This story was originally published on Judd Legum’s Substack, Popular Information, to which you can subscribe here.
President-elect Donald Trump has appointed Elon Musk and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to head the Department of Government Efficiency. Despite the name, it is not a government department. In fact, it is not part of the government at all. It is a non-governmental commission that will provide advice to the Trump administration.
Musk says he will identify “at least $2 trillion” in savings from the $6.5 trillion federal budget. How will Musk do it? Details are scarce. Musk is recruiting “high-IQ revolutionaries” to work 80-hour weeks for no pay to help him with the task.
Cutting $2 trillion is impossible politically. But if Musk is serious about cutting government spending and waste there is only one place to start: the defense budget. About half of the discretionary budget—the spending that Congress approves each year—is spent on defense. For the 2024 budget, the amount allocated for the Department of Defense (DOD) exceeded $840 billion.
The 15 agencies that could not properly account for their finances in the latest audit account for 68 percent of the Pentagon’s budget.
About half of the massive defense budget goes to military contractors, with tens of billions directed to “Big 5” firms—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman. These contractors, according to a “60 Minutes” investigation last year, “overcharge the Pentagon on almost everything the Department of Defense buys.” The misuse of taxpayer dollars became more acute “in the early 2000s when the Pentagon, in another cost-saving move, cut 130,000 employees whose jobs were to negotiate and oversee defense contracts.” Another factor is the consolidation of the defense industry, resulting in less competition for contracts.
Still, Musk may have a difficult time cutting DoD spending. First, Musk is the CEO of the company, SpaceX, that actively seeks billions in defense contracts. Second, if Musk is able to overcome his conflict-of-interest, defense industry lobbyists will lobby Congress to reverse any planned cuts. Finally, Trump has pledged to increase military spending during his second term.
Trump is calling for more defense spending even though defense spending has doubled over the last 20 years. The DOD struggles to accurately account how it spends this gusher of money. For the seventh year in a row, it has failed an independent audit.
This year’s audit failure means that the DOD has not passed since Congress began mandating the audits in 2018. The 2024 audit, which surveyed 28 separate agencies that operate under the Pentagon’s umbrella, found that 15 agencies failed to provide enough information for the auditors to assess how they handle their money.
Michael McCord, the Pentagon’s comptroller and chief financial officer, was unfazed by this failure, calling it “expected.” He also argued that because some agencies passed, the audit was actually a success. “So if someone had a report card that is half good and half not good, I don’t know that you call the student or the report card a failure,” McCord told reporters at a press conference on Friday. “We have a lot of work to do, but I think we’re making progress.”
Nine agencies passed their audit and three agency audits are still pending. In 2023, auditors failed 18 agencies.
Eight agencies also did a better job this year of balancing their spending and the amount of cash they have in government accounts. But of those eight, only two agencies actually passed their audit. The other six, while properly accounting for their cash, did not have enough information about their other assets to pass the audit.
Even with the improvements McCord touted, the scope of the Pentagon’s failure to keep track of its assets is still vast. According to the audit, the 15 agencies that could not properly account for their finances make up 44 percent of the Pentagon’s total assets and 68 percent of its budget. This year, the Pentagon held over $4.1 trillion in assets and had a budget of over $840 billion, meaning that auditors were unable to pin down $1.8 trillion in assets and $571 billion of the budget.
Despite these failures, Congress continues to appropriate more money every year to the DOD. The 2024 National Defense Authorization Act requires the department to pass its audit by 2028, but has no mechanism for penalizing failure.
McCord insisted that the Pentagon was on track for a clean audit by 2028, but that it would take the cooperation of the incoming Trump administration to reach that goal. If Trump is serious about improving government efficiency, he could push his DOD to do a better job tracking its assets. But if he decides not to, the Pentagon will not face any consequences.
SpaceX launched its sixth Starship rocket Tuesday, proving for the first time that the stainless steel ship can maneuver in space and paving the way for an even larger, upgraded vehicle slated to debut on the next test flight.
The only hiccup was an abortive attempt to catch the rocket's Super Heavy booster back at the launch site in South Texas, something SpaceX achieved on the previous flight on October 13. The Starship upper stage flew halfway around the world, reaching an altitude of 118 miles (190 kilometers) before plunging through the atmosphere for a pinpoint slow-speed splashdown in the Indian Ocean.
The sixth flight of the world's largest launcher—standing 398 feet (121.3 meters) tall—began with a lumbering liftoff from SpaceX's Starbase facility near the US-Mexico border at 4 pm CST (22:00 UTC) Tuesday. The rocket headed east over the Gulf of Mexico, propelled by 33 Raptor engines clustered on the bottom of its Super Heavy first stage.
This story was originally published on Judd Legum’s Substack, Popular Information, to which you can subscribe here.
President-elect Donald Trump has appointed Elon Musk and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to head the Department of Government Efficiency. Despite the name, it is not a government department. In fact, it is not part of the government at all. It is a non-governmental commission that will provide advice to the Trump administration.
