If former President Donald Trump wins the 2024 U.S. presidential election, it will cap off a remarkable string of victories for his billionaire cheerleader Elon Musk.
In a spectacular engineering feat, Musk’s SpaceX company launched and recovered its 233-foot-tall, “super heavy,” first-stage rocket booster in a descent from 46 miles up, “catching” the rocket on its launch platform in mid-air on Oct. 14. The next day, one of Musk’s rockets took NASA’s $5.2 billion Europa Clipper mission into orbit, beginning the spacecraft’s six-year journey to Jupiter.
Those successes are part of why SpaceX is the second-most valuable private company in the world, valued at $210 billion, just behind TikTok’s parent company ByteDance. But Musk, who is frequently the world’s richest man depending on the performance of the stock of his electric-car company Tesla, also has a more earthly ambition—to “make America great again” and elect Trump as the 47th president of the United States.
Musk has spent at least $119 million on his pro-Trump political action committee, America PAC, and plans to spend election night alongside Trump at Mar-a-Lago, The New York Times reported. That puts Musk alongside Republican mega-donors like Dr. Miriam Adelson, who has given $100 million to her pro-Trump super PAC, as among the leading individual contributors willing to spend jaw-dropping sums of money to help secure Trump’s election as president.
“My view is if Trump doesn’t win this election, it’s the last election we’re gonna have,” Musk told Tucker Carlson on Oct. 7. “My prediction is, if there’s another four years of a Dem administration, they will legalize so many illegals that are there that the next election, there won’t be any swing states and we’ll be a single-party country.”
The former Fox News host interviewed Musk on the latter’s social-media platform, X, which Musk bought in 2022, when it was known as Twitter, for $44 billion. Musk said at the time that he wanted the platform to become a place where “speech is as free as possible.”
Before Musk bought the company, Republican critics alleged frequently that Twitter stifled the voices of conservative politicians and news outlets. Just before the 2020 election, Twitter locked the New York Post out of its account for two weeks, after the tabloid published the drug-fuelled, lurid contents of the laptop of U.S. President Joe Biden’s son Hunter. The social-media company later banned Trump from the service for a series of posts he made after the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.
Under Musk’s ownership—and with his decision to endorse Trump—many are concerned that he might use X to thumb the scale for Republicans.
Musk, whose tweets reportedly receive special amplification from his more than 200 million followers and the site’s half-a-billion monthly users, frequently posts about his support for the former president. (JNS sought comment from X.)
In September, X and the Trump campaign coordinated to block links to a hacked internal Republican opposition research file on Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) and to suspend the account of the journalist who obtained the material in an Iranian hack of the Trump campaign, The New York Times reported on Oct. 11. More than two weeks later, Musk intervened personally to restore his account on free speech grounds, according to the journalist.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Oct. 29 that X serves political content to users who express no interest in politics and promotes pro-Trump over pro-Harris posts at a two-to-one ratio.
Musk’s extensive ventures into politicking have drawn criticism from several directions, including from those who accuse him of running afoul of the law and giving a platform to antisemites.
‘Totally inappropriate’
Musk’s PAC has run a $1 million-a-day giveaway to Trump voters, which prompted a lawsuit from the Philadelphia district attorney, alleging that the giveaway is an illegal lottery and a warning from the U.S. Justice Department that it may violate federal election laws.
A Pennsylvania judge ruled on Monday that the cash rewards could continue after Musk’s lawyers revealed that the “winners” are pre-selected for their abilities as spokesmen and not by chance.
Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, have discussed Musk extensively in recent days.
Harris said in an Oct. 21 press gaggle in Royal Oak, Mich., that “I think people are looking into” the $1 million giveaways, adding, with a laugh, per the official transcript. “I mean I hear that folks are looking into it, just based on the stuff you all are reporting.”
At the Church of Christian Compassion in Philadelphia, Harris was asked on Oct. 27 about what she makes of Musk’s involvement in the state. “I haven’t really been paying attention. I’m focused on our work,” she said with a laugh. “But thank you for asking.”
Biden began a press gaggle on Oct. 26 at Philadelphia International Airport, “I assume you want to talk about Elon Musk being here illegally. I’m only joking. What you got?”
Two days later, in remarks in New Castle, Del., a reporter said, “Sir, Elon Musk is handing out checks to registered voters—.” “Tell him I registered,” Biden said. “A million dollars. “Do you think that’s legal conduct?” the reporter asked. “Do you think that’s election interference?”
“I think it’s totally inappropriate,” Biden said.
