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On the left is Elon Musk and on the right is former President Donald Trump.
new york
CNN
—
At first glance, Elon Musk and Donald Trump don’t seem like natural allies.
One side has made reducing greenhouse gas emissions a major business selling point, while the other side questions the very need to reduce emissions and condemns most clean energy as unnecessary at best and destructive at worst.
One wants to move away from fossil fuels and switch every car sold worldwide to electric vehicles, while the other believes that EVs would be an economic disaster for America and that the country should produce and burn more oil.
But as of Saturday, Musk had publicly endorsed President Trump’s reelection bid, and The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, citing people familiar with the matter, that Musk now plans to support Trump’s presidential campaign by donating $45 million per month to a new super PAC backing him.
If the donation goes through, it would be a significant development not only for the presidential campaign but also for the relationship between the two men, who have a passionate following of millions of fans who believe almost everything they say.
Musk has donated to candidates of both parties in the past, giving $5,000 to Barack Obama in April 2011. He used to give primarily to Democrats, but his relatively small amounts pale in comparison to the money he’s currently reported giving to Republican presidential candidates. He has said for several years that he believes the Democratic Party has moved too far to the left to support many of its candidates.
Musk did not directly comment on the WSJ report, but suggested the report was false by posting a meme of people dressed as African wildebeests with the caption “Fake Wildebeests.” He also tweeted shortly after Saturday’s assassination attempt on Trump, “I support President Trump fully and wish him a speedy recovery.”
But Musk replied to the account @EndWokeness, with whom he frequently communicates, saying, “Yeah right,” and added, “Musk went from being an Obama supporter to donating $180 million to help elect Donald Trump. The woke left really sucks. It’s awful.”
The super PAC, called America PAC, aims to help with voter registration, encourage early voting and seek mail-in ballots in battleground states, one of the people told The Wall Street Journal.
Aside from his financial backing for the Trump campaign, Musk is likely one of the most followed “influencers” in the world, with 190 million followers on his platform “X,” and also has the highest net worth on the planet.
He has millions of fans: Tesla’s recent annual meeting had the feel of a political rally, with shareholders telling him things like, “We love you all with all our hearts. We love you, Elon.”
At that meeting, shareholders voted 84% to reinstate the largest ever compensation package given to a CEO, which included stock options worth $48 billion at the time of the meeting, after a Delaware judge had previously stripped him of that package.
Asked at the meeting about his relationship with Trump and how Trump has spoken kindly about Tesla while attacking electric vehicles, Musk replied, “I’m persuasive.”
“I mean, I’ve talked to him a couple of times, and he’ll just call me out of the blue, for no reason. I don’t know why, but he’ll call me,” Musk continued. “He was very nice to call me, and I said, ‘I think electric cars are going to be pretty good in the future. America is the leader in electric cars. Buy American products. In fact, a lot of his friends drive Teslas, and they love them. He’s a big fan of the Cybertruck, so maybe that’s a factor.”
The relationship between the two hasn’t always been friendly: Musk resigned from two White House business councils in early 2017 after Trump announced the US would withdraw from the Paris climate accord.
“Climate change is real. Leaving Paris is bad for America or the world,” he tweeted at the time.
But over the past few years, Musk has repeatedly voiced his support for Trump or his opposition to President Joe Biden.
Musk reinstated Trump’s Twitter account shortly after he bought the social media platform, then known as Twitter, in the fall of 2022. Trump had complained that Twitter had improperly censored anti-Biden stories under its previous ownership, though Twitter’s lawyers later filed court documents disputing that conclusion.
Tesla, the largest source of Musk’s net worth as the world’s top car maker, is benefiting from subsidies passed under the Biden administration, offering EV buyers tax credits of up to $7,500. But those tax credits also help established automakers looking to sell their own EVs. Musk recently tweeted that EV subsidies passed under the Biden administration actually helped rival companies more than Tesla.
“Remove subsidies. It will only help Tesla,” he tweeted early Tuesday. “Also remove subsidies from all industries!”
Musk is right to point out that some of the industries he criticizes, particularly coal and oil, are heavily subsidized by the government, but his tweet fails to acknowledge that much of his wealth comes from government-backed Tesla and SpaceX (among his other companies that rely on government contracts to operate).
