In Mr. Musk’s own telling, his political views were shaped by X.

In a recent interview with Fox News, Mr. Musk said that videos circulating on X years ago depicting crowds of migrants sparked his fascination with right-wing politics and stronger border protections.

“I’ve seen videos of people streaming across the border on Twitter, now X,” he said, citing politicized and sometimes misleading videos that have spread online about migrants. “And I was like, is this real?”

It was a stark example of the power X has to politicize its own users — including the world’s richest man — using hyperpartisan opinions and far-right media.

To better understand how the information that Mr. Musk consumes on X could shape his worldview, The New York Times recreated a version of Mr. Musk’s personal feed by opening a new account on X and following the same 1,109 users that he follows. We then analyzed more than 175,000 posts from the accounts that he follows, using a service that collects data from X.

Though there is no guarantee that Mr. Musk saw all of the posts captured by The New York Times, the accounts that he follows — including world leaders and business tycoons alongside conspiracy theorists and far-right influencers — reveal the voices that Mr. Musk appears to value. (This “Following” feed is different from the main “For You” feed, which includes posts from those he follows alongside others selected by X’s algorithm.)

The resulting feed, shown in this article as a selection of posts curated from the much larger set, revealed ample praise for Mr. Musk and his various priorities, mixed with a torrent of right-wing outrage over progressive politics. It highlights the ways that social networks can create information bubbles. X declined to comment.

Step, once again, into a version of Mr. Musk’s personal X feed below.

Those voices are mostly right-wing: Among tens of thousands of posts during a typical week, nearly half of them came from right-wing media figures, conservative influencers, Republican politicians or government leaders.

Those accounts included Chaya Raichik, whose X account, Libs of TikTok, has more than four million followers. Ms. Raichik’s appearances on Mr. Musk’s feed match her growing prominence offline: Her influence has exploded during the second Trump administration, and she has appeared at the White House multiple times this year, cementing her status as a top Trump advocate.

The accounts that Mr. Musk follows are also the ones he interacts with most on X, according to The Times’s analysis, giving them a valuable boost on the platform since Mr. Musk is the site’s most popular user, with more than 200 million followers.

That seems to give his followers the power to seize Mr. Musk’s attention and could even redirect his policy goals. It is something they have noticed, with some users boasting they can catch Mr. Musk’s attention with a well-timed post or question.

“Pretty amazing when the owner of a platform personally tells you he is fixing your problem in real time,” Mario Nawfal, an influencer with more than two million followers, posted after Mr. Musk said he would fix an issue on X.

Some of the ideas that circulated on Mr. Musk’s feed later emerged on the national stage.

President Trump had claimed at an address to Congress that federal funds were used for “making mice transgender” — a misleading description of various studies that tested the effect of hormone therapy on H.I.V. infections and other other side effects of the medication. The idea had gathered steam on X two months earlier, when a conservative-led animal advocacy group posted about it. The group’s account is followed by Representative Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina, and by Mr. Musk. Mr. Musk had personally shared one of the posts.

Later, as Tesla vehicles and dealerships were vandalized or attacked in a violent reaction to Mr. Musk, his feed was filled with calls to charge the attackers with “domestic terrorism,” giving the perpetrators 20-year prison sentences.

Mr. Musk agreed, calling attacks on Tesla’s vehicles “extreme domestic terrorism!!” Days later, Mr. Trump repeated the idea, saying that he would enjoy seeing “the sick terrorist thugs get 20 year jail sentences.”

After a right-wing news aggregator claimed, incorrectly, that DOGE had blocked a $52 million payment for the World Economic Forum, Mr. Musk replied: “True. You’re welcome.” In reality, ending the program had saved $7.8 million.

Those inaccuracies have not stopped Mr. Musk from recommending the DOGE account to others — he frequently promotes the accounts he follows to his own 219 million followers.

“Just follow @DOGE for details,” Mr. Musk wrote in February. “There is a firehouse of information.”

One problem that promoters of cryptocurrencies have faced since the asset class first emerged is that its reputation stinks.

Crypto trading has become identified by regulators and in the public mind as a haven for scams, theft and other forms of sharp practice. The FBI, in its most recent annual report on cryptocurrency, found that crypto-related fraud has exploded. Criminality is “pervasive” in the field, the agency warned.

The elusive use case for crypto assets seemed to have been narrowed down to facilitating criminal fraud, ransomware attacks, drug and human trafficking.

Then came Donald Trump. During the presidential campaign and after his election, crypto promoters thought they were entering the nirvana of officially recognized legitimacy.

Trump signaled that he would end government regulatory initiatives on crypto, “in order to promote United States leadership in digital assets and financial technology while protecting economic liberty,” to quote the executive order he issued Jan. 23, effectively wiping out federal regulations on the class.

Things aren’t working out as they hoped. Since Trump returned to the presidency, his and his family’s involvement in crypto-related deals has critics charging that crypto has become an entirely new path for official corruption and conflicts of interest in the White House.