Musk says he will identify “at least $2 trillion” in savings from the $6.5 trillion federal budget. How will Musk do it? Details are scarce. Musk is recruiting “high-IQ revolutionaries” to work 80-hour weeks for no pay to help him with the task.
Cutting $2 trillion is impossible politically. But if Musk is serious about cutting government spending and waste there is only one place to start: the defense budget. About half of the discretionary budget—the spending that Congress approves each year—is spent on defense. For the 2024 budget, the amount allocated for the Department of Defense (DOD) exceeded $840 billion.
The 15 agencies that could not properly account for their finances in the latest audit account for 68 percent of the Pentagon’s budget.
About half of the massive defense budget goes to military contractors, with tens of billions directed to “Big 5” firms—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman. These contractors, according to a “60 Minutes” investigation last year, “overcharge the Pentagon on almost everything the Department of Defense buys.” The misuse of taxpayer dollars became more acute “in the early 2000s when the Pentagon, in another cost-saving move, cut 130,000 employees whose jobs were to negotiate and oversee defense contracts.” Another factor is the consolidation of the defense industry, resulting in less competition for contracts.
Still, Musk may have a difficult time cutting DoD spending. First, Musk is the CEO of the company, SpaceX, that actively seeks billions in defense contracts. Second, if Musk is able to overcome his conflict-of-interest, defense industry lobbyists will lobby Congress to reverse any planned cuts. Finally, Trump has pledged to increase military spending during his second term.
Trump is calling for more defense spending even though defense spending has doubled over the last 20 years. The DOD struggles to accurately account how it spends this gusher of money. For the seventh year in a row, it has failed an independent audit.
This year’s audit failure means that the DOD has not passed since Congress began mandating the audits in 2018. The 2024 audit, which surveyed 28 separate agencies that operate under the Pentagon’s umbrella, found that 15 agencies failed to provide enough information for the auditors to assess how they handle their money.
Michael McCord, the Pentagon’s comptroller and chief financial officer, was unfazed by this failure, calling it “expected.” He also argued that because some agencies passed, the audit was actually a success. “So if someone had a report card that is half good and half not good, I don’t know that you call the student or the report card a failure,” McCord told reporters at a press conference on Friday. “We have a lot of work to do, but I think we’re making progress.”
Nine agencies passed their audit and three agency audits are still pending. In 2023, auditors failed 18 agencies.
Eight agencies also did a better job this year of balancing their spending and the amount of cash they have in government accounts. But of those eight, only two agencies actually passed their audit. The other six, while properly accounting for their cash, did not have enough information about their other assets to pass the audit.
Even with the improvements McCord touted, the scope of the Pentagon’s failure to keep track of its assets is still vast. According to the audit, the 15 agencies that could not properly account for their finances make up 44 percent of the Pentagon’s total assets and 68 percent of its budget. This year, the Pentagon held over $4.1 trillion in assets and had a budget of over $840 billion, meaning that auditors were unable to pin down $1.8 trillion in assets and $571 billion of the budget.
Despite these failures, Congress continues to appropriate more money every year to the DOD. The 2024 National Defense Authorization Act requires the department to pass its audit by 2028, but has no mechanism for penalizing failure.
McCord insisted that the Pentagon was on track for a clean audit by 2028, but that it would take the cooperation of the incoming Trump administration to reach that goal. If Trump is serious about improving government efficiency, he could push his DOD to do a better job tracking its assets. But if he decides not to, the Pentagon will not face any consequences.
On Thursday afternoon, a federal bankruptcy judge in Texas ordered an evidentiary hearing to review the auction process that resulted in Infowars being sold to satire site the Onion, saying he wanted to ensure the “process and transparency” of the sale. Infowars’ founder, the conspiracy mega-entrepreneur Alex Jones, has unsurprisingly declared that the auction process was “rigged” and vowed that the review process will return the site to him, while the Onion’s CEO told Mother Jones and other news outlets that the sale is proceeding. For reasons that no one has yet explained, attorneys for X, formerly known as Twitter, the social media giant now owned by Elon Musk, entered an appearance during the hearing and asked to be included on any future communications about the case.
“I was told Elon is going to be very involved in this,” Jones said during a live broadcast on X. After Infowars was seized and the site shut down, Jones promptly began operating under the name and branding of a new venture, dubbed the Alex Jones Network, which streams on X. Jones noted that lawyers for X were present at the hearing, adding, somewhat mysteriously, “The cavalry is here. Trump is pissed.” (He later elaborated that “Trump knows I’m one of his biggest defenders.”)
“I was told Elon is going to be very involved in this,” Jones said.
An attorney who entered an appearance for X didn’t respond to a request for comment; nor did X’s press office. Onion CEO Ben Collins, previously a journalist at NBC News covering disinformation, told Mother Jones on Friday morning, “We won the bid. The idea that he was just going to walk away from this gracefully without doing this sort of thing is funny in itself.” In a statement reprinted by Variety and other outlets, Collins said that the sale is “currently underway, pending standard processes.” Collins had said previously that the plan was to relaunch Infowars as a satirized version of itself in January.
