Musk’s commentary on noncitizens voting is based on a “weak to non-existent” understanding of election law, said David Schultz, a professor of political science at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. Federal law bars non-US citizens from voting in presidential elections, and voters must legally swear, under penalty of criminal prosecution, that they’re eligible to cast a ballot.

In order to become a US citizen and vote, undocumented immigrants have only a few viable paths, some which take years, such as securing asylum or successfully challenging a deportation order. Meanwhile, state-led investigations by both Republican and Democratic officials have repeatedly found that noncitizen voting is extraordinarily rare — and it’s never been shown to affect the outcome of any election. “Given what we know about how infrequently voter fraud has occurred over the last two or three elections in the US, the odds of drawing a random ballot, and that ballot being fraudulent, approach that of winning the Powerball,” Schultz said.

But as the most-followed account on X, Musk is the platform’s single most important influencer. In early 2023, Musk instructed his engineers to incorporate a special system that pushes his posts into people’s feeds, according to tech news outlet Platformer. He is still the most widely read person on the site today.

At the Butler rally, voters who had traveled from hundreds of miles away echoed Musk’s description of migrants flooding the US and receiving preferential treatment. “As far as our border being wide open? It’s absolutely ridiculous and unsustainable,” said 35-year-old Tom Lavisky, an attendee of the rally who traveled from Ohio to see Musk speak.

In an interview, Lavisky said he believed that undocumented immigrants were reaping a variety of benefits after coming to America, including receiving new cars and food stamps worth thousands of dollars. Under federal guidelines, undocumented immigrants do not qualify for food stamps. “We were born here. It’s not fair,” he said. “More importantly, people aren’t going to let it stand. It doesn’t really matter what the establishment wants. There’s infinitely more of us.”

Listen to More: When Elon Musk Got Political

Musk is bringing his popular posts to life in an ongoing tour of Pennsylvania, telling Trump supporters they can come see him for free — as long as they can declare they already voted. At an appearance near Philadelphia last week, he again repeated the claim that Democrats are bringing migrants in to vote for their party, likening the situation at the US-Mexico border to a “zombie apocalypse.”

In 2019, Musk declared he was “openly moderate,” but his politics have evolved in recent years as he clashed with the Biden administration and other Democrats over actions he perceived as unfair treatment of his companies. In August 2023, Musk proclaimed that a Justice Department lawsuit alleging that SpaceX had discriminated against asylees was a “weaponization” of the agency’s authority “for political purposes.” As he increasingly interacted with online personalities on the far right, he began speaking more openly about the threat of illegal immigration in the US — despite being an immigrant himself, and acknowledging his own citizenship status was once in a legal “gray area.”

With Musk now all in on Trump, he is arguably the former president’s most important backer. He created America PAC, a political action committee that runs the campaign’s ground game in battleground states, pledging to give away $1 million a day to voters for signing his PAC’s petition. He pledged around $75 million to his pro-Trump spending group in the span of just three months, according to federal disclosures. His PAC also started a group on X “dedicated to sharing potential instances of voter fraud and irregularities that Americans are experiencing in the 2024 Election.”

Vice President Kamala Harris has begun more directly campaigning against Musk. Her pick for VP, Tim Walz, recently called Musk Trump’s “running mate.” A recent Harris campaign ad calls Musk a “far-right billionaire” trying to “tip the scales” for Trump.

Read More: Elon Musk Is the Democrats’ New Supervillain

Musk, 53, and Trump, 78, were not close before the 2024 election cycle. Musk served on the former president’s business advisory councils during Trump’s first term, but quit in June 2017 following Trump’s announcement that the US would pull out of the historic Paris climate agreement. In those days, Musk styled himself as politically independent and made few donations to federal candidates. In 2022, Musk said Trump was too old to hold office and suggested that he should “sail into the sunset.”

Musk’s interests started to align more with Trump’s in the years after he moved to Texas in 2020, during the pandemic. In September 2023, Musk went to the border crossing in Eagle Pass, Texas — a place Republicans had already singled out as emblematic of the migrant crisis. Musk streamed the visit live on X so his following, 150 million-strong at the time, could “see what was really going on.” On that trip, Musk, who was born in South Africa, said he supported immigrants coming to the US but emphasized the need for people to enter the country in an orderly fashion.

