Is Elon Musk Weaponizing X to Help Trump Win?

Elon Musk may have denied reports that he would donate $45 million a month to Donald Trump’s campaign, but his social media platform appears to be helping the Republican presidential nominee in more covert ways.

Two deepfakes of Vice President Kamala Harris racked up hundreds of thousands of views on X (formerly Twitter) over the weekend, despite the fact that they appear to violate the website’s own terms of service.

One video, which altered footage of Harris and President Joe Biden on Friday during a historic prisoner swap with Russia, falsely depicted the Democratic presidential nominee as fumbling over her words and repeating the same phrases. Trump then shared the phony video on his account on his own social media platform, Truth Social, on Saturday with a caption claiming that Harris is “really DUMB” and “unable to speak properly without a teleprompter.”

“She has an extremely Low IQ, and our Country does not need someone who is unable to put two sentences together,” Trump wrote. “She can’t, and besides, we just got finished with that—His name is Sleepy Joe Biden!”

That clip was then recirculated by an account on X, which copies and pastes Trump’s Truth Social posts verbatim, garnering the attention of hundreds of thousands of viewers before X marked the content as manipulated media.

Trump continued to elevate that lie during a rally in Atlanta that evening, insisting that Harris had a “low IQ” and was like “Bernie Sanders but not as smart.”

Another deepfake of Harris gained momentum after Musk himself shared a doctored audio recording of Harris on July 27 in which she appears to say she’s “the ultimate diversity hire” and accuses anyone of not voting for her as “sexist” and “racist.”

“This is amazing,” Musk wrote alongside a laughing emoji, disseminating the fake audio to his 192 million followers with zero additional context.

That clip has since been viewed by more than 132 million X users, and has not yet been tagged as manipulated media, despite the original poster’s comment that the clip is a parody.

Elsewhere on X, the platform’s A.I. chatbot Grok has been spreading false claims about Harris. Grok stated that Harris had missed the ballot deadline in nine states, which is untrue. But that didn’t stop millions of people from sharing the claim. Five secretaries of state sent Musk a letter on Monday calling on him to “immediately implement changes” to stop Grok from sharing disinformation.