Tech billionaire Elon Musk’s social media posts have gotten a ‘sudden boost’ since July, new research shows

On July 13, shortly after Donald Trump was targeted in an assassination attempt, Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X (formerly Twitter), tweeted to his more than 200 million followers:

I fully support President Trump and hope for his speedy recovery.

Musk’s efforts to influence who wins next week’s US presidential election have continued. Over the past three months, for example, he has donated more than $100 million to a political action committee called America PAC, which promotes Trump.

But our new research (currently available in preprint form) indicates that Musk can also exert influence in other, more subtle ways. However, the increasing opacity of the platform for researchers makes this difficult to say with certainty.

Shortly after Musk endorsed Trump’s presidential campaign, there was a statistically abnormal increase in engagement on his X account. Suddenly, his posts received many more views, retweets and likes compared to other prominent political accounts on the platform.

This raises suspicions about whether Musk has adjusted the platform’s algorithm to increase the reach of his posts ahead of the US presidential election. It also highlights the problems with the way social media platforms like X are currently regulated around the world.

Not the first time

Musk has a history of tweaking X’s algorithms so his own content reaches more people.

Last year, he reportedly mobilized a team of around 80 engineers to algorithmically strengthen his posts. This came after his tweet in support of the Philadelphia Eagles during the Super Bowl was surpassed by a similar tweet from President Joe Biden. Musk seemed to confirm that this was happening, posting a photo of a woman captioned “Elon’s Tweets” forcibly bottle-feeding another woman captioned “Twitter.”

To see if Musk has done this again in the run-up to the US election, we compared Musk’s engagement metrics – such as views, retweets and likes – with a range of other prominent political accounts on the social media platform. The data covers the period from January 1, 2024 to October 25, 2024.

Other political stories that served as a basis for comparison include those of right-wing commentators Jack Posobiec, Tucker Carlson, and Donald Trump Jr. Our research also examined stories from the other side of the political spectrum, including that of U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. , U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders and Vice President Kamala Harris.

A sudden and significant increase

Since July, engagement on Musk’s X account has increased suddenly and significantly.

The number of views for his posts has increased by 138%, retweets by 238% and likes by 186%.

In contrast, other prominent political accounts on

This suggests that while engagement rose for all accounts after July, Musk’s metrics saw a particularly large increase, especially in retweets and likes.

The study further found that other conservative and right-wing X accounts have performed better in terms of post visibility compared to progressive and left-wing accounts since July.

The call requested comment from X on the investigation, but did not receive a response before deadline.

Without backstage access to the company’s inner workings, it’s impossible to know for sure whether changes to the curation system will boost the owner’s posts. The platform has limited the access it offers to researchers since Musk took over. This means that there are limitations to the amount of data we could collect for this study.

However, the Washington Post recently found that tweets from Republicans are much more likely to go viral and receive billions more views than those from Democrats. Similarly, an investigation by the Wall Street Journal revealed that new users of the platform are “covered in political content” that disproportionately favors Trump.

Since Musk’s purchase of the platform, it has become more sympathetic to figures on the right, including people previously banned for spreading harmful and false information.

The myth of neutrality

The findings raise the question of the extent to which Musk’s influential social media platform amplifies its owner’s political agenda.

Musk, whose companies have extensive government contracts, has turned his unapologetic support of Trump into a public and financial spectacle. The billionaire tech mogul is reportedly Trump’s second-largest financial donor. He also promoted Trump in a glitchy live interview on X and wrote a stream of tweets promoting Trump’s campaign.

Musk also hands out $1 million a day to select registered voters. This plan (which has raised questions about its legality) is apparently intended to boost voter registration among sympathizers in swing states.

Musk’s actions have torpedoed the fantasy that social media platforms like X are neutral. Considering he previously tweaked

For too long, social media platforms have enjoyed immunity from the information they selectively inject into users’ feeds. It is time for governments to rethink their approach to regulating the oligopolistic power over our information environment wielded by a handful of technology billionaires.