The Washington Post reports:

Elon Musk began privately gathering support for Donald Trump’s second presidency long before he tweeted his public endorsement on July 13.

At least five months earlier, Musk made a pitch for Trump at the Palm Beach oceanfront mansion of Wendy’s co-founder Nelson Peltz, where some of the billionaires and top political strategists who had gathered to discuss 2024 campaign strategy were surprised to see him.

The Feb. 16 event included a number of Trump skeptics: Karl Rove, a former adviser to George W. Bush and a current adviser to hotelier Steve Wynn, argued that the assembled crew should give money to down-ballot candidates and state parties. Another donor urged the crowd to keep helping GOP contender Nikki Haley, according to attendees who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share private conversations.

But Musk, sitting by Peltz at the center of the table, offered an explicitly pro-Trump view, the attendees said. He started by saying he was not a big fan of Trump, but then segued into a lengthy discussion of illegal immigration. While President Biden would allow millions of additional undocumented immigrants to cross America’s southern border — to the detriment of the U.S. economy and American land, Musk asserted — Trump would stop the crossings, he said. He added that a surge of immigrants would fuel a demographic shift that could doom the Republican Party in future elections.

Musk asked people in the room to tell their friends to vote for Trump, saying he had learned from his experience selling Teslas that word-of-mouth promotion was critical. Some people in the crowd shook their heads and winced.

Despite his support, Musk was concerned — along with other potential donors — that Trump might use their money to pay his rising legal bills, the attendees said. Others, he acknowledged, might not want to appear on campaign disclosure forms.

So he suggested giving to an outside group instead. In May, Musk helped launch America PAC, which in a little over a month reported raising $8.5 million, much of it from Silicon Valley. Musk has signaled that he will donate, too, but he denied a report in the Wall Street Journal that he would give the group $45 million a month.

Musk’s presence at the Palm Beach event marked the culmination of a political transformation for the world’s richest person, who has said he favored Biden in 2020. But in the four years since, Musk’s relationship with the Biden administration steadily soured.

Under Biden, the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission have advanced investigations into Tesla’s marketing of its driver-assistance technologies. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced a recall of almost every Tesla over concerns about driver inattention. The SEC is pursuing a separate investigation into X, formerly Twitter, which Musk purchased in 2022. And Biden has personally ridiculed Musk’s business acumen, once quipping that the best way for NPR to disappear would be for him to buy it, while the White House snubbed Tesla at a high-profile electric vehicle summit in 2021.

A second Trump administration promises a very different environment for Musk, analysts and investors said. Trump could ease Tesla’s regulatory path to delivering a fully autonomous personal vehicle — a goal key to the company’s $700 billion valuation — they said, and dial back federal scrutiny of Tesla and X, as well as a National Labor Relations Board investigation into allegations of harassment at SpaceX. [Continue reading…]