Itwo years ago, in October 2022, Elon Musk acquired Twitter, for the astronomical sum of $44 billion [la même somme en euros à l’époque]. According to many analysts, the operation is a bitter disaster for him as for his investors: the number of users of the social network has fallen, according to some estimates, by 33%, and its valuation by 75%.
But far from ruining his image as a business and technology visionary, Twitter has catapulted Elon Musk's notoriety to dizzying levels. Throughout the American presidential campaign, he emerged as an extraordinary figure, both adored and reviled, at the crossroads of the worlds of technology and politics. The man who precipitated the birth of the electric car market has become the king of disinformation and conspiracy theories which present him as a victim (of your choice) of the government, of wokism, of migrants.
The polarizing role he takes on and his decision to make Twitter, which he renamed X, a far-right propaganda platform may seem unprecedented. In reality, its rise is only one particularly visible element of a broader phenomenon, which began decades ago: the Internet favors conservatives, adept at using its platforms to spread their messages ever closer to the far right .
Heroes of the right
The fact is that when the right exploits the Internet for political purposes, it does so much better than the left – an asymmetry at the heart of my research for almost fifteen years. While it's tempting to view an Elon Musk or a Donald Trump as the instigators of this burgeoning far-right movement, in truth, they are merely its inevitable products, propelled forward by a conservative digital media ecosystem whose roots extend far and go deep.
Musk's rise to become the planet's most prominent oligarch reveals important aspects of how these dynamics are reshaping our world. The messages he endorses and disseminates have a strong resonance not because they are original, but because they amplify ideas that today define not only the far right, but also the modern Republican Party.
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It was certainly not Musk who invented the far-right digital ecosystem. Still, it is interesting to try to understand how he became aware of the power of this ecosystem and how he uses it for his own purposes. Musk's support for the far right may seem like an anomaly. The man has long voted Democratic, as he himself admits, and many of his companies – including Tesla and SpaceX – have benefited from government contracts and subsidies.
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