“Trump’s cryptocurrency ventures are nothing more than a fig leaf for payoffs from foreign nationals & foreign gov’ts,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) tweeted on May 7. Blumenthal’s target was the offer of a sit-down private dinner with Trump scheduled for May 22 at his Virginia golf club, and personal tours of the White House for the biggest buyers of $TRUMP, a “memecoin” assiduously promoted by Trump and his family.

The price of the coin soared to about $74 on Jan. 19, the day before Trump’s inauguration. It immediately fell in value, though its price has been propped up by the offer of the dinner and tours; the most recent quotes place it at about $13. The top 220 holders of the Trump coin, who are entitled to the dinner, spent nearly $148 million for the privilege, according to an estimate by Reuters.

More than half of the biggest holders appear to be foreign entities, according to an analysis by Bloomberg. That implies that the purchases might be designed to circumvent federal laws barring foreigners from making political contributions in the U.S.

Democratic Sens. Adam Schiff of California and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts demanded that the federal Office of Government Ethics, an independent executive branch agency, open an inquiry into the “severe risk that President Trump and other officials may be engaging in ‘pay to play’ corruption by selling presidential access to individuals or entities, to include foreign nationals and corporate actors with vested interests in federal action, while personally enriching the President and his family.”

DWF, a crypto firm based in the United Arab Emirates, announced last month that it had bought $25 million in coins issued by the Trump-affiliated firm World Liberty Financial, in part to “enhance regulatory engagement with U.S. policymakers.” Freight Technologies, a Houston logistics company, announced April 30 that it had borrowed $20 million to buy Trump coins, calling the transaction “an effective way to advocate for fair, balanced, and free trade between Mexico and the US.”

The unease has spread to Republicans on Capitol Hill, who fear that the Trumps’ crypto deals will undermine their efforts to enact crypto-friendly regulations.

“This gives me pause,” Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.), a leader in the legislative movement to pass a pro-crypto law, told NBC News. “Even what may appear to be ‘cringey’ with regard to meme coins, it’s legal, and what we need to do is have a regulatory framework that makes this more clear, so we don’t have this Wild West scenario.”

Trump’s activities already have derailed, if temporarily, the so-called GENIUS Act, which would regulate a form of cryptocurrency known as “stablecoins,” which are supposedly pegged to the value of underlying currencies such as dollars. Schiff and eight other Senate Democrats who had supported the measure have bailed on it, making passage in its current form virtually impossible.

Democrats in both chambers have introduced the “End Crypto Corruption Act,” which would bar the president, vice president, members of Congress and high-level executive branch appointees from issuing, sponsoring or endorsing any “cryptocurrency, meme coin, token, non-fungible token, stablecoin, or other digital asset that is sold for remuneration.”

Even some crypto promoters are no happier than the politicians. “They’re plumbing new depths of idiocy with the memecoin launch,” Nic Carter, a crypto investor and Trump supporter, told Politico.

As a crypto category, memecoins are disdained even by many participants in the field. They generally have even less utiilty or authenticity than mainstream cryptocurrencies, often originate as joke investments, and ride waves of pure hype. The Trump coin has no discernible value apart from its identification with Trump himself.

I asked the White House for comment on the accusations of corruption and received this reply from spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt: “President Trump is compliant with all conflict-of-interest rules, and only acts in the best interests of the American public.”

The memecoin isn’t Trump’s only venture into crypto, though some of his arrangements seem designed to give him plausible deniability if legal or ethics questions are raised. World Liberty Financial, which markets a crypto token designated $WLFI and a stablecoin designated USD1, is 60% owned by Trump and members of his family, who are entitled to up to 75% of the proceeds of sales of $WLFI.

The firm’s website features an image of Trump striking a heroic pose and says the WLFI token is “inspired by Donald J. Trump.” In the small print it asserts, however, that “any references to or quotes or imagery attributed to or associated with Donald J. Trump or his family members should not be construed as an endorsement or representation or warranty.”

Crypto investors really stepped up to the plate with political donations during the 2024 election cycle. Fairshake, the super PAC representing the class, spent nearly $41 million in contributions. That included $13 million to defeat two congressional candidates in Democratic primaries, Rep. Katie Porter (D-Irvine) and Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-New York). Both were known to favor stricter regulation of the asset class, and both lost their races.

The biggest crypto firms spent lavishly in 2023 and 2024 to fatten Fairshake’s war chest, which collected more than $162 million in that time frame; Coinbase contributed $46.5 million, Ripple Labs, $45 million and Andreessen Horowitz, a major crypto investor, $44 million. Much of the total was funneled to two other crypto-related political action committees, according to federal election records.

After the election, many of the firms, like more traditional businesses, made contributions of $1 million or more to Trump’s inauguration fund.

One can hardly deny that the crypto camp has gotten its money’s worth from the Trump administration so far. The Securities and Exchange Commission has dropped or deferred more than a dozen enforcement cases against Ripple, Coinbase, Gemini, Kraken and other crypto promoters.

