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.
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 Points 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 of 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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