Musk Is
Going All In to Elect Trump
Elon Musk is
planting himself in Pennsylvania, has brought his brain trust to help and may
even knock on doors himself.
Elon Musk
appeared with former President Donald J. Trump on Saturday at a rally in
Butler, Pa., the site of an assassination attempt on Mr. Trump earlier this
year.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
Theodore
Schleifer Maggie Haberman Ryan MacJonathan Swan
By Theodore
Schleifer Maggie Haberman Ryan Mac and Jonathan Swan
Oct. 11,
2024
In the final
weeks of the presidential campaign, the richest man in the world has involved
himself in the U.S. election in a manner unparalleled in modern history.
Elon Musk,
seen over the weekend jumping for joy alongside former President Donald J.
Trump at a rally in Butler, Pa., is now talking to the Republican candidate
multiple times a week.
He has
effectively moved his base of operations to Pennsylvania, the place that he has
recently told confidants he believes is the linchpin to Mr. Trump’s
re-election.
He has
relentlessly promoted Mr. Trump’s candidacy to his 201 million followers on X,
the social platform formerly known as Twitter that he bought for $44 billion
and has used to spread conspiracy theories about the Democratic Party and to
insult its candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris.
Above all,
he is personally steering the actions of a super PAC that he has funded with
tens of millions of dollars to turn out the vote for Mr. Trump, not just in
Pennsylvania but across the country. He has even proposed taking a campaign bus
tour across Pennsylvania and knocking on doors himself, in part to see how his
money is being used.
Taken
together, a clear picture has emerged of Mr. Musk’s battle plan as he directs
his efforts to elect Mr. Trump with the same frenetic energy and exacting
demands that he has honed at his companies SpaceX, Tesla and X.
As early as
February, Mr. Musk was speaking apocalyptically, in private, about what he
considered the crucial need to defeat President Biden. But even as he was
meeting with advisers in Austin, Texas, in April to plot his super PAC, Mr.
Musk sounded as if he considered Mr. Trump merely the lesser of two evils. He
told friends in the spring that he wasn’t sure he even wanted to explicitly
endorse Mr. Trump.
These days,
in private conversations, Mr. Musk is obsessive, almost manic, about the stakes
of the election and the need for Mr. Trump to win. He praises Mr. Trump’s
courage under fire — he endorsed him on the night of the assassination attempt
in Butler — and talks about how funny he is. One person who spoke recently to
Mr. Musk recalled him saying, without any hint of irony, “I love Trump.”
Mr. Musk’s
frenzied engagement reflects his view of this moment in American history. On X,
he has warned in dire terms about the effects of progressive policies and
censorship. He has claimed, without basis, that Democrats are trying to fill
the country with undocumented immigrants who would reward them with permanent
power, warning that the 2024 race could be the last free election in America.
It may be
impossible to capture the financial value of all the support Mr. Musk is
providing to Mr. Trump. This is in part because of his role on X, where he
amplifies so much of the former president’s message. Mr. Trump has privately
used grand — and unverified — terms to describe what Mr. Musk is donating to
the super PAC, telling one associate recently that the figure is $500 million.
But friends
and colleagues say Mr. Musk is adopting the same strategy that he has used
during other crises he has considered existential. Just as Mr. Musk worked late
into the night as his companies teetered on the verge of catastrophe, tinkering
with rocket designs at SpaceX, sleeping on a couch in the Tesla factory or
making staff cuts at Twitter, Mr. Musk has deemed this an all-hands-on-deck
moment.
And so, just
as he recruited friends, family and trusted lieutenants to Twitter after he
bought the company, Mr. Musk has done the same at America PAC, which he founded
to help Mr. Trump. Most recently, Mr. Musk added Steve Davis, a former SpaceX
engineer and the head of his tunneling company, to the group, with Mr. Davis
reprising a sidekick role that he played after Mr. Musk’s takeover of Twitter.
Ensconced in
a war room in Pittsburgh with a team of lawyers, public-relations
professionals, canvassing experts and longtime friends, Mr. Musk is trying to
apply strategies and entrepreneurial lessons from his businesses to a
grind-it-out political mission with just weeks to go until Election Day. This
article is based on interviews with 17 people familiar with Mr. Musk’s thinking
and operations as Election Day approaches.
“I’m not
sure there is a precedent in modern history to how Musk has inserted himself
into the presidential race,” said Benjamin Soskis, a historian of the
ultrarich.
The
relationship between Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk has evolved over time.
Mr. Musk,
who once privately called Mr. Trump a “stone-cold loser,” possesses in
abundance the things Mr. Trump values most: wealth, fame and a massive
platform.
Mr. Musk
initially supported Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida for president and suggested
that Mr. Trump should “sail into the sunset.” Mr. Trump replied that Mr. Musk
begged on his knees for government subsidies. Still, Mr. Trump has remained
fascinated by Mr. Musk.
America PAC
declined to comment, and the Trump team declined to provide a comment for this
story. Mr. Musk did not return a request for comment.
Secret
support, at first
The idea for
the super PAC was born out of two exclusive dinners. After Mr. DeSantis flamed
out of the Republican primary, Mr. Musk began to tell friends that he wanted to
find a way to support Mr. Trump — secretly.
