From Murdoch to Musk: Hacking the State

An Unexpected ‘Hello’

We can blame Steve Jobs. The founder of Apple gave Rupert Murdoch an iPad around Christmas 2011, and Murdoch thought it was a game-changer. He installed one of its most popular apps. “Hello @twitter!” Murdoch wrote:

“First tweet. Thanks to all my followers. Hope this is a good way to keep in touch with interesting people and ideas.”

Within two days, a Twitter user purporting to be his then‑still estranged but un-divorced wife, Wendi Deng, piped up: “You okay, hun?” The fake account was so convincing it was verified and then banned. But Rupert persisted.

One of the most iconic media figures was finally available to the public, without a phalanx of lawyers and handlers to inhibit him. It was a PR disaster.

Murdoch fell into every cliché. Extolling red meat, rebuking renewable energy, gunning for then‑Prime Minister David Cameron or President Barack Obama (“out to lunch!”), pushing for Scottish independence – his outbursts were like an embarrassing grandfather at Christmas dinner.

“Maybe most Moslems [are] peaceful, but until they recognise and destroy their growing jihadist cancer they must be held responsible”, he thundered. Then mused: “Why is the Jewish‑owned press so consistently anti‑Israel in every crisis?”

Forget the equal opportunity bigotry. Arguably the most powerful media mogul of his generation – the publisher of more than a hundred newspapers from The Times of London to The Sun, the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal – the holder of the megaphone of Fox News and various Sky networks, somehow still seemed to feel he didn’t have a voice.

But was social media the place to find it?

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Holding the Spotlight

Murdoch straddles an entire century of major media transformation. Brought up in the Citizen Kane world of press barons, commanding and controlling assembly lines of workers of hand and brain, he then transitioned through the post‑war world of pop culture and mass media, and bang into the networked Information Age.

The old industrial power of print was instilled in Murdoch’s blood like ink.

His father was an influential newspaperman who played an important role in the Gallipoli scandal of Churchill’s failed Turkish campaign in the First World War. Such was the sway of newspaper barons in the early part of the 20th Century that two of them – Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Northcliffe – became part of Lloyd George’s Cabinet. Keith Murdoch was so highly rated that, as an Australian, he was dubbed ‘Lord Southcliffe’.

The power of print – as Rupert later said – ‘to do great good or evil’ was therefore grimed under the son’s fingernails.

After Oxford University, where he tried to rise in the Labour Party and kept a bust of Lenin in his college rooms, Murdoch learned his trade on the backbenches of the Daily Express in its 1950s heyday. He went back to Australia to start up a populist tabloid with its own Page 3 glamour girls, as well as a high‑end broadsheet.

In 1969, he returned to the UK to buy the News of the World title, and a few years later took over and transformed the Labour‑leaning The Sun to become a demotic daily, blending 60s permissive culture with a sexist, bigoted bent.

The red tops were tabloid hits. But it was the takeover of the establishment Times and Sunday Times during the early 80s that proved Murdoch’s astute ability to parlay media influence into political clout.

As a stalwart supporter of Margaret Thatcher’s free market agenda, he was allowed to bypass competition law and become the dominant force in Fleet Street.

By the time of the Wapping dispute in 1985, Murdoch had Thatcher’s backing to break the print unions, with the heavy‑handed presence of the Metropolitan Police. The conflicts were as violent as the miners’ strike, and Murdoch’s victory was perhaps just as important for Britain’s post‑industrial future.

His impact renders redundant the perennial question of whether he is a businessman interested in money or a politician manqué obsessed with power. In the era of Thatcher‑Reagan deregulation, de‑unionisation, and international finance, economics and politics were inseparable.

The monopoly cash from Fortress Wapping (Murdoch had 40% of the circulation of Fleet Street but 50% of the profits) provided the funding for his US launch pad.

He wanted to buy a network of channels that would become the basis for Fox News. But, under stricter American media ownership laws, he had to be a US citizen – fast. President Ronald Reagan obliged. So did Margaret Thatcher (again) allowing him to broadcast his Sky satellite network from Europe, though his rival BSB had won the franchise. Murdoch eventually merged with BSB to have a controlling interest in BSkyB.

For all the favours from politicians and regulators, Murdoch couldn’t buck the market when it came to technology.

By the turn of the millennium, the dot-com boom threatened both the print empire and satellite businesses. People were increasingly replacing aerial dishes with internet connections. The Murdochs – especially James Murdoch – tried to get into the new digital domain and bought the popular early social media site, MySpace.

That was a flop, and MySpace became a ghost town as it was quickly vacated by people favouring the bright new Facebook. So James came up with a new gambit: buy up the whole of BSkyB and turn it into a digital hub for all their content.

Cue the courtship and endorsement of the new Conservative Party leadership, David Cameron and George Osborne, and the appointment of senior Murdoch Editor Andy Coulson as Downing Street’s head of communications.

When, boosted by Murdoch’s papers, Coulson and Cameron entered No 10 in 2010, the strategic takeover of BSkyB was unexpectedly stalled by anti‑monopoly regulators and the administration’s Liberal Democrat coalition partners. It was eventually derailed by the Guardian and investigative journalist Nick Davies’ revelations of the phone‑hacking scandal.

