A month of Elon Musk on X: Politics, crime and conspiracy content

An NBC News analysis of one month of Musk’s social media posts shows what’s been on his mind, including a broad cross-section of fringe political topics.

Elon Musk can’t stop posting about the political fringe.

In recent weeks, the world’s wealthiest person used X to post about immigrants to Britain, saying they will cause the country’s collapse. He posted about examples of violent crime in Minnesota and South Carolina — where he does not live — and about judges in California and New York he believes are too lenient. Musk also smeared trans people, complained about Black-on-white crime, stoked fear about the end of civilization and shared his thoughts about the race of child actors.

Musk posted about all those topics and more in a recent one-month period, during which NBC News tracked and analyzed all of his posts for an in-depth look at where the tech billionaire focuses his attention online.

Musk left his role in the second Trump administration in May to focus on his companies, and since then he has continued to share a torrent of content on his social media site. Between Sept. 17 and Oct. 17, Musk posted, replied to or shared content 1,716 times on his X account — about 55 times a day, on average.

Some of his messages invoke extreme ideas, like the antisemitic “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which says there is a top-down plot organized by Jewish people to replace the white populations of the United States and Europe with nonwhite people. Musk backed the same false theory two years ago, causing a backlash among X advertisers. Though he later said he was “aspirationally Jewish” and not antisemitic, he continues to share the conspiracy theory. He also shared the baseless conspiracy theory that the FBI staged the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.