Musk Follow Tracker — Issue #12: Grok's Coder, PayPal's Reunion, and Starmer's Office

Six BigTechAlert alerts fired on May 23 — the highest single-day count in this tracker's history. The day's most consequential follow came at 17:41 UTC, when Musk added @kilocode, an AI coding platform that had just shipped integration with xAI's own Grok Build 0.1 model. Two hours earlier, he had followed @mlevchin — Max Levchin, his original PayPal co-founder — with SpaceX's June 8 roadshow now two weeks out. The rest of the day's list reads like a cross-section of Musk's current political and cultural orbit: the UK Prime Minister's official account, a Trump-endorsed LA mayoral candidate, and a viral content aggregator.

Kilo Code (@kilocode) is an AI coding assistant built for VS Code, JetBrains, and the CLI — a direct competitor to Cursor in the agentic coding space 1. It has 20,800 followers and was founded in March 2025. The BigTechAlert alert drew 28,800 views, more than three times any other alert that day.

The timing is not subtle. Less than 24 hours before Musk followed the account, Kilo posted a writeup of building seven sites using Grok Build 0.1 inside Kilo Code — xAI's new 256K-context coding model, which Kilo had integrated into its platform 2. The post drew 71,000 views. Kilo described Grok Build 0.1 as "the architect to Grok Code Fast's autocomplete" — positioning it as the heavy-lift model behind Kilo's agentic workflow engine, which it calls KiloClaw.

This is structurally different from Musk's prior AI coding follows. Issues #3 through #11 tracked attention flowing to Cursor/Anysphere — the @cursor_ai corporate account, then CEO Sualeh Asif (@sualehasif996), then Composer researcher Federico Cassano (@ellev3n11). Those follows mapped to the $60B option SpaceX holds on Anysphere per its S-1 prospectus. The @kilocode follow maps to something else: a third-party platform already shipping Grok inside its coding stack. Musk now watches both the option he holds and the ecosystem of tools distributing xAI's models.

A few days before the follow, Kilo also posted that its CLI is built on OpenCode, an MIT-licensed open-source project, and that improvements go back upstream — a detail consistent with Musk's longstanding preference for open-source infrastructure 3.

Max Levchin (@mlevchin) is the co-founder of PayPal and current CEO of Affirm, the buy-now-pay-later lender listed on Nasdaq (AFRM). He and Musk built PayPal together in 1999–2002 before eBay acquired it for $1.5 billion. Levchin has 254,600 followers and has posted infrequently in 2026 4.

The follow arrived on May 23 — 16 days before SpaceX's June 8 roadshow. SpaceX's S-1, filed May 20, is Goldman Sachs-led and targets a Nasdaq listing under SPCX. It discloses Q1 capex of $10.1 billion (doubled year-over-year), $7.7 billion of which is AI infrastructure. The PayPal Mafia has provided the institutional bedrock of Silicon Valley's venture and fintech ecosystems for two decades.

Levchin's most visible recent activity was a retweet of Jeff Bezos on May 21, which drew 3.2 million views 5. The retweet sent traffic to a Bezos post that Levchin apparently considered worth amplifying to his audience. The original PayPal group — Musk, Levchin, Thiel, Hoffman, Sacks — are now each pulling influence threads through a different part of the current political and financial moment. Musk reconnecting with Levchin publicly, days before the largest space-company IPO in history, is worth tracking.

Whether this signals anything about Affirm specifically — AFRM trades near $13 billion market cap — is unclear. The more obvious read is that Musk is consolidating attention among people he built something with before, ahead of a high-stakes public market moment.

The @10DowningStreet follow landed at 00:30 UTC, the first alert of the day. This is the official X account of the UK Prime Minister's office, currently representing Keir Starmer's Labour government.

Musk spent much of late 2024 and early 2025 attacking Starmer personally and amplifying UK Reform UK content, including Nigel Farage. He has described Starmer's government in harsh terms on multiple occasions. Following the official PM account does not reverse any of that — but it is a factual change in his follow list 6.

The context worth noting: there are active negotiations over UK-US trade and tech-sector cooperation, and Starmer's government has been seeking to stabilize the relationship with the US tech industry after a difficult stretch. Whether Musk's follow reflects private diplomatic engagement or simply curiosity is not established by the data available.

Spencer Pratt (@spencerpratt) is a former reality TV personality from The Hills who is running for mayor of Los Angeles against incumbent Karen Bass. He has 1.15 million followers and has been posting high-engagement anti-Bass, anti-politician content, with some posts drawing over 1.3 million views in the May 23 window 7.

Trump officially endorsed Pratt. Pratt describes himself as having no party label — "I'm just Spencer, husband to Heidi, father to Ryker and Gunner, and I'm a pissed off Angeleno" — while running explicitly on the LA wildfires failure, homelessness, and Bass mismanagement 8.

The follow is consistent with Musk's pattern of supporting Trump-adjacent challengers to incumbent Democrat municipal leadership. LA is a major political signal market. Low investment signal, high political signal.

@BretWJ (15:47 UTC): BigTechAlert fired an alert, but @BretWJ has no accessible public tweets and no confirmed identity in the tracker's search methodology. Also followed on the same day by @turkeybeaver per the BigTechAlert feed — both fires are probably latency artifacts from an earlier real-time follow event. No signal assigned pending identity confirmation.

@TheBestqueenx (22:54 UTC): "The Best" is a viral content aggregator with 1.28 million followers — posting memes, photography, and animal content 9. The account follows only 1 person. No investment signal.

@kilocode is the thread to pull. Kilo Code is distributing Grok Build 0.1 as its primary heavy-lift coding model — the same model xAI launched publicly in May 2026. If Musk engages with Kilo's content or Kilo accelerates Grok integration, that is a data point about xAI's distribution strategy independent of the Cursor/Anysphere option. The SpaceX S-1 describes $7.7 billion in AI capex; where that compute capacity routes is the question Kilo's roadmap may partially answer.

@mlevchin and the SpaceX roadshow window: June 8 is two weeks out. Watch for any public statements from PayPal Mafia members about SpaceX, xAI, or the IPO.

Issue #8 ghost unfollow remains unresolved.