By March, Musk was endorsing the former president’s claim that Biden’s border policies were meant to overthrow the country; he also took a meeting with Trump as the candidate sought to woo high-profile donors. In July, after Trump’s ear was struck by a bullet from a would-be assassin in Butler, Musk said publicly for the first time that Trump had his full endorsement for president.

Musk was changing his mind in the public eye. According to Bloomberg’s analysis, since Musk purchased Twitter in late 2022, his activity on the platform has skyrocketed. A typical day in 2024 shows him posting around 60 times; he has also posted as many as 40 times within an hour. That’s sharply up from about a dozen tweets per day in 2022. The billionaire is known to pay close attention to the engagement his posts receive. Any time Musk talks about immigration on X, the reposts, replies and views reliably roll in. Though Musk has written about immigration and voter fraud issues in 2024 with about the same frequency as he’s written about Tesla, the automaker he is chief executive of, his immigration-related posts have amassed more than six times the number of reposts.

“Donald Trump famously uses his rallies as a kind of focus group, choosing nicknames and attack lines based on how loudly his audience cheers,” said Emerson Brooking, a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who studies online networks. “It’s possible that Elon Musk treats X in a similar fashion.”

Musk’s power on the network directs users’ attention to whomever he interacts with. Bloomberg’s analysis also shows that a majority of Musk’s posts about immigration and voter fraud — around 70% — are short replies, many of which amplified or implicitly endorsed misleading conspiracies. Musk posted exclamation marks in response to around 200 posts on X discussing immigration; said “Wow” more than 40 times; and posted emojis like “💯,” “🤔” and “🎯” more than 70 times. The effect is that Musk can stay an arm’s length away from spreading misinformation himself, even as he gives dubious posts attention and engagement.

On the issue of immigration and voter fraud, Musk has engaged with the anonymous far right account @EndWokeness, according to Bloomberg’s analysis, replying approvingly to its posts about the topic more than 70 times in the past two years (and more than 420 times in general over the same period). Other accounts whose anti-immigrant posts he frequently responds to include @KanekoaTheGreat, a proponent of the baseless QAnon conspiracy movement, and Michael Benz, a former Trump State Department official who has routinely promoted racist conspiracy theories online. Neither responded to requests for comment.

In February, @EndWokeness implied on X that US taxpayer money for veterans was being diverted to pay for the needs of migrants in the country. American tax dollars “are being used to house & feed these invaders,” the anonymous account wrote, while there were scores of homeless veterans in the US. Musk replied simply: “Yeah.”

Though higher rates of homelessness among veterans have long been documented and studied, since 2008, a bipartisan effort from Congress overseeing billions in aid for unhoused veterans has resulted in a marked decline in the problem. A spokesperson for the US Department of Veterans Affairs added in an emailed statement that “zero VA funds” are used for any other purpose besides providing health care and benefits to veterans and their families. The @endwokeness account declined to comment, saying they expected a “garbage hit piece,” in a direct message sent on X.

On X, Musk has promoted a program called Community Notes to add context to posts using a network of thousands of volunteers. He has said all posts, including his own, are eligible for this fact-checking. But in a manual review of hundreds of Musk’s most influential posts about immigration and voter fraud, reporters found only two that displayed a Community Note — both of which were cases where Musk had explicitly asked the Community Notes account to weigh in on immigration-related topics. X didn’t respond to a request for comment on whether Musk’s posts are exempt.

This summer, Musk’s attention expanded from the border itself to communities further north where migrants are settling. In late August, he re-posted a video from another user that purportedly showed the notorious Venezuelan street gang, Tren de Aragua, overtaking an apartment complex in the city of Aurora, a Denver suburb. “Insane,” Musk wrote in his post about the video, which was retweeted 60,000 times. Less than two weeks later, Trump mentioned Aurora as an example of a community that had been overtaken by dangerous migrants in his debate with Harris.