Elon Musk appeared with former President Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, the site of an assassination attempt on Trump earlier this year. Photo / Doug Mills, The New York Times
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 US election in a manner unparalleled in modern history.
He has effectively moved his base of operations to Pennsylvania, the place he has recently told confidants he believes is the linchpin to Trump’s reelection.
He has relentlessly promoted Trump’s candidacy to his 201 million followers on X, the social platform formerly known as Twitter that he bought for US$44 billion ($72b) 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 political action committee he has funded with tens of millions of dollars to turn out the vote for 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 Musk’s battle plan as he directs his efforts to elect Trump with the same frenetic energy and exacting demands that he has honed at his companies SpaceX, Tesla and X.
As early as February, Musk was speaking apocalyptically, in private, about what he considered the crucial need to defeat President Joe Biden. But even as he was meeting with advisers in Austin, Texas, in April to plot his super PAC, Musk sounded as if he considered Trump merely the lesser of two evils. He told friends in the spring that he wasn’t sure he even wanted to explicitly endorse Trump.
These days, in private conversations, Musk is obsessive, almost manic, about the stakes of the election and the need for Trump to win. He praises 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 Musk recalled him saying, without any hint of irony, “I love Trump”.
Musk’s frenzied engagement reflects his view of this moment in US 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 immigrants in the country illegally who would reward them with permanent power, warning that the 2024 race could be the last free election in the US.
It may be impossible to capture the financial value of all the support Musk is providing to Trump. This is in part because of his role on X, where he amplifies so much of the former President’s message. Trump has privately used grand – and unverified – terms to describe what Musk is donating to the super PAC, telling one associate recently that the figure is US$500 million.
But friends and colleagues say Musk is adopting the same strategy he has used during other crises he has considered existential. Just as 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, 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, Musk has done the same at America PAC, which he founded to help Trump. Most recently, Musk added Steve Davis, a former SpaceX engineer and the head of his tunnelling company, to the group, with Davis reprising a sidekick role that he played after 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, 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 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 Trump and Musk has evolved over time.
Musk, who once privately called Trump a “stone-cold loser”, possesses in abundance the things Trump values most: wealth, fame and a massive platform.
Musk initially supported Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida for President and suggested that Trump should “sail into the sunset”. Trump replied that Musk begged on his knees for government subsidies. Still, Trump has remained fascinated by Musk.
America PAC declined to comment, and the Trump team declined to provide a comment for this story. Musk did not return a request for comment.
The idea for the super PAC was born out of two exclusive dinners. After DeSantis flamed out of the Republican primary, Musk began to tell friends that he wanted to find a way to support Trump – secretly.
At one dinner this year with a group of Trump-friendly billionaires including Nelson Peltz and John Paulson, Musk voiced an earnest, if naive, belief in the way that politics should work. He dismissed the power of television advertising and spoke sweepingly of an organic movement to elect Trump, with supporters persuading others to join the cause. Two voters by two voters – that was how Trump would win, he said.
In April, Musk arranged for a dinner to be held at the Los Angeles home of venture capitalist David Sacks. There, Musk and a phalanx of some of the world’s wealthiest people – including Rupert Murdoch, former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and onetime Trump supporter Peter Thiel – said that 10 by 10 voters was how Trump would win. Musk told about a dozen dinner companions that supporting Trump would be politically safe if they did it in large numbers – and so it was important for the businesspeople to organise their peers.
Trump has made clear that he appreciates the help, promising to appoint Musk to oversee a government-efficiency team if he is reelected. At a rally in Reading, Pennsylvania, on Wednesday night, Trump appeared preoccupied with Musk, telling stories about his talks with Musk in three unrelated tangents and celebrating the “dark MAGA” hat that some attendees said they had bought because 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.
At the core of Musk’s project is America PAC, an organisation that the Trump campaign is relying on for significant help in knocking on doors in battleground states and encouraging 800,000 to 1 million voters to cast ballots for the former President.
The group has spent about US$80 million to help Trump, according to federal records, primarily on its canvassing programme. Musk’s advisers have told donors that the group has about 2500 organisers 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 Musk’s social media posts about the group, as a way to encourage them.
The scale of Musk’s personal financial commitment will not be made public until the middle of the month. Initially, Musk and his friends in the group had spoken of a budget totalling from US$140 million to US$180 million, almost all it from 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 organisations.
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 Trump’s orbit are uncertain about how effective the outside efforts will be. Some donors to the super PAC have groused that Musk is relying on the same team that formed the core of DeSantis’ 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 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 the team was not “relying” on the group but did consider it a “key” partner, along with many other outside groups, as “added firepower”.
If America PAC is the most ambitious and costly manifestation of Musk’s support for 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 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 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,” Musk wrote this month in a post that has gained nearly 18 million views. “This is existential.”
Online, Musk has painted a dark picture of what would happen if Trump lost, a circumstance that could hurt Musk personally. In an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, he acknowledged “trashing Kamala nonstop” and being all in for Trump.
If Trump loses, he joked, “how long do you think my prison sentence is going to be?”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Theodore Schleifer, Maggie Haberman, Ryan Mac and Jonathan Swan
Photographs by: Doug Mills,
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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