The Conspiracy Theory That Elon Musk Stole the Election Using Starlink Is Everywhere Now

On November 9, a TikTok user called Etheria77 posted a nine-minute long video in which she outlined a conspiracy theory suggesting that Elon Musk’s Starlink internet satellite system was used as part of a sophisticated effort to steal the election on behalf of president-elect Donald Trump.

“California and other swing states were able to use Starlink in order to tally up and to count voting ballots in their state,” said Etheria77. “The numbers don’t make sense, and the reason I’m going to tell you that is, you had guaranteed states that were going to turn blue and didn’t. Then you had millions of [votes] that are missing. This right here is bullshit.”

The account was not the first to suggest the conspiracy theory, but the video was one of the main reasons it has taken off in recent days. While TikTok has since removed the video, that has not stopped it from being shared on other social media platforms, including X, Reddit, Threads, Facebook, and Instagram, where it has racked up millions of views.

This was just one of dozens of TikTok videos, many of them with hundreds of thousands of views, that shared the conspiracy theory. On other platforms, accounts with large followings also boosted the Starlink conspiracy theory and an assortment of others about Trump’s win.

The promotion of baseless election-related conspiracy theories, in what has been dubbed the rise of the so-called BlueAnon movement, mimics in many ways the rise of the Stop the Steal movement in the wake of the 2020 US presidential election. Just like now, those conspiracy theories began as vague claims of election fraud before morphing into very specific and increasingly unhinged narratives about voting machines, military satellites, and all-powerful figures working with the winning campaign. What began as vague, amorphous claims that “something doesn’t add up” in the hours after president-elect Donald Trump won the election last week have now crystallized into an evolving conspiracy theory involving Musk and Starlink.

The major difference, however, is that while Trump and his allies quickly embraced the conspiracies, so far no Democratic lawmaker or election official has promoted the idea that the 2024 election was stolen.

“Similar to the general claims we’ve seen from the left baselessly speculating that the election was rigged for Trump, the surge in posts about Starlink appears to have been partly driven by relatively obscure accounts that often share little to no identifying information,” says Sam Howard, politics editor with media monitoring group NewsGuard. “I’m not aware of any federal-level Democratic officeholders or officials who have pushed this to date.”

Harris and her campaign have never once suggested the election results are anything but what was reported, and in her concession speech last week Harris urged her supporters to accept the outcome.

Disinformation researchers are still unsure whether this trend will continue to grow into a significant movement, akin to Stop the Steal, or fizzle out without support from major figures within the Democratic party. But some believe the movement could continue to grow thanks to influencers seeking to gain clout.

“There are incentives for people to do this,” says Elise Thomas, a senior open source analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. “It feels really good to get all of those likes. If they’re getting, you know, 100,000 likes, 500,000 likes for these tweets, they’re going to keep doing it, and they’re going to come up with new twists on the narrative, and new explanations. That’s exactly what we saw happening on the right.”

It took just minutes after Vice President Kamala Harris conceded the election for conspiracy theories about the results to flood social media platforms. Research company PeakMetrics tracked a million posts on November 6 on X related to vague claims like “something doesn’t add up” along with hashtags like “#Recount2024“ and “#DontConcedeKamala.”

Eighteen percent of these posts were made by inauthentic accounts, according to an analysis shared with WIRED by researchers from Cyabra, a real-time AI disinformation detection tool. However, when the researchers checked again this week, they found that while the proportion of inauthentic accounts had dropped significantly—6 percent—the conspiracy continued to grow.

“Despite this decline, the conspiracy’s momentum persists, driven increasingly by a blend of real influencers and unwitting participants,” the Cyabra researchers wrote.

PeakMetrics recorded a 2,200 percent rise in the number of posts mentioning Starlink and the election or voting between Saturday and Sunday last, with posts about the Starlink conspiracy theory surpassing posts using the #Recount2024 hashtag on X on Monday.

A NewsGuard analysis shared with WIRED found there were 281,644 mentions of Starlink on X on November 10, compared to a daily average of 40,100 mentions a day from November 5 to November 9.

The conspiracy theory took hold after it was discovered that Starlink was used at some polling locations to improve connectivity—not for voting machines, but for voter check-in. The false claims have been repeatedly debunked by fact-checking organizations, and election officials have reiterated that voting machines are not connected to the internet.

Starlink did not respond to a request for comment.

This conspiracy theory has continued to spread, and it’s not limited to X: Discussion threads on Reddit, posts on Instagram and Threads, and dozens of Facebook posts all push the narrative that Musk colluded with Trump to use his Starlink satellites to steal the election.

One of the most active platforms for these conspiracy theories is TikTok. WIRED has reviewed dozens of videos posted on the platform by users either repeating the claim about Musk and Starlink or adding new twists to the conspiracy theory.

X, Meta, Reddit, and TikTok did not respond to requests for comment.

One of the most popular new aspects of the theory relates to the fact that Starlink satellites were observed burning up over the US last weekend, which those pushing the conspiracy theory claim is evidence of Musk attempting to cover his tracks. The reality is that Starlink satellites are designed to burn up on reentry at the end of their lifespan.

The conspiracy theory has eerily similar aspects to the so-called Italygate conspiracy pushed by the Trump campaign after the 2020 election, which suggested an Italian military satellite was used to flip votes from Trump to President Joe Biden.

“It’s concerning to see it solidifying and crystallizing into specific narratives, and then to see stuff being added on—this is what we saw last time as well,” says Thomas. “You see this sort of collective storytelling that happens within these communities where the people who are trying to gain clout online by promoting a new version of a conspiracy theory, they all have to add their little bits to it so that they can get their engagement.”

Other conspiracy theorists claimed Trump spoke about “a little secret” he made onstage that he had with Musk, referencing a comment he made during his Madison Square Garden rally last month. In fact, the comment was directed at House speaker Mike Johnson. Some left-leaning accounts have also pointed to podcaster Joe Rogan’s comments this week that Musk had developed a bespoke app to give him early access to election results.

“Apparently Elon created an app and he knew who won the election four hours before the results,” Rogan said. “So as the results are coming in, four hours before they called it, Dana White told me Elon said, ‘I’m leaving. It’s over. Donald won.’” It’s unclear how this app worked or what data it used.

Jen Easterly, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency that oversees the US elections, said in a November 6 statement that there was “no evidence of any malicious activity that had a material impact on the security or integrity of our election infrastructure.”

While some right-wing figures are continuing to push election conspiracy theories, the vast majority have fallen silent in the wake of Trump’s win, abandoning overnight four years worth of nonstop posting and shouting about election fraud.

And while the left-wing election conspiracies are nowhere near the scale that the Stop the Steal movement was just weeks ago, some experts are still concerned.

“I’ve seen some comparisons to Stop the Steal and some of these other right-wing conspiracy election theories, and it is smaller than those, as they were at the end of the Trump presidency,” says Thomas. “But I think the significant difference there is that they came after months, if not years, of deliberate agitation and cultivation by a variety of actors. So, for me, to see these left-wing election fraud conspiracy theories getting pretty significant traction quickly, I think, personally, is quite concerning.”