How Musk and Trump could build a techno-autocracy

Tech tools could make Trumpism very difficult to dislodge

The second Trump Administration? More like the first Trump-Musk co-presidency. Maybe even the advent of President Musk.

At least, that’s how the last few weeks have played out. Elon Musk, the wealthiest man in the world, is tearing through the federal government with seemingly open disregard for Congress, the courts, the separation of powers, and every other aspect of our constitutional system.

For the best summary to-date of Musk’s hostile takeover, read Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic: The ‘rapid unscheduled disassembly’ of the United States Government.

Musk’s de-facto elevation to co-chief executive is just part of a growing alliance between Donald Trump and key elements of the US technology industry. That alliance between the authoritarian faction and tech leviathans like Musk (and Mark Andreessen and Peter Thiel) should ring alarm bells. Why? Because together they control two key prongs of autocratic consolidation: information and surveillance.

The entrenchment agenda — Trump’s plans to dig in, cement power, and limit competition — involves more than just government power. It’s also about harnessing the capabilities of modern tech.

If this techno-authoritarian alliance deepens, it could result in a system where ruling leaders not only have direct control over much of our democracy’s information ecosystem, but also have direct visibility into the behavior, activities, and beliefs of its citizens.

Prong one: Control over information ecosystems

In Hungary, Viktor Orbán has built the prototypical modern competitive authoritarian state. (So much so that Trump and his allies explicitly cite it as a role model).

Last year, Amanda Carpenter wrote about Orbán’s successful effort to seize and centralize control over media broadcasters and platforms: The MAGA model for returning to power and dismantling democracy.

The story of how Orbán took over the country’s independent media and used it to quash dissent is worth learning from. It began with a coordinated effort to legally harass and bully independent outlets until they were on the brink of financial insolvency. And then the twist:

Faced with the crushing pressure of the regulations and dwindling advertising revenue, many owners eventually succumbed to offers to buy their floundering media companies. For many, the choice was: sell or go bankrupt.

But the buyers were not saviors. They were Orban’s oligarch allies, ready to pool those previously-independent media outlets into a centralized propaganda machine.

Today, Orbán and his allies directly control the flow of information to the majority of Hungarians.

It’s difficult to imagine Trumpism similarly succeeding in their efforts to capture traditional media outlets in the United States. (Even as cable news outlets like ABC and newspapers like the Washington Post engage in anticipatory obedience, we’re still a long way from outright control and propaganda — though there are notable parallels between Trump’s lawsuits targeting the press and the legal harassment that marked the outset of Orbán’s quest to control independent media.)

Read more: The existential struggle between journalism and authoritarianism.

But the thing is: Most Americans don’t get their news from cable TV or newspapers anymore.

According to Pew Research Center, the majority of Americans get their news online. And a growing portion of that is occurring on social media sites like TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter/X.

Musk’s takeover of Twitter shows what a growing Orbánization of social media platforms could look like.

Musk transformed a mainstream social media platform into his own personal political megaphone through a process not unlike that which he is now applying to the federal government: bring in a small team of loyalists to make dramatic cuts to personnel (especially in roles like, say, Trust & Safety), seize technical resources, make radical policy changes, and count on speed and shock to ensure a fait accompli before critics find their feet.

Research and reports from X engineers have revealed Musk’s demand that his X account be algorithmically preferenced on the platform. Having the most followed account on X has allowed him to model the preferred form of engagement (including Musk’s own 200-fold increase in political content). Meanwhile, the so-called “Trump’s Online War Machine” and Musk’s political action committee’s "Election Integrity Community" group on X have galvanized users to disseminate election conspiracy theories resulting in the harassment and attempted doxing of individuals.

