Billionaire space boy says he’s voting Republican next election

If I had a net worth of over $200 billion, you would never hear from me again. I’d be living my best life behind closed doors. But rather than doing everybody a favor and locking himself in a Tesla, Elon Musk is acting like a toddler in public again. This time, he’s threatening to vote Republican because people on Twitter hurt his feelings.

On Monday, the All-In podcast published an interview with Musk where he said he’s planning to vote for Republicans in the November midterm elections. “You know, the reality is that Twitter at this point, you know, has a very far-left bias,” he said, “and I would classify myself as a moderate, neither a Republican nor Democrat.”

“And in fact, I have voted overwhelmingly for Democrats, historically, overwhelmingly,” Musk continued. “Like, I’m not sure — I might never have voted for a Republican, just to be clear. Now this election I will.”

Oh, the completely unexpected horror of a rich white man voting Republican!

Musk’s comments about Twitter are pretty expected, too. In April, he got bored and ended up striking a deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion. The potential of having Musk as Twitter’s new overlord was met with a lot of applause from conservatives — especially after he said he’d let Donald Trump back on the platform. But while Musk started off with a lot of grand plans for Twitter (that were just a can of worms), he’s been trying to get out of the deal for weeks now. Last week, Musk tweeted that the deal was “temporarily on hold” until Twitter could prove that fake accounts make up less than 5% of its users.

Of course, Musk’s claims that Twitter has a “far-left” bias are part of the usual ol’ conservative dogwhistle. In 2020, a study by the Pew Research Center found 90% of Republicans believed views were being censored, and 69% of Republicans believed social media companies “generally support the views of liberals over conservatives.” But that’s not actually true. In 2021, a report from the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights found these claims “[are] itself a form of disinformation.” In fact, disinformation expert Paul Barrett and researcher J. Grant Sims found that social media platforms were “often affording conservatives greater reach than liberal or nonpartisan content creators.”

But of course Musk couldn’t keep his comments limited to regurgitating ol’ conspiracy theories. He also had to bring in some anti-union rhetoric, too, stating that the Democratic Party is “overly, overly controlled by the unions and by the trial lawyers ... And generally if you’ll see something that doesn’t, that is not in the interest of the people on the Democrat side, it’s going to come because of the unions.”

As for Republicans, Musks said anything “not ideal” is due to “corporate evil and religious zealotry,” which, fair.