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Elon Musk-Led Election Falsehoods Hang Over Vote as Tally Begins
Sophie Alexander, Annie Massa and Biz Carson
6 min read
(Bloomberg) -- An ultra-rich American pouring tens of millions of dollars into a presidential race is nothing new. Nor is lobbying for their business interests or vying for a position in the next administration.
But in what could prove to be a consequential shift, the world’s richest man has become one of the most prominent propagators of falsehoods, leading other billionaires and business executives in favor of their preferred candidate.
Elon Musk has used X, the social media platform he bought for $44 billion in 2022, to unleash misinformation about immigration and voter fraud and make claims that are deceptive and impossible to verify.
In the early hours of Tuesday morning, before Americans lined up at polling places, he continued to echo some of the same themes to his 203 million followers, responding “!” to a misleading video that claimed a nonprofit was encouraging undocumented immigrants in Pennsylvania to vote illegally.
Musk, who’s worth $263.8 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, has become Republican candidate Donald Trump’s most high-profile donor and supporter, campaigning alongside him and funding his ground game in swing states. He didn’t respond to a request for comment.
“I can’t think of anyone who has spent as much time with as big of a mic as Elon Musk, who has spent time talking about voter fraud,” said Justin Grimmer, a political science professor at Stanford University and an expert with the MIT Election Data and Science Lab. “They’re laying the groundwork for more people to be wrapped up in this vague sense that something is wrong even when there’s no hard evidence that there is.”
Grimmer, who has done research on voter fraud in the US, said while it does happen, it’s very rare and never enough to sway the results of an election. He also said there has never been any evidence of systemic voter fraud.
Musk also engages with influential, like-minded users including hedge-fund billionaire Bill Ackman and Sequoia Capital general partner Shaun Maguire — an investor in several of Musk’s companies — who hype pro-Trump posts to their own Wall Street and Silicon Valley audiences.
At times this content has been misleading, too.
After the presidential debate, Ackman and Maguire both expressed outrage over a “whistleblower affidavit” attributed to an unidentified ABC News employee that claimed the network shared questions with the Harris campaign in advance. No evidence emerged to back up the claims, which were shared from an anonymous X account. (The account, called “Black Insurrectionist,” could be traced to a white man in upstate New York who was repeatedly accused of defrauding business partners and lenders, the AP reported.)
Later, both men backed away from it: Ackman wrote that it seemed clear the story was “a fake” and Maguire wrote that it was likely “not credible.”
A spokesman for Ackman declined to comment. Maguire declined to comment.
“Trump has normalized lying. In no other environment, no other business environment, would you tolerate your senior person consistently lying and misusing data,” said former American Express CEO Ken Chenault in a pre-election briefing held by the Business & Democracy Initiative, a group that works on rebuilding trust in democratic institutions. “One of the things I think that’s critical for leaders is the quest for truth.”
Bloomberg News spent Election Day fact-checking prominent billionaires’ and business leaders’ social media posts. Here’s what we found:
The Post:
Early Tuesday morning, Musk responded “!” to a misleading video from far-right activist and journalist James O’Keefe that claimed a Philadelphia nonprofit was telling non-citizens they can vote with just an ITIN number, or an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number.
Fact Check:
It is illegal for non-citizens to vote and you can’t register to vote if you are not a citizen. Trey Hood III, a political science professor at the University of Georgia and member of the MIT Election Data and Science Lab, emphasized this, adding that in some states, they check voter rolls against databases of citizens.
On Pennsylvania’s voter registration application, it asks for the last four digits of your social security number, your driver’s license number or ID card number. There is nowhere on the voter registration application that asks for an ITIN or any taxpayer number.
It appears O’Keefe is misrepresenting the non-profit Ceiba’s ITIN program, which it runs to help people without social security numbers file taxes. In his video he shows a flier from Ceiba with information about ITINs, as if it’s evidence of his claims that they’re encouraging voter fraud. There is nothing on the sheet that says anything about voting. The video also includes partial audio clips that O’Keefe claims are evidence of the nonprofit workers encouraging voter fraud.
The nonprofit didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Post:
Musk wrote that “voting machines have terrible reliability” in response to a post about a software malfunction in the electronic voting system in Cambria County, Pennsylvania.
Fact Check:
Like all technology, voting machines sometimes have occasional hiccups, but hand-counting ballots has been found to be less accurate, according to 2018 research from Charles Stewart III, the founding director of MIT’s Election Data and Science Lab. There are several checks voting machines go through to make sure they are working properly, including audits from election officials, who keep a “ballot chain of custody.”
A Pennsylvania court order extended voting hours in Cambria County until 10 p.m. after the software glitch.
The Post:
Musk posted that men are coming out to vote in record numbers, which he has said would be a good sign for Trump.
Fact Check:
Exit polls with information on who is showing up to vote weren’t available when Musk posted this, so was impossible to say yet whether more men are voting this election. Data on early voters showed that far more women showed up than men.
The Post:
Musk and other tech allies amplified a rumor several times on Tuesday afternoon that Google showed a “Where to vote” panel with a map for users entering the query, “Where can I vote for Harris,” while noting there wasn’t a similar panel that appeared when people asked about Trump.
Fact Check:
In response, Google swiftly quashed the rumor, saying it was triggering for some specific searches because Harris is also a name of a county in Texas. Musk thanked Google for the clarification, and in a live conversation on X later, acknowledged “it was less nefarious than it seemed.”
