Musk ramps u posts against Biden on social platform X

His posts on US election signal willingness to tip political scales as owner of a social media firm

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WASHINGTON - In April 2024, Tesla chief executive Elon Musk posted on the social platform X that US President Joe Biden "obviously barely knows what's going on".

"He is just a tragic front for a far left political machine," Mr Musk wrote. It was the 29th time in 2024 that he had posted about the US President on X, which Mr Musk bought in 2022.

Mr Musk has steadily ramped up his criticism of Mr Biden as the campaign season heats up before the November US presidential election. Mr Musk has posted about Mr Biden on X at least seven times a month since January, attacking him over everything from his age to his policies on immigration and health.

Before that, he posted about Mr Biden twice in December and not at all in November, according to a New York Times analysis. In all, Mr Musk had posted nearly 40 times about Mr Biden in 2024, compared with about 30 times for all of 2023.

In contrast, Mr Musk had posted more than 20 times on X this year about former US president Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee. In those posts, Mr Musk defended Trump, arguing that he is a victim of media and prosecutorial bias in the criminal cases he faces.

Mr Musk's posts about the 2024 US presidential race stand out because he is signalling a willingness to tip the political scales as the owner of an influential social media platform, something that no other leader of a social media firm has done. And Mr Musk exerts outsize influence over the political discourse on X, where he regularly posts to his 184 million followers.

Mr Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's founder, has shied away from endorsing candidates and rarely posts political content on Facebook or Instagram. Microsoft's chief executive Satya Nadella and Google's chief Sundar Pichai have also not posted political commentary on their companies' social media platforms, LinkedIn and YouTube, respectively.