The largest victory arguably belongs to Coinbase, the biggest crypto trading platform in the U.S. The SEC in 2023 charged the firm with running an unlawful trading exchange and marketing unregistered securities. The case reflected the SEC’s position that what crypto firms are marketing are securities by a different name, and thus need to be registered as securities so buyers and sellers get the same legal protections as stock and bond investors.

A federal judge in New York cleared the enforcement action to move ahead in 2024, after finding that the SEC had made a plausible case that Coinbase was operating illegally. The SEC dropped the case in February. Coinbase had asserted that the SEC was wrong “on the facts and the law,” and that “the case should never have been filed in the first place.”

Earlier this month, the agency settled its case against Ripple, which it had charged in 2020 with having raised $1.3 billion through unregistered securities. As part of the settlement, the SEC agreed to return to Ripple $75 million of a $125-million penalty it held in escrow. The settlement elicited a crisp rebuke from Commissioner Caroline A. Crenshaw, a member of the commission’s Democratic minority.

Crenshaw noted that the deal was part and parcel of the SEC’s effective abandonment of crypto regulation. “This settlement, alongside the programmatic disassembly of the SEC’s crypto enforcement program, does a tremendous disservice to the investing public,” she wrote.

That won’t be the end of the deregulation drive. On April 7, Deputy Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche — who was Trump’s defense attorney in the New York criminal case that resulted in guilty verdicts on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records — ordered an end to Justice Department regulatory cases based on interpreting crypto assets as securities or commodities. That closed down the government’s principal regulatory initiative against crypto promoters.

Blanche directed the DOJ’s Market Integrity and Major Frauds Unit to “cease cryptocurrency enforcement,” and disbanded the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team, “effective immediately.”

There doesn’t seem to be any sign that Trump’s involvement with crypto will slow down even as he disembowels the government’s regulatory capacity over crypto ventures.

World Liberty Financial recently announced that Abu Dhabi would use its stablecoin to invest $2 billion in Binance, a multinational crypto firm that pleaded guilty and paid a $4.3-billion penalty in 2023 on charges of financial crimes including money laundering. Binance’s chief executive, Changpeng Zhao, also pleaded guilty and spent four months in U.S. prison.

Last month, the SEC put its civil case against Binance on hold for at least 60 days.

On its investor advice webpage, the SEC used to post a warning on its website about crypto. “Trendy investments are especially ripe for fraudsters so be aware there is a real risk of fraud,” it said. “Cryptocurrencies may be today’s shiny, new opportunity but there are serious risks involved.”

That page has been taken down.

In this example, Leslie Jordan Inc., a company that sells activewear for special events, imported a shipment of women’s T-shirts from China at the end of April. That was after Mr. Trump aggressively escalated levies on Chinese imports, but before officials from both countries agreed on a temporary reprieve — an example of how companies have struggled to plan for their purchases as tariff levels continually shift.

The shipment was valued at $18,639, but this company paid $34,389 in tariffs — almost twice the value of the goods themselves. The import tax on this one shipment added up to nearly 185 percent.

Often Mr. Trump’s new tariffs are layered on top of existing ones. In this case, the T-shirts were subject to a base tariff of 32 percent based on the value of the import. Many goods typically have a very low base tariff, but garments and other textile goods are subject to some of the highest tariffs.

A number of goods from China are also subject to special tariffs to combat alleged unfair trade practices. These tariffs — known as Section 301 duties — were introduced during Mr. Trump’s first term and later expanded by former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. In this case, they resulted in a 7.5 percent additional charge.

One of Mr. Trump’s first trade actions when he started his second term in January was to impose a tariff on China for enabling the flow of fentanyl into the United States. The tariff started at 10 percent but was then raised to 20 percent.

In early April, the administration introduced “reciprocal” tariffs. China’s rate started at 34 percent, then escalated to 84 percent before rising to 125 percent. (This tariff, in addition to the 20 percent “fentanyl” tariff, amounts to a 145 percent tariff on most goods.)

To import one shipment of T-shirts, the company had to pay four different tariffs. “It is impossible to plan and run a business this way,” said Leslie Jordan, the company’s owner.

On Monday, the reciprocal portion of tariffs on Chinese imports was suspended for 90 days as the United States and China negotiate new trade terms.

That means if this same shipment were to arrive today, it would face a total tariff rate of 69.5 percent — a very high level, but a fraction of what the company was forced to pay just a couple of weeks ago. This lower rate means Ms. Jordan would have paid $21,000 less in tariffs on this one shipment than she did before.

Ms. Jordan, who founded her company nearly 40 years ago, said the administration’s tariff policy had been the hardest challenge she had faced running the business. While some of the tariffs have been lifted, at least temporarily, the time it takes to place orders, get products manufactured and then have them loaded onto ships and transported across the Pacific would probably exceed the 90-day reprieve.

And given the drastic changes in U.S. trade policy, Ms. Jordan said, she has little ability to predict how much she may need to pay when her next order lands at American ports. “If we base it on today’s tariff,” she said, “who knows what it will be when the goods are produced and arrive?”