Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla and owner of X
Credit: Reuters File Photo
By Craig Trudell
Elon Musk has assured his more than 175 million followers that he’s not donating money to Donald Trump or Joe Biden. Instead, the billionaire is making something of an in-kind contribution to the former with his relentless posting on X.
In just the last few days, Musk has baselessly speculated that Biden took Adderall to deliver a livelier State of the Union address and badgered House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries about border legislation. He repeatedly claimed Democrats are lax on immigration as part of a plot to boost their electoral prospects and revisited a year-old wisecrack that his pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.
He endorsed Trump’s claim that the current president’s border policies are a conspiracy to overthrow the country, suggested Biden is committing treason and accused him of laying groundwork for a national security event worse than September 11, 2001.
All this in a week that began with Musk joining other prospective donors in meeting with Trump, who virtually locked up the Republican nomination. The volume and tenor of the posts suggest that Musk, who has a long history of promoting conspiracies and has been accused of spreading anti-Semitism, intends to play a role in shaping the US political discourse that’s unprecedented for a social media company owner in an election year.
The South African-born Musk, who moved to California in 1995 and became a US citizen in 2002, posts often about an issue that’s expected to be a liability for Democrats in November. He’s referred to undocumented immigrants as “illegals” in almost 30 posts already this year, and this week made light of people being criticized for using the term, which suggests humans are de facto criminals.
Already one of Twitter’s most prominent users before his $44 billion acquisition of the company in late 2022, Musk has been even more vocal since he’s taken over. He’s posted, reposted or replied on X around 600 times already this month, or roughly 75 times a day. His views apparently are resonating with Trump and his allies on the Republican National Committee, who CNBC reported Friday want to convince Musk to speak at the GOP convention in July.
‘Too Much Drama’
The chief executive officer of Tesla Inc. and SpaceX claimed in September 2021 that he preferred to stay out of politics. Eight months later, he abandoned that predilection with gusto, declaring that Democrats had become “the party of division & hate,” and threw his support behind Republicans.
The day before the midterm elections in November 2022, Musk recommended that his followers vote Republican.
While Musk has made his leanings abundantly clear, he’s stopped short of endorsing Trump. His biographer Walter Isaacson wrote in a book published last year that Musk harbored “deep disdain” for the former president, who he considered “a con man” and “kind of nuts.” The two clashed in mid-2022, when Musk tweeted that he would be voting Republican for the first time. “He told me he voted for me, so he’s another bulls--t artist,” Trump said at an event in July of that year.
After Musk shot back that Trump was too old to be president, too much drama, and should “hang up his hat & sail into the sunset,” Trump let loose.
“When Elon Musk came to the White House asking me for help on all his many subsidized projects,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform, “I could have said, ‘drop to your knees and beg,’ and he would have done it.” He attached a photo of Musk standing next to him behind the Oval Office desk and took pot shots at Tesla, SpaceX and then-Twitter.
To the Moon
Musk’s post this week saying that he won’t donate money to either US presidential candidate left some room for the possibility he will contribute to a super political action committee, or otherwise put some of his $188.6 billion fortune to work in this year’s election. He didn’t respond to an emailed request for comment.
While Musk’s companies are big beneficiaries of legislation Biden has signed into law — Tesla will cash in on Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding for electric-car chargers and Inflation Reduction Act tax credits — he and the president have been at odds.
Musk has resented that Biden rarely mentions Tesla when discussing the US auto industry or his administration’s efforts to encourage its transition to electric vehicles. Biden invited executives from General Motors Co., Ford Motor Co. and Stellantis NV to the White House for an EV event in August 2021 and didn’t invite Tesla.
That rankled Musk, who referred to Biden as “a damp sock puppet in human form” after Tesla was excluded from another White House event in February 2022.
Biden hasn’t been as derisive of Musk as his political archrival has. A few months after the sock puppet comment, the president dismissed Musk’s warnings about the state of the economy, pointing to investments other American companies had been making.
“So, you know,” Biden said, “lots of luck on his trip to the moon.”