This is what Elon Musk’s personal feed on X looks like.
He follows more than 1,000 people: right-wing influencers, conspiracy theorists, anti-transgender activists and dozens of his own superfans.
His feed represents a flattering alternate reality filled with boundless praise — for him, for Tesla, for X, for his politics.
And it mirrors his own deepening allegiances to the far-right.
In Mr. Musk’s own telling, his political views were shaped by X.
In a recent interview with Fox News, Mr. Musk said that videos circulating on X years ago depicting crowds of migrants sparked his fascination with right-wing politics and stronger border protections.
“I’ve seen videos of people streaming across the border on Twitter, now X,” he said, citing politicized and sometimes misleading videos that have spread online about migrants. “And I was like, is this real?”
It was a stark example of the power X has to politicize its own users — including the world’s richest man — using hyperpartisan opinions and far-right media.
To better understand how the information that Mr. Musk consumes on X could shape his worldview, The New York Times recreated a version of Mr. Musk’s personal feed by opening a new account on X and following the same 1,109 users that he follows. We then analyzed more than 175,000 posts from the accounts that he follows, using a service that collects data from X.
Though there is no guarantee that Mr. Musk saw all of the posts captured by The New York Times, the accounts that he follows — including world leaders and business tycoons alongside conspiracy theorists and far-right influencers — reveal the voices that Mr. Musk appears to value. (This “Following” feed is different from the main “For You” feed, which includes posts from those he follows alongside others selected by X’s algorithm.)
The resulting feed, shown in this article as a selection of posts curated from the much larger set, revealed ample praise for Mr. Musk and his various priorities, mixed with a torrent of right-wing outrage over progressive politics. It highlights the ways that social networks can create information bubbles. X declined to comment.
Step, once again, into a version of Mr. Musk’s personal X feed below.
Among the most popular topics on Mr. Musk’s feed on X? Elon Musk himself.
He follows dozens of superfans who post near-constant praise for him and his companies.
Many other users devote time to praising the executive, too — between posts about politics, memes or culture wars.
Those voices are mostly right-wing: Among tens of thousands of posts during a typical week, nearly half of them came from right-wing media figures, conservative influencers, Republican politicians or government leaders.
Those accounts included Chaya Raichik, whose X account, Libs of TikTok, has more than four million followers. Ms. Raichik’s appearances on Mr. Musk’s feed match her growing prominence offline: Her influence has exploded during the second Trump administration, and she has appeared at the White House multiple times this year, cementing her status as a top Trump advocate.
The accounts that Mr. Musk follows are also the ones he interacts with most on X, according to The Times’s analysis, giving them a valuable boost on the platform since Mr. Musk is the site’s most popular user, with more than 200 million followers.
That seems to give his followers the power to seize Mr. Musk’s attention and could even redirect his policy goals. It is something they have noticed, with some users boasting they can catch Mr. Musk’s attention with a well-timed post or question.
“Pretty amazing when the owner of a platform personally tells you he is fixing your problem in real time,” Mario Nawfal, an influencer with more than two million followers, posted after Mr. Musk said he would fix an issue on X.
Who does Mr. Musk follow?
Mr. Musk follows more than 1,100 users on X, including hundreds of right-wing personalities.
Some of the ideas that circulated on Mr. Musk’s feed later emerged on the national stage.
President Trump had claimed at an address to Congress that federal funds were used for “making mice transgender” — a misleading description of various studies that tested the effect of hormone therapy on H.I.V. infections and other other side effects of the medication. The idea had gathered steam on X two months earlier, when a conservative-led animal advocacy group posted about it. The group’s account is followed by Representative Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina, and by Mr. Musk. Mr. Musk had personally shared one of the posts.
Later, as Tesla vehicles and dealerships were vandalized or attacked in a violent reaction to Mr. Musk, his feed was filled with calls to charge the attackers with “domestic terrorism,” giving the perpetrators 20-year prison sentences.
Mr. Musk agreed, calling attacks on Tesla’s vehicles “extreme domestic terrorism!!” Days later, Mr. Trump repeated the idea, saying that he would enjoy seeing “the sick terrorist thugs get 20 year jail sentences.”
The content on Mr. Musk’s feed is a mirror of his own interests: As Mr. Musk’s role in the government’s cost-cuttings grew, so did praise for those plans on X.
The accounts he follows boast frequently about his supposed cuts, claiming billions in cost-savings that have often proven false or misleading under additional scrutiny.
Polling has shown that cutting government spending is popular, but that Mr. Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency are not. If Mr. Musk seemed oblivious to the criticism, his feed offers some reasons why: The users he follows praised his work and claimed Americans loved him for it.
After a right-wing news aggregator claimed, incorrectly, that DOGE had blocked a $52 million payment for the World Economic Forum, Mr. Musk replied: “True. You’re welcome.” In reality, ending the program had saved $7.8 million.
Those inaccuracies have not stopped Mr. Musk from recommending the DOGE account to others — he frequently promotes the accounts he follows to his own 219 million followers.
“Just follow @DOGE for details,” Mr. Musk wrote in February. “There is a firehouse of information.”