As this odd situation played out, however, Infowars’ website came back online on Friday afternoon; soon after, Jones and his staff had also returned to Infowars‘ studios. Throughout Friday and Saturday morning, the site was full of stories preemptively declaring Jones’ victory over the Onion.
“I told you,” Jones crowed during a Friday night broadcast, back behind his usual desk. “If you want a fight, you got one.”
(After the original publication of this article, Collins responded to the revival of Infowars in a Twitter thread, reiterating that the Onion won the bid and writing that his company “left the hearing with clear next steps to complete the sale. InfoWars’ current management asked to continue operating until then. We always knew the guys who currently run InfoWars were going to take this badly and use a loss to fundraise off of it. They did not disappoint!”)
Jones also vowed that even if Infowars is sold he would sue anyone who “impersonates” him, as well as “the big Democrat gun control group,” involved in the sale. (The New York Times has reported that Everytown for Gun Safety, which advocates for gun law reform, plans to advertise on the relaunched, satire version of the site.)
Judge Christopher Lopez of Texas’ Southern District has been overseeing the years-long bankruptcy process for Infowars. The company and Jones personally filed for bankruptcy protection amid civil lawsuits brought by the parents of children who died at Sandy Hook. Jones was found liable by default for defaming the Sandy Hook families by repeatedly claiming that the mass shooting was a “hoax” and suggesting some of the parents were actors. In the Thursday hearing, Lopez said, “nobody should feel comfortable with the results of the auction” until the evidentiary hearing was held. Christopher Murray, the court-appointed bankruptcy trustee who declared the Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron LLC, to be the auction’s winner, considered the bids in private. According to Bloomberg, Murray told Lopez that Global Tetrahedron’s bid was a better option because the Sandy Hook families agreed to waive some of the money owed to them in order to pay off Jones’ other creditors.
“I’ve always thought my goal was to maximize the recovery for unsecured creditors,” Murray said, per Bloomberg. “And under one bid, they’re clearly better than they were under the other.”
Jones has made it clear that he was working with a group of what he dubbed “good guy” bidders, who he hoped would buy the site and keep him on air. The only other bid besides the Onion’s was $3.5 million from First United American Companies LLC, the company that operates Jones’ online supplement store.
The evidentiary hearing is expected to be held next week.
In the days before the election, when too many stories about deadlocked polls and undecided voters and the MAGAfication of young men began to wear on my soul, I turned to TikTok to see what women were thinking. Soon enough I was swimming in a sea of female excitement and angst. I watched videos of ordinary women of all ages and races—in deep blue districts and deep red ones—describing what this election meant to them. Women who had just voted, sitting in their cars and sobbing about what it would mean to elect the first female president, what it would mean to defeat a vitriolically sexist candidate who’s been found liable for sexually assaulting one woman and who stands accused by dozens more, whose campaign gleefully demeaned women as “trash” and “childless cat ladies.” What it would mean to elect someone who’d spent the last three months, and the two years before that, connecting reproductive freedom to economic concerns. What it would mean to elect someone taking the stress of caring for both kids and parents seriously, who recognizes the housing crisis is hurting all but the richest, who has more than a concept of a plan for how to address such problems.
I watched one young woman driving 10 hours to her home state because her absentee ballot never arrived, muttering “10 and 2, 10 and 2” as she stared out at the road ahead. I watched women flying across the country to vote. I watched women take part in the “They both reached for the gun” Chicago meme as they talked about canceling out the vote of their Trump-supporting father, brother, or husband. Or bragging on husbands or dads whose vote they didn’t have to cancel. One who said she wouldn’t have to cancel out her husband’s vote because he’d forget to do it if she didn’t remind him.
One woman told of breaking off her engagement when she found out her fiancé was for Trump. (“I can’t share my life with someone who is going to vote in that direction…Ladies, we need to stick together.”) I watched as young woman after young woman testified that they’d never, ever consider dating anyone who voted for Trump. I watched as women who were in middle or high school in 2016 reacted in horror at seeing, for the first time, Trump bragging on an Access Hollywood bus about grabbing women by the pussy and moving on them “like a bitch,” or stalking Hillary Clinton around a debate stage, or seeing the testimonies of the more than 25 women who have reported being sexually assaulted by him. “Dads voted for this?” read one incredulous caption.
There can be no doubt that there is fertile ground for those who find prominence and profit in nurturing resentment of women.
I was well aware that algorithmic offerings are not reality, particularly on TikTok, which serves you things akin to the things you’ve engaged with. But the videos seemed to be representative of a record gender divide, clocked by pollsters at about 30 points nationally at the time and even higher in key districts and among certain demographics. Would women, horrified by Trump’s and Vance’s statements and actions, furious that their reproductive rights were rolled back, foreclose another Trump term? Would enough white women finally cleave from white men, and vote for a woman who was also Black and Asian?
