Elon Musk
denies report he will donate $45m a month to Trump Super Pac
Musk said it
was ‘not true’ that he was planning large monthly donations but said he had
created ‘America Pac’ and is making ‘lower level’ donations
Helen
Sullivan
Tue 23 Jul
2024 22.30 EDT
Tesla CEO
Elon Musk has denied reports that emerged last week that he was planning to
donate $45m a month to a Super Pac focused on getting Trump elected.
On Tuesday,
Musk appeared on Jordan Peterson’s show, where he said the claim was “simply
not true”. “I am not donating $45m a month to Trump,” he said.
“Now what I
have done is that I have created a Pac or Super Pac or whatever you want to
call it,” he said. It is called the America Pac.”
Super Pacs,
short for Political Action Committees, are independent political organisations
to which donors can give unlimited amounts of money, while donations to
individuals or non-Super Pacs are capped.
After the
Peterson interview, Musk replied on X to a clip from the interview saying,
“Yeah”, and to another tweet referencing the reports saying, “Yeah, it’s
ridiculous. I am making some donations to America PAC, but at a much lower
level and the key values of the Pac are supporting a meritocracy &
individual freedom. Republicans are mostly, but not entirely, on the side of
merit & freedom”.
The denial
comes days after Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race, endorsing his
vice-president Kamala Harris, who now has enough delegates to claim the
Democratic nomination in August.
Also on
Tuesday, the New York Times reported that the Super Pac was being staffed by
former aides to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign. “The
Super Pac has acquired an air of mystery in the Trump orbit, with other outside
groups largely in the dark about its plans,” the Times reported.
But the
aides, Generra Peck, who initially managed the DeSantis campaign, and Phil Cox,
a former head of the Republican Governors Association, “may help legitimize it
within the Republican establishment as it aims to become one of the leading
groups on behalf of Mr Trump.”
“The intent
is to promote the principles that made America great in the first place,” Musk
said on Peterson’s show. “I wouldn’t say that I’m for example Maga,” he added,
referring to the Trump catchphrase. “I think America is great. I’m more M-A-G,
make America greater.”
Musk did not
clarify how much he intends to donate to the Pac.
The America
Pac has already been backed by some of Musk’s friends and allies in the tech
world, the Times reported, including Joe Lonsdale, who co-founded the software
company Palantir with Peter Thiel, a major political donor to Trump’s newly
named vice-president pick, the Ohio senator JD Vance.
The
Winklevoss twins, cryptocurrency entrepreneurs who have attacked Joe Biden for
waging what they called a war on cryptocurrency through regulation, have also
reportedly contributed to the effort, the Wall Street Journal reported. They
hailed Trump as “pro-Bitcoin, pro-crypto, pro-business” in June.
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