Twitter/X owner Elon Musk’s latest volley in the 2024 presidential campaign is a completely fake doctored video of Kamala Harris, clearly intended to deceive people, as the Trump-Harris election has Silicon Valley’s wealthiest tech bros at each other’s throats.

It’s funny how so many in the Silicon Valley billionaire class hate the Biden-Harris administration, considering that the Biden-Harris administration bailed their asses out when they were begging for a Silicon Valley Bank bailout. But the ethos of claiming victimhood is a constant among the tech plutocrat set, and a cabal of them have rallied toward Donald Trump in the 2024 election.

Xitter owner Elon Musk is suddenly one of the biggest Trumpers of the bunch, and in his ongoing Trump propaganda campaign, the New York Times reports that this past weekend, Musk shared a manipulated deepfake video of Kamala Harris on X, in clear violation of X’s own policies, yet the video remains up and has currently 130 million views.

We are not posting or linking the fraudulent video itself, but you’re free to look it up on Musk’s timeline if you care (this takes a while, because the man who supposedly runs five companies has time to tweet 80 times a day). It was posted at 4:11 pm PT on Friday, July 26. It shows the video of an actual Harris ad, with manipulated audio of Harris speaking over it.

“I, Kamala Harris, am your Democrat candidate for president because Joe Biden finally exposed his senility at the debate,” the Harris voice says in the video, per The Hill. "I was selected because I am the ultimate diversity hire. I’m both a woman and a person of color, so if you criticize anything, I say you’re both sexist and racist. I may not know the first thing about running the country, but remember, that’s a good thing if you’re a deep state puppet."

The video was originally posted by an account called Mr Reagan, and labeled as “PARODY”, but Musk’s shared version removed the word “parody.”  

Mashable notes that there are also rampant Harris deepfakes on TikTok, but notes that TikTok has been aggressively removing these. Not so on Xitter.

Twitter/X CEO Linda Yaccarino is getting a fair amount of mockery for her cowardly, evasive response that “So much debate on so many important topics today. 🔥.”

The Times reports that, internally, there was debate among those who manage the Xitter “Community Notes” feature that points out blatant falsehoods, as the post clearly violates Twitter’s terms against “significantly and deceptively altered, manipulated or fabricated” material.

Per the Times, the group considered seven different disclaimers on the post, along the lines of ”This is an AI generated video of Vice President Kamala Harris using audio of clips that were never actually stated by the VP.” But in the end, none of these were added, as there may be tremendous fear within the company of not being seen as one of Musk’s faithful lickspittles.

Yet it would not be fair to say that all Silicon Valley tech billionaires are in the tank for Trump. A separate New York Times article explores the 2024 election rift between the Silicon Valley elite, with Musk, David Sacks, and the Andreessen Horowitz founders on the Trump side, but with Sun Microsystems founder and big-deal VC guy Vinod Khosla, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings very enthusiastically in the Kamala Harris camp (particularly now that Biden is out).

But far-off Texas billionaire Mark Cuban has a theory that the tech set is supporting Trump for reasons that have nothing to do with politics. “It’s a bitcoin play,” Cuban tweeted about two weeks ago. “What will drive the price of BTC [bitcoin] is lower tax rates and tariffs, which if history is any guide (and it’s not always ), will be inflationary. Combine that with global uncertainty as to the geopolitical role of the USA, and the impact on the US Dollar as a reserve currency, and you can’t align the stars any better for a BTC price acceleration.”

In other words, these tech billionaires may just hope to crash the value of the US dollar so as to make their crypto more valuable, and they couldn’t really care less what other consequences come with a second Trump administration.

Related: Elon Musk’s Trans Daughter Gives First Public Interview, Says Musk Is ‘In a Ketamine-Fueled Haze’ [SFist]

Image: (Left) U.S. Air Force / Trevor Cokley, (Right) Lawrence Jackson, both via Wikimedia Commons