Ken Bensinger
When far-right Romanian politician Calin Georgescu was arrested in February during a failed run for president that led to accusations of campaign fraud, he made an important phone call.
The man on the other end of the line – Mario Nawfal – wasn’t a lawyer or political adviser. He wasn’t even Romanian. But he offered Georgescu something few others could: the chance to get his story spread by the world’s ultimate influencer, Elon Musk.
“Mario, the police is here arresting me on the streets,” Georgescu said in a call that Nawfal later posted on X.
Before this year, Musk had never mentioned Georgescu on X, the social media platform he owns. But over two months starting around the time of the arrest, Musk replied to or recirculated at least 15 posts about the politician, most of them originated by Nawfal.
Collectively, those posts racked up more than 100 million views and helped transform Georgescu, at least momentarily, into a darling of the global right.
The phone call had paid off.
Nobody has gotten more online engagement from the world’s richest man over the past several years than Nawfal, a baby-faced Australian influencer and entrepreneur who lives in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Since last year’s US presidential election, Musk has reposted, shared or commented on posts originating from Nawfal’s X account 1311 times, according to an analysis by The New York Times, more than any other account.
Nawfal’s output, which in great part mixes reverential praise for Musk and his companies with sensationalised recaps of major news events, is far from unique; social media is riddled with accounts pumping out nearly indistinguishable content. Yet it is his account that Musk – for no specific reason the billionaire has ever enunciated – has elected to highlight above all others.
Nawfal, 36, has recognised that attaching his brand to the single largest account on X is the best business decision he or any other online influencer could possibly make. For him, the content is entirely subordinate to the attention it generates.
“Mario moulded himself to be exactly what Elon wanted out of his creators,” said Chet Long, a former employee of Nawfal.
Until recently, Nawfal was best known, when he was known at all, for his luxurious lifestyle, his relentless promotion of crypto products and a series of claims of wrongdoing. In recent years, critics and former colleagues have accused him of using bots to artificially elevate engagement on his X account, of ripping off investors with misleading sales tactics, of having an uncomfortably close relationship with Russia and of being among the web’s most frequent spreaders of misinformation.
Yet he has used his talent for capturing Musk’s eye to build a following of 2.6 million on X – and to turbocharge his cryptocurrency marketing firm and media brand, according to hundreds of pages of documents from Nawfal’s companies obtained by The New York Times and more than two dozen interviews with former employees, associates and clients.
Nawfal’s companies, like his own social media account, are finely calibrated to capitalise on that attention. His media firm, Citizen Journalism Network, produces audio and video news shows that feature interviews with right-leaning political figures. Musk regularly reposts and comments on those interviews on X.
Those activities work in concert with his crypto firm, International Blockchain Consulting Group, or IBC, which Nawfal has said is his primary source of income. The firm touts Musk’s frequent social media engagement with Nawfal to help sell six-figure marketing deals: would-be clients are encouraged to believe that they, too, can expect similar attention from the world’s richest man.
Over three interviews, two via videoconference as he reclined in bed in his Dubai penthouse, Nawfal said all of the past accusations about him and his business practices were “fabricated” but declined to discuss his relationship with Musk. He would not even discuss whether the two men had a real-life relationship – or had ever met in person – and Musk and X did not respond to requests for comment.
‘Is that the real Elon Musk, guys?’
On November 12, 2022, Nawfal was hosting The Roundtable, a live audio program about crypto that he created on the social network that was still called Twitter.
The episode focused on the bankruptcy filing by the giant FTX crypto exchange the day before and the resulting panic in the industry. Tens of thousands of people had logged in to listen. Then someone new entered the chat.
“Is that the real Elon Musk requesting to speak?” Nawfal asked excitedly. “Is that the real Elon Musk, guys?”
It was a watershed moment for Nawfal, who immigrated to Australia from Lebanon at a young age, dropped out of college and started a company that sold blenders and juice makers. The firm, Froothie, which is still in business, reached eight figures in annual sales in less than two years, Nawfal said, and by 2016, he had moved to Dubai for what he described as tax reasons.
After Froothie, Nawfal founded companies that sold, among other things, hoverboards and aromatherapy diffusers. In 2017, he incorporated IBC, which he calls an “incubator” that has helped more than 600 start-ups introduce cryptocurrency-related products like memecoins and non-fungible tokens, or NFTs.
IBC’s main business is selling marketing packages to start-ups hoping to publicise their crypto products, according to five former employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they had signed non-disclosure agreements. Sales materials reviewed by the Times show IBC offering promotion by Nawfal in exchange for cash or equity, an arrangement akin to advertising or product placement.
