Elon Musk Gets in One Last Face Plant Before Voters Go to the Polls

Fresh off his victory in the courtroom yesterday, tech billionaire turned political operative Elon Musk logged on to X and posted a QAnon video.

The sixty-second video has a fash-wave aesthetic, an art style popular with the online far-right that mixes fascist memes with a retro scanline-infused style. In the video, clips of Donald Trump from the 1980s and today mix with military imagery and scenes of docile suburban American life.

At the 36-second mark, the word “Patriots” appears on the screen, fuzzes, and becomes “PATRIQTS.” The other letters fade away, leaving only Q. “We will drive out the globalists…we will cast out the communists,” Trump says in the fuzzy images while Van Halen’s Jump plays. This is an overt reference to the QAnon conspiracy. One popular part of the conspiracy theory is that Trump will one day say a magic code word that activates Trump’s loyal sleeper cells across the country who will arrest and execute his political enemies.

Musk got the video from the West Bestern account, a blue check X user who has spent the past few weeks stumping online for Trump and posting similar content. The account’s banner references both an anti-trans and antisemitic conspiracy theory. In January, the account shared a racist meme about Amazon delivery drivers and called the company AmaZog, another reference to an antisemitic conspiracy theory.

These are the kinds of people Musk is promoting on his platform on the final day of the election.

Musk’s X feed has been awash with pro-Trump messaging and rocket pics for days. Since the billionaire threw in with Trump during the Summer, he’s spent a lot of time and money boosting his preferred candidate on the website he owns. According to a study from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Musk’s posts have generated around 17 billion views since July. The study said that’s the equivalent of spending $24 million on ad campaigns. Musk paid $44 billion to buy Twitter.

The quality of those views remains to be seen. Not every eyeball is an endorsement and, for many of us still using X, there’s a sense that we are trapped on the site with Musk. Anyone who scrolls the For You tab will be algorithmically forced to see some dumb shit Musk has posted.

Currently, Musk’s feed largely consists of clips taken from his recent Joe Rogan appearance. Last night the popular podcast dropped a freshly recorded episode with Musk and officially endorsed Trump for president. Rogan posting the Musk video and giving his endorsement this close to November 5 is a little odd. More than 78 million Americans have already voted and though early voting is down overall, it’s way up in crucial swing states like North Carolina and Georgia. Tens of millions of people have already made their decision and are completely unreachable by a last-minute stunt like this.

Among the curated clips Musk chose to share were videos of him talking about P’Nut the squirrel, rants about immigrants and voter ID laws, and the claim that should Kamala Harris win, this would be the last election America ever conducted. Another popular fixation in these clips was misinformation, the lies of the mainstream media, and the power of X as a bastion of truth. That’s all pretty rich from a guy who reposted a video of an anonymous bluecheck spreading bullshit about a Zionist Occupied Government.

As election eve wore on, Musk was supposed to appear in a live town hall hosted on X as a final rally for Trump. It didn’t go well. Scheduled to start at 8 p.m. EST, the event started 20 minutes late. The moderator attempted to take questions from the audience, but they couldn’t be heard. “Well, I think if people vote, we’re definitely going to win,” Musk said on the call.

Then he called the whole thing off. “Let’s cancel this, since we seem to be having some technical issues.” Then he posted throughout the night.