The second-worst person in American public life is …

We can fight Trump with our votes. But what to do about his newfound ally?

Friends,

In yesterday’s Office Hours, I said I’ve started to imagine we can relegate Trump to the dustbin of history along with some of the other horrible people in American public life today.

I asked you to vote on the second-worst person. I nominated JD Vance, Clarence Thomas, Tucker Carlson, and Elon Musk.

Over 4,800 of you participated in the poll (as of midnight ET).

JD Vance garnered just 3 percent of your votes. Tucker Carlson, 4 percent. Clarence Thomas got 32 percent.

But the winner by far, with 57 percent, is Elon Musk.

Several of you explained that although Thomas is powerful and unaccountable, he’s just one of nine powerful and unaccountable justices. But Musk is rapidly transforming his enormous wealth — he’s the richest person in the world — into a huge source of unaccountable political power that’s now backing Trump and other authoritarians around the world.

Musk owns X. He recently released an AI chatbot that falsely told hundreds of millions that “the ballot deadline has passed” in several states, including the battlegrounds of Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania, among others.

Secretaries of state in five states have urged Musk to “immediately implement changes” to his chatbot, but Musk hasn’t done so.

In the last few days, Musk has also reposted a faked version of Kamala Harris’s first campaign video with an altered voice track sounding like Harris and saying she doesn’t “know the first thing about running the country” and is the “ultimate diversity hire.” Musk tagged the video “amazing.” It’s got 135 million views, so far. It’s still up.

The website of Musk’s America PAC is tricking people into sharing personal data. Although the site promises to help them register to vote, it asks users in battleground states to give their names and phone numbers without directing them to a voter registration site. That personal information is being used to send them anti-Harris and pro-Trump ads.

Musk has also promised $45 million of cash per month to pro-Trump PACs.

According to a new report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Musk himself has posted 50 false election claims on X so far this year. They’ve accrued a total of 1.2 billion views. None of them had a “Community Note” from X’s purported fact-checking system.

Meanwhile, in the UK, far-right thugs are burning, looting, and terrorizing minority communities because Musk’s X has been spreading lies about an immigrant being responsible for a deadly attack on school girls. Musk has not only allowed instigators of this hate to spread these lies, but he’s re-tweeting and supporting them.

What to do about Musk? In the past, I’ve suggested a boycott of Tesla.

I’ve also urged advertisers to boycott X.

But now that a coalition of major advertisers has organized such a boycott, Musk is suing them under antitrust law. “We tried peace for 2 years, now it is war,” he wrote on X earlier this week, referring to advertisers who criticize him and X.

What’s the next step? Regulators around the world must stand up to the rise in hate speech and disinformation on X, and put Musk out of business.