The world's richest man, Elon Musk, was long considered a political 'moderate'.
Pre-pandemic, he donated to Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama. In 2016 he told CNBC that Donald Trump doesn't have the "sort of character that reflects well on the United States."
Now, he is at the heart of Trump's presidency, with an office in The White House. So what are his current views?
In recent years he has become an increasingly active tweeter, an activity that has ramped up further as he entered the political world.
Using a bespoke social media search tool Prime Time downloaded and analysed all his tweets from his first 15 full days working in the US government, to try to get an insight into his activity, his current mindset, and his ideology.
The tweets show he is posting everything from apparent Russian disinformation, to videos of Irish local election candidates.
Elon Musk posted almost 100 tweets a day on average during his first two weeks in charge of ensuring US federal employees were working efficiently, data from the website he owns, X, shows.
From Tuesday 21 January to Tuesday 4 February Mr Musk posted 1,494 times in total, with his daily activity peaking at a remarkable 178 posts on 3 February.
On each of those days, he posted across at least nine different hours of the day, and exceeded that significantly on most days.
During his most active hour over the period, on 2 February between 3am and 4am Washington DC time (EST) Mr Musk tweeted 49 times, or an average of once every 80 seconds.
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Despite him and his team being given the power to access whole swathes of databases and systems underpinning US federal government - and to lock out thousands of employees and officials - the exact employment status of Mr Musk within the Trump administration remains unclear.
He is reportedly not an employee but a "special government adviser".
Emerging clashes and crises
Officially, he and his team, called DOGE, have been tasked by Mr Trump with "modernising federal technology and software to maximise governmental efficiency and productivity."
Yet the scale of his activities has sparked what is increasingly being seen as a constitutional crisis in the US. In recent days, he has been accused of implementing a "plutocratic coup" by Democratic politicians.
His tweets provide some insight into how he views that accusation.
"Dems keep saying ‘No one elected Elon Musk’ Yes we did. Elon was very visible with Trump and we elected Trump to utilize Elon..." Mr Musk retweeted at 3am on 3 February.
Under Article 1 of the the US constitution, Congress has authority over federal spending. Mr Musk operates under the executive branch of government (the presidency), which manages those funds as directed by Congress.
Yet DOGE has inserted itself into at least 15 federal agencies, in many cases upending staffing and spending systems in ways that have triggered court cases and protests, and accusations that Article 1 has been ignored.
Entry into USAID
Last week, Mr Musk’s aides entered the offices of USAID, the country’s agency for overseas aid and development. It is funded through decisions of Congress.
Dozens of his tweets refer to the agency, and provide an insight into how he views the related constitutional concerns.
Following the entrance of DOGE into USAID, the vast majority of the agency’s 10,000 staff were placed on leave, and the agency - which provides humanitarian assistance in 100 countries - has been largely shut down.
In one of multiple tweets on the topic, Mr Musk himself described what his team did as "feeding USAID into the wood chipper."
That comment was made in one of many late-night posts by Mr Musk over the first two weeks of the Trump Administration.
A time analysis shows his tweets have been dispersed across the 24 hours of the day, but tend to drop off after 3am EST, and ramp up again around mid-afternoon.
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Amplifying misleading and false claims
While USAID was a key focus of his tweets, he also commented on vaccines, other US agencies, media outlets, and the trustworthiness or corruption of civil servants.
Various tweets amplified or promoted misinformation, and in one case even amplified suspected Russian disinformation.
Among the tweets promoting misinformation was one on 2 February, in which he said, "Did you know that USAID, using YOUR tax dollars, funded bioweapon research, including COVID-19, that killed millions of people?"
While there is ongoing discussion in some parts of the scientific community about whether the virus that caused the Covid-19 pandemic emerged from a ‘lab leak’, there are not credible claims - even from proponents of the lab leak theory - that the virus was engineered as a bioweapon, or that USAID funded such research.
Mr Musk has also amplified apparent misinformation about the very spending he is responsible for examining.
