No billionaire helped Donald Trump win the US presidential election greater than Elon Musk. The head of Tesla Inc. and SpaceX will now discover whether it's value it or whether he'll find yourself burned.
Musk, whose growing political apparatus has already proven his mettle, will gain greater than just an ally within the White House. Trump has proposed giving him an official role in cutting government spending – giving him the ability to influence policies and the federal agencies that oversee his vast corporate empire.
“He’s a character. He's a special guy. He’s a super genius,” Trump said of Musk as he addressed his supporters overnight. “We must protect our geniuses. We don’t have that many of them.”
Tesla shares are already booming. The stock rose as much as 15% in early US trading as investors look to capitalize on a Trump return to the White House. Early Wednesday morning, Musk also released a chart that he said showed record usage of X, his social network.
“Let that sink in,” he said
In recent months, Musk has been Trump's most aggressive deputy. The world's richest man endorsed Trump on
Musk spent greater than $130 million on Trump and upvoted Republicans in closely contested House races, earning him a spot in the highest tier of donors this election cycle. On Election Day, Musk voted in Texas after which flew to Florida on his private jet to look at the election with Trump and his family at Mar-a-Lago. His PAC released a photograph of him sitting side by side with Trump and Dana White, the UFC's executive director, on the celebrations.
“Musk is new to politics, but it means a lot for a billionaire tech mogul to stand up for President Trump,” said Jondavid Longo, the Pennsylvania state director of Early Vote Action, a corporation dedicated to registering Republican voters. Trump's victory in Pennsylvania was key to his victory, helping him flip battleground states he lost in 2020 but won in his first presidential run in 2016. Musk donated $1 million to the group.
Musk can