Musk's Abuse of Power

The spade is being a spade.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

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.

If you haven’t yet, I highly recommend reading X.com’s rules. They seem like legitimate and fair rules for such a platform. But, after reading it, you will quickly notice that Musk and his moronic AI Grok, as well as plenty of accounts that he interacts with, flagrantly violate these rules on an almost daily basis. For example, it explicitly bans inciting violence, the promotion of hateful entities, child sexual exploitation, artificially boosting or suppressing information and the use of fake identities, all of which Elon has arguably done in broad daylight on X.com many, many many, times. If the rules of X.com were worth the bytes of memory they take up in some distant server rack, then the very owner of Twitter/X.com would have been kicked out years ago.

But what you will notice is that these rules do not ban the collection and posting of publicly available data. That is why those Pelosi tracker accounts were never banned, because they followed the rules. So, why was this Trump tracker account banned? That seems deeply hypocritical.

This isn’t the first time Musk has done this, either. A few years ago, Musk banned an account called ElonJet, which used publicly available FAA data to track his private jet in real time. The purpose of accounts like this was to hold the super-wealthy, in particular those claiming to be climate-conscious, accountable for their colossal personal carbon footprints. Musk claimed the account was banned because it constituted doxxing, which is defined as “publicly revealing private or identifying information about a person without their consent”. This is objectively not true, as the data doesn’t reveal any previously unknown identifying information about Elon and is completely public. Such accounts now have a 24-hour delay rather than posting in real time and are currently not banned, as Musk doesn’t see this as doxxing. But again, if posting real-time jet locations is doxxing, Musk should go after the FAA, not these users.

And it’s not just ElonJet. If you have been paying attention, you will know that Musk has tried every method to silence those he doesn’t like on his little platform.

In that way, ElonJet was just an amuse-bouche to the Trump Tracker fiasco. It doesn’t matter what the rules Musk himself laid out say; it is whether what is posted gets in the way of Musk’s self-enrichment.

As a really quick side note: why is Musk like this? Well, Musk is a clear narcissist (given that he is the richest man in the world that does zero philanthropy), and narcissism is strongly correlated with authoritarian beliefs, conspiratorial thinking, and psychopathy, all of which are Musk’s fundamental personality traits. When you think about it, this makes sense. If you believe you deserve ungodly amounts of power and authority, you perceive the world through that lens and advocate for concentrating power, which is the nature of authoritarianism. But if this power is taken away, or perceived to be taken away, severe narcissism will inhibit the ability to rationally handle that loss, so these people fill in the blank space with a totally made-up conspiracy about people out to get them. This is why the likes of Elon view cancel culture, #MeToo, wokeness, multiculturalism, and progressivism not as the decentralised movement of individual voices calling for accountability and a better planet, but as an evil cabal out to destroy him and, therefore, the world. They can use this totally unfounded belief to justify whatever heinous shit they want to do to gain more power. So, the reason Elon and his ilk are like this is almost certainly because they are both pathetic and mentally ill.

That is at least one argument as to why Musk has done this. But why should we care that this Trump tracker was suspended?

Let me put it this way: an oligarch is abusing his position of power to protect the president he was instrumental in putting into office from accusations of corruption, cronyism, and kleptocracy. This is not just a worrying attack on free speech — though, because social media is not seen as protected speech, the actual legal case here is that X.com has violated its own terms of use with this user — but also an attack upon the mechanisms that enable democracy and upward accountability, those being the collection and dissemination of data that hold those in power accountable for their wrongdoings.

At this point, X.com is tiny and almost inconsequential, as so many people have left the platform. The impact of this one ban is arguably not that significant. But if Elon is doing this in the open, what kind of stuff is he doing, or has already done, behind the scenes that we don’t know about? These actions set a worrying precedent and are a clear sign we should investigate and dig deeper.

It also shows why we need to divest, boycott and diversify our lives away from these platforms and points of control these oligarchs wield. We need to loudly say, “This isn’t acceptable,” and actively not support it. This is why I strongly oppose giving the likes of Starlink, X, or xAI a more prevalent place in our lives. As we have seen, you can’t use X.com to disseminate information that holds the oligarch class to account. Musk could stop the operations of businesses that rely on Grok if he decides he doesn’t like the business. Musk could ban certain websites from Starlink, stomping out information from any website, not just X.com, that could impact him or his political class. Particularly in the digital age, these are mechanisms critical to fostering a healthy democracy and a fair, equitable society. And that is what we all want, right?

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Thanks for reading! Everything expressed in this article is my opinion, and should not be taken as financial advice or accusations. Don’t forget to check out my YouTube channel for more from me, or Subscribe. Oh, and don’t forget to hit the share button below to get the word out!