In September 2023, Elon Musk visited Eagle Pass, a small border city in Texas adjacent to Mexico. For someone whose travel typically reflects his status as a global entrepreneur and the world’s wealthiest individual, this trip was unusual. Musk did not arrive as a corporate executive or public official, but rather as what he described as a “citizen journalist.” Equipped only with a smartphone, an internet connection, and his account on X (formerly Twitter), Musk documented his visit and broadcast his interpretation of what he claimed was really happening at the U.S.–Mexico border.
This visit followed weeks of Musk publicly criticizing mainstream news organizations for what he framed as their failure to adequately cover the migrant crisis. According to Musk, this absence of coverage reflected a broader liberal bias embedded within legacy media institutions. His claims resonated with a central narrative within contemporary right-wing politics: the belief that conservative identities and concerns have been marginalized by cultural elites, and that mainstream journalism functions less as a democratic watchdog than as a vehicle for liberal political agendas (Nadler and Taussig 2023; Meeks 2022; Conroy 2021). Presenting his actions as a corrective to these perceived failures, Musk livestreamed his border visit on X and soon encouraged others to do the same, declaring that “citizen journalism is the path to a better future” and urging users worldwide to post real-time news in text and video formats (Musk, Oct 4 2023).
Musk has repeatedly articulated an expansive vision for X as an alternative system of news production—one that replaces traditional newsrooms with what he has described as a “group mind” or “cybernetic super-intelligence” composed of networked citizen journalists operating at massive scale (Tesla Owners SV 2023; Musk Nov 3 2022). In his telling, X functions as an open and inclusive arena for free speech, capable of delivering truth more rapidly, accurately, and even humorously than legacy media institutions (TED 2022; Musk Sept 29 2023; Musk Nov 26 2022). Central to this vision is Musk’s commitment to free speech absolutism, a principle that guided sweeping policy changes after his acquisition of Twitter. These included the dismantling of trust and safety teams and the reinstatement of accounts previously banned for hate speech or incitement to violence.
Empirical research, however, demonstrates that these changes dramatically reshaped the platform’s information ecosystem. Under Musk’s leadership, X has seen increased levels of hate speech, antisemitism, foreign state propaganda, and disinformation (Myers et al. 2023). Rather than fostering a democratic “town square,” these policies have heightened risks for marginalized users, undermined information integrity, and weakened democratic processes more broadly (Navaroli 2023).
Given this record, Musk’s framing of X as a digital public square or newsroom is often dismissed as self-serving rhetoric. Critics frequently interpret it as an extension of Musk’s antagonistic relationship with journalists, an expression of billionaire hubris, or an attempt to rehabilitate and monetize a costly acquisition. Scholarly and journalistic accounts of Musk’s takeover have rightly emphasized the harms his policies pose to journalism, democracy, and online safety.
Yet focusing exclusively on Musk’s motives or the platform’s negative effects obscures an important dimension of his influence. Despite widespread criticism from academics, journalists, and the political left, Musk’s cultural standing among conservatives has risen sharply. Although X’s overall user base has declined by approximately 23 percent (Hern 2024), conservative accounts have gained followers, and right-leaning politicians, activists, influencers, and independent journalists have increasingly consolidated on the platform (Faife 2022; Counts 2024). Public opinion data mirrors this shift: by 2024, Republican users were three times more likely than in 2021 to view X as “mostly good” for democracy (McClain et al. 2024). These developments suggest that Musk’s vision of X has achieved meaningful political and cultural resonance among particular audiences.
To understand this resonance, it is necessary to examine how Musk constructs and sustains authority through rhetoric, style, and cultural positioning. Existing scholarship has largely overlooked the ways Musk’s messaging draws upon broader sociopolitical tensions and popular cultural narratives. As Schudson (1992) reminds us, culture shapes how stories are told, and even contradictory or self-interested visions must resonate with shared meanings to gain traction. In a moment of crisis for professional journalism (Lemann 2020), it is therefore crucial to analyze the discursive strategies through which Musk imbues his alternative conception of news with significance.
