Donald Trump and his campaign to be the president once again need money. You know who says he has money? Elon Musk, the second richest person on Earth. It’s a match made in “guys who suck” heaven; Trump and his team are apparently looking for additional donors to shore up his finances ahead of his general electric rematch with President Biden in November, and who better than Musk to help him out?
Trump met with Musk and a few other wealthy Republican donors on March 3 looking for some cash, but he’s reportedly hoping for a one-on-one meeting with the multi-company CEO soon, according to anonymous sources who spoke with The New York Times. Right now, it isn’t exactly clear if Musk will fork over any of his $200 billion-ish fortune to Trump.
Update, Wednesday, March 6, 2024 11:20 a.m. EST: Elon Musk posted on X that he will not be donating any money to either candidate for President, but Elon says a lot of things, so who really knows?
However, Musk has become increasingly more hostile toward the Biden Administration, especially on his social media platform X (I still call it Twitter usually, I’m not weird). If Musk’s net worth is to be believed, The Times says he can pretty much single-handedly erase Biden’s financial advantage over Trump.
Here’s a little more on Musk’s political situation, from The Times:
Mr. Musk has long portrayed himself as independent-minded, and like many business leaders he has donated to candidates from both parties over the years. Unlike other U.S. billionaires, he has not spent heavily on a presidential election, and his donations have been fairly evenly split over the years between Democrats and Republicans. Mr. Musk’s businesses, Tesla and SpaceX, have benefited from federal government contracts and subsidies.
A person close to Mr. Musk said his relationship with the government had historically made him wary about identifying too closely with one political party over the other. In 2017, the billionaire famously stepped away from two business advisory councils when Mr. Trump was president over Mr. Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement.
“Climate change is real,” Mr. Musk posted on Twitter in June 2017. “Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world.”
The two have had other moments of friction. A few months before the midterm elections, in the summer of 2022, he and the former president traded insults, with Mr. Trump calling him an expletive and Mr. Musk saying it was time for the former president to “sail into the sunset.”
That being said, Musk has become a whole lot more welcoming to the Republican Party when it comes to both economic and social issues, The Times reports:
On the eve of the midterms, he told his more than 100 million followers on X — the website that was called Twitter until Mr. Musk bought it in 2022 — that they should vote for a Republican Congress. He has railed against what he describes as the left’s “woke” agenda and has attacked Mr. Biden over the record number of migrants who have entered the United States during his presidency.
Mr. Musk’s comments about immigration have grown increasingly alarmist. He has suggested that the president’s immigration policies threaten the existence of America itself and have pushed American democracy to the brink. He has suggested that Democrats are “ushering in vast numbers of illegals” to cheat in elections. There is no evidence to support his claim of mass voter fraud.
“America will fall if it tries to absorb the world,” Mr. Musk posted on X on Tuesday. Earlier in the day, he posted that the Biden administration’s immigration policies amounted to “treason.”
The person close to Mr. Musk, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that if he does get behind Mr. Trump, his views about immigration will have been a significant motivator.
Mr. Musk has previously raised questions over Mr. Biden’s age and once echoed one of Mr. Trump’s favorite jabs by claiming the president was “still sleeping” after Mr. Biden failed to congratulate one of his companies. Mr. Musk has also held a grudge against the president after the White House did not invite Tesla to an event on electric vehicles in August 2021.
“Let’s not forget the White House giving Tesla the cold shoulder, excluding us from the EV summit,” Mr. Musk, the Tesla chief executive, posted on X in December.
I suppose only time will tell if Musk decides to put his enormous financial weight behind Trump, but even if he doesn’t, he still holds a whole lot of power in this election. With 175 million followers on his social media platform (many of which will do just about anything he says), Musk can shape things like few others can.