Since Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and subsequently turned it into X, disaffected users have talked about leaving once and for all. Maybe they’d post some about how X has gotten worse to use, how it harbors white supremacists, how it pushes right-wing posts into their feed, or how distasteful they find the fact that Musk has cozied up to Donald Trump. Then they’d leave. Or at least some of them did. For the most part, X has held up as the closest thing to a central platform for political and cultural discourse.

But that may have changed. After Trump’s election victory, more people appear to have gotten serious about leaving. According to Similarweb, a social-media analytics company, the week after the election corresponded with the biggest spike in account deactivations on X since Musk’s takeover of the site. Many of these users have fled to Bluesky: The Twitter-like microblogging platform has added about 10 million new accounts since October.

X has millions of users and can afford to shed some here and there. Many liberal celebrities, journalists, writers, athletes, and artists still use it—but that they’ll continue to do so is not guaranteed. In a sense, this is a victory for conservatives: As the left flees and X loses broader relevance, it becomes a more overtly right-wing site. But the right needs liberals on X. If the platform becomes akin to “alt-tech platforms” such as Gab or Truth Social, this shift would be good for people on the right who want their politics to be affirmed. It may not be as good for persuading people to join their political movement.

The number of people departing X indicates that something is shifting, but raw user numbers have never fully captured the point of what the site was. Twitter’s value proposition was that relatively influential people talked to each other on it. In theory, you could log on to Twitter and see a country singer rib a cable-news anchor, billionaires bloviate, artists talk about media theory, historians get into vicious arguments, and celebrities share vaguely interesting minutiae about their lives. More so than anywhere else, you could see the unvarnished thoughts of the relatively powerful and influential. And anyone, even you, could maybe strike up a conversation with such people. As each wave departs X, the site gradually becomes less valuable to those who stay, prompting a cycle that slowly but surely diminishes X’s relevance.

This is how you get something approaching Gab or Truth Social. They are both platforms with modest but persistent usership that can be useful for conservatives to send messages to their base: Trump owns Truth Social, and has announced many of his Cabinet picks on the site. (As Doug Burgum, his nominee for interior secretary, said earlier this month: “Nothing’s true until you read it on Truth Social.”) But the platforms have little utility to the general public. Gab and Truth Social are rare examples of actual echo chambers, where conservatives can congregate to energize themselves and reinforce their ideology. These are not spaces that mean much to anyone who is not just conservative, but extremely conservative. Normal people do not log on to Gab and Truth Social. These places are for political obsessives whose appetites are not satiated by talk radio and Fox News. They are for open anti-Semites, unabashed swastika-posting neo-Nazis, transphobes, and people who say they want to kill Democrats.  

Of course, if X becomes more explicitly right wing, it will be a far bigger conservative echo chamber than either Gab or Truth Social. Truth Social reportedly had just 70,000 users as of May, and a 2022 study found just 1 percent of American adults get their news from Gab. Still, the right successfully completing a Gab-ification of X doesn’t mean that moderates and everyone to the left of them would have to live on a platform dominated by the right and mainline conservative perspectives. It would just mean that even more people with moderate and liberal sympathies will get disgusted and leave the platform, and that the right will lose the ability to shape wider discourse.

The conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who has successfully seeded moral panics around critical race theory and DEI hiring practices, has directly pointed to X as a tool that has let him reach a general audience. The reason right-wing politicians and influencers such as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nick Fuentes, and Candace Owens keep posting on it instead of on conservative platforms is because they want what Rufo wants: a chance to push their perspectives into the mainstream. This utility becomes diminished when most of the people looking at X are just other right-wingers who already agree with them. The fringier, vanguard segments of the online right seem to understand this and are trying to follow the libs to Bluesky.

Liberals and the left do not need the right to be online in the way that the right needs liberals and the left. The nature of reactionary politics demands constant confrontations—literal reactions—to the left. People like Rufo would have a substantially harder time trying to influence opinions on a platform without liberals. “Triggering the libs” sounds like a joke, but it is often essential for segments of the right. This explains the popularity of some X accounts with millions of followers, such as Libs of TikTok, whose purpose is to troll liberals.

The more liberals leave X, the less value it offers to the right, both in terms of cultural relevance and in opportunities for trolling. The X exodus won’t happen overnight. Some users might be reluctant to leave because it’s hard to reestablish an audience built up over the years, and network effects will keep X relevant. But it’s not a given that a platform has to last. Old habits die hard, but they can die.

After Donald Trump won this month’s election, one of the first things he did was to name two unelected male plutocrats, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, to run a new Department of Government Efficiency. The yet-to-be-created entity’s acronym, DOGE, is something of a joke—a reference to a cryptocurrency named for an internet meme involving a Shiba Inu. But its appointed task of reorganizing the federal bureaucracy and slashing its spending heralds a new political arrangement in Washington: a broligarchy, in which tremendous power is flowing to tech and finance magnates, some of whom appear indifferent or even overtly hostile to democratic tradition.

The broligarchs’ ranks also include the PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel—Vice President–Elect J. D. Vance’s mentor, former employer, and primary financial backer—as well as venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen and David Sacks, both of whom added millions of dollars to Trump’s campaign. Musk, to be sure, is the archetype. The world’s richest man has reportedly been sitting in on the president-elect’s calls with at least three heads of foreign states: Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić, and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Musk joined Trump in welcoming Argentine President Javier Milei at Mar-a-Lago and, according to The New York Times, met privately in New York with Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations in a bid to “defuse tensions” between that country and the United States. Recently, after Musk publicly endorsed the financier Howard Lutnick for secretary of the Treasury, some in Trump’s camp were concerned that Musk was acting as a “co-president,” The Washington Post reported.

