Elon Musk is going all-in on Donald Trump

By Chris Isidore, CNN

New York (CNN) — At first glance, Elon Musk and Donald Trump wouldn’t seem to be natural allies.

One has made cutting greenhouse emissions a major business selling point. The other questions the need to cut emissions at all, denouncing most forms of clean energy as at best unnecessary and at worst destructive.

One wants to move away from fossil fuels and convert all car sales worldwide to electric vehicles. The other believes EVs will be an economic disaster for America and that the nation should produce and burn more oil.

But as of last Saturday, Musk is now publicly endorsing Trump’s presidential reelection bid. And the Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the matter, reported Monday that Musk is now planning on supporting Trump’s presidential campaign by committing $45 million a month to a new super PAC backing the former president.

However, Musk backtracked on that, telling a podcaster that he’s giving Trump money “at a much lower level.”

“I am making some donations to America PAC, but at a much lower level and the key values of the PAC are supporting a meritocracy & individual freedom,” he wrote on X. “Republicans are mostly, but not entirely, on the side of merit & freedom.”

The donations, if they come to pass, are a significant development in not only the presidential campaign, but also the relationship between the two men, who both have fervent support among millions of fans who stand ready to believe most anything they say.

Musk has given money to candidates from both parties in the past, including $5,000 to Barack Obama in April 2011. He used to be primarily a Democratic donor, but those relatively paltry sums pale in comparison to the amount he is now reportedly donating to the Republican presidential candidate. He has said for several years the Democratic party has moved too far to the left for him to support many of its candidates.

Musk used a meme of people dressed as African wildebeests with the title “Fake Gnus,” suggesting the report was incorrect. He also tweeted soon after the assassination attempt on Trump: “I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery.”

But Musk responded “yeah” to an account he interacts with frequently, @EndWokeness, which said that Musk “went from being an Obama voter to pledging $180 million to elect DJT. The woke left really f*cked up. Badly.”

The super PAC, called America PAC, aims to help register voters, persuade people to vote early and to ask for mail-in ballots in swing states, one person told the Journal.

Beyond his financial support for the Trump campaign, Musk, with 190 million followers on his platform X, is possibly one of the world’s most-followed “influencers,” in addition to having the greatest net worth on the planet.

He has millions of fans — a recent Tesla annual meeting had the feeling of its own political rally, with shareholders telling him things like “We love you all from our bottom of the heart, we love you so much, Elon.”

The shareholders at that meeting voted 84% in favor of restoring the most lucrative pay package ever given to a CEO, with stock options worth $48 billion at the time of the meeting. A judge in Delaware had previously stripped him of that package.

Asked at that meeting about his relationship with Trump, and of the former president having nice things to say about Tesla even as he attacks EVs, Musk replied, “I can be persuasive.”

“I mean, I have had some conversations with him and he just called me out of the blue for no reason, I don’t know why, but he does,” Musk continued. “And it’s like he’s very nice when he calls and I was like, electric cars, I think are pretty good for the future. America is the leader in electric cars, buy American stuff. And I think he actually — a lot of his friends now have Teslas and they all love it. And he’s a huge fan of the Cybertruck. So I think those may be contributing factors, yeah.”

Relations haven’t always been so friendly between the two. Musk quit two White House business councils he served on early in 2017 after Trump announced America would withdraw from the Paris climate accord.

“Climate change is real. Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world,” Musk tweeted at that time.

But for the last several years Musk has repeatedly shown support for Trump — or opposition to President Joe Biden.

Soon after Musk purchased the social media platform then known as Twitter in the fall of 2022, he restored Trump’s Twitter account. He has complained that Twitter was improperly censoring anti-Biden stories under its previous ownership, although Twitter’s own lawyers later challenged that conclusion in a court filing.

Tesla, the greatest source of Musk’s planet-leading net worth, has benefited from subsidies passed under the Biden administration, providing tax credits of up to $7,500 for EV buyers. But those tax credits also help established automakers seeking to sell their own EVs. Musk recently tweeted the EV subsidies passed under Biden actually helped its rivals more than Tesla.

“Take away the subsidies. It will only help Tesla,” he tweeted early Tuesday. “Also, remove subsidies from all industries!”

While Musk is right that some of the industries he criticizes, specifically coal and oil, receive their own massive government subsidies, his tweet doesn’t acknowledge that much of his wealth has come from government support of Tesla and SpaceX, one of his other companies and which depends upon government contracts to operate.

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This story has been updated with additional developments and context.