That was then.
On February 15 of 2024 Swisher read an excerpt from her latest book, BURN BOOK: A TECH LOVE STORY, for the Washington Post in the form of an opinion piece entitled How Trump pushed Silicon Valley off the rails. She could just as easily been talking about the 2024 election — NOT, it was 2016. Apparently Trump has been in bed with the tech sector since the first Tech Summit at the Trump Tower in NYC just after his sleight of hand-crafted win in a large part due to social media.
This is now, our nation’s Semiquincentennial year.
Swisher wrote, “Purveyors of propaganda, both foreign and domestic, saw an opportunity to spread lies and misinformation. Today malevolent actors continue to game the platforms, and there’s still no real solution in sight because these powerful platforms are doing exactly what they were designed to do.”
I think there was an enormous amount of propaganda in this, pushed by Elon Musk and others that really worked, like worked in a way that they often do.
Transcript of a segment which aired on CNN November 06, 2024 — 10:00 ET the morning after the 2024 United States Presidential election
Trump Elected 47th President of the United States; Elon Musk’s Net Worth Rises $12 Billion-Plus After Trump Win.
KASIE HUNT, CNN ANCHOR: I want to ask you about X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, and how a Musk role in a Trump administration would interact with his ownership of that platform.
KARA SWISHER, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: I would suspect he’s going to try to merge Trump Social. I’ve heard from a number of people today with X and take it public, because there’s a meme stock now, Trump Social already, which is a terrible business. So, is X, by the way. X has always been a terrible business and that was preceding Musk and now it’s worse than ever. But they could merge them and make it a meme stock and make a lot of money for themselves. That could be interesting and incredibly corrupt.
They could also — he’ll use it as a propaganda organ, which is precisely why he bought it. People misunderstood they kept saying he was losing money and I think it was very clear it wasn’t about money. This was a great investment by Elon Musk in Donald Trump and that’s how he sees it, to make — he spent hundreds of millions to make billions and he could be our world’s first trillionaire.
If you’re comfortable with a single person who has interests all over the federal government, including $15 billion in contracts deciding things, and I know it’s gone on in history, but nothing like this. No one’s owned such an organ and such an ability, a public city organ. And that’s what it is, a propaganda organ that he’s created in this way.
It’s not the same as before. It is not even close to the same. He has control over a number of important things, and we have to be very careful of a single person doing this. That — I think in history, that’s always been the case.
Notes:
- Kara Swisher makes prediction on future of Truth Social and X
- Buy New York Times Bestseller BURN BOOK: A TECH LOVE STORY
- Swisher, Kara. “How Trump Pushed Silicon Valley off the Rails.” The Washington Post, 15 February 2024.
- “Trump Elected 47th President of the United States; Elon Musk’s Net Worth Rises $12 Billion-plus after Trump Win.” CNN, 6 Nov. 2024, transcripts.cnn.com/show/se/date/2024-11-06/segment/17. Accessed 28 Feb. 2025.