We know the answer now, and while conclusive demographic data will take months to emerge, exit polls in 10 historic battleground states indicate that women there favored Harris by 8 points overall—less than the margin for Hillary Clinton in 2016 or Joe Biden in 2020—resulting in an 11 point gender gap. (The exit polls’ ongoing inclusion of Florida, Ohio, and Texas might being warping our conclusions, but we don’t yet know.) Black women, Democrats’ most loyal constituency, voted for her in those states at a rate of 91 percent. Latinas, 60 percent. Young women, 61 percent. Other age groups, 49–54 percent. Harris won 57 percent of women with college degrees and 66 percent of women with even more education. But she lost white women with little or no college education by a mile. Only 35 percent of them supported her, and since those women constitute about one-fifth of the total electorate, they drove down her margins with women overall.
The questions that feel most burning right now—like what is up with those who voted against abortion bans but also for Trump, and which part of his gains can be attributed mostly to racism and/or sexism—are complex and will take more data and analysis to really understand. But it’s safe to say Trump’s margin of victory was powered by men, who, those same polls found, voted for him by 55 percent—a few points more than went for him in 2020. Trump looks to have made gains with almost every type of man, especially younger men and Latino men. (Despite a lot of pre-election angst, Black men overwhelmingly backed Harris, though Trump increased his margins there, too.) White men of all education levels went for Trump, but white men who didn’t go to college overwhelmingly so.
The Trump campaign knew that men were his ticket back to power, and it targeted them—pointedly young men, and men of color—with a sophisticated campaign of grievance and disinformation. And in that, they were massively aided by the manosphere and its billionaire mascot: Elon Musk.
Since he bought Twitter in 2022, Musk has been on a mission to turn it into an amplifier of toxicity. He allowed hate-mongers—including virulent misogynists such as Andrew Tate—back on the platform, now called X, and dismantled tools to help users fight harassment while making sure everyone was far more likely to see posts and replies from MAGA fans, foremost himself. He personally promoted disinformation of all kinds—about voting, about transgender kids (despite, or because of, having one), about Harris (his PAC literally called her a “c-word”), about science—to his more than 204 million followers. Who can forget his promise to impregnate Taylor Swift after she announced her support for Harris? His misleading election posts, including ones falsely claiming Democrats were “importing” millions of migrants to vote for Harris, were viewed 2 billion times according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which estimated his posts were worth $24 million to the Trump campaign. (Musk, who likes to claim he’s a defender of free speech, sued the center in 2023; a federal judge tossed the case, ruling it was an obvious attempt to both stifle criticism of X and bankrupt the organization.)
Musk gave, directly and through super-PACs, about $200 million to help Trump’s campaign in the final months, and mounted a parallel ground game in Pennsylvania, which Trump carried. He stumped for Trump, made the “brocast” rounds for Trump, and urged other tech billionaires to support Trump. He gave millions—possibly tens of millions—to Building America’s Future, a group focused on dividing communities of color and wooing Black men to vote for Trump.
Musk dismantled tools to help users fight harassment while making sure everyone was far more likely to see posts and replies from MAGA fans—foremost himself.
Musk’s efforts are both part of and indicative of the fact that more and more men are cocooned in a YouTube/podcast/Twitch information ecosystem that connects sports, gaming, and other male-dominated hobbies to politics. And in that space, algorithmic forces and concerted efforts by far-right influencers and adjacent grifters are normalizing disdain or hate for women, part of a conveyor belt of extremism. A good example of that came immediately after the election, when neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes (who famously dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago) posted “Your body, my choice.” Soon that slogan was screamed at high school girls all over the country by their male classmates, many of whom had likely never heard of Fuentes himself. (Similarly, Black people, including kids at my son’s school, were subjected to a decentralized but nationwide campaign of racist texts.)
There can be no doubt that there is fertile ground for those who find prominence and profit in nurturing resentment of women. For decades, men have been losing ground relative to women, be it in education or job opportunities. Women are increasingly likely to be a household’s primary breadwinner or raise families by themselves. The MeToo movement was a massively needed corrective for sexual harassment and abuse, but the ferocity of it (and some occasional overreach) did destabilize many men.
This has all happened before. Women in the 1940s were sent to the factories and then back to the kitchen. The feminist movement of the 1970s led to big gains—we finally got those credit cards, ladies!—and then to a backlash, as Susan Faludi famously chronicled. An “anti-PC” movement arose too. But eventually the pendulum swung back, and new waves of female empowerment began to swell. Hopefully this election will do the same, and figuring out how to reach young men before they calcify into hardened misogyny needs to be a big part of that.
After the 2016 election, I wrote that Trump’s victory was a “brutal affront to women” and “all who value kindness and tolerance.” His administration plumbed new depths of chaos, corruption, and cruelty, and while some voters are too young to fully remember, his 2024 campaign made sure that no one could say they didn’t get what he stands for.
The women who voted for Harris know that—and they are not okay. About one-third of women now live in states with abortion bans, and anybody who believed that Trump won’t try for a national ban, or revive the Comstock Act to stop distribution of mifepristone or even contraception, is likely to be bitterly disappointed. Even if nationwide prohibitions don’t come to pass, women in red states, and their doctors, will be further surveilled to prevent abortions, and women trying to have children will continue to die in hospital parking lots because doctors are too afraid to provide lifesaving care. What else do the “pronatalist” policies that JD Vance and Elon Musk have been so eager to enact hold for women?
