On Saturday, October 5, former president Donald Trump returned to Butler, Pennsylvania, for a rally less than three months after the assassination attempt on his life at the same location. This time, Trump appeared onstage with billionaire and X owner Elon Musk.
Trump’s supporters loved it.
A day before the campaign event, Musk posted on X that he would be in attendance. The excitement about his presence was palpable: On the road leading to the rally location, an electronic billboard flashed an image of Musk’s face and a rocket ship with text reading “In Musk we trust!” On a side road, where hundreds of attendees parked their cars, a Tesla cybertruck sported two Trump flags on the back.
As Musk took the stage, he was greeted with cheers. Thousands of people took out their phones to film him. Musk called on Trump’s supporters to register to vote, saying, “Get everyone you know, and everyone you don’t know. Drag them to register to vote.”
“If they don’t, this will be the last election,” he added ominously. “That’s my prediction.”
And Trump supporters in Butler who spoke to WIRED said that, although they’d been planning to attend the rally regardless of Musk’s presence, they were excited to have him in the MAGA fold. Some had even come from out of town to attend the event.
“That definitely did sweeten the deal,” says Sherry O’Donnell, a Trump supporter who attended the Butler rally.
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“I was excited because I really like Elon Musk, and we love what he's doing with the space program,” Brian Yanoviak, who drove from eastern Pennsylvania to attend the rally, told WIRED. Yanoviak was a delegate to the Republican National Convention. “He's very intelligent, very innovative. He understands what's happening to the United States. And he truly cares about the future of our country. Very similar to Trump, very similar to Tucker Carlson, very similar to RFK Jr. … It's truly a movement, and it's a movement to make America great again, because if we don't, we're going to lose our republic.”
Musk’s appearance at the rally was part of a larger get-out-the-vote effort from the billionaire and X owner. Over the past few months, Musk has gone all in for the Trump campaign and Republican candidates all over the country, spending millions of dollars. Musk has also used his personal X account to get out the vote, posting voter registration links in swing states to his 200 million followers.
Many of the rally attendees WIRED spoke to saw Musk’s ownership of X as a boon.
Rob Gray, who also attended the Butler rally, says that he mostly posts on Facebook but does keep up with news on X. “They say, ‘Oh, Trump’s a threat to democracy.’ What’s a bigger threat to democracy than the censorship that is just so rampant in all social media?” says Gray. “I'm just totally grateful he bought Twitter, turned it into X, and people can actually have the freedom to talk to each other now."
Musk has styled himself as a “free speech absolutist.” Within weeks of taking over Twitter in 2022, he fired the vast majority of the company’s trust and safety staff, the people who keep hate speech and disinformation off the platform. He also reinstated the accounts of people who had previously been banned for violating the platform’s policies, such as conspiracist Alex Jones and neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes. Research following Musk’s takeover found that hate speech increased on the platform under Musk. Musk himself has used the platform to boost lies and conspiracies.
At the rally, Musk repeated the baseless claim that Democrats would bring in immigrants to swell the ranks of their voters. “This election is the most important election of our lifetime,” he said. “This is no ordinary election.”
Musk has not always been a fan of Trump. During the 2016 election he voiced his support for Hillary Clinton, and in 2011, Musk donated $40,000 to Obama’s reelection campaign. But in recent years, his views have become increasingly right-leaning, as have his political donations. In the hours after the first assassination attempt against Trump, Musk posted on X that he fully endorsed Trump and would be setting up a PAC to back his campaign with $45 million a month in funding. (He later backtracked on the specific amount of funding.) In an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson released days after his appearance in Butler, Musk said he was “all in” on his support for Trump.
Musk is doing more than just promoting Trump and parroting right-wing conspiracies. Earlier this week, Musk said his America PAC would pay $47 referral bonuses to anyone who referred a swing state voter who was willing to sign a pledge supporting the First and Second Amendments. (At the Butler rally, Musk’s declaration that the “Second Amendment is the reason we have the First Amendment” received cheers from the crowd.) The PAC has funded an ad blitz across swing states to collect voter data to power its ground game; it has also plowed $8.2 million into Republican congressional races and offered $30 an hour to those willing to work on “increasing voter turnout.”
This comes at a time when Republican strategists have raised concerns about the Trump campaign’s lack of ground game, which appears to have been largely left to outside groups like Musk’s America PAC.
A former Twitter employee, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, told WIRED that they’re worried Musk’s open support for one candidate or party could have ramifications within the company when it comes to whether or not the platform chooses to enforce its policies. In 2021, after the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol, Twitter banned Trump’s account for inciting violence and also took down other accounts that repeated similar claims. The former employee says those kinds of decisions would likely be harder to make now with Musk in charge of the platform.
“Often the most controversial issues get escalated to the very top of the company,” they say. “If the CEO is weighing in, and if there's partiality, it'll affect the ultimate decision both for the candidate themselves and also for their followers.”
And the former employee says it’s likely that if employees know their CEO’s political alignment, they might self-censor, deciding not to bring up issues with accounts or content supportive of Trump. “It just creates a culture of silence within an organization, because it also changes the internal norms and the ability for people to speak candidly if they feel that their views are not accepted,” they say.
That fear is not unfounded; after taking over Twitter, Musk fired several employees who disagreed with him.
After his speech, Trump thanked Musk for appearing, and the crowd chanted his name. Shortly after, Musk logged back in to X and immediately shared election fraud conspiracies. In a post shared just after leaving the stage, he wrote, “If @realDonaldTrump doesn’t win, the ‘Democratic’ Party will legalize so many illegals that there will be no swing states!”
