Bill Ackman speaking in June.Jared Siskin/Patrick McMullan/Getty
Something unusual happened the other week, when podcasting megastar Joe Rogan sat down with Ohio Senator and Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance. In the midst of a conversation about abortion, Vance claimed that liberal women publicly celebrate terminating their pregnancies with elaborate displays on social media: “They’re baking birthday cakes and posting about it,” he declared.
In 2024, rich men fell for things at a previously unimaginable rate.
Unusually, Rogan actually pushed back. “I think there’s very few people that are celebrating,” he responded.
This basic fact-checking—a brief display of a bare minimum, basement level of common sense—was not only rare for Rogan, but it was rare in an election season where some of the country’s richest and most powerful men have relentlessly promoted hoaxes, politically charged lies, and conspiracy theories of varying degrees of absurdity.
That addled tendency was on full display at other moments in Vance’s interview with Rogan, with the two agreeing that teens are transitioning genders or becoming non-binary to get into Harvard or Yale and to “reject [their] white privilege.” (Vance also nudged into anti-vaccine territory, saying he’d become “red-pilled on the whole vax thing” after two days of illness following a shot.)
If there’s one salient feature of the 2024 election cycle, it’s that rich people—rich men, particularly, and even more particularly ones who support Donald Trump’s reelection campaign—fell for things at a previously unimaginable rate. Separate from simply supporting Trump or advancing right-wing talking points, they promoted ideas and stories that almost no reasonable person could possibly believe: cartoonish lies, absurd leaps of logic, and clearly fake documents.
Take billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, who spent days this fall promoting a ludicrous conspiracy theory that an “ABC News whistleblower” had emerged to prove the presidential debate the channel hosted had been rigged for Kamala Harris. The hoax was promulgated by a Twitter user calling himself Black Insurrectionist, who pushed a typo-filled “affidavit” from the “whistleblower” that it appeared he had written himself. Later, the poster tried to promote even more lurid, and clearly fake, sexual assault claims against Tim Walz before apparently deleting his account entirely. When the Associated Press tracked down the person behind “Black Insurrectionist,” he turned out to be a white serial fraudster in upstate New York.
Ackman hasn’t publicly commented on Palmer’s unmasking, and did not respond to multiple requests for comment. He did, weeks after promoting the ABC whistleblower story, eventually allow that it was “pretty clear” that it had turned out to be false. But he immediately pivoted to join Trump and others in accusing CBS News of misleadingly editing an interview with Kamala Harris, calling an FCC complaint filed against the network by a right-wing law firm “irrefutable.”
Ackman, of course, wasn’t alone in pushing such false or flimsy notions. As the Atlantic noted, other Trump-loving venture capitalists spend unimaginable amounts of time on Twitter—if there’s a contagious disease at work here, the site would be where they caught it—pumping out endless quantities of suspicion and unsourced claims. For example, Shaun Maguire of Sequoia Capital publicly backed Donald Trump this spring, then went all-in on voter fraud allegations, reposting texts a “general contractor friend” sent him claiming “hundreds of ballots” had been mailed to a vacant house he worked on in 2020. Maguire speculated that the ballots had been sent there so that “antifa” could do voter fraud. Earlier this year, after the July assassination attempt against Donald Trump, he speculated that the shooter “will almost certainly be discovered to be a member” of antifa. (The shooter turned out to be a 20-year-old registered Republican.)
And of course, there was the richest of the rich men, and the one most willing to repeat lies of any variety: Elon Musk turned himself into a one-man conveyor belt for false claims, especially election disinformation and endless false claims about illegal immigration and undocumented people voting. (He also reposted Maguire’s ballots post, adding, “Anyone else seeing this sort of thing?”)
In his own conversation with Joe Rogan on Monday, Musk made a final preemptive claim of Democratic voter fraud, and signaled an atmosphere of permanent, perpetual suspicion going forward, should Harris win.
“Everything they accuse Trump of, they are guilty of,” he said. “If Trump doesn’t win, this will be the last real election in America. And… if the big government, Kamala puppet machine wins, they will legalize the illegals in the swing states. There will be no swing states. Every election going forward will be a guaranteed Democrat win.”
“This is,” he promised solemnly, a few moments later, “the last chance.”
With all of these very rich men, of course, there is a basic unanswerable question: how much of these ideas they actually believe, and how much they repeat simply because they think it will help Donald Trump, or at least cloud a potential Harris win.
In the end, though, it doesn’t really matter: they’ve thrown the unimaginable weight of their money, power, and influence behind these lies. Their impulse towards suspicion and paranoia—and their willingness to make extreme claims of fraud—won’t go away after Election Day. And the next target is anyone’s guess.
