Elon Musk is widely known as an ambitious meme-master who struggles to get along with the medium no matter how many jokes he steals. It seems that all the money in the world can’t replace a decent sense of humor.
But until this election season, Musk’s comedic endeavors have mostly been self-serving. Now, an independent political action committee, called America PAC, is spending money on social media to spread satirical memes in support of former President Donald Trump as his campaign against Vice President Kamala Harris enters its final stretch.
It's not clear how much money Musk has contributed to the PAC — he has repeatedly denied a report that he plans to give $45 million a month to the group — but the Tesla CEO has taken credit for creating the PAC, and it has attracted generous donations from Musk's allies in the tech world.
The independent political action committee that backs the Make America Great Again campaign, led by some of the strategists behind Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s failed 2024 primary, has spent $33 million over the past month, with much of it directed toward more than a dozen competitive House races. Trump appears to be the primary focus of the independent political action committee, with the group’s ads tending to target swing states, attacking Harris as a soft-on-immigration “socialist” and promising that Trump will “save” America.
But among these more traditional ads are paid publications that try to capitalize on popular memes to make a political point. The problem is that whoever is making these ads has the same comedic instincts as Musk. In the case of their “Disaster Girl” ad, which uses a popular photo of a young girl looking conspiratorially at the camera as if she were responsible for the house fire in the background, the author calls the house “America Under Kamala Harris.” This effortless joke is visually disrupted by the superimposition of the PAC logo above the girl’s head, making it seem as if she, too, is supposed to represent America—or that the PAC itself set the country on fire.
Elsewhere, Drake's meme referring to Harris as a “failed border czar” (there is no such position) could have been edited out, as he misspelled the word “survivor” in Trump's declaration that he is a “strong assassination survivor.” [sic]“It’s unclear what value an implicit endorsement from Drake, who recently lost a major rap battle when rival Kendrick Lamar called him a “certified pedophile” in the song “Not Like Us,” might have. At least the PAC managed to manage the “distracted lover” image from being coherently unfunny, though it and the other macros suggest the social team behind the strategy haven’t learned any new memes since 2017.
But there are other options that are more confusing—and that lead us directly to Musk. For example, an Instagram post by the US Political Action Committee shows a photo of Trump after a gunman attempted to assassinate him at a rally in July, with the caption, “Impeached. Arrested. Convicted. Shot. Still standing.” Rather than framing the meme itself, the post is a screenshot of a tweet from an anonymous X account that Musk often interacts with, and one that is known for heavily promoting the cryptocurrency Dogecoin. The resulting image is small and grainy, though it also serves as a subtle advertisement for the kind of content you can find on X, if any of the US Political Action Committee’s 398 Instagram followers are interested. On its X account, the organization may have inadvertently made itself the butt of a joke by formatting a text-on-phone meme that shows its messages being ignored by recipients.
While it’s hard to say whether Musk had any direct input into these ads, he’s reportedly taken a hands-on approach when it comes to America PAC, and it’s not surprising to think he may have offered some suggestions. The posts that misleadingly claim that “Comrade Kamala” wants to defund the police certainly dovetail with Musk’s criticism of the Democratic nominee. At least one of the anti-Harris video ads depicts the vice president laughing while surrounded by flames — an extreme image for a political ad, one that comes close to the kind of right-wing trolling content that Musk has allowed and promoted on his platform.
After a second apparent attempt on Trump’s life by a gunman on Sunday, Musk tweeted, “No one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” along with a thinking face emoji. Many users condemned the post as incitement to violence, prompting Musk to delete it. Some critics called on the US to revoke his security clearance and government contracts. The Secret Service said it was “aware” of Musk’s tweet, but did not announce an investigation.
Apparently realizing the irresponsibility of this comment, Musk tweeted several comments, writing in part: “Turns out jokes are a lot less funny if people don’t know the context and the presentation is plain text.” He spoke like a man who would never admit he’s not funny at all.