Women are suspicious, guarded, and apoplectic, knowing that some in our families or neighborhoods voted us back into second-class status.
When I went back to TikTok after the election, I saw sorrow and disbelief and terror, but also incandescent rage. Women are furious—in a Greek mythology sort of way. Black women are especially flattened and yet unsurprised that white women didn’t break for Harris. Some young women began shaving their heads and embracing the South Korean feminist 4B movement, in which women swear off dating, sex, and childrearing. (“The good news is that men hate us, so there’s no point in catering to them,” posted one.) Not many are likely to go that far, but it was clear even before the outcome that this election could have far-reaching impacts on dating and marriage and divorce. Certainly sex: If women can’t get abortions and are prevented from obtaining contraception, young men will awake to a very different world, soon enough. “If his ballot was red, his balls stay blue,” posted one woman. (And guys? Project 2025 wants to come after porn, too.)
Will the backlash, once the election’s consequences become fully apparent, help power a reckoning with misogyny and racism once more? Perhaps. But right now, so many of us fear for ourselves, fear for our daughters, fear for women whom we’ve never met, and all others with a target on their backs, and we are walking around, suspicious and guarded and apoplectic, knowing that some in our families or neighborhoods voted us back into second-class status, and wondering what else they’re ready to go along with.
SpaceX's Starlink Internet satellites are responsible for more and more public reports of unexplained anomalous phenomena (UAPs), but most recent cases remain unsolved, according to a US government report released Thursday.
Starlinks often move across the sky in "trains" that appear like gleaming gems in the blackness of space. They are particularly visible to the naked eye shortly after each Starlink launch.
In recent years, leaks and disclosures from government officials have revitalized open discussion about mysterious lights and objects, some of which move in, to put it bluntly, unquestionably weird ways. Some of these images, particularly those from sophisticated instruments on military fighter jets, have made their way into the national discourse. The New Yorker, Ars' sister publication, has a thorough report on how UAPs—you might know them better as UFOs—became mainstream.
In the days before the election, when too many stories about deadlocked polls and undecided voters and the MAGAfication of young men began to wear on my soul, I turned to TikTok to see what women were thinking. Soon enough I was swimming in a sea of female excitement and angst. I watched videos of ordinary women of all ages and races—in deep blue districts and deep red ones—describing what this election meant to them. Women who had just voted, sitting in their cars and sobbing about what it would mean to elect the first female president, what it would mean to defeat a vitriolically sexist candidate who’s been found liable for sexually assaulting one woman and who stands accused by dozens more, whose campaign gleefully demeaned women as “trash” and “childless cat ladies.” What it would mean to elect someone who’d spent the last three months, and the two years before that, connecting reproductive freedom to economic concerns. What it would mean to elect someone taking the stress of caring for both kids and parents seriously, who recognizes the housing crisis is hurting all but the richest, who has more than a concept of a plan for how to address such problems.
I watched one young woman driving 10 hours to her home state because her absentee ballot never arrived, muttering “10 and 2, 10 and 2” as she stared out at the road ahead. I watched women flying across the country to vote. I watched women take part in the “They both reached for the gun” Chicago meme as they talked about canceling out the vote of their Trump-supporting father, brother, or husband. Or bragging on husbands or dads whose vote they didn’t have to cancel. One who said she wouldn’t have to cancel out her husband’s vote because he’d forget to do it if she didn’t remind him.
One woman told of breaking off her engagement when she found out her fiancé was for Trump. (“I can’t share my life with someone who is going to vote in that direction…Ladies, we need to stick together.”) I watched as young woman after young woman testified that they’d never, ever consider dating anyone who voted for Trump. I watched as women who were in middle or high school in 2016 reacted in horror at seeing, for the first time, Trump bragging on an Access Hollywood bus about grabbing women by the pussy and moving on them “like a bitch,” or stalking Hillary Clinton around a debate stage, or seeing the testimonies of the more than 25 women who have reported being sexually assaulted by him. “Dads voted for this?” read one incredulous caption.
There can be no doubt that there is fertile ground for those who find prominence and profit in nurturing resentment of women.
I was well aware that algorithmic offerings are not reality, particularly on TikTok, which serves you things akin to the things you’ve engaged with. But the videos seemed to be representative of a record gender divide, clocked by pollsters at about 30 points nationally at the time and even higher in key districts and among certain demographics. Would women, horrified by Trump’s and Vance’s statements and actions, furious that their reproductive rights were rolled back, foreclose another Trump term? Would enough white women finally cleave from white men, and vote for a woman who was also Black and Asian?