The site has also become a powerful tool to target individual critics, civil servants, and opposition figures. For instance, federal workers whose positions Musk derided as “fake jobs” have experienced a wave of harassment that drove some off of social media entirely. Similarly, after Trump’s May conviction on 34 felony counts, his followers called for jurors to be doxxed and killed, going so far as to publish some jurors’ addresses. Most recently, the American Accountability Foundation published online a “DEI watch list” with the names and photos of fifty federal workers the organization encouraged Trump to fire.

To be clear, Musk’s X is just one piece of the online ecosystem puzzle right now. We don’t know if and whether other platforms — such as Meta’s Instagram and Facebook — will continue their post-election drift towards Trump. We don’t know yet what will happen to TikTok (Trump this week proposed it be effectively purchased by the US government). We don’t know how many other tech investors will follow in what appears to be the increasingly authoritarian footsteps of Mark Andreessen and Peter Thiel.

But still, it’s not difficult to imagine a broader “X-ification” of the internet where the platforms themselves become increasingly ideological tools to embed the authoritarian faction in power.

Prong two: Scaled surveillance

Over the past week, Elon Musk and his team of handpicked operators from Musk’s tech enterprises have gained access to some of the most sensitive payment and information systems of the US government, including the personal data of millions of civil servants.

This raises an even larger, longer-term risk.

For the last quarter century, the United States, regardless of who or what party occupied the White House, has built increasingly sophisticated mechanisms for both federal data collection and surveillance — with only limited safeguards. Under the first Trump Administration, this apparatus and its applications noticeably grew.

Federal immigration authorities proposed expanding the collection of biometric data to surveil immigrants and their families, increased their tracking of social media information from noncitizens, signed a contract to deploy autonomous AI-enabled surveillance towers along the 100 mile-wide zone north of the border, refined biometric data collection by federal agencies to monitor public places via surveillance cameras, and used facial recognition technology to identify people who took part in the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.

Today, the surveillance industry consists of a growing field of startups linked by a small group of investors and executives.

Andreessen Horowitz, Mark Andreessen’s firm, is invested in two AI surveillance startups: Skydio, an AI-enabled startup focused on drone flight, and Ambient.AI, which offers AI to monitor surveillance cameras for suspicious activity. After winning its first federal contracts under Trump, Peter Thiel-funded Anduril has continued to expand its government footprint. And, Clearview AI, another Peter Thiel-backed venture, is now among the top vendors for supplying facial-recognition software to federal agencies.

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We don’t know yet how aggressively the Trump-Musk administration will pursue surveillance as an entrenchment tool, but it very much appears to be on the table.

For example, a former Trump official has assessed that Trump is likely to support expanding the use of AI in border surveillance, while the CEO of a prison contractor recently told investors that he expects the administration to “take a much more expansive approach” to immigration monitoring. Meanwhile, Musk and his allies are aggregating a number of datasets containing sensitive information about citizens via the guise of fraud detection — one piece of their broader discussion around deploying AI as part of their administrative takeover.

If all these new surveillance and AI tools were to make the jump to deployment against Trump’s critics — especially if combined with the additional data on countless Americans now in the hands of Musk and DOGE — they could become a powerful tool to intimidate opposition and quash dissent.

President Musk ‘moves fast and breaks things’

In uncanny alignment with the tech ethos of “move fast and break things,” Musk hasn’t wasted any time since the start of the administration using Trump’s reacquired powers to advance their tech agenda.

We don’t know exactly where this is all going to lead, but it’s happening fast. So it’s worth asking the hard questions now before the hypothetical becomes reality:

• What happens if the government and social media platforms effectively fuse – and pursue a shared campaign to intimidate and harass their opposition?

• What would it look like if a politicized law enforcement gains access to dramatically expanded, AI-powered surveillance tools?

• How far can an unelected set of tech oligarchs get in entrenching and wielding political power through an aligned administration?

We probably don’t want to know the answer to any of those questions.

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Protect Democracy’s Alexandra Chandler, Edison Forman, Ben Gips, Izzy Gray, and Cecelia Vieira contributed to this piece.

Photo credit: Chris Unger, Getty Images