At one
dinner earlier this year with a group of Trump-friendly billionaires including
Nelson Peltz and John Paulson, Mr. Musk voiced an earnest, if naïve, belief in
the way that politics should work. He dismissed the power of television
advertising and spoke sweepingly of an organic movement to elect Mr. Trump,
with supporters persuading others to join the cause. Two voters by two voters —
that was how Mr. Trump would win, he said.
In April,
Mr. Musk arranged for a dinner to be held at the Los Angeles home of the
venture capitalist David Sacks. There, Mr. Musk and a phalanx of some of the
world’s wealthiest people — including Rupert Murdoch, former Treasury Secretary
Steven Mnuchin and the onetime Trump supporter Peter Thiel — said that 10 by 10
voters was how Mr. Trump would win. Mr. Musk told about a dozen dinner
companions that supporting Mr. Trump would be politically safe if they did it
in large numbers — and so it was important for the businesspeople to organize
their peers.
Mr. Trump
has made clear that he appreciates the help, promising to appoint Mr. Musk to
oversee a government-efficiency team if he is re-elected. At a rally in
Reading, Pa., on Wednesday night, Mr. Trump appeared preoccupied with Mr. Musk,
telling stories about his talks with Mr. Musk in three unrelated tangents and
celebrating the “dark MAGA” hat that some attendees said they had bought
because Mr. Musk wore it in Butler.
The
relationship has proved significant in other ways. After a reporter’s
publication of hacked Trump campaign information last month, the campaign
connected with X to prevent the circulation of links to the material on the
platform, according to two people with knowledge of the events. X eventually
blocked links to the material and suspended the reporter’s account.
One million
voters
At the core
of Mr. Musk’s project is America PAC, an organization that the Trump campaign
is relying on for significant help in knocking on doors in battleground states
and encouraging 800,000 to one million voters to cast ballots for the former
president.
The group
has spent about $80 million to help Mr. Trump according to federal records,
primarily on its canvassing program. Mr. Musk’s advisers have told donors that
the group has about 2,500 organizers in the field, and the group has
effectively acquired the Wisconsin assets of another group, Turning Point USA,
taking on about 200 new canvassers in the state. Some canvassers, during
training, have been shown Mr. Musk’s social media posts about the group, as a
way to encourage them.
The scale of
Mr. Musk’s personal financial commitment will not be made public until the
middle of the month. Initially, Mr. Musk and his friends in the group had
spoken of a budget totaling from $140 million to $180 million, almost all it
from Mr. Musk himself. The group has told other prospective donors in recent
weeks that it is fully funded.
The Trump
campaign is conducting something of an experiment by outsourcing portions of
its voter contact operation to America PAC and other groups. That is possible
because of new federal election guidance that allows political campaigns to
coordinate their activities more closely with outside organizations.
The campaign
signed a data-sharing agreement with America PAC and several others, and it
works closely with them to assess which voters are most important to speak to
at their homes.
Still, some
people in Mr. Trump’s orbit are uncertain about how effective the outside
efforts will be. Some donors to the super PAC have groused that Mr. Musk is
relying on the same team that formed the core of Mr. DeSantis’s advisers when
he attempted a similar effort in the Republican primaries, to no avail.
Veterans of
past campaigns argue that canvassing operations generally take months or even
years to become effective machines. There is little precedent for successfully
standing up a group of this scale just months before a presidential election.
And turmoil
has plagued America PAC at times, as Mr. Musk has repeatedly jettisoned
advisers and vendors that were supplying canvassers and replaced them, at one
point stranding hundreds of paid door-knockers across the country.
A senior
Trump campaign official, who was granted anonymity to discuss internal views
about America PAC, said that the team was not “relying” on the group but did
consider it a “key” partner, along with many other outside groups, as “added
firepower.”
Spreading
misinformation
If America
PAC is the most ambitious and costly manifestation of Mr. Musk’s support for
Mr. Trump, nowhere has his cheerleading been more evident than on X.
Since
publicly endorsing the former president in July, he has posted at least 109
times about Mr. Trump and the election. And while he has said in the past that
the platform should be “politically neutral,” he has used it to advance
election misinformation and the baseless claim that Democrats are engaging in
“deliberate voter importation” and “fast-tracking” immigrants to citizenship to
gain control over the electorate.
One post
with that claim this month has garnered nearly 34 million views, according to
X’s own metrics, underscoring the scale of attention that Mr. Musk, owner of
the platform’s most followed account, can command.
“Unless
Trump wins and we get rid of the mountain of smothering regulations (that have
nothing to do with safety!), humanity will never reach Mars,” Mr. Musk wrote
this month in a post that has gained nearly 18 million views. “This is
existential.”
Online, Mr.
Musk has painted a dark picture of what would happen if Mr. Trump lost, a
circumstance that could hurt Mr. Musk personally. In an interview with the
former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, he acknowledged “trashing Kamala nonstop”
and being all in for Mr. Trump.
If Mr. Trump
loses, he joked, “how long do you think my prison sentence is going to be?”
Theodore
Schleifer is a Times reporter covering campaign finance and the influence of
billionaires in American politics. More about Theodore Schleifer
Maggie
Haberman is a senior political correspondent reporting on the 2024 presidential
campaign, down ballot races across the country and the investigations into
former President Donald J. Trump. More about Maggie Haberman
Ryan Mac
covers corporate accountability across the global technology industry. More
about Ryan Mac
Jonathan
Swan is a political reporter covering the 2024 presidential election and Donald
Trump’s campaign. More about Jonathan Swan
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