In a dramatic turn of events on Saturday, former President Donald Trump was the target of an assassination attempt at a rally in Butler, outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The gunman killed one spectator and wounded two before Secret Service agents shot the attacker dead.

A bullet, one of the six to eight shots that were fired at the rally, grazed the ear of former President Trump who was rushed to a medical facility, but discharged later that the same day.

Shortly after the 20-year-old gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks fired the shots directed at Trump, Secret Service agents whisked Donald Trump off to his car. Leaning on the agents, he could be seen punching his fist in the air and mouthing the words of what appeared to be him saying, “Fight, fight, fight.”

Not long after the shooting, Elon Musk took to X which he owns, to deliver an unambiguous endorsement of Trump who will be running for President again this November. With an accompanying video of Trump mouthing those words, Musk wrote, “I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery.”

While some of the conspiracy theories on X came from fringe elements with topics such as “#falseflag” and “staged” trending, Musk seemed to be filling the space with further speculation around the shooting. He reposted a post by Blake Hall which questioned the security lapse that allowed a gunman to get into position atop a rooftop 130 metres from the former President. In another post, Musk added, “Extreme incompetence or it was deliberate. Either way, the SS leadership must resign.”

Apart from X, Meta’s Threads which recently celebrated its first anniversary also occasionally displayed conspiracy-related posts atop its trending topic for the incident, reported The Verge. Facebook’s search results primarily pointed to news outlets.

YouTube showed news clips and mostly directed search results toward news reports and verified creators.

With an accompanying image of mainstream media cautiously reporting initially on the incident while the facts were still being unravelled, Musk carried a single post that perhaps was the most telling of them all and the direction where Big Tech aims to head: “The legacy media is a pure propaganda machine. X is the voice of the people.”