'They got addicted': Analyst says Trump and Musk chasing 'likes' is fueling misinformation

Former President Donald Trump and tech billionaire Elon Musk are "addicted" to chasing adulation on social media, CNN correspondent Donie O'Sullivan told Anderson Cooper on Friday evening — and the extent to which that obsession is driving misinformation and potentially influencing voters should not be overlooked.

This comes as Musk, who owns Tesla Motors, SpaceX and X, has essentially taken over voter outreach campaign operations from the Trump campaign, in ways that are plagued with glitches and may not be entirely legal.

"It is remarkable the amount of just things that aren't true that [Musk] is pushing out," said Cooper, noting that he has lately been pushing attacks on Dominion Voting Systems, the company that forced a legal settlement from Fox News for conspiracy theories about rigging the 2020 presidential election.

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"Exactly," said O'Sullivan. "It's just — but I really think the role that Twitter, now called X, such a pivotal role it's played in both Trump's life, in terms of basically getting him into the White House, giving him that megaphone, and now of course, Musk."

"Both of these guys have gotten — they got addicted, right?" O'Sullivan continued. "They got addicted to the likes and shares and the retweets, and it's manifested in different ways. Musk ended up buying the platform. But yeah, you can really see that, and Musk does this thing all the time ... where something would be totally ridiculous and Musk just responds to it, says 'interesting' and immediately that gets posted, that gets elevated to potentially 200 million of his followers every single day."

"Musk has, obviously, a lot of business interests that rely on U.S. government contracts, connections," added O'Sullivan. "I mean, he's putting a lot of stock in Trump's going to get reelected. It would obviously benefit him hugely."

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