BURSTA campaign aide to Vice President Harris accused tech billionaire Elon Musk of throttling content on X ahead of the 2024 election, when Harris lost to president-elect Trump.
Harris’s deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty, in an interview with Semafor, argued that Musk purchasing X, formerly known as Twitter, was “a problem” for Democrats in this election.
“Its importance was twofold. One, it was where you reach elites and high-information people. But two, it was also the kind of place where politics could sort of careen into culture. And so it was a really important central node, even if it wasn’t the farthest-reaching platform,” Flaherty said.
He added, “Having that node be fundamentally controlled by, effectively, an arm of the Trump campaign was not good. Really a problem. And so Elon obviously sort of achieved his ends there. It was obvious that center-left and left content was being throttled compared to right content.”
Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX executive, supported Trump through his influence, as well as by spending at least $250 million throughout the election cycle. He donated nearly $239 million, including in-kind contributions, to America PAC, his super PAC that backed Trump’s Oval Office bid, according to FEC reports filed earlier this month.
Musk, along with entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, has since been put in charge of his administration’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) and tasked with tackling government waste.
He has also been a part of Trump’s inner circle in recent months, most recently sitting with the president-elect at the Army-Navy game on Saturday.