Will Elon Musk Be the October Surprise?

A version of the below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

As I’ve noted in previous issues, I’m now co-hosting a pop-up video podcast on the midterms called Stress Test with award-winning video producer Garrison Hayes. (You can catch the latest episode here.) The name refers to the challenge American democracy is currently facing. With an authoritarian demagogue in the White House, can the United States conduct free and fair elections that produce results that will be widely respected? Can the US political system reject the Donald Trump virus that undermines the rule of law and threatens the constitutional republic? Will it survive the stress placed upon it by a president who tried to overturn a previous election and who has already begun to subvert this one with false accusations of fraud?

In each episode, Garrison and I ask our guests what’s stressing them out about the midterms. My answer, as of today, is the possibility of a last-minute intervention of big money and disinformation, yielding an October surprise that influences one or more of the House and Senate races determining which party ends up controlling Congress. And standing at the intersection of obscenely huge campaign donations and potentially harmful false narratives is a jerk named Elon Musk.

Last week, there was much coverage of the news that Musk has injected $366 million into the midterm elections to aid Trump and the Republicans. (It appears likely his total tab will exceed half a billion dollars.) Much of this money has gone to bolster GOP Senate candidates, particularly the corruption-scarred Ken Paxton in Texas. As pundits and political chatterers pondered the impact of Musk’s millions, my colleague Anna Merlan wisely observed that Musk posed another threat and tagged him the “biggest election disinformation risk.”

She characterized Musk this way after he played a crucial role in spreading the false claim—cooked up by MAGA influencers—that James Talarico, the Democratic Senate candidate in Texas, had been absent from the campaign trail because he had checked himself into a mental health hospital in Ohio. The story was 100 percent bullshit. Talarico, according to his campaign, had contracted a nasty bout of the flu, and, after nine or so days out of sight, he was back in public view at the time these MAGA doofuses were asserting he had been in the Ohio facility (which eventually denied Talarico had ever been treated there). Yet the phony tale caught fire and zipped across the internet, largely due to its amplification on the Musk-owned X.

Here’s a fascinating visual depiction of how this crap flew across X:

Musk, as Merlan points out, was a key amplifier of this fraud. He tweeted to his 241.5 million followers—an audience about 100 times the size of Fox News—that the “Talarico campaign is hiding something big that voters ought to know about.” In another post, he maintained, “The Talarico campaign is not being honest about what’s happening.” When the story fell apart, he did not acknowledge he had been wrong. Nor did the MAGA influencers and other right-wingers who had peddled this phony story.

This idiotic assault on Talarico is not likely to lessen his chances of becoming the first Democrat to win a statewide race in Texas in 32 years. But it illustrates a standard play: Start an unfounded and scurrilous rumor about a candidate and use Musk’s platform—perhaps Musk himself—to spread it quickly. If done closer to Election Day, there might not be sufficient time for a candidate to beat back the false accusation. And super-PACs with plenty of cash—from Musk or others (including other Big Tech plutocrats in the AI and crypto fields who are pouring gobs of money into this election)—can do the same: Drop negative ads boosting false allegations in the final week of the campaign. It’s even possible these days for billionaires to use corporate cutouts to finance attack ads anonymously.

With so much at stake—Musk himself has billions of dollars in government contracts he wants to protect or land—it would be surprising if the final days of this campaign were free of disinformation skullduggery and campaign-cash chicanery. (The Russians, too, have started meddling in this election to help the GOP. See the next item.)

The South Africa–born Musk holds an unprecedented position in American politics. With his donations this year, he has made the largest known personal financial contribution to an election, and he controls a social media platform through which political news and disinformation flow, reaching millions of voters—and he himself generates some of that disinformation.

Naturally, Musk warrants continuous scrutiny—especially since he’s a dishonest fellow who’s been promoting the most ludicrous allegations and conspiracy theories for years. During the 2024 campaign, he repeatedly posted the false claim that large numbers of noncitizens were voting, even going so far as to declare that Democrats were flying asylum seekers into swing states and fast-tracking them for citizenship so they could vote. His false or misleading allegations about that election racked up 1.2 billion views on X. He received 134 million views when he reposted an AI-manipulated deepfake video of Kamala Harris supposedly making offensive remarks.

Musk’s conspiracism has extended far beyond election disinformation. He claimed that DEI was the cause of errors in the Los Angeles Fire Department’s response to wildfires and that “white genocide” was underway in South Africa. (Neither allegation was true.) He amplified the fake story that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets. He’s resorted to antisemitic tropes to attack George Soros. He falsely charged that millions of dead people were collecting Social Security. (This genius misread the data.) He boosted Russian disinformation that claimed USAID was paying Hollywood celebrities millions of dollars to visit Ukraine, and he put up posts saying USAID funded bioweapons research that included Covid-19. He seconded a meme that proclaimed Pizzagate was “real.” Earlier this year, he amplified a post that said that during the 2020 election, “Pennsylvania sent out 1,823,148 mail-in ballots but received back around 2.5 MILLION mail-in ballots.” This charge—long a mainstay of Trump’s election deniers—has been repeatedly debunked.

That’s a mere sampling. Musk is a nutter. He recently endorsed a social media post that said only men with high testosterone and people with autism should be allowed to engage in governmental “decision making”—sorry, all you gals—and he has shared assorted racist sentiments.

Yet when you’re a trillionaire, your racism, misogyny, antisemitism, ignorance, and conspiracism don’t matter. Republicans have tried to make a scandal of far-left influencer Hasan Piker’s campaigning with Abdul El-Sayed, the Michigan Democratic Senate candidate, during the primary contest. Yet Musk’s direct aid to a wide range of GOP candidates has not sparked as much of a hullabaloo. Only certain associations seem to be worthy of outrage.

Musk’s influence in the midterms is unparalleled. There’s a lot that could happen in the waning days of this election. Trump, no doubt, is contemplating actions that could cause chaos or spark a crisis. MAGA activists have been urging him to declare martial law—though that would not technically permit him to seize ballots or block elections. Such extreme options aside, an October surprise is more likely to involve disinformation and money. So in the coming weeks, keep your eye on Musk. And in the long run, Americans are going to have to figure out how to keep a schmuck like this from having so much sway in US politics.