Why Elon Musk Is Opening His Wallet for Donald Trump

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Hey it's Sarah Holder. With just a few days to go until the US presidential election, Elon Musk has become one of the most vocal Donald Trump supporters online and off.

There.

Take over e laid, Yes, take over.

There's a lot of people out there who, uh, who need.

To vote for President Trump. Okay, so the like, this is a real battle. This is a real election battle. So you need to get frands and family to vote. Make sure they vote.

The tech ceo has spoken at Trump rallies and funneled more than one hundred million dollars into getting Trump and his allies elected. Musk has also created a pro Trump pack that's giving away million dollar checks to randomly selected swing state voters who sign a petition to support free speech and the right to bear arms. Musk is the richest man in the world with an extremely large megaphone.

Week, my fellow Americans. Mahallo.

It's April twenty eleven White House Correspondence Dinner in DC, a giant annual party for politicians and the press Corps. President Barack Obama on stage, roasting himself, his colleagues, the press, and the odd celebrity.

As some of you heard, the State of Hawaii released my official long form birth certificate. Anyway, Donald Trump, let's say it tonight.

For months leading up to this, Donald Trump was going on talk shows falsely claiming that Obama wasn't born in the US, which, if that was true, would have made him a wrongfully elected president. People believed it. The rumor grew enough so that Obama had to weigh in.

No one is happier, no one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than the Donald. Obviously, we all know about your credentials and breadth of experience. Well seriously, just recently, in an episode of Celebrity Apprentice at the Steakhouse, the men's cooking team did not impress the judges from Omaha Stakes. And you, mister Trump, recognized that the real problem was a lack of leadership. And so ultimately you didn't blame Little John or Meet Loaf.

Omarosa Newman, she was actually also on the Apprentice, was also at the Correspondent Center that night. Later in a PBS documentary, she said that just.

Kept going and going, and he just kept hammering him, and I thought, oh, Barack Obama starting something. I don't know if he'll be able to finish.

Donald Trump went on to beat Hillary Clinton for the job of president. He literally took over Obama's home and job.

Every critic, every detractor, will have to bow down to President Trump. It's everyone who's ever doubted Donald, whoever disagreed, whoever challenged him. It is the ultimate revenge to become the most powerful man in the universe.

Now fast forward a few more years. It's twenty twenty one. Joe Biden's the President, and one afternoon on the White House lawn, he signs an executive order saying that by twenty thirty, half of all new cars sold would be electric. It was a piece of Biden's big plan to prioritize the climate to make evs that's electric vehicles, by the way, a lot cheaper. This was new Biden all in on EV's and the big automakers too.

We are the United States of America. There's not a single solitary thing, nothing beyond our capacity to get done. I want to thank the CEOs of the automobile companies, and I also want to thank all the auto workers.

At the White House that day. Are members of Congress, the UAW, United Auto Workers, and a bunch of big wigs from the Big Three that's General Motors, Ford and Stillantis better known as Chrysler. Right before putting pen to paper, Biden invites his colleagues to come up and stand by his side.

Come on, let's let the CEOs go too.

Let's let the CEOs through too.

This is an executive or strength in America's leadership and clean cars and trucks.

And again, let me start up, I thanking.

The CEOs as well as the UAW approach you all of me.

Why has happened?

Thank you, thank you.

Thank you. There is one guy who'd done more to make evs happen than anybody in the Big three, who was missing from the White House that day, noticeably so, but he was watching. So on one hand, we've got Barack Obama roasting Donald Trump and the fallout from that. On the other, Joe Biden hyping up electric cars, separate events ten years apart. What do they have to do with each other? I think kind of a lot. I'm Max Chafkin, a reporter with Bloomberg BusinessWeek. This is Citizen Elon.

It is a fixer opper of a planet, but eventual, so you can transform Mars into an Earth like planet.

How would you do that?

You'd warm it up? The fast Way has dropped the nuclear weapons over the polls. I actually have to say, we have to keep it essays only questions. Everyone was a slave everyone, well not everyone was a slave.

No, everyone was a slave. We are all decided from slaves, all of us.

Yeah, just a question of when.

Of course, Elon could also be cold cruel. Looking back on it now, I think maybe I was letting him off too easily paying attention to his achievements and ignoring his bad behavior. In terms of politics, Elon's always been kind of a chameleon. When George W. Bush was president, Elon didn't have much to say about climate change. He drove a Porsche. When Barack Obama was president, Elon became a green capitalist, ecologically conscious. He wanted a blanket America

You know, hopefully Trump doesn't forget the nomination of you know, the Republican Party. That's because I think that's, yeah, that wouldn't be good.

And again, after twenty sixteen, Musk more or less got on board with Trump, meetings with Steve Bannon, was on advisory councils to the president. It was business as usual. But then COVID came. It's something changed, especially after Biden became president.

