In the final weeks of the presidential campaign, the world’s richest man became involved in US elections in a way unprecedented in modern history.
Elon Musk, who was happy to jump up and down with former President Donald J. Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, over the weekend, now speaks with Republican candidates multiple times a week.
He has effectively moved his operations to Pennsylvania, where he recently told close associates that he believes the state will be key to Trump’s re-election bid.
He relentlessly promoted Trump’s candidacy to his 201 million followers on social platform X, which he bought for $44 billion, spreading conspiracy theories about Democrats and insulting Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris. I’ve used it to do that. .
Best of all, he is personally directing the actions of a super PAC that has funded tens of millions of dollars to rally votes for Trump, not just in Pennsylvania but across the country. He even offered to take a campaign bus tour throughout Pennsylvania and knock on doors himself to see how his money was being spent.
Taken together, this provides a clear picture of Musk’s battle plan to lead the effort to elect Trump with the same frenetic energy and exacting demands that he honed at his companies SpaceX, Tesla, and X. A complete picture has emerged.
As early as February, Musk was speaking privately and apocalypically about what he thought was crucially needed to defeat President Biden. But even as Mr. Musk was meeting with advisers in Austin, Texas, in April to plan his super PAC, he sounded as if he viewed Mr. Trump simply as the lesser of two evils. Ta. He told friends this spring that he wasn’t even sure if he would explicitly support Trump.
Lately, Mr. Musk has become almost manic in private conversations about the stakes of the election and the need for Mr. Trump to win. He praised Trump’s courage in the face of criticism (he supported Trump on the night of Butler’s assassination attempt) and said how funny he is. One person who spoke to Mr. Musk recently recalled him saying, without any hint of irony, “I love Trump.”
Mr. Musk’s enthusiastic engagement reflects his views on this moment in American history. Regarding X, he warned in dire terms about the effects of progressive policies and censorship. He baselessly claimed that Democrats were trying to fill the country with illegal immigrants who would give them permanent power and warned that the 2024 election could be America’s last free election.
It may be impossible to grasp the monetary value of all the support Mr. Musk is providing Mr. Trump. This is partly due to his role in “X,” in which he amplifies many of the former president’s messages. Mr. Trump has privately used grandiose (and unverified) language to describe the amount of money Mr. Musk is donating to his super PAC, recently telling an official that the amount is $500 million. That’s what he said.
But friends and colleagues say Mr. Musk is employing the same strategy he has used during other crises he considered existential. Just as Mr. Musk worked late into the night when his company was on the brink of collapse, tinkered with rocket designs at SpaceX, slept on a couch in a Tesla factory, and announced layoffs on Twitter. , Musk thinks this is all there is to it. -The moment you actually touch the deck.
So just as Mr. Musk recruited friends, family and trusted lieutenants to Twitter after buying the company, he did the same with the America PAC he set up to support Mr. Trump. Most recently, Musk added Steve Davis, a former SpaceX engineer and head of a tunneling company, to the group, with Davis reprising the sidekick role he played after Musk’s acquisition of Twitter.
Trapped in a war room in Pittsburgh with a team of lawyers, public relations experts, recruitment experts, and longtime friends, Musk put the strategies and entrepreneurial lessons of his business to bed in just a few weeks. He is trying to apply it to difficult political missions. By election day. This article is based on interviews with 17 people familiar with Musk’s thinking and policies as Election Day approaches.
“It’s unclear whether there is any precedent in modern history for how Mr. Musk came to the presidential race,” said Benjamin Soskice, a historian of the ultra-wealthy.
The relationship between Trump and Musk has changed over time.
Mr. Musk, who once privately called Mr. Trump a “stoned loser,” is rich in what Mr. Trump values most: wealth, fame and a huge platform.
Musk initially endorsed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as a presidential candidate, suggesting Trump should “sail off into the sunset.” Mr. Trump responded that Mr. Musk had begged for government subsidies on the ground. Still, Trump remains fascinated by Musk.
America PAC declined to comment, and the Trump team also declined to comment on the matter. Mr. Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
Secret support at first
The idea for the super PAC came from two exclusive dinners. After Mr. DeSantis lost the Republican primary, Mr. Musk began telling friends — privately — that he wanted to find a way to support Mr. Trump.
