Musk's Abuse of Power
The spade is being a spade.
We all know Musk is an oligarchic kleptomaniac with a severe allergy to responsibility and accountability. Thankfully, he is also a painful narcissist, and it seems this deep, crippling desire to be adored was the only thing keeping him even slightly on the rails for the past few decades. But now that everyone hates him, it appears he has devolved into the “if you can’t handle me at my worst” phase of his midlife crisis, and over the past few years, he’s gone full crazy train. Arguably, the most transparent flexing of his authoritarian rage is on Twitter (sorry, I mean X.com) — you know, the place where his Grok AI posts CSAM.
First, we need to wind the clock back a little bit. It’s fair to say that Trump’s cronyism and kleptocratic ways are becoming a serious concern for many in the US. As The Guardian reported, Trump’s personal income in 2025 nearly quadrupled his 2024 business venture earnings, with most of the $2.2 billion gain coming from cryptocurrency schemes many have called scams. This is utterly unprecedented and almost certainly a blatant abuse of power. But it gets worse. Trump’s trades look very ‘insidery’. For example, he bought $2 million in Dell stock just before it was handed a near $10 billion Pentagon contract. The government has also given Trump’s family enormous government contracts, and a criminal Trump donor won a no-bid contract to restore the reflecting pool.
This is arguably more kleptocratic and motivated by cronyism than in Putin’s Russia, so understandably, a huge portion of the US wants Trump’s wheelings and dealings to be far more public and transparent so they can hold this disastrous scheming to account.
This is where we come back to Elon.
Twitter/X has always been famous for accounts that use APIs to automatically collect and post public data into a nice, neat, and transparent timeline, such as the countless Nancy Pelosi trade-tracker accounts. Well, one ingenious fellow created a similar account for Trump and his stock trades, setting up the “Donald Trump Portfolio Tracker” on July 1st.
Unfortunately, the account disappeared the following day after X suspended it for ‘violating platform rules’. X has not stated which rule this account broke, nor why all the other accounts tracking politician trades have not faced suspension.
