Musk is going all in to elect Trump
In the final weeks of the presidential campaign, the richest man in the world has involved himself in the U.S. election in a manner unparalleled in modern history.
Elon Musk, seen over the weekend jumping for joy alongside former President Donald J. Trump at a rally in Butler, Pa., is now talking to the Republican candidate multiple times a week.
He has effectively moved his base of operations to Pennsylvania, the place that he has recently told confidants he believes is the linchpin to Mr. Trump’s re-election.
He has relentlessly promoted Mr. Trump’s candidacy to his 201 million followers on X, the social platform formerly known as Twitter that he bought for $44 billion 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 PAC that he has funded with tens of millions of dollars to turn out the vote for Mr. 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 Mr. Musk’s battle plan as he directs his efforts to elect Mr. Trump with the same frenetic energy and exacting demands that he has honed at his companies SpaceX, Tesla and X.
As early as February, Mr. Musk was speaking apocalyptically, in private, about what he considered the crucial need to defeat President Biden. But even as he was meeting with advisers in Austin, Texas, in April to plot his super PAC, Mr. Musk sounded as if he considered Mr. Trump merely the lesser of two evils. He told friends in the spring that he wasn’t sure he even wanted to explicitly endorse Mr. Trump.
These days, in private conversations, Mr. Musk is obsessive, almost manic, about the stakes of the election and the need for Mr. Trump to win. He praises Mr. 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 Mr. Musk recalled him saying, without any hint of irony, “I love Trump.” [Continue reading…]