All right, hello everyone, So my apologies for the late start. We unfortunately had a massive, distributed anil of service attack against our servers.
When Elon Musk sat down to interview Donald Trump on his platform X, it was easy to ridicule the world's richest man, known for his innovation in space travel, was experiencing technical difficulties.
And so it's not time to proceed. But as this massive attack illustrates, there's a lot of opposition to people just hearing what President Trump has to say.
But the conversation was interesting in another way, showing just how close these two men have become.
And so we have to consider it an honor.
But congratulations and breaking every record in the book tonight.
That's great, Well, thank you.
Well, you'd almost forget that just two years ago the pair were openly hostile to each other.
You know, he said the other day, I've never voted for a Republican.
I said, I didn't know that. He told me voted for me. So he's another bullshit artist, but he's.
Not going to be buying.
It's now been revealed that Elon Musk has been working behind the scenes to fundraise for Trump for months, not just raising millions of dollars, but going to great lengths to keep his involvement secret from Schwartz Media. I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven AM today. Wall Street Journal reporter Dana Maddioli on the political transformation of Elon Musk and what she uncovered about his secret plans to return Trump to
the White House. It's Thursday, August twenty two. Dana. You've been looking into Elon Musk's increasing influence on the US presidential race, and you uncovered all of this information about secret Friday meetings that Elon Musk was having building this network to help Donald Trump. Tell me about what you found.
Yeah, it's pretty remarkable. Not only has he come out and endorsed Donald Trump since the assassination attempt, he started this super political action committee, what we call a super pac in the US. They're different from a traditional pack in that, you know, corporations and labor unions form these old fashioned sorts of packs to back or oppose political candidates, and donors are limited to giving five thousand dollars a year to a pack, and packs can only give as
much as thirty three hundred dollars a candidate. So super PACs are these groups that can raise unlimited sums of money for ads to support or oppose a candidate.
In SpaceX like fashion, Trump donations are about to enter a new stratosphere. Elon Musk making some major donations. That's coming up to a new Trump super pac. That's according to a Wall Street Journal report. The Journal's data Mattioli broke this story. She's the everything.
We reported that every Friday he has this hour long meeting with all the packs vendors where he gets like progress reports and how many doors were knocked on for Donald Trump? You know, how many voters were registered? What
were the conversations like? And this is, like I said, this is a man that runs six different companies, right, It's not like he's got a lot of free time on his hands, but he's spending it with the intent of helping turn out eight hundred thousand voters in swing states in the US to help Trump win the election.
And so we know about this super pac now, But initially Musk's involvement was Sacred Ride. Can you tell me about that?
Yeah, he didn't want to contribute to it until after June thirtieth because there are regulatory filings quarterly regulatory filings
for these packs that show all the donors. So what he did was starting in April, he started talking to vendors, trying to understand how he could be most of use for this campaign, started hiring vendors, getting proposals, and then he lined up a bunch of people that were not him to fund those first few months of operations, with the idea that he would give on or after July first,
which wouldn't show up until the October filings. There was a report, I think it was like July twelfth by Bloomberg News saying that Elon was involved with this new super pac called the America Pack.
And then we at the Wall Street Journal we started.
Digging into this to see what was going on there, and we learned that not only was he involved in the super pac, he had headed it up and he was willing to give forty five million dollars a month to it.
So much are you still going to donate to Trump?
Do you still donate forty five million dollars?
And we put this big story out, which we were told really aggravated Elon.
At no point did I say that I was going parents Trump. That was a fiction made up by the Wolf, the.
Journeys they started, and we're trying to see how exactly
it leaked out. And then subsequently we followed up about what was going on inside the super Pack, and you know, in July there was a big shakeup where a lot of the top people at the Pack were replaced with people from Governor Ron DeSantis's failed presidential bid, and they fired many of their big vendors and had several weeks very close to the election the election is fewer than ninety days away, where they weren't knocking ondoors, they weren't registering voters, and it led to.
A bit of chaos.
Okay, so we've got Elon Musk funneling about forty five million US dollars a month into this super Pac, which is an incredible amount of money. But at the same time, it seems like there's there's quite a bit of chaos going on inside that pack. Can you tell me a little bit more about what we know about what had actually achieved and what was happening behind the scenes.
So, since launching, the superPAC had relied on two very big vendors. One was called in Field Strategies, the other ones called Racontour and as of July twelfth, they had knocked on seven hundred and twenty five thousand doors in swing states, They had one hundred and fifty thousand substantive conversations with prospective voters. They got twenty six thousand people to agree to get their absentee ballots, and they'd also started the voter registration process for more than eighty five
hundred people, so they were making pretty decent progress. Then there was this shakeup where people from the Desanta's campaign came over and the vendors were fired sort of abruptly, and as a result of that, the door knocking stopped. There were those eighty five hundred voter registrations that were started, they were never mailed out to the voters to finish the process to actually register to vote.
The website for the superPAC was.
Not maintained and there was this bad glitch on the website and they stopped spending money and placements for advertising on Facebook and Instagram and all of their social media's.
Were not updated once the vendors wrote let go.
So this had a pretty big disruption for the pack, you know, very close to.
When the elections taking place.
After the break, how Elon Musk broke with the Democrats. Dana, You've been looking into Elon Musk's involvement in this super pack America pack, But can you tell me about exactly when Musk began to involve himself with getting Donald Trump re elected.
Yeah, it's really fascinating.