Murdoch went to Parliament to apologise – the “humblest day of my life” – and was grilled by lawyers at the Leveson Inquiry into press ethics, practices, and culture.

That was the moment Murdoch decided to join Twitter.

Though he understood the importance of social media, it was obviously painful for him to be in the spotlight rather than controlling it – he had preferred quiet conclaves with powerful people and back‑door meetings with prime ministers. According to Tony Blair’s director of communications, Lance Price, Murdoch was secretly the 24th member of the Cabinet.

Secrecy was key.

The glare of negative publicity, police investigations, lengthy trials, and the Leveson recommendations for press regulation all seem to have aggravated and radicalised Murdoch.

His conservatism shifted away from traditional values around the rule of law and convention to a libertarian extreme where all regulation is considered a form of ‘state control’ and lawyers are ‘activists’. He beat a track that Elon Musk would soon follow; from a demand for ‘small government’ to zero government – from liberty to lawlessness.

Even the police he usually praised were there to be defied: in the case of Murdoch’s executives, deleting 20,000 million emails when asked by the Met to preserve them.

In the end, under the barrage of scandal, Murdoch admitted he found the directness of social media too much (I had a brief spat about the New York Times with him but he was very polite). When, in 2016, he married his last wife but one, Jerry Hall, he tweeted:

“No more tweets for 10 days or ever! Feel like the luckiest AND happiest man in the world.”

Then someone quietly removed the iPad.

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‘Vox Populi, Vox Dei’

A decade of civil litigation later, court filings suggest that there are more than 5,000 victims of unlawful information gathering at Murdoch’s UK tabloids – which extended beyond phone‑hacking to burglary, surveillance, and blagging of confidential medical and financial records.

Murdoch has paid out more than $1 billion to settle the claims. More extraordinary still, many of those victims turned out to be politicians and their aides, including members of the parliamentary select committee investigating phone‑hacking and government ministers discussing the BSkyB takeover.

So it would not be unfair to say that Murdoch hacked the British state. But his intrusion into public affairs is nothing like the extent to which Elon Musk has now hacked the United States.

Like Murdoch, who arrived from Australia via the UK, Musk is a naturalised US citizen, following a similar trajectory as an insurgent outsider—from South Africa via Canada. Both are immigrants, who themselves have supported labour mobility, but who at the same time amplify fears about immigration. Both rail against government while having thrived off different forms of state aid. But that’s where the similarities end.

Where Murdoch was cramped, crotchety, and awkward on Twitter, Musk found his voice on the microblogging platform and has never since ceased amplifying it.

By the time the nonagenarian had logged out, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX had 10 times the number of Twitter followers than Murdoch—five million.

With the encouragement of Twitter’s founder, Jack Dorsey, Musk’s social media presence then took off (more successfully than a lot of his rockets). By 2017, it had doubled to 10 million followers and doubled again to 20 million the year after that.

Animated by a dislike of journalists and what he calls ‘legacy media’, Musk now had a direct line to an audience of 600 million users to promote his electronic vehicles and long‑term mission to colonise Mars. He became more disinhibited, calling critics ‘pedos’, dissing lovers, posting comic memes, and making jokes about drug use.

Whether by design or co‑evolution, Twitter amplified his quirky ‘edgelord’ personality and turned Musk into a tech‑bro hero.

This virality was financially rewarding. It ramped up the value of Musk’s shares so much so that a comment in August 2018 about taking Tesla private attracted a fine of $20 million from the Securities and Exchange Commission, making it the most expensive tweet in history.

But, surrounded by admirers and acolytes, the bravado kept paying off.

Musk’s net worth surpassed Rupert Murdoch’s $20 billion around 2019. By 2022, when Musk was openly discussing buying up Twitter, he had amassed 120 million followers—equalling the global reach of all of Murdoch’s various media outlets combined. Where could he go from here, but upwards?

By then, the only person above him in the charts of Twitter followers was former President Barack Obama. Musk was getting more and more interested in politics, and one of his first major moves when taking over the social media giant (apart from sacking half his staff) was to poll his customers about reinstating Donald Trump to the platform (he’d been kicked off for stirring up the 2021 January 6 US Capitol insurrection). When a narrow margin voted yes, Musk proclaimed:

“The people have spoken. Trump will be reinstated. Vox Populi, Vox Dei.”

[Source: Musk’s tweet, November 19, 2022]

The voice of the people is the voice of God, but even his selected sample was fairly equivocal. As the town hall of the world became more like a cult following, Musk was taking on the role of a divine prophet.

The next year, Musk overtook Obama as the most followed and loudest voice on the platform, but the sense of inauthenticity and fakeness always gnawed at him. What were those noises echoing back? Were those real people or bots following him? Who was his ‘Wendi Deng’?

This anxiety reached a climax when he was a personal guest of Rupert Murdoch at the 2023 Superbowl in Arizona.