Key to that proposition was expanding Nawfal’s reach on Twitter, a preferred platform for crypto investors. The more people who followed him, the more attention he could potentially deliver to clients.
By the fall of 2022, IBC was charging customers $US10,000 for a marketing package that included “three tweets from Mario,” an unspecified number of “shout-outs” – name drops by Nawfal on The Roundtable – and the chance to “pitch your product summary for 90 seconds” on the program, company documents show.
IBC’s staff worked hard to build up Nawfal’s following, which had reached 100,000, according to internal company messages and former employees. Among other efforts, the staff focused on luring prominent guests to The Roundtable, one of the more popular programs using Twitter’s interactive audio feature, Spaces. Employees sent out thousands of invitations and scored appearances from crypto entrepreneur Changpeng Zhao, who later pleaded guilty to money laundering; Kim Dotcom, an internet activist; and other major tech figures.
Musk was on an entirely different level.
Just two weeks earlier, he had completed his purchase of Twitter, and he had its second-largest account, with about 115 million followers. (He now has more than 229 million.) His endorsements moved markets. Former IBC employees recalled that they had tried repeatedly to get Musk’s attention, with no luck until the marathon Roundtable episode about FTX.
In total, Musk stayed on the show for about 10 minutes, talking about crypto and his vision for Twitter, which he would soon rename X. Later that day, he replied to a post by Nawfal for the first time, referring to The Roundtable as “Twitter at its best”.
The impact was instantaneous. In a matter of weeks, Nawfal’s following tripled, breaking 300,000. A sales deck from that December showed that the cost of IBC’s entry-level marketing package had jumped as well, to $US25,000.
Musk continued engaging with Nawfal, amplifying his political posts or those praising Musk’s companies and popping up periodically on The Roundtable. By April 2023, Nawfal had reached 432,000 followers, and the price for IBC’s marketing package had soared to $US60,000, a third sales deck shows. The price for a deluxe package, with more posts and shoutouts, was $US190,000.
By 2024, Nawfal’s following on X had surpassed 2 million.
Until late 2022, Nawfal had largely avoided politics. Then he took a cue from Musk, who soon after buying Twitter had started amplifying right-leaning political content, disparaging traditional media and promoting accounts that delivered news primarily on his platform.
“That’s when Mario pivoted from crypto to media,” said Long, the former employee, who served as a frequent Roundtable co-host and left his job as head of security at IBC at the end of 2022.
In short order, Nawfal began hosting Roundtable episodes focused on political topics, starting with one discussing the release of the so-called Twitter Files, a project initiated by Musk that involved disclosing internal company messages about alleged censorship on the platform under its previous ownership.
That episode drew 2.6 million listeners and participants, including Musk. Soon, the crypto personalities who had dominated The Roundtable gave way to politicians and pundits like Robert F. Kennedy Jr and Tucker Carlson. An episode that Nawfal hosted in December 2023, featuring Musk, right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and manosphere influencer Andrew Tate, drew 15 million listeners.
As Nawfal’s following rose, he began hiring researchers and ghostwriters to compose the vast majority of his posts and make sure his account was always active and drawing engagement.
In 2023, Nawfal incorporated the Citizen Journalism Network to oversee his rapidly expanding media efforts. About 80 people work for CJN, with an additional 120 or so on IBC’s crypto marketing efforts, he said.
Nawfal’s account is frequently accused of spreading false or unverified information. In mid-June, for example, it posted a video that it said showed emergency workers flooding a street in Tel Aviv, Israel, after missile attacks from Iran. In fact, it was a video of immigration protests from the previous week in Los Angeles.
Nawfal said the rate of errors for his account had decreased of late and that, relative to his high volume of posts, it was quite low.
He has also frequently been accused of juicing his engagement with bots.
Cyabra, a social media intelligence company based in Israel, found what it called “significant presence of fake profiles attempting to boost visibility and manipulate narratives”.
Over one month this spring, Cyabra analysed more than 7000 accounts that commented on Nawfal’s posts and identified 30 per cent as “fake”. It also determined that two-thirds of the accounts engaging with a separate X account for The Roundtable were most likely bots, far above “the typical 7 to 10 per cent fake engagement rate seen across general online discourse.”
Nawfal denies ever using bots. But internal text messages posted online appear to show his staff negotiating with a firm in mid-2022 to create a “Mario Nawfal Growth Strategy” that would boost his Twitter following to 100,000 using “inorganic engagement” and increase Roundtable audiences with a “Twitter space hack”.
Nawfal acknowledged that IBC had hired the firm for three months but said the service had not used bots. “We were very kosher, and nothing was done with artificially inflating our numbers,” he said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times
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