Roughly 30 minutes after former President Donald J. Trump was shot at a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, Elon Musk backed his bid for the White House.
“I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery,” Mr. Musk wrote on X, the social media platform he owns, sharing a video of Mr. Trump raising his fist.
In more than 100 posts after the shooting, Mr. Musk further stepped up his political speech. And on Monday, after Mr. Trump announced that Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio would be his Republican running mate, Mr. Musk posted congratulations and said it was an “excellent decision by @realDonaldTrump.”
With those moves, Mr. Musk, 53, entered uncharted territory. He broke with tradition set by the leaders of other major social media firms, none of whom have endorsed a presidential candidate. By using X as a megaphone for his politics — posting to his nearly 190 million followers — Mr. Musk also erased any air of neutrality for the platform.
Now, as the presidential election gets closer, Mr. Musk’s full-throated support for the Republican candidates raises questions about how their opponents can expect to be treated on this site.
“He can fashion the platform in his image,” said Gita Johar, a professor at Columbia Business School who studies consumer behavior. “He’s got a huge following and makes no bones on where he stands on issues and politics.”
He has also turned the notion that the tech industry supports Democratic candidates on its head. For all the complaints that social media platforms have censored Mr. Trump and other Republicans in recent years, no senior executive at one of the companies has openly expressed a preference for a Democratic candidate.
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s founder, rarely posts about politics, and Jack Dorsey, the former Twitter chief, became more outspoken on the topic only after he stepped down three years ago. Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief, and Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief, have also kept quiet about their political views on the companies’ respective social platforms, LinkedIn and YouTube.
Beyond the endorsement, a new super PAC designed to help Mr. Trump could draw support from Mr. Musk, The New York Times reported Monday. The founding donors of the group, America PAC, include several wealthy tech entrepreneurs from Mr. Musk’s social circle.
Mr. Musk, X and the Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
“Arrogant billionaires only out for themselves are not what America wants or what America needs,” James Singer, a Biden campaign spokesman, said in a statement. “Elon knows Trump is a sucker who will sell America out.”
While many newspapers have long endorsed political candidates, social media platforms’ vast scale is akin to the early days of television, when viewers were glued to the nightly news broadcasts of a few networks. And the platforms’ impact on consumers — particularly young people — has grown considerably in recent years as the traditional news industry has shrunk.
When it comes to Mr. Musk and X, “it’s pretty clear what his political views are, and now people can make a choice with more transparency and information on where they want to spend their time online,” said Sarah Kreps, director of the Tech Policy Institute at Cornell University.
For years, Mr. Musk held back on sharing his political beliefs in large part because of his controlling interest in SpaceX, according to three former company executives. The rocket company was in fierce competition with rivals to win government space contracts.
In November 2016, days before the presidential election, Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer, pushed Mr. Musk to do an interview with CNBC, the three people said. During the interview, he gave a lukewarm endorsement of Hillary Clinton, saying he felt Mr. Trump was “not the right guy.”
“He doesn’t seem to have the sort of character that reflects well on the United States,” Mr. Musk said. Ms. Clinton’s economic and environmental politics were “the right ones.”
SpaceX has received $14.7 billion in federal launch contracts over the last decade, and the government is now reliant on the company, relieving much of the political pressure, the people said.
In 2020, Mr. Musk said he had voted for Joseph R. Biden Jr. Two years later, he posted that people should vote Republican in the midterm elections. And over the past few months, Mr. Musk has steadily ramped up his criticism of Mr. Biden in posts on X, attacking the president for everything from his age to his immigration and health policies.
At the same time, Mr. Musk was courting Mr. Trump to return to X. The site barred Mr. Trump after the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Mr. Musk restored the former president’s account shortly after buying the site in late 2022. Since then, however, Mr. Trump has posted only once.
Since the assassination attempt, X has swirled with conspiracy theories and disinformation. On Saturday, the word “staged” trended on X, as users debated whether the shooting had been faked by the deep state or anyone else, including Mr. Trump.
Mr. Musk, the most followed person on the site, has accused rival tech executives and the media of using inflammatory language that contributed to the attack. He said the Secret Service had shown “extreme incompetence” or, in an accusation for which there is no evidence, let the attack happen deliberately.
He replied to and amplified a post that Kimberly Cheatle, the director of the Secret Service, had been improperly focused on “diversity hires.” Right-wing accounts have been pushing the theory that diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts have weakened the agency protecting current and former presidents, and that women were not capable of protecting Mr. Trump.
Mr. Musk said Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, whose department oversees the Secret Service, “ought to be in jail.”
X will take action against posts that spread misinformation or praise the attack, according to an internal email that was sent on Sunday and obtained by The Times.
“At moments like this, the world turns to X and we have a responsibility to protect the conversation happening on our platform,” wrote Linda Yaccarino, the company’s chief executive.
Mr. Musk posted on Sunday that X was the place to find the truth, calling legacy media “a pure propaganda machine.” On Monday, he acknowledged the platform’s spread of incorrect information as he lashed out at media outlets including The Times and The Wall Street Journal.
“When something is wrong on X, it is corrected very fast, but it stays wrong for hours to days on legacy media,” he wrote.
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