‘Routine’ Jew-hatred
Some Jewish groups worry about Musk’s political involvement, given widespread Jew-hatred on X and given his appearances with Tucker Carlson, whose guests have included a Holocaust denier and anti-Israel clergy.
Yfat Barak-Cheney, the World Jewish Congress’s director of international affairs and director of technology and human rights, told JNS that the WJC is working with X to identify gaps in their policies and better enforce content guidelines.
“Jews should never be a political tool, and hate speech should not appear on any online platform,” Barak-Cheney said. “World Jewish Congress research has shown that antisemitism routinely appears on X.”
Musk, on the other hand, has promoted the idea that users of other social media platforms are more antisemitic or anti-Israel than users of X.
In November, the American Jewish Committee accused Musk of promoting the “deadliest antisemitic conspiracy theory in modern U.S. history” when Musk agreed with a user, who claimed that Jewish communities support “dialectical hatred against whites” and that Jews were responsible for the “hordes of minorities” in the United States.
Following that controversy in an apparent effort at damage control, Musk took trips to Israel and to Auschwitz, called the post “the worst and dumbest post I’ve ever done” and described himself as philo-semitic and “aspirationally Jewish.”
The Anti-Defamation League, which Musk previously threatened to sue over his claims that the group had tanked X’s ad revenue, rated the platform in September as the least responsive social-media service for addressing anti-Jewish content.
X “scored the lowest with an ‘F,’ as most of the platform’s actions consisted in limiting the problematic content’s visibility,” the ADL reported. “While ADL credited X for taking action, X did not, like other platforms, remove the hateful content.”
Another Musk-linked political action committee, Future Coalition PAC, is running contradictory Israel-related ads in key swing states. In Michigan—with its large Arab- and Muslim-American population—Future Coalition ran an ad ostensibly supporting Vice President Kamala Harris as pro-Israel and a supporter of the Jewish community.
“Supporters of free Palestine? They hate her,” the ad says.
But in Pennsylvania, where more than 2% of the population is Jewish, Future Coalition ran an ad accusing Harris of being anti-Israel. “In Jewish communities throughout America, questions are being asked: Why did Kamala Harris support denying Israel the weapons needed to defeat the Hamas terrorists who massacred thousands?” the ad’s narrator says. “Jewish voters must say, ‘No more.’ Kamala Harris, we say ‘no more.’”
Musk has given tens of millions of dollars to the group which, per U.S. Federal Election Commission filings, is the sole funder of Future Coalition, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Mark Mellman, the president and CEO of Democratic Majority for Israel, called the ads microtargeting Jewish and Muslim votes “among the most reprehensible” that he has seen in politics.
“Voters should see right through Musk’s attempt at manipulation and reject it,” Mellman stated. “Muslims and Jews, Democrats and Republicans should come together to condemn this dishonest and divisive behavior.”
‘A different approach to things’
Tevi Troy, a historian and former U.S. deputy secretary of health and human services, told JNS that Musk is not the first American mogul to try to play kingmaker in American politics. Troy is the author of the new book The Power and the Money, which examines the “epic clashes” between presidents and tycoons.
“I see a lot of parallels with Musk and some people who’ve come before him,” Troy said. “Henry Ford is one. He reshaped the car industry like Musk did and then tried to buy a platform. Ford bought the Dearborn Independent, which was unfortunately an antisemitic newspaper, and Musk bought Twitter. So definitely some similarities there.”
A billionaire throwing money into an election is unlikely to tip the result, but media-savvy CEOs have had a significant impact in past elections, Troy told JNS.
“In 2008 and 2012, Facebook employees, including Chris Hughes, went and helped the Obama campaign to use the new social media technologies,” he said. “That was pretty effective.”
Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook, left the tech giant in 2007 to volunteer for then-senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and used voter databases and other tools to help Obama win the presidency.
Musk’s decision to go all-in for Trump could create reputational problems for a man whose Silicon Valley employee base likely skews heavily towards Democrats, Troy told JNS. Musk could also face business risks if Democrats win in November and decide to create a tougher regulatory environment for his companies.
But for Musk, an immigrant from South Africa who turned himself into the richest man on the planet and who dreams of sending humanity to the stars, backing Trump might just be the latest in a long line of very successful gambles.
“He takes a different approach to things,” Troy said. “He went on ‘Saturday Night Live,’ and he said, ‘Look, I remade the electric car, and I’m sending people to Mars. Do you think I was gonna be a normal, chill dude?’”
“He’s successful because he takes different bets,” Troy added. “He does different things than other people would do, and so, even though my historical analysis says that it is risky to endorse a candidate too strongly, Musk has made a career of taking different approaches.”
