Elon Musk is widely known as a wannabe memelord who struggles with the medium no matter how many jokes he steals. All the money in the world, it seems, is no substitute for a decent sense of humor.
But until this election season, Musk’s attempts at comedy have been largely self-serving. Now, his Super PAC, the creatively-named America PAC, is spending to blast out dire memes on social media in support of former president Donald Trump as his campaign against Vice President Kamala Harris enters the home stretch.
It’s not clear how much money Musk has contributed to America PAC — he has repeatedly denied a report that he planned to give $45 million a month to the group — but the Tesla CEO has taken credit for creating the Super PAC, and it has attracted generous donations from Musk allies in the tech world.
The MAGA-aligned Super PAC, which is being steered by some of the strategists responsible for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis‘ botched 2024 primary run, spent $33 million over the last month, with a significant portion funneled toward more than a dozen competitive House races. Across Meta‘s Facebook and Instagram, and the Musk-owned X (formerly Twitter), it appears that electing Trump is the Super PAC’s primary focus, as the group’s ads tend to target swing states, attacking Harris as a “socialist” who is soft on immigration and promising that Trump will “save” America.
Between those more conventional ads, however, are paid posts that attempt to leverage popular meme templates to make a political point. The trouble is, whoever they have making these ads suffers from the same comedic instincts as Musk. In the case of their “Disaster Girl” spot, which makes use of an iconic photo of a little girl casting a conspiratorial glance at the camera as if she is responsible for the house fire in the background of the picture, the author labeled the house “America Under Kamala Harris.” This dull, zero-effort gag is visually muddled by the placement of the America PAC logo over the girl’s head, which makes it appear that she, too, is supposed to represent America — or that the PAC itself set the country on fire.
Elsewhere, a Drake meme referring to Harris as a “Failed Border Czar” (there is no such position) could have used an edit, since it misspells the word “survivor” in declaring Trump a “Badass Assassination Surviver [sic].” It’s unclear what value an implied endorsement from Drake, recent loser of a major rap beef that saw rival Kendrick Lamar call him a “certified pedophile” in the hit diss track “Not Like Us,” might carry. An America PAC take on the “Distracted Boyfriend” stock photo at least manages to be coherently unfunny, though along with the other image macros it suggests that the social team behind this strategy has not learned of any new memes since 2017.
Other choices are more puzzling still — but lead straight back to Musk. An America PAC post on Instagram, for example, features a picture of Trump following a gunman’s attempt to assassinate him at a rally in July, with the caption “Impeached. Arrested. Convicted. Shot. Still Standing.” Except rather than framing the meme itself, the post is a screenshot of a tweet from an anonymous X account with which Musk often interacts, an account known to heavily promote the meme cryptocurrency Dogecoin. The resulting image is small and grainy, though it does double as an accurate ad for the kind of content you can find on X, if any of America PAC’s 398 Instagram followers are interested. And on its own X account, the organization perhaps inadvertently made itself the butt of the joke with a phone text meme format that showed its messages being ignored by a recipient.
While it’s hard to say whether Musk has had any direct input on these ads, he’s reportedly taken a hands-on approach when it comes to America PAC, and it’s not a stretch to think he may have thrown out a few suggestions. Certainly the posts that misleadingly claim “Comrade Kamala” wants to defund the police are in line with Musk’s criticisms of the Democratic candidate. At least one of the anti-Harris video ads depicts the vice president laughing while engulfed in flames — an extreme image for a political commercial, falling closer to the kind of trollish right-wing content that Musk has allowed and amplified on his platform.
Following an apparent second attempt on Trump’s life by an armed individual on Sunday, Musk tweeted that “no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” with a thinking-face emoji. Many users condemned the post as an incitement to violence, leading Musk to delete it. Some critics called for the U.S. to revoke his security clearance and government contracts. The Secret Service has said it is “aware” of Musk’s tweet, but stopped short of announcing an investigation.
Musk tweeted several follow-up comments after evidently recognizing the irresponsibility of the remark, writing in part, “Turns out that jokes are WAY less funny if people don’t know the context and the delivery is plain text.” Spoken like a man who will never admit that he’s just not funny at all.
