No American billionaire has played politics like Elon Musk.
He is not the first to seed vanity super PACs with nine-figure sums or work his candidate relationships for policies and government appointments. Since the newspaper wars of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, rich publishers have leveraged their megaphones to tilt the political scales, as Musk does on his social network X.
But Musk goes further. In recent weeks, he has defied a Justice Department letter warning that he may be illegally paying to incentivize voter registration. He has joked about the futility of assassinating Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris; shared a blizzard of misleading information about the integrity of the US voting system; and boasted to his own investors about the transactional value of his support for Republican nominee Donald Trump, who has promised to have Musk lead a new “efficiency” task force to overhaul the federal government.
“There should be a federal approval process for autonomous vehicles,” Musk said on an Oct. 23 Tesla earnings call. “If there’s a Department of Government Efficiency, I’ll try to help make that happen.”
Rather than operate in the backroom, Musk has made himself the public face of Trump’s closing argument, a human October surprise that can finance his own canvassing army, attract his own media attention, and stage rallies for Trump across the swing state of Pennsylvania. Musk’s group, America PAC, to which he has given at least $118.5 million, closely coordinates with Trump’s campaign on its get-out-the-vote operation, even though it remains legally independent.
“Are you ready to join Elon Musk and go Dark MAGA?” read the subject line of a Trump fund-raising email last week, which treated Musk as a celebrity draw like Democratic supporters George Clooney or Sarah Jessica Parker. For a suggested donation of $47, the email offered entry to a raffle for a signed black MAGA cap, like the one Musk once wore standing next to Trump.
“It’s such an extraordinary scene that we haven’t really absorbed the magnitude of it — or the uniqueness of it,” said Trevor Potter, a former Republican chairman of the Federal Election Commission and counsel to John McCain’s presidential campaigns. “You have the richest man in the world building a campaign apparatus with the Trump campaign at a time when one of the reasons he is the richest man in the world is all of the government contracts and business relationships that are controlled by who is in the White House.”
The nation’s modern campaign finance system, established by a 1976 Supreme Court opinion after the Watergate scandal, is based on the premise that large contributions from wealthy interests can create corruption or the appearance of corruption. The Supreme Court remade that system in 2010, when it concluded that “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” Since then, the role of the wealthiest few in politics has exploded, aided by the repeated judicial and regulatory expansions of what “independent” means.
As it stands, Musk remains legally “independent” from Trump’s campaign, even though he appears at his rallies; speaks regularly with the candidate; funds a field operation that shares data with Trump’s campaign; advertises through direct mail, text message, and radio to elect Trump; has secured an advisory role in a future Trump administration; and has publicly announced that he plans to use that position to improve his own business fortunes.
In this way, Musk is not unlike many others in his billionaire cohort, including Trump, who have taken an interest in politics in recent years. Musk did not respond to an email seeking an interview. A spokesperson for America PAC declined to comment for this story.
A 2023 study by Northwestern University political scientist Daniel Krcmaric and two colleagues found that 11 percent of those on the international Forbes billionaire list have held or sought a formal political office, including by appointment. The rate was far higher in authoritarian countries than the United States, where less than 4 percent had sought direct political involvement and the very wealthy prefer a lower profile. (Jeff Bezos, the second richest man in the world who also has substantial business interests before the federal government, owns The Washington Post. He directs the Post’s editorial board and recently decided against running an endorsement of Harris. But he does not exercise direct control over the newsroom that produced this story.)
“The difference is Musk wants everyone to know about it,” Krcmaric said, “whereas others want to keep it quiet.”
Musk publicly opposed Trump’s election in 2016 and resigned in protest from a government advisory council in 2017, after Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate Accords. Just two years ago, Trump dismissed Musk as a “bull—- artist,” mocked his “driverless cars that crash, or rocket ships to nowhere.” Trump wrote that Musk would “be worthless” without government subsidies for his businesses. Musk announced that Trump should “hang up his hat and sail into the sunset.”
Earlier this year, Musk remained skeptical of getting too involved in Trump’s effort, telling other billionaire donors that a Trump win would be better for them — but he understood the skepticism of giving large checks directly to efforts Trump controlled. “He didn’t want to be the public face of this at all,” a person who spoke to him in the spring said. “He was trying to figure out how to help Trump without becoming linked to it.”
Now the two praise each other effusively, and Trump’s advisers have come to see Musk as a key ally. “Elon Musk is a once-in-a-generation industry leader and our broken federal bureaucracy could certainly benefit from his ideas and efficiency,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.
The two men speak with some regularity by phone, and Musk has met with Trump’s top political team, according to Trump advisers, who like others for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Musk has regularly raised immigration, election rules, and censorship with Trump, the people said.
“They probably talk about every other day,” said a person close to Trump, who described the former president as impressed with Musk’s commitment and his ability to draw a crowd.
At a major donor dinner in New York in September, Trump told the other donors they should be giving money like Musk, a person who attended said. Musk — who was born in South Africa and launched his career in the United States working illegally, according to reporting by The Washington Post — has bonded with Trump over their concern about undocumented immigration and election fraud.
Musk now ranks as the fourth largest donor in this election cycle, though he may move up given his rate of late spending. Campaign finance records show that Musk began making donations to America PAC in early July, but he only announced his endorsement after the former president survived an assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania.
“He believes that if Trump wins Pennsylvania, he wins the election. He’s told us that repeatedly. He’s treating this almost like it’s a business deal,” said one Trump adviser. “He knows if he loses this election, he’s screwed. The regulations, the attitude of a new Democratic administration, the animosity they’ll have for all the money he’s spent to help Trump — it’s a big business bet for him.”
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