Elon Musk elevated a false conspiracy theory about Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico over the weekend, lifting a fringe claim concerning the Texan's mental health to the forefront of users' X feeds, where it garnered hundreds of thousands of impressions.
"The Talarico campaign is hiding something big that voters ought to know about," Musk wrote Sunday afternoon, replying to a post alleging that Talarico had been checked into the Lindner Center of Hope, a mental health facility in suburban Cincinnati. Musk's reply amassed over 870,000 views, more than double the impression count of the post to which he was responding.
The theory had been circulating online for days, fueled by Talarico's absence from the campaign trail, which his team has consistently said was due to the flu. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton promoted a "Tala-Freak-Out Tip Line" on Friday, which was still active as of Monday night. President Donald Trump weighed in, arguing the Democrat's convalescence was too long to be the "flu bug."
Musk's engagement with the theory gave it a much wider audience - and the flurry of attention ultimately prompted the treatment center in Mason, Ohio, to publicly refute the allegations.
"Rep. James Talarico has never received treatment from Lindner Center of Hope," the facility wrote in a statement posted to X, five hours after Musk's initial posts on the subject. Talarico replied to the post Monday, saying he had "never even been to Ohio," with a laughing emoji.
A day earlier, he described the conspiracy theory as "the craziest thing I've ever heard" in an interview with MS NOW. Talarico's spokesperson, JT Ennis, said the claims were a "lie designed to promote a pathetic conspiracy theory."
The episode demonstrates a key way that Musk is wielding political power in the midterms. He has retreated from the political spotlight after his public feud with Trump in 2025. He has taken a lower-profile approach to political spending this election cycle. He has used his formidable war chest to quietly back efforts to elect Republicans to office. The New York Times reported on Monday his midterm spending has swelled to at least $276 million since the beginning of July, making him the Republicans' top individual donor.
But on X, the social media platform he bought in 2022 and later folded into SpaceX, Musk continues to be outspoken about candidates and political issues - and his enormous audience acts as an influence machine, propelling a fringe claim into the political conversation with a single post.
"You have someone … who is in bed with the political party, or an agenda, and is spreading falsehoods about an opponent who is gaining a tremendous amount of traction," said Danielle Citron, a University of Virginia law professor who has spent more than a decade researching and writing about online abuse and has advised campaigns on the subject. "It is like a thumb on the scale that we haven't really ever seen."
Talarico's campaign, the Lindner Center of Hope, and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
The theory surrounding Talarico originated in far-right circles, spreading further when right-wing influencer Nick Sortor posted an audio clip. The clip, which he claimed was a clinic employee stating that Talarico had recently been discharged, received 7.3 million views according to X. Sortor called for the Texas Democrat to quit the race.
Talarico's campaign said the candidate had been recovering from the flu, leading to a nine-day absence from the campaign trail. He appeared at an Austin music festival on Friday, even though the call that Sortor posted was recorded on Saturday night, according to phone logs posted by the caller.
The conspiracy theories drove mentions of Talarico among key right-wing figures - including politicians and influencers - to their highest rate on record, a Washington Post analysis found.
Until last week, Musk had posted relatively infrequently on Talarico - just twice in the past year. Since Wednesday, however, Musk has posted about Talarico at least a dozen times.
One of Musk's posts Sunday, a repost to his more than 240 million followers, put the onus on Talarico to clear the record: "If this was not true, Talarico's campaign would immediately authorize the release of the records to clear him."
While Sortor's audio clip led discussion to peak between 1 and 2 p.m. on Sunday, Musk weighed in as the matter was driving a significant level of conversation in right-wing circles - and it continued to hold traction for about eight hours afterward.
Jared Holt, a senior researcher at Open Measures, a platform that measures the spread of online extremism and disinformation, said Musk's elevation helped claims like Sortor's proliferate.
"His engagement with posts promoting the claims did boost them to wider audiences than they may have reached otherwise and likely served to legitimize them in the eyes of ideologically aligned users," Holt said in an email.
This kind of public attention can prove dangerous for ordinary figures suddenly lifted to the center of public fascination, he added. "The ecosystem where these claims spread has regularly elicited threats to schools, medical facilities, election offices, courts, and private businesses," Holt said.
Since buying the site formerly known as Twitter in 2022, Musk has regularly injected high-profile misinformation into users' feeds.
Late last year, Musk elevated allegations that members of the Somali-American community were involved in widespread fraud. Some rogue X users followed the posts from participants in the fraud claims to real life locations. Musk has also spread baseless theories about a volunteer in a Thai cave rescue, California wildfires and other topics.
In 2022, shortly after acquiring Twitter, Musk elevated a conspiracy theory about Paul Pelosi, the husband of former Democratic House speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was badly injured in an attack at the family's San Francisco home after a hammer-wielding intruder broke in and struck him in the head repeatedly.
The rapid spread of online theories can place political campaigns in a tricky situation. Zac Petkanas was Hillary Clinton's rapid response director during 2016 campaign, when online conspiracy theories alleged Clinton was secretly seriously ill and had to employ a body double to replace her on the campaign trail.
"The way that it mattered [to Clinton's campaign] was not that people believed Pizzagate or other conspiracy theories; it's that it contributed to a narrative that she was potentially untrustworthy," Petkanas said. "It was sort of a death by 1,000 paper cuts, and that was partly because people were really having to judge information coming off of the internet and realizing the scale at which misinformation could be weaponized. It's 10 years later. People are much more inured to that."
Citron, the University of Virginia law professor, said actors take advantage of the short windows between campaigns and elections to spread falsehoods because they are unlikely to face consequences. If a claim is defamatory, for example, she said, the matter can take too long to resolve in the courts to have an impact on the race.
"Given we're within 30 days of an election, I think your lawsuit is not doing anything for you," she said. "They know they're in that chokepoint where you can tip an election. … It's timed just right."
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Right-wing attention on Talarico spiked on Sunday
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This article originally appeared on Washington Post at https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/elon-musk-megaphone-propels-conspiracy-121709511.html