[Read: Musk’s Twitter is a blueprint for a MAGA government]

Musk doesn’t always get what he wants; Trump picked Lutnick to be secretary of commerce instead. Even so, the broligarchs’ ascendancy on both the foreign- and domestic-policy fronts has taken many observers by surprise—including me, even though I wrote last August about the broligarchs’ deepening political alignment with Trump. Though some of them have previously opposed Trump because of his immigration or tariff policies, the broligarchs share his politics of impunity: the idea that some men should be above the law. This defiant rejection of all constraint by and obligation to the societies that made them wealthy is common among the world’s ultrarich, a group whose practices and norms I have studied for nearly two decades. Trump has exemplified this ethos, up to the present moment: He is currently in violation of a law—which he signed into effect during his first term—requiring incoming presidents to agree to an ethics pledge.

Trump—who infamously said of sexual assault, “When you’re a star, they let you do it”—cites his celebrity as a basis for his elevation above the law. Many broligarchs also see themselves as exceptional beings, but arrived at that view through a different path: via science fiction, fantasy literature, and comic books. Ideas from these genres have long pervaded Silicon Valley culture; last year, Andreessen published a manifesto calling for “Becoming Technological Supermen,” defined by embarking on a “Hero’s Journey” and “conquering dragons.”

Superhero narratives also appear to inform many of Musk’s more eccentric political views, including his reported belief that the superintelligent have a duty to reproduce, and may help explain why in September he reposted a claim that “a Republic of high status males” would be superior to our current democracy. Last week, Musk likened Matt Gaetz, Trump’s then-nominee for attorney general, to Judge Dredd, a dystopian comic-book character authorized to conduct summary executions. Musk seems to have meant this as a compliment. He described Gaetz—who, until his resignation from the House, was under a congressional investigation in connection with an alleged sex-trafficking scheme—as “our Hammer of Justice.”

[Read: What Elon Musk really wants]

Whatever its source, the broligarchs’ sense of their innate superiority has led many of them to positions on taxation quite similar to Trump’s. In 2016, the Republican presidential nominee bragged about avoiding tax payments for years—“That makes me smart,” he crowed from the debate stage. The broligarchs have quietly liberated themselves from one of the only certainties in life. As ProPublica reported in 2021, Musk paid zero federal income taxes in 2018 and a de facto tax rate of 3.3 percent from 2014 to 2018, during which his wealth grew by $13.9 billion. Thiel used a government program intended to expand retirement savings by middle-class Americans to amass $5 billion in capital-gains income, completely tax-free. The Trump-friendly broligarchs’ political ascendancy turns the rallying cry of the Boston Tea Party on its head, achieving representation with minimal taxation.

In their hostility to taxation and regulation, the men who rule Wall Street and Silicon Valley resemble earlier generations of wealthy capitalists who enjoyed outsize influence on American politics. Even some tech barons who supported Kamala Harris clamored for the firing of Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, who favors vigorous antitrust enforcement. But the broligarchs are distinct from old-school American oligarchs in one key respect: Their political vision seeks to undermine the nation-state system globally. Musk, among others, has set his sights on the privatization and colonization of space with little or no government involvement. Thiel and Andreessen have invested heavily in creating alternatives to the nation-state here on Earth, including libertarian colonies with minimal taxation. One such colony is up and running in Honduras; Thiel has also invested in efforts to create artificial islands and other autonomous communities to serve as new outposts for private governance. “The nature of government is about to change at a very fundamental level,” Thiel said of these initiatives in 2008.

Cryptocurrency is the financial engine of the broligarchs’ political project. For centuries, states have been defined by two monopolies: first, on the legitimate use of coercive force (as by the military and the police); and second, on control of the money supply. Today’s broligarchs have long sought to weaken government control of global finance. Thiel notes in his 2014 book, Zero to One, that when he, Musk, and others started PayPal, it “had a suitably grand mission … We wanted to create a new internet currency to replace the U.S. dollar.” If broligarchs succeed in making cryptocurrency a major competitor to or replacement for the dollar, the effects could be enormous. The American currency is also the world’s reserve currency—a global medium of exchange. This has contributed to U.S. economic dominance in the world for 80 years and gives Washington greater latitude to use financial and economic pressure as an alternative to military action.

[Read: What to expect from Elon Musk’s government makeover]

Undercutting the dollar could enrich broligarchs who hold considerable amounts of wealth in cryptocurrencies, but would also weaken the United States and likely destabilize the world economy. Yet Trump—despite his pledge to “Make America great again” and his previous claims that crypto was a “scam” against the dollar—now seems fully on board with the broligarchs’ agenda. Signaling this alignment during his campaign, Trump gave the keynote speech at a crypto conference last July; he later pledged to make crypto a centerpiece of American monetary policy via purchase of a strategic bitcoin reserve. The day after the election, one crypto advocate posted on X, “We have a #Bitcoin president.” The incoming administration is reportedly vetting candidates for the role of “crypto czar.”

If American economic and political dominance recedes, the country’s wealthiest men may be well positioned to fill and profit from the power vacuum that results. But is a weakened country, greater global instability, and rule by a wealthy few really what voters wanted when they chose Trump?

Musk spent millions of dollars to support Trump’s campaign and promoted it on X. He’s now doing everything he can to capitalize on Trump’s victory and maximize his own power—to the point of siccing his X followers on obscure individual government officials. Some evidence, including Axios’s recent focus-group study of swing voters, suggests that Americans may already feel queasy about the influence of the broligarchs. “I didn’t vote for him,” one participant said of Musk. “I don't know what his ultimate agenda would be for having that type of access.” Another voter added, “There’s nothing, in my opinion, in Elon Musk’s history that shows that he’s got the best interest of the country or its citizens in mind.” Even so, we can expect him and his fellow broligarchs to extend their influence as far as they can for as long as Trump lets them.