We know the answer now, and while conclusive demographic data will take months to emerge, exit polls in 10 historic battleground states indicate that women there favored Harris by 8 points overall—less than the margin for Hillary Clinton in 2016 or Joe Biden in 2020—resulting in an 11 point gender gap. (The exit polls’ ongoing inclusion of Florida, Ohio, and Texas might being warping our conclusions, but we don’t yet know.) Black women, Democrats’ most loyal constituency, voted for her in those states at a rate of 91 percent. Latinas, 60 percent. Young women, 61 percent. Other age groups, 49–54 percent. Harris won 57 percent of women with college degrees and 66 percent of women with even more education. But she lost white women with little or no college education by a mile. Only 35 percent of them supported her, and since those women constitute about one-fifth of the total electorate, they drove down her margins with women overall.
The questions that feel most burning right now—like what is up with those who voted against abortion bans but also for Trump, and which part of his gains can be attributed mostly to racism and/or sexism—are complex and will take more data and analysis to really understand. But it’s safe to say Trump’s margin of victory was powered by men, who, those same polls found, voted for him by 55 percent—a few points more than went for him in 2020. Trump looks to have made gains with almost every type of man, especially younger men and Latino men. (Despite a lot of pre-election angst, Black men overwhelmingly backed Harris, though Trump increased his margins there, too.) White men of all education levels went for Trump, but white men who didn’t go to college overwhelmingly so.
The Trump campaign knew that men were his ticket back to power, and it targeted them—pointedly young men, and men of color—with a sophisticated campaign of grievance and disinformation. And in that, they were massively aided by the manosphere and its billionaire mascot: Elon Musk.
Since he bought Twitter in 2022, Musk has been on a mission to turn it into an amplifier of toxicity. He allowed hate-mongers—including virulent misogynists such as Andrew Tate—back on the platform, now called X, and dismantled tools to help users fight harassment while making sure everyone was far more likely to see posts and replies from MAGA fans, foremost himself. He personally promoted disinformation of all kinds—about voting, about transgender kids (despite, or because of, having one), about Harris (his PAC literally called her a “c-word”), about science—to his more than 204 million followers. Who can forget his promise to impregnate Taylor Swift after she announced her support for Harris? His misleading election posts, including ones falsely claiming Democrats were “importing” millions of migrants to vote for Harris, were viewed 2 billion times according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which estimated his posts were worth $24 million to the Trump campaign. (Musk, who likes to claim he’s a defender of free speech, sued the center in 2023; a federal judge tossed the case, ruling it was an obvious attempt to both stifle criticism of X and bankrupt the organization.)
Musk gave, directly and through super-PACs, about $200 million to help Trump’s campaign in the final months, and mounted a parallel ground game in Pennsylvania, which Trump carried. He stumped for Trump, made the “brocast” rounds for Trump, and urged other tech billionaires to support Trump. He gave millions—possibly tens of millions—to Building America’s Future, a group focused on dividing communities of color and wooing Black men to vote for Trump.
Musk dismantled tools to help users fight harassment while making sure everyone was far more likely to see posts and replies from MAGA fans—foremost himself.
Musk’s efforts are both part of and indicative of the fact that more and more men are cocooned in a YouTube/podcast/Twitch information ecosystem that connects sports, gaming, and other male-dominated hobbies to politics. And in that space, algorithmic forces and concerted efforts by far-right influencers and adjacent grifters are normalizing disdain or hate for women, part of a conveyor belt of extremism. A good example of that came immediately after the election, when neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes (who famously dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago) posted “Your body, my choice.” Soon that slogan was screamed at high school girls all over the country by their male classmates, many of whom had likely never heard of Fuentes himself. (Similarly, Black people, including kids at my son’s school, were subjected to a decentralized but nationwide campaign of racist texts.)
There can be no doubt that there is fertile ground for those who find prominence and profit in nurturing resentment of women. For decades, men have been losing ground relative to women, be it in education or job opportunities. Women are increasingly likely to be a household’s primary breadwinner or raise families by themselves. The MeToo movement was a massively needed corrective for sexual harassment and abuse, but the ferocity of it (and some occasional overreach) did destabilize many men.
This has all happened before. Women in the 1940s were sent to the factories and then back to the kitchen. The feminist movement of the 1970s led to big gains—we finally got those credit cards, ladies!—and then to a backlash, as Susan Faludi famously chronicled. An “anti-PC” movement arose too. But eventually the pendulum swung back, and new waves of female empowerment began to swell. Hopefully this election will do the same, and figuring out how to reach young men before they calcify into hardened misogyny needs to be a big part of that.
After the 2016 election, I wrote that Trump’s victory was a “brutal affront to women” and “all who value kindness and tolerance.” His administration plumbed new depths of chaos, corruption, and cruelty, and while some voters are too young to fully remember, his 2024 campaign made sure that no one could say they didn’t get what he stands for.
The women who voted for Harris know that—and they are not okay. About one-third of women now live in states with abortion bans, and anybody who believed that Trump won’t try for a national ban, or revive the Comstock Act to stop distribution of mifepristone or even contraception, is likely to be bitterly disappointed. Even if nationwide prohibitions don’t come to pass, women in red states, and their doctors, will be further surveilled to prevent abortions, and women trying to have children will continue to die in hospital parking lots because doctors are too afraid to provide lifesaving care. What else do the “pronatalist” policies that JD Vance and Elon Musk have been so eager to enact hold for women?