At a dinner earlier this year with a group of pro-Trump billionaires, including Nelson Peltz and John Paulson, Musk expressed his simple but serious beliefs about the state of politics. He dismissed the power of television ads and spoke extensively about the organic movement to elect Trump, including his supporters persuading others to join the movement. Two voters by two voters, he said, is how Trump wins.
In April, Musk arranged for a dinner to be held at venture capitalist David Sachs’ Los Angeles home. Musk and some of the world’s wealthiest people, including Rupert Murdoch, former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and former Trump supporter Peter Thiel, gathered there, with 10 voters each voting for Trump to win. He said it would lead to. Musk told his dinner companions of about a dozen people that it was important for businessmen to organize their allies because supporting Trump in large numbers would make them politically safer.
Trump said he was grateful for the support and promised to appoint Musk to oversee his government efficiency team if re-elected. At a rally in Reading, Pennsylvania, on Wednesday night, Mr. Trump seemed preoccupied with Mr. Musk, bringing up three unrelated stories about his meeting with Mr. Musk that some attendees said were troubling. Said praised the “dark MAGA” hat. I bought this because Mr. Musk wore it at Butler.
This relationship has proven important in other ways as well. After a reporter published information about the Trump campaign that had been hacked last month, the campaign worked with X to block the circulation of links to materials on the platform, two people familiar with the matter said. X ultimately blocked links to the material and suspended the reporter’s account.
1 million voters
At the heart of Musk’s project is the organization America, which the Trump campaign is knocking on doors in battleground states and asking for significant help in encouraging 800,000 to 1 million voters to vote for the former president. PAC.”
The group spent about $80 million supporting Mr. Trump, mostly on recruitment programs, according to federal records. Mr. Musk’s advisers told donors that the group has about 2,500 organizers in the field and that the group had effectively bought out the Wisconsin assets of another group, Turning Point USA. , said it is taking on about 200 new recruiters in the state. Some recruiters were shown social media posts about Musk’s group during training as a way to encourage them.
The extent of Musk’s personal finances will not be made public until the middle of this month. Initially, Musk and friends of the group were talking about a total budget of $140 million to $180 million, almost all of which came from Musk himself. The organization has been telling other potential donors in recent weeks that their efforts are fully funded.
The Trump campaign is conducting something of an experiment by outsourcing some of its voter contact work to groups such as America’s PAC. This was made possible thanks to new federal election guidelines that allow political campaigns to more closely coordinate their activities with outside organizations.
The campaign has data-sharing agreements with America PAC and several other groups, and is working closely with them to assess which voters are most important to talk to at home.
Still, some in Trump’s orbit are unsure how effective outside efforts will be. Some of the super PAC’s donors rely on the same team that formed the core of Mr. DeSantis’ advisers when Mr. Musk tried a similar effort in the Republican primary to no avail. I’m angry.
Veterans of past campaigns argue that it typically takes months or even years for recruitment efforts to become effective machines. There is little precedent for successfully launching a group of this size months before a presidential election.
America’s PAC has also been in turmoil at times, as Mr. Musk repeatedly fired and replaced advisers and vendors who supplied recruiters, at one point stranding hundreds of paid doorknockers across the country.
A senior Trump campaign official, who was granted anonymity to discuss internal views on America PAC, said the team was not “reliant” on the group, but called it a “key” partner, along with many other outside groups. He said he thought so. Firepower. ”
spread false information
If America PAC is Mr. Musk’s most ambitious and costly expression of his support for Mr. Trump, nowhere has Mr. Musk’s cheerleading been more evident than in X.
Since going public with his support for the former president in July, he has posted at least 109 times about Trump and the election. He has also said in the past that the platform should be “politically neutral,” but he has also criticized election misinformation and Democrats’ “deliberate voter transfer” and “fast-tracking” of immigrants to citizenship. It has been used to spread unsubstantiated claims that it is working on a Control the voters.
One post making such a claim has received nearly 34 million views this month, according to Company X’s own metrics, indicating that Musk, the owner of the platform’s most-followed account, It highlights just how much attention it can attract.
“Humans will never reach Mars unless Trump wins and removes mountains of oppressive regulations (which have nothing to do with safety!),” Musk wrote in a post earlier this month. , which has been viewed approximately 18 million times. “This is existential.”
Musk has painted a bleak picture online of what will happen if Trump loses, a situation that could hurt him personally. In an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, he admitted he “bashes Kamala non-stop” and fully supports Trump.
If Trump loses, he joked, “How long do you think my prison sentence will be?”
