Elon Musk Is the Midterms’ Biggest Disinformation Risk

Over the weekend, a poorly constructed and very obviously fake claim about Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico sprang up on X only to almost instantly fall apart. The claim was that Talarico had been absent from the campaign trail not because he had the flu, as he and his campaign have said, but because he was secretly flown to Ohio on a private plane and committed to a mental hospital there.

One of the most prominent people involved in spreading the story on X was none other than the site’s owner, Elon Musk. With the midterm elections just weeks away, Musk is pouring money into GOP Senate candidates’ coffers and involving himself in the spread of literal fake news about a Democratic candidate, at a time when basically every true trust and safety guardrail has long been erased from his site. Given that he and his companies stand to profit handsomely from a Republican victory, the pattern is clear: The biggest election disinformation risk in the next few weeks is Elon Musk. 

The Talarico story, as journalists Will Sommer and Andrew Egger have written at The Bulwark, centers on accusations that the candidate had suspiciously disappeared from the campaign trail. Talarico himself said repeatedly that he had the flu, and appeared remotely at an event on September 30, citing his illness. But on Sunday, MAGA influencers Nick Sortor and Rhein Amacher began hinting that they had bombshell news about exactly where Talarico had been. Sortor gave Talarico a 1 PM deadline to “reveal” the truth before he said they’d break it themselves, adding in a tweet to a follower: “I’m genuinely trying to give them a chance to respond, but some high profile folks we’ve informed are ridiculously excited.”  

One of those “high profile folks” appears to have been Musk. At the appointed time, Sortor and Amacher released a 55-second audio clip on X of a purported call between Amacher and the Lindner Center of Hope, a mental health treatment center in Mason, Ohio. In the call, an unidentified employee is asked about Talarico and appears to say that there is no one by that name in the hospital’s records, but then, in response to further questions, says Talarico had been released on Saturday night. 

This timeline didn’t add up, given that Talarico had been seen campaigning in Texas on Friday and Saturday. Amacher soon tried to explain these appearances away by tweeting that it “is not uncommon in the healthcare industry for a patient to be physically discharged from a facility before all administrative discharge documentation has been finalized.”

Nonetheless, Musk responded to Sortor’s tweet breaking the “news,” tweeting, “The Talarico campaign is hiding something big that voters ought to know about.” A few minutes later he responsed to a tweet from presidential special envoy Richard Grenell that shared the story, adding that “The Talarico campaign is not being honest about what’s happening.” 

The Lindner Center released a brief statement Sunday evening that Talarico had “never received treatment” at their facility, and Talarico re-shared it, adding, “I’ve never even been to Ohio,” along with a laughing emoji.

The Lindner Center’s clear denial took the air out of the story immediately, but no one involved—especially not Musk—admitted that they might have made a mistake. Instead, Musk began tweeting clips of Talarico speaking critically about capitalism, which the trillionaire called “troubling.” In other words, in the absence of an actual scandal, Musk resorted to fearmongering.

He stayed in the spotlight on Monday, as the The New York Times reported that Musk has become the midterms’ biggest donor, pouring $276 million into what the paper termed a “rescue mission” to keep Republicans in office and in control of Congress.

The midterms’ largest donor, then, is also a person who controls an enormous information source, one that he frequently uses to amplify politically motivated lies and fake news—including tweeting about the possibility of “large-scale fraud” in elections. Musk’s company SpaceX currently holds several lucrative federal contracts with the Defense Department, which could be probed if Democrats retake Congress. And House Republicans have repeatedly blocked efforts to subpoena Musk amid an ongoing Democrat-led inquiry into his conduct while working as a part of DOGE. With a Democratic majority, that subpoena could move ahead. 

Besides Musk’s personal behavior and business interests, his threat as a disinformation vector is also due to how he’s changed X since acquiring the platform. Under his watch, X decimated its teams of internal moderators and engineers working on trust and safety. A group of academic researchers wrote in a 2024 paper that they’d found an increase in hate speech on the platform and no decrease in inauthentic activity, contrary to Musk’s pledge to root out “spam bots” when taking it over. If anything, the researchers wrote, there was a “potential increase” in “the activity of inauthentic accounts.”

As it comes to the midterms, recently a network of X accounts tied to a Russian disinformation operation produced a blizzard of fake videos and news articles, each one offering a false and lurid piece of fake information about a Democrat. (One might argue that the disinformation was just slightly too outrageous to even work; one claimed that a candidate had murdered several sex workers; another claimed that a different candidate had sold crack to college students, resulting in their deaths.) Some of the videos purported to be from CNN, others from Mother Jones. The fake videos purporting to be from this new organization weren’t removed until our lawyer contacted X.