Women are suspicious, guarded, and apoplectic, knowing that some in our families or neighborhoods voted us back into second-class status.
When I went back to TikTok after the election, I saw sorrow and disbelief and terror, but also incandescent rage. Women are furious—in a Greek mythology sort of way. Black women are especially flattened and yet unsurprised that white women didn’t break for Harris. Some young women began shaving their heads and embracing the South Korean feminist 4B movement, in which women swear off dating, sex, and childrearing. (“The good news is that men hate us, so there’s no point in catering to them,” posted one.) Not many are likely to go that far, but it was clear even before the outcome that this election could have far-reaching impacts on dating and marriage and divorce. Certainly sex: If women can’t get abortions and are prevented from obtaining contraception, young men will awake to a very different world, soon enough. “If his ballot was red, his balls stay blue,” posted one woman. (And guys? Project 2025 wants to come after porn, too.)
Will the backlash, once the election’s consequences become fully apparent, help power a reckoning with misogyny and racism once more? Perhaps. But right now, so many of us fear for ourselves, fear for our daughters, fear for women whom we’ve never met, and all others with a target on their backs, and we are walking around, suspicious and guarded and apoplectic, knowing that some in our families or neighborhoods voted us back into second-class status, and wondering what else they’re ready to go along with.
During his “Closer Look” segment on Wednesday night, Seth Meyers commented on President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet picks for several key roles, including Fox News host and Army National Guard veteran Pete Hegseth leading the Department of Defense. “While Biden’s looking for ways to accommodate Trump, Trump’s looking for ways to tear down everything Biden did. […]
Hedge fund billionaire Nelson Peltz, the activist investor who launched an unsuccessful proxy fight to shake up Disney’s board, said he’s responsible for connecting Elon Musk and Donald Trump. Peltz, founding partner and CEO of investment firm Trian Partners, made the claim during the CNBC Delivering Alpha conference Wednesday. “Elon is a friend of mine,” […]
U.K. publication The Guardian will no longer post on X, the social media platform previously known as Twitter that has been taken over by Elon Musk. The Guardian made the announcement on Wednesday in a post on its website, writing that “the benefits of being on the platform formerly called Twitter” have now been “outweighed […]
President-elect Donald Trump assigned Elon Musk on Tuesday to “dismantle” the U.S. bureaucracy, and named a longtime Fox News host, Pete Hegseth, to lead the Pentagon. Musk, the billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, had offered himself during the campaign as someone who could cut waste out of the federal budget. In late October, he […]
Chloe Fineman claimed in a now-deleted TikTok post that Elon Musk made her cry when he hosted “Saturday Night Live.” Back in August, Fineman’s “SNL” co-star Bowen Yang revealed on “Watch What Happens Live” that a male host once made “multiple cast members cry” during a table-read for the sketch comedy series. “This man who…this […]
As of early Sunday, major news outlets had yet to call the race between Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) and Republican candidate Kari Lake, though Gallego was leading with an estimated 88 percent of ballots counted. But in the “Election Integrity Community” on X—billed as a space for its 65,000 members to “share potential incidents of voter fraud or irregularities you see while voting in the 2024 election,” and backed by Musk’s pro-Trump PAC—such a close race, and potentially a GOP loss, can mean only one thing: The election was stolen.
One of the mainmysteriesamong members of the X community seems to be how a Democrat could potentially win a Senate seat in a state Trump won. (The Associated Press called Arizona for Trump on Saturday, reporting that he led Harris in the state by about 185,000 votes.) “This is as egregious an example of election fraud as when Biden allegedly had the dead voting for him in 2020,” one userclaimed, without evidence. But in fact, split-ticket voting—in which people do not cast all their votes for candidates in the same party—is a thing, and should not come as a surprise in Arizona, given that Lake has long polled poorly in the Senate race and still refuses to concede her 2022 loss in the governor’s race, as my colleague Tim Murphy has written.
Other members point to an alleged clerical error in Pima County—in which the number of uncounted ballots appeared to increase on Friday—as evidence of a conspiracy, urging Lake to “fight” the “election steal.” A lawyer for Lake sent a letter to the county demanding an explanation on Friday; Mark Evans, the county’s public communications manager, told the Arizona Capitol Times it was a “clerical error,” adding, “in this age of conspiracy, everything gets blown up into inserted votes.”
This context, though, appears absent from the X feed—as were fact-checks to false claims of voter fraud that percolated on Election Day, as I reported then. But this is not a surprise, given that research shows Musk’s so-called crowd-sourced fact-checking mechanism on X, known as “community notes,” did not actually address most false and misleading claims about the US elections circulating on the platform during the campaign. And with Musk poised to become even more powerful following Trump’s win, don’t expect that to change anytime soon.