You have to remember that, like, you know, Elon Musk is a guy who can't get enough of the dopamine feedback of people and crowds and adulation.

Dana Hall is another reporter here at Bloomberg. She also covers Elon.

Musk and during the pandemic we were all locked down in our houses. And he was incredibly angry that Tesla's factory in California was shut down because of COVID restrictions.

On an ernie's call talking to investors, Elon called stay at home orders in Alameda County, where Tesla's factories were based fascist quote, this is not democratic, this is not freedom. Give people back their goddamn freedom.

And then you started seeing more tweets that were kind of questioning, you know, the efficacy of vaccines, and just like a little bit more COVID denihilism.

And then Danna said, by this point it was just a hop, skip and a jump to much fringier conspiracy theories. And then there was something else that happened during COVID, something huge.

But at some point Elon Musk became the richest person in the world. And I think that once you're the richest person in the world, you are emboldened to do things that maybe you weren't before.

Let's go back to that summit. August twenty twenty one. A month after that, Elon's at a tech conference. He's on stage in front of an audience, and that snub that he felt he's still thinking about it.

You know, like Biden held this EB summit, didn't invite Tesla and invited Jammed Forward, Chrysler, and UW maybe summit on the White House.

So you were pissed. So this has sound maybe a little biased.

Eight months go by and Elon sits down for another interview with the guys running a club for Tesla owners in Silicon Valley. It's called the Tesla Owners Club of Silicon Valley. And remember that White House snub. Elon is still pissed off about it.

Last year, President Biden held an EB summit where Tela was explicitly not allowed to come. Now, Tela's made two thirds of all electric vehicles in the United States. Deliberately excluding us from an EV summit at the White House. That tells you what you need to know.

It's insane.

Insane.

Fast forward another eighteen months. A year and a half later, Elon's on stage at a New York Times event. He's talking to the financial columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin.

You've been very frustrated with the Biden administration, feeling like they did not respect what you've created.

Have you forgotten yet about that White House snub? No, neither has Elon.

Well, I mean, without any doing nothing to provoke the Biden administration. They held an electric vehicle summit at the White House and specifically refused to let Tesla attend. We've done nothing to provoke them. Then Biden went on to add insult injury.

Elon says President Biden even singled out General Motors for having quote led the ev Revolution.

This was in the same quarter that Tesla made three hundred thousand electric cars and GM made twenty six. Does that seem fair to you?

Tesla actually sold three hundred and eight thousand cars that quarter. Elon's under selling the number. And he's also right about GM that they really did just sell twenty six. Something important to note here is that Elon has never been a fan of labor unions. That's putting it mildly. Joe Biden, on the other hand, the opposite. Biden loves labor unions. He's called himself the quote most pro union president in history. He made it a big part of his presidential campaign.

Can you give us any insight into why Tesla wasn't included in this event?

Well, we of course welcome.

This is from a White House press briefing.

So it's not because Tesla is a non union shop.

Well, these are the three largest employers of the United Autoworkers, So let dry your own conclusion.

Go ahead.

Translation, Yes, which classic politics, right, But Elon didn't take it that way. Biden doesn't have to include every automaker. It's not like Toyota or Volkswagen were there either. But Elon's reaction was personal. He couldn't seem to move beyond his own feelings to see this as anything other than a grievous insult. On the one hand, it's surprising to see a busy CEO fixate like this. Doesn't he have bigger things to worry about. Who cares about GM and Biden?

You know, if he didn't like what you were doing, or thought you were an idiot, or any one of these sort of negative reactions to you.

Personally, this is Jim Cantrell. He was on the founding team at SpaceX for a long time. He and Elon worked closely together.

He wouldn't come talk to you about it. He would either call you an idiot, he would tell you you're wrong, He would challenge you. He would yell at you, and then later he'd just fire you.

Elon is indisputably really impressive. Jim agrees, but Jim also could not take Elon's mood swings, and so he quit.

By the way, that's a controversial topic that he.

Last year, the writer Walter Isaacson published a sprawling biography of Elon's life. So far, Elon participated in the book's creation. He talked to Isaacson, and when he talked about his early days at SpaceX.

He told Isaacson that I wasn't employee. And I don't know why he says that.

But I was, yeah, we're not sorry. I'm not trying to litigate this. I just know I.

Understand it's a short point for me, so I am.

This fixation on credit, this pettiness, it's also vintage Elon. He actually got into it big time with Martin Eberhard, the guy who started Tesla. Martin himself claimed that Elon was taking up more than his share of credit for the company. And even though these guys settled their lawsuit in two thousand and nine, it's something Elon still brings up all the time. I told jim My theory about the correspondence dinner and the EV summit, and I asked him, does he see the same parallels that I do.

I do.

Yeah, I think he and Trump probably feel a kinship. There's a certain this resonates with what I understand of Elon. There's a certain sort of sense of fairness and fair play that, like Trump, he feels violated.

