Over the weekend, a poorly-constructed and very obviously fake claim about Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico sprang up on X only to almost instantly fall apart. The claim was that Talarico had been absent from the campaign trail not because he had the flu, as he and his campaign have said, but because he was secretly flown to Ohio on a private plane and committed to a mental hospital there.

One of the most prominent people involved in spreading the story on X was none other than the site’s owner, Elon Musk. With the midterm elections just weeks away, Musk is pouring money into GOP Senate candidates’ coffers and involving himself in the spread of literal fake news about a Democratic candidate, at a time when basically every true trust and safety guardrail has long been erased from his site. Given that he and his companies stand to profit handsomely from a Republican victory, the pattern is clear: the biggest election disinformation risk in the next few weeks is Elon Musk.

The Talarico story, as journalists Will Sommer and Andrew Egger have written at The Bulwark, centers around accusations that the candidate had suspiciously disappeared from the campaign trail. Talarico himself said repeatedly that he had the flu, and appeared remotely at an event on September 30, citing his illness. But on Sunday, MAGA influencers Nick Sortor and Rhein Amacher began hinting that they had bombshell news about exactly where........

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