Sat next to the ageing News Corp owner, Musk seemed more interested in his phone than the match. He tweeted out support for his old college town team – “Go Eagles” – which racked up eight million views. But when a subsequent tweet about the game from then‑President Joe Biden surpassed him with 25 million views, Musk was incensed.

According to the authors of the graphic saga, Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter (see for example this analysis), the owner of the now‑X then rushed back to his engineers and insisted they change the algorithm. After a rancorous session, an “author_is_elon” code was added to boost the owner’s tweets by as much as 10,000 times.

Free speech absolutist? Absolutely—a powerful cocktail of overweening digital power, personal vanity, and political ambition was beginning to brew.

It came to a head during the Presidential Election year of 2024.

Musk had previously said he would not endorse any candidate, but his financial model of ‘paid‑for’ blue tick accounts was not making much money, and advertisers had fled the unmoderated nastiness of his rebranded X platform. It was time to double‑down. He wasn’t going to surrender to the “woke mind virus”.

Sharing a video of the Republican candidate raising his fist after the assassination attempt of 13 August, Musk publicly endorsed Donald Trump. The post received approximately 2.3 million likes, making it one of X’s most popular tweets of the year.

The rest is history.

Musk not only funnelled hundreds of millions of dollars into Trump’s campaign, he turned a global source of news into a megaphone for the ‘MAGA’ movement, promoting far‑right accounts, paid Kremlin social influencers, and a vortex of disinformation about migrants and trans people.

The story of how X radicalised and weaponised the electorate will no doubt be studied for years, but it is also a parable of its owner being radicalised and weaponised by his own platform.

Musk became a classic social media addict. You can see this in his tweeting frequency. By 2016, he was tweeting on average about twice a day. In 2022, when he acquired Twitter, that leapt to more than 13 times a day. By 2024, the year of the Presidential Election, his engagement had escalated dramatically, with reports indicating that he tweeted about 13,000 times in the first seven months. By the end of the campaign, he was posting an average of 61 times a day—about four tweets an hour given normal waking hours (not that Musk seems to have any).

Many of us will recognise the symptoms here of online addiction. Who hasn’t at some point been kept awake by something that someone said on Facebook? Or excited by a message on a dating app? Miffed at a WhatsApp or jealous of an Instagram post? The incessant notifications of social media define our era.

Whereas Murdoch claimed to influence politics through his newspaper front pages (‘It’s The Sun Wot Won It’ was his tabloid’s headline after the 1992 UK General Election), Musk has the means at his fingertips to do this directly—and personally—through the ecosystem of social media, modifying the newsfeed and terms of debate in real time. This virtual reality is rewiring people’s minds.

But it comes at a cost. As he checks his phone, Musk’s mentions must be overwhelming.

He appears to doomscroll late into the night, searching for solace, lols or someone to troll. To that extent, he is a victim of the reinforcement systems of X’s algorithms—a living slave of his own attention‑harvesting machine, hooked on a sleepless mind virus.

But the reward for the hits isn’t just dopamine—it is dollars.

As I write, Musk now has more than 200 million followers on X, and an estimated net worth of $400 billion, 20 times greater than Murdoch’s. No wonder Trump gave Musk a front‑row seat to his inauguration.

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A Digital Coup

While Murdoch spent more than half a century slowly building the media outlets that bought back‑door political influence, Musk took over Twitter and stormed through the front door of the White House in just two years.

Through his new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE—named after a memecoin), Musk can now access the levers of power and knowledge in ways Murdoch could only dream of. According to Wired, Musk’s DOGE team directly infiltrated the digital infrastructure of the US Government’s key departments. The interlopers included a 19‑year‑old known online as ‘Big Balls’, who was previously fired by a cybersecurity firm for leaking company secrets; and a 25‑year‑old with a penchant for eugenics.

An internal email reviewed by Wired said the access to the US federal payments systems of $5.45 trillion in 2024 was “the single greatest insider threat risk the Bureau of the Fiscal Service has ever faced”.

So a private citizen with no official role now has access to the most extensive and sensitive data on the planet.

Musk has already used some of the information to target perceived enemies. The USAID department was investigating the use of his Starlink satellite internet system, but within hours of accessing its budgets, Musk claimed that the agency was a “criminal” enterprise. Just like Twitter, a swathe of staff were sacked from the agency and the web pages about USAID’s Starlink investigation disappeared. More information appears to have been handed over to WikiLeaks for selective targeting of media and democracy organisations that received grants from the agency.

“Of course, it’s a coup”, wrote Yale Professor Timothy Snyder. “In the third decade of the 21st Century, power is more digital than physical.”

Once upon a time, troops had to storm a winter palace for a revolution to happen. As mass media became more powerful, you had to park your tanks on the lawns of TV and radio stations. In the Information Age, all it might take is a teenager with access to a database.

And behind this revolution, brought on by Big Tech, is the king of the ‘broligarchs’ —the richest man in the world — who has somehow bypassed left and right, and brought libertarians and authoritarians together in the biggest potential power transfer of public goods to private ownership in history, while micro-dosing on ketamine.

Peter Jukes is the author of ‘The Fall of the House of Murdoch’ and co-creator of the ‘Sergei and the Westminster Spy Ring’ podcast