Where Jim's take diverge from mine was about Elon's feelings. I just think Elon was hurt, and maybe justifiably hurt. Like this guy revolutionized the electric vehicle industry, he spends you know, a decade and a half not taken seriously called a joke, and then the President of the United States basically finally embraces it, like everything that Elon has imagined is happening without him.

Yeah, I'm going to tell you something that goes against that theory. Elon, I don't think he was hurt by it. I think he didn't really want to be part of that crowd. I don't think he cared. There's a certain rage in the Machine song, you know, you'll do what I want to. I mean that if I had a theme song for Elon, that would be it.

That the conference was the summer of twenty twenty one. Within a few months, the rage started to bubble up, and it was a very specific, politically charged rage, usually in tweet form, usually some right wing line about Biden being too old, calling Biden quote a damp sock puppet in human form, or saying Biden looks good for a two hundred year old. When I read these, I could tell that Elon was mad. What I couldn't tell is where these insults, these specific words were coming from.

NPC is the biggest one to me.

Ellie Reeve is a CNN correspondent. She spent the past ten years or so covering the far right. In November twenty twenty one, she noticed this tweet from Elon. It was a random comment on a six month old video where Biden was praising the Autoworkers Union. Elon responded to that video by tweeting that Biden quote talk it's like an NPC with a limited dialogue tree. That acronym is what caught Ellie's attention.

N PC from non player character, comes from a video game world. It's like, you know, instead of the character that you can play, it's this static character with no interiority that gives you directions or something. And in the four Chan world, that's their term for unthinking liberals.

Real quick. Four Chan was this free for all online forum where people would share memes. It's also where a lot of Donald Trump's early support comes from. You've probably heard this term alt right that started on four Chan. Back to Ellie and the NPCs, the tweet she noticed it was basically Elon calling Biden a tool of the elite. And I don't mean elite in the normal sense. I mean it in the conspiratorial sense of an elite cabal,

Elon Musk is a very powerful person.

You know.

He's not a guy with a Twitter handle like this guy can influence wars. Does Elon have the social skills to actually lead a massive men I don't know, But does he have enough of a network to spread these ideas into like among people who are in the position to truly affect how the government works? Like that's the question for me.

Ellie's not alone on this one. And she's certainly not the only person who's noticing Elon's changing politics.

The first thing that I really noticed about Musk was during the rise of the all Right.

Joe Novan is a sociologist. She specializes in disinformation, that's people or groups who lie on purpose for political gain.

He seemed to be very cued into the idea of population collapse.

In this idea, this is like the NPC thing. It doesn't sound that bad on its face, but if you're paying attention to the subtext, it's not just about babies.

He seems to believe that the wrong kind of people are the ones who are reproducing because white people are not reproducing at the same rate as other people. He does really get his hackles up about population collapse and about this idea that white people might not be the dominant culture going forward.

Right eugenics a discredited theory about selective breeding. By the way, we invited Elon must to come talk to us or to provide comment. He didn't respond. Another thing that Elon's growing interested in, and I mean really interested in, is free speech, specifically the idea that right wing guys on the Internet are being suppressed by social media sites those right wing guys, though I don't think they were really

Around the time he started to say that he should just buy Twitter. That's when I first saw the far right really starting to believe he was a mover and that he was going to do something huge.

After the attacks on the Capitol on January sixth, in twenty twenty one, Twitter banned tens of thousands of accounts associated with the right wing conspiracy theory known as QAnon. They even van Donald Trump's account permanently for the role he played in inciting violence. Then in March of twenty twenty two, something happened that especially Claudilan's attention. Twitter suspends this satirical newspaper, the Babylon Beat. They're like a right

Please?

Or can you buy Twitter and make it radically free speech? And so he did.

Welcome to Tucker Carlson said, a good news show. Don't get those two often. It's April twenty fifth, twenty twenty two. Elon Musk bought Twitter today. Unlike the leaders of Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, Elon Musk believes in free speech is the single biggest political development since Donald Trump's election in twenty sixteen. It is certainly the most threatening challenge to the corrupt and incompetent leadership of this country.

Now that I.

Remember watching this and rolling my eyes, I thought, Elon Musk is no free speech savior. He's a business guy who's just spent forty four billion dollars to buy Twitter. Why would he mess with that. He's got other companies to worry about. But now looking back, I think Tucker really was seeing something, something seismic and inevitable. For years, Elon and Trump have been marching in the same general direction,

It's a slight that tells you that they think they're the parents sitting at the table and your child is not invited. And I can see Elon wanting to just destroy the table, burn it to the ground.

What does Elon do right after closing the Twitter deal? He reinstates Donald Trump's account. If you can't join them, beat them, that's next time. Citizen Elon is produced by Lina Mesitzi's Rayhon Armonci is our senior editor, Blake Maple's handles engineering, and William Elstrom fact checking. Brendan Francis Newnham is our executive producer, Sage Bauman is the head of