As of early Sunday, major news outlets had yet to call the race between Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) and Republican candidate Kari Lake, though Gallego was leading with an estimated 88 percent of ballots counted. But in the “Election Integrity Community” on X—billed as a space for its 65,000 members to “share potential incidents of voter fraud or irregularities you see while voting in the 2024 election,” and backed by Musk’s pro-Trump PAC—such a close race, and potentially a GOP loss, can mean only one thing: The election was stolen.
One of the mainmysteriesamong members of the X community seems to be how a Democrat could potentially win a Senate seat in a state Trump won. (The Associated Press called Arizona for Trump on Saturday, reporting that he led Harris in the state by about 185,000 votes.) “This is as egregious an example of election fraud as when Biden allegedly had the dead voting for him in 2020,” one userclaimed, without evidence. But in fact, split-ticket voting—in which people do not cast all their votes for candidates in the same party—is a thing, and should not come as a surprise in Arizona, given that Lake has long polled poorly in the Senate race and still refuses to concede her 2022 loss in the governor’s race, as my colleague Tim Murphy has written.
Other members point to an alleged clerical error in Pima County—in which the number of uncounted ballots appeared to increase on Friday—as evidence of a conspiracy, urging Lake to “fight” the “election steal.” A lawyer for Lake sent a letter to the county demanding an explanation on Friday; Mark Evans, the county’s public communications manager, told the Arizona Capitol Times it was a “clerical error,” adding, “in this age of conspiracy, everything gets blown up into inserted votes.”
This context, though, appears absent from the X feed—as were fact-checks to false claims of voter fraud that percolated on Election Day, as I reported then. But this is not a surprise, given that research shows Musk’s so-called crowd-sourced fact-checking mechanism on X, known as “community notes,” did not actually address most false and misleading claims about the US elections circulating on the platform during the campaign. And with Musk poised to become even more powerful following Trump’s win, don’t expect that to change anytime soon.
Elon Musk is apparently not impressed by Dana Carvey’s impression of him on “Saturday Night Live.” “Dana Carvey just sounds like Dana Carvey,” Musk wrote on X, replying under a clip of last night’s cold open, in which Carvey sported Musk’s “dark MAGA” hat and jumped up and down chanting, “USA! USA!” Responding to another […]
Jimmy Kimmel didn’t hold back when responding to Elon Musk’s X post calling him an “insufferable nonsense propaganda puppet.” “At least my children like me, you know,” Kimmel said during his monologue on Thursday night’s episode of “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” Musk posted about Kimmel on Wednesday after the late-night host teared up while talking about […]
In a blockbuster story published Friday morning, The Wall Street Journal reports that Elon Musk has been in regular contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin for about two years, with the discussions covering a range of issues from geopolitics to business to personal matters.
There are no on-the-record sources confirming the regular conversations between Musk and Putin, and Musk did not comment to the news organization. A Putin spokesperson said the Russian leader and Musk have had just one telephone call. However, the report is plausibly true, and the Journal cites "several current and former US, European, and Russian officials." This is also not the first time there have been reports of contact between Musk and Putin.
The new story about Musk's direct links to an avowed enemy of the United States immediately raised concerns among some prominent US officials who work with the billionaire entrepreneur, including NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.
Enlarge/ A pedestrian walks past a flown Falcon 9 booster at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, on Tuesday, the same day Elon Musk said he will relocate the headquarters to Texas. (credit: Frederic J. Brown / AFP via Getty Images)
Elon Musk said Tuesday that he will move the headquarters of SpaceX and his social media company X from California to Texas in response to a new gender identity law signed by California Governor Gavin Newsom.
Musk's announcement, made via a post on X, follows his decision in 2021 to move the headquarters of the electric car company Tesla from Palo Alto, California, to Austin, Texas, in the wake of coronavirus lockdowns in the Bay Area the year before. Now, two of Musk's other major holdings are making symbolic moves out of California: SpaceX to the company's Starbase launch facility near Brownsville, Texas, and X to Austin.
The new gender identity law, signed by Governor Newsom, a Democrat, on Monday, bars school districts in California from requiring teachers to disclose a change in a student's gender identification or sexual orientation to their parents. Musk wrote on X that the law was the "final straw" prompting the relocation to Texas, where the billionaire executive and his companies could take advantage of lower taxes and light-touch regulations.
Enlarge/ Numerous pieces of ice fell off the second stage of the Falcon 9 rocket during its climb into orbit from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. (credit: SpaceX)
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket suffered an upper stage engine failure and deployed a batch of Starlink Internet satellites into a perilously low orbit after launch from California Thursday night, the first blemish on the workhorse launcher's record in more than 300 missions since 2016.
Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and CEO, posted on X that the rocket's upper stage engine failed when it attempted to reignite nearly an hour after the Falcon 9 lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, at 7:35 pm PDT (02:35 UTC).
Frosty evidence
After departing Vandenberg to begin SpaceX's Starlink 9-3 mission, the rocket's reusable first stage booster propelled the Starlink satellites into the upper atmosphere, then returned to Earth for an on-target landing on a recovery ship parked in the Pacific Ocean. A single Merlin Vacuum engine on the rocket's second stage fired for about six minutes to reach a preliminary orbit.
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