53-year-old tech billionaire Elon Musk is the world’s richest man with a net worth of $462.9 billion as of December 17th, 2024. As the owner of multiple billion-dollar tech companies, he has become one of the most influential members of the tech industry… but also one of the most influential in politics?

On October 27th, 2022, Musk would purchase the social media platform Twitter for $44 billion. Founded in 2006, Twitter has been one of the most used social media platforms since the rise of social media, with over 600 million monthly active users across the world. 

Since the acquisition of the platform, Musk has made many changes (that are controversial to say the least), such as adding a paid subscription that gives users a “verified” checkmark and monetization features, loosening up the moderation of tweets, and most notably changing the platform’s name to X. 

While Musk would claim the purchase was him wanting to “help humanity” and to create a place where all political beliefs are free to be expressed, there may be specific voices being amplified on the platform.

Since the tech billionaire acquired the platform, Republican politicians have seen a huge increase in engagement through followers and viral tweets. While Republicans won the presidency, Senate, House, and majority of governor elections, the presence of Republicans in the algorithm may not be purely due to the opinions of the American people.

Elon Musk previously stated he was a very strong Democrat and saying “I might not have ever voted for a Republican”, in 2022 he said he would be voting Republican in the 2024 election, and he has become increasingly more public about his preference towards right-wing politics.

Statistics show that Democrats’ tweets got far less engagement during this election. The White House’s Twitter account went from averaging 209.1 thousand views per tweet in July of 2023 to 105.5 thousand in Oct. of 2024. From July of 2023 to Oct. of 2024, The Washington Post found that when looking at the 50 most active congressional accounts from each party, Republicans had 53 tweets reach over 20 million views while Democrats had just 17. Republicans also have seen growth in followers, while all candidates who lost followers in the Washington Post’s study were Democratic candidates. 

There is nothing wrong with having platforms that promote your ideologies, no matter if you are a Democrat, Republican, or even a third party. That’s the power of technology, you can push your message and exercise your freedoms. However, when your ideals affect the flow of information and influence others without telling them, X becomes less of a platform and more of a political tool used to push narratives and agendas.