This article takes Musk’s claims seriously—not to validate them, but to analyze how they function. Through a qualitative analysis of Musk’s posts on X, along with audiovisual content and public interviews, I examine how Musk performs journalistic authenticity and populist authority. The analysis addresses two central questions. First, how are authenticity and authority constructed within Musk’s branding of X-based citizen journalism? What cultural and symbolic references render this content socially meaningful (Peck 2019)? Second, within what broader political, media, and technological context does Musk’s anti-institutional vision emerge? Following Stuart Hall, this study treats Musk’s project not as an isolated phenomenon but as one articulated in relation to a dominant bloc. What aspects of mainstream journalism and institutional authority does Musk position himself against, and what alternative social vision does he advance?
I argue that Musk’s conception of X as a newsroom draws on widespread dissatisfaction with professional journalism to claim legitimacy as news produced “by and for” ordinary citizens. This vision is deeply contradictory: it is reactionary in its rejection of legacy media while simultaneously techno-utopian in its faith that unmoderated digital platforms will generate collective truth. Musk’s rhetoric fuses populist transgression, working-class appeals to common sense, and technocratic claims to efficiency. Rather than undermining one another, these elements work together to produce a sense of authenticity and authority. At a time of hegemonic instability—marked by declining trust in journalism and epistemic institutions (Knight and Gallup 2022)—this hybrid vision carries powerful affective appeal, offering a participatory alternative to institutional reality.
Methodology
This study employs qualitative content analysis to examine Musk’s articulation of X as a journalistic platform. In spring 2023, I manually reviewed Musk’s X profile, observing his posts, replies, and reposts within their original sociotechnical context. I archived relevant content through screenshots and screen recordings, focusing on posts that explicitly addressed the platform, Musk’s acquisition, or his techno-populist self-presentation. Due to X’s daily viewing limits (2,400 posts per day as of August 2025), this process did not yield a complete archive, but it nonetheless produced a rich and contextualized corpus.
To expand this dataset, I also analyzed an archive of Musk’s posts compiled by data journalist Dada Lyndell (2025) and published on Kaggle. Using natural language processing techniques, I extracted posts from 2022 to 2024 containing the keywords “X” and “Twitter,” resulting in a dataset of 913 posts. These materials were analyzed qualitatively, with attention to populist rhetorical strategies and stylistic elements. Findings are situated within secondary literature that traces Musk’s evolving public narrative and positions him within broader political, technological, and media transformations.
Rather than evaluating whether a social media platform can legitimately function as a newsroom, this article focuses on how Musk enacts that claim. Drawing on Eyal and Medvetz (2023), I analyze the styles of speech, performance, and action through which authority is constructed. The concern here is not the validity of Musk’s assertion, but the mechanisms through which it gains traction.
Hegemony and the Contemporary Media Landscape
To situate Musk’s project, it is necessary to consider transformations within the contemporary media ecosystem. This analysis is informed by Stuart Hall’s theory of hegemony, while also engaging debates about its applicability in the present moment. Hegemony, as Raymond Williams (1977) defines it, is a lived system of meanings and values that shapes how reality is experienced and understood. It is not static but continually contested and rearticulated.
As Savas Coban (2018) notes, hegemony must be constantly renewed and stabilized, much like an acrobat balancing on unstable ground. Hall (1988) conceptualizes the “popular” as a key site of this struggle, where alternative political formations compete for cultural legitimacy. Radical alternatives, Hall argues, do not emerge spontaneously but draw upon existing practices and ideologies, reorganizing them according to new logics.
Viewed through this lens, Musk’s reimagining of X can be understood not merely as the impulsive project of an eccentric billionaire, but as an intervention in an ongoing struggle over cultural authority. Historically, legacy newsrooms occupied a hegemonic position, particularly during the high modern period of the mid-twentieth century, when public trust in institutions enabled journalists to operate as authoritative gatekeepers (Hallin 1992; 2000). Through professional norms such as objectivity, transparency, and ethical codes, journalism cultivated legitimacy as a mediator of public knowledge (Tuchman 1972; Lippmann 1922).
Today, however, that authority is increasingly contested. Musk’s success as a media figure thus functions as a barometer of broader cultural shifts, revealing fractures in trust and the reconfiguration of what counts as legitimate knowledge in the digital age.
