter registration to confirm that he was registered. That is the game and Musk knows it, even if his tweets or his own profile does not elevate Trump, I can see the way that his money and his microtargeting could be really, really impactful.

Leah Feiger: David, how about you?

David Gilbert: I agree with Tori. What about you? What do you think is going to happen?

Leah Feiger: There are a lot of billionaires out there right now that are lending support to both parties. You have Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn all in on Kamala Harris. You have Peter Thiel, these are folks that have a lot of money to throw around, and a lot of energy to dedicate to these causes and politicians. Musk is different. Musk is that billionaire, but he is different. He is singularly focused on Trump right now, he is singularly focused on getting Republicans into office. I don’t know if we’ve ever seen that kind of singular focus from someone before that is so rich, so powerful, and has so much influence. He’s positioned himself as a god, and considering that that’s exactly what Trump has done as well, it’s not a huge surprise to me that they have found such excellent partners in each other for this quest. But the commitment to the Get Out The Vote efforts, both online and off, is just going to be a force to be reckoned with and I’m not sure the Democrats are ready.

Vittoria Elliott: And not necessarily even a god, he’s Tony Stark. He’s a Marvel hero.

Leah Feiger: He’s a Marvel hero.

Vittoria Elliott: And that is, I think he’s benefiting from 10 to 15 years of great press coverage, and this is what he’s doing with it.

Leah Feiger: We’re going to see what happens. But for now, going to take a break, and when we’re back it’s time for Conspiracy of the Week. Welcome back to WIRED Politics Lab. I’m excited to get back to my favorite part of the show, Conspiracy of the Week, where our lovely guests bring their favorite conspiracies they’ve come across recently, and I pick my favorite. Tori, David, I got to tell you, because we didn’t do Conspiracy of the Week last week due to the vice presidential debate, I had a number of people at my Air of Rosh Hashanah dinner very upset that we had missed it. Do we have some good conspiracies for them to make up for our failings?

David Gilbert: Oh, we sure do.

Vittoria Elliott: I have a non politics conspiracy, so everyone can have a little palate cleanser.

Leah Feiger: Excellent. Tori, take it away.

Vittoria Elliott: Yeah, so this is an old one, but it’s one that I just discovered which means it is news. I, like The New York Times, can be the only breaker of news, and this conspiracy is that Beyonce and Solange Knowles are not actually sisters. That Beyonce is actually secretly Solange’s mother, and that she had Solange when she was a teenager but then there was a scramble to cover it up. And this has been a thing apparently in the R&B music conspiracy world for a long time, and it was kicked off by a couple of different things. But one was that the actress Gabrielle Union, who was in a bunch of movies, but in my favorite movie 10 Things I Hate About You—

Leah Feiger: Oh, I was going to say, I think her best role was actually Bring It On.

Vittoria Elliott: Oh, agree. I also love Bring It On, but I love 10 Things I Hate About You better. But she has said in 2008 that she and Beyonce were teenagers together, and Gabrielle Union was born in 1972 and Beyonce was born in 1981. So, that kicked off this firestorm of like-

Leah Feiger: Oh my goodness.

Vittoria Elliott: …”What do you mean? You’re 10 years older than her, how are you the same age?” And obviously—

Leah Feiger: Figure of speech. They were coming up in the industry at the same time.

Vittoria Elliott: Right, but that has not stopped the internet for literally over a decade perpetuating this conspiracy that Beyonce is actually secretly much older than she says and that Solange is her daughter from when she was a teenager.

Leah Feiger: That is so ridiculous, but I will absolutely Google this after we finish recording.

Vittoria Elliott: You are welcome.

Leah Feiger: Thanks, Tor. David, how about you?

David Gilbert: I just feel I have to do a hurricane conspiracy.

Leah Feiger: You have to.

David Gilbert: Because it’s just been dominating my feeds for the last couple of weeks now, but especially in the last couple of days. I suppose, just in case you haven’t seen anything, the idea being pushed at the moment by congresspeople and far-right influencers and everything is that the Hurricane Milton has been orchestrated by the government and is being controlled by them and to target people in Florida. So, that’s the idea. It stems from the idea that chemtrails have been used to create weather back in the day. This has a long, long history, this conspiracy.

Leah Feiger: It’s so wild. It’s not just about targeting people in Florida, right? It’s about specifically targeting Republicans.

David Gilbert: Well, it depends on which conspiracy track you’ve gone down.

Leah Feiger: Which pill did we take today, Neo?

David Gilbert: Exactly. So, some people believe that it’s targeting Republicans, some people believe it’s linked to the idea that it’ll affect the election outcome, some people believe that it’s a cover for bringing in the immigrants that will actually affect the election while the hurricane is happening.

Leah Feiger: Unreal.

David Gilbert: But my favorite one I think is the fact that this is just part of the New World’s Order depopulation efforts. So, people are just absolutely losing their minds on this, and it’s absolutely everywhere. It’s not confined to US conspiracy groups; it’s everywhere. And my Irish conspiracy groups that I’m in, everyone is talking about it. So, it’s a conspiracy that’s gone everywhere really quickly—

Leah Feiger: Life of its own.

David Gilbert: … and it’s really disturbing. Yeah.

Leah Feiger: For all of our lovely listeners, we actually have an article about this on WIRED.com right now. We’re going to list it in the show notes for you, but these hurricane conspiracies have really taken on a life of their own, and our thoughts are with everyone that’s going to be affected this week and have been affected already. David, just on account of the fact that it made me so sad, I think that I’m going to have to pick Tori’s conspiracy this week.

David Gilbert: That’s fair.

Vittoria Elliott: Wow. We’ve really turned a corner here.

Leah Feiger: Tori, congratulations. This is a good one, I know you’ve been looking for a win for a while now.

Vittoria Elliott: Thank you, yeah.

Leah Feiger: Anyone you’d like to thank on this journey?

Vittoria Elliott: No, just me.

Leah Feiger: Just me. Thank you both so much for joining us this week.

David Gilbert: Yeah, it’s been great.

Vittoria Elliott: Thanks for having us, Leah.

Leah Feiger: Thanks for listening to WIRED Politics Lab. If you like what you heard today, make sure to follow the show and give us five stars. We also have a newsletter, which MaKena Kelly writes each week. The link to the newsletter and the WIRED reporting we mention today are in the show notes. If you’d like to get in touch with us with any questions, comments, or show suggestions, please, please write to [email protected]. That’s [email protected]. We’re so excited to hear from you. WIRED Politics Lab is produced by Jake Harper, Pran Bandi is our studio engineer, Amar Lal mixed this episode, Steven Valentino is our executive producer, Chris Bannon is global head of audio at Conde Nast, and I’m your host, Leah Feiger. We’ll be back in your feeds with a new episode next week.