Elon for many years has said that he voted exclusively Democratic down the Democratic ticket.
He you know, was a big fan of President Obama.
That Obama is sticking to his gun to means, sticking to the fairly radical changes that he initiated. I think it's by far the best space policy that we've had since Apollos. I mean, that's that's my most opinion, at least when you.
Look at the companies he has.
He's got six different companies, and many of them have you know, environmental missions which are mostly associated with the Democratic Party.
Things, you know, things like getting off of fossil fuels.
When you think of a company like Tesla or SpaceX is about you know, going to space because you know, there's a view that the Earth might not be sustainable. So he'd really been committed to democratic causes and voted for Democrats. And more recently we've seen this break between Elon and the Democrats, and some of that stemmed in the last four years with the Biden administration.
Tesla's CEO, Elon Musk, accused President Biden of ignoring his electric vehicle company and paying more attention to legacy automakers.
You know, Tesla's by far the biggest EV maker electric vehicle maker in the US, and whenever Biden hosted other car makers at the White House or had EV summits, Tesla never got the invite.
With corporate leaders.
Must have quote the notion of feud is not quite right. Biden's pointedly ignored Tesla at every turn and falsely stated to the public the GM leads the electric car industry when fact that.
Really irked Tesla, but also Elon.
So there's one thing to be disenchanted by the Democratic Party's another thing to throw your power and your giant microphone and a lot of money behind Donald Trump.
Right, who he had openly criticized too.
Right.
So it's there's been a big turning point there. And what we've seen is if you follow Musk's tweets closely, you could see that there's this political evolution happening. He started to espouse more right wing sentiment.
I think we need to be very courtious about anything that is anti meritocratic and anything that is that results in the suppression of a free speech. So, you know, those are two of the aspects of the worklind Virus that I think are very dangerous.
But he had stopped short of endorsing Donald Trump.
And since the assassination attempt, you know, there was a lot of people, including Elon Musk, that came out and tweeted their official endorse of the candidate, and that's exactly what must do.
So Elon had sort of been skirting around the edges. Why did he wait until then to publicly endorse Trump.
You know, Elon's has all these companies, some of them you know, have very liberal employee bases, so there's, you know, always the risk of coming out with the political view and irking your own employee base.
Companies like Tesla are electric car.
Makers, and Trump is famously very close to the big oil CEOs, so there could be some issues with that.
The last election cycle, CEOs did not want to come out in support of Donald Trump, and people have spoken to this election cycle that our CEOs have said this go around they feel like they could be more open about their support with Donald Trump, but they don't have to be closeted, as they say, you know, not just with Elon, but with other people in Silicon Valley, you know, the venture capitalists, the tech CEOs that they're frustrated on a number of fronts. Particular is concerned about a legal
immigration in the US. That's something that's like very much a Republican talking point, and you know, border crossings and things of that nature. Elon has expressed concerns about election integrity, which is also a big Trump talking point. They're worried about inflation the economy, and we've seen this shift to
the right in the tech world. So there's been other big name venture capitalists CEOs that have come out in support of Trump this cycle that you know, prior cycles had voted democratic or they sort of hid their support for Trump because it was something that people didn't want to be publicly associated with.
Yeah, and I suppose the bigger kind of question in all of this, when you look at the amount of money that's being spent here, doesn't work. Are democratic elections won by who can funnel the most money into a campaign?
Well, when I speak to you know Republican operatives, they sort of describe the need for this type of work. You know, they do need a robust ground game in order to combat what they're seeing from Democrats who do spend a lot of time and money on these issues. You know, it's really tough to say if they're one that way, but I would say that this is a
strategy that both sides rely on. There are super packs on both sides of the aisle where very wealthy donors are able to circumvent some of the you know, individual contribution laws in place as it relates to individual contributions at elections, and this is where you know, really wealthy donors have influence. If you wanted to have a wealthy billionaire on your side, there's arguably fewer better than Elon Musk,
who has one of the world's biggest microphones. Right that one on one conversation were millions of people, including undecided voters, tuned in. It wasn't like a typical journalist asking questions and guiding and probing.
Some of the political reporters I spoke to sort of.
Described it as a moderated Trump rally. Also fair to say, I mean, this is Elon's this is not as value Wick.
You know, he is someone who's very innovative. He's able to.
Launch these companies, but he's kind of new to politics, and it's you know, it's done world, it's got its own language, and it's a lot harder for outsiders to understand.
And I think that is that is America, that is strength under fire, and so that's you know, a big you know, part of the reason why I was excited to endorse you as Dana.
Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. It's been great having a chat.
Thanks for having me.
Dana Mattioli is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal and author of The Everything War, Amazon's Ruthless quest to own the world and remake corporate power. Also in the news today, new legislation introduced in Parliament plans to find MPs who behave badly. The proposal for a new independent Parliamentary Standards Committee wants the power to investigate workplace complaints
against MPs as well as issue fines or suspensions. It comes as independent MPs Kylie tink Alegraspender and Sophie Scamps joined forces to speak out against condescending, aggressive and often misogynistic behavior during question time, and a child is hospitalized every day in Australia due to domestic or family violence.
According to new data published by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, it found more than five thousand young people have had a hospital day between twenty ten and twenty twenty one, with the most common presentation being fractures to the head. Of those statistics, more than half a female and more than a third had their first hospital stay under the age of five. And Ruby Jones, this is seven am.
See you tomorrow.