Funding databases his team has gained access to include the US Treasury Department payments system, which is responsible for disbursing more than $6 trillion of annual US government spending.
On 28 January, the White House Press Secretary said it that as a result of their work, DOGE prevented $50m being spent "to fund condoms for Gaza."
The claim itself was met with bemusement, with fact-checkers and people working in the humanitarian sector globally saying such money would be enough to procure about one billion condoms at wholesale prices. Several noted that a comprehensive report on USAID spending last year found just $46,000 had been spent on wider family planning initiatives across all of the Middle East.
Mr Musk responded to a tweet about the comments from the White House press secretary saying "My guess is that a lot of that money ended up in the pockets of Hamas, not actually condoms."
The White House refused to provide any more details about the claimed intended spending.
Analysts later noted that a paediatric AIDS foundation in Mozambique had been in receipt of several million dollars in grants since 2021 for reproductive health projects in two provinces in the country, one of which is also named Gaza.
Mr Musk also retweeted a video on the afternoon of 5 February which analysts say has the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign targeting support in the US for Ukraine.
The video was originally posted by an account called ‘I Meme Therefore I Am’ and had the branding and style of the E! News network, but was never posted by that network.
In recent months, similar videos falsely branded with western media logos and graphic animations have originated from Russian pro-Kremlin Telegram groups.
The Twitter account amplified by Mr Musk added text above the video ‘Did you know that USAID spent your tax dollars to fund celebrity trips to Ukraine, all to boost Zelensky’s popularity among Americans?’
The video claimed USAID funded celebrity visits to Ukraine, alleging that a trip in 2022 by actor Ben Stiller cost US taxpayers $4 million.
Ben Stiller subsequently said the claims in the fake E! News video were "Totally false. Untrue. These are lies coming from Russian media. I completely self-funded my humanitarian trip to Ukraine. There was no funding from USAID and certainly no personal payments."
No further evidence has been provided to back the claims amplified by Mr Musk.
Far-right meme accounts
The ‘I Meme Therefore I Am’ account is one of several ‘alt right’ meme accounts Mr Musk regularly replies to and promotes. The data shows they are among the accounts with which he most often engaged over the two-week period.
One of the meme accounts Mr Musk most often quote-tweeted or replied to is called 'Autism Capital'. He engaged with it more than 30 times during the two-week period analysed.
On 2 February, 'Autism Capital' shared a post about two USAID officials, naming one directly, saying "John Voorhees and his deputy, were put on leave late Saturday night after refusing to allow DOGE members access to USAID systems."
Mr Musk reposted this with the caption "USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die."
When an account on Twitter later published a list of just names of several of Mr Musk’s aides who are working under DOGE, Mr Musk, replied "You have committed a crime," and the account was removed by X.
In other posts, Mr Musk promoted "the return of free speech".
Another similar meme account which Mr Musk interacts with is called 'Amuse', which has more than 530,000 followers. Mr Musk reposted or quote-tweeted it more than 20 times in his first 14 days with the Trump Administration.
A third is called 'Rabbit Hole', with over 978,000 followers. Mr Musk reposted or replied to content shared from the account more than 30 times in his first two weeks in office.
Mr Musk has also interacted with a further meme account called 'Rothmus' around 25 times, including retweeting a screenshot of a US news website story about a survey in Sweden claiming that 79% of refugees go on holiday to the country they fled from.
Mr Musk captioned the post with "Almost 80% of ‘refugees’ go on vacation to the country they claim to have fled from…"
The claim he amplified was based on a 2022 survey with a sample of 183 people with refugee status in Sweden. The pollsters subsequently told the BBC that respondents typically spoke Swedish fluently, and were likely given refugee status decades ago.
"We were talking about people who usually have come from the war in Yugoslavia, they came from Chile, from the fall of the Soviet Bloc, from Eastern Europe, so these are countries where the situation is not the same as it used to be," the pollster who conducted the original survey told the BBC.
The straight arm moment and the media
Media organisations, like the BBC, were also a target of Mr Musk’s commentary during the time period analysed, particularly in the days after he spoke to a crowd of Trump supporters following the presidential inauguration.
On ending his speech, Mr Musk controversially stood back from the microphone, made what appeared to be two straight-armed salutes, then returned to the microphone and said "My heart goes out to you."
Watch: Footage of the speech and gesture by Musk
Several media organisations said the gesture appeared to be a fascist or ‘Roman’ salute.
"It was astonishing how insanely hard legacy media tried to cancel me for saying ‘my heart goes out to you’ and moving my hand from my heart to the audience. In the end, this deception will just be another nail in the coffin of legacy media," Mr Musk said two days later.
He also reposted or amplified tweets criticising news outlets like Politico, BBC, NPR, and CBS. In several cases the comments amplified were misleading.
For example, he amplified claims also made by Mr Trump and others saying that "billions of dollars" had been paid to "fake news" for positive coverage, $8m of which had gone to Politico.
Politico’s leadership said in a widely-reported memo to staff that it "has never been a beneficiary of government programs or subsidies - not one cent, ever."
It appears the money paid to Politico - which is a specialist outlet focused on policy, legislative and political issues - was paid by staff in a number of government agencies for subscriptions related to their work.
European focus
Over the 14 days analysed, Mr Musk also regularly turned his focus to European media and issues, posted several variations of the message ‘MEGA - Make Europe Great Again.’
He often did so by amplifying an account which has also been linked to a cryptocurrency scam called 'InevitableWest'.
On 5 February, Mr Musk reposted content from that account claiming that no European leaders had posted or spoken about a shooting in a Swedish education facility in which 10 people were killed.
"No European politician has mentioned it. The legacy media, as always, is silent. Is this the new normal for Europe?" the post said.
By that point multiple European leaders had issued statements condemning the shooting, and it was a leading news story in countries across the continent, including Ireland.
Subsequently, the lead investigator into the attack has said "multiple nationalities, different genders and different ages" were among those killed.
Broadcaster TV4 has also since published a video filmed by a student hiding in a bathroom in which shots can be heard outside and a person can be heard shouting: "You will leave Europe!"
The Syrian embassy in Sweden said at least two of the victims were Syrian, while Bosnia's foreign ministry said a Bosnian woman had been killed, citing family members of the victim who had contacted their embassy.
Mr Musk, who has expressed support for UK-based far-right agitator Tommy Robinson, has not returned to the topic of the school shooting since.
He has also been calling in posts for voters to back the far-right German party AfD in the upcoming election.
On 1 February he amplified a video of himself and a post saying "It is very important to talk to your friends and family and convince them to consider voting for AfD."
He has also boosted posts from advisors to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
Reach and conflict concerns
Among several posts he has recently amplified related to Ireland was one containing a video in which an unsuccessful local election candidate claimed her child was "the only Irish child" in a class of 30.
Mr Musk simply reposted the original tweet at 6pm (EST) on 30 January adding the term "Wow."
The woman in the video has previously posted footage of herself ‘confronting’ Green Party leader Roderic O’Gorman while walking along a street near his home in Blanchardstown, about what she described as mass immigration.
Data from X on the post containing the video indicates it has been seen 50 million times. It has been retweeted by 46,000 accounts.
Mr Musk has 216m followers on X. The X algorithm has been changed since he took over the company to ensure users see his posts consistently and prominently.
His companies have dozens of major contracts with US government agencies, raising significant conflict of interest questions about his activities.
Mr Trump, who received millions in campaign contributions from Mr Musk, told the public last week there’s no cause for concern. "If there’s a conflict [of interest]", the president said, "then we won’t let him get near it."
On Friday, Mr Trump said he had instructed Mr Musk to next "check out the Pentagon," home of the US Department of Defense, where Mr Musk's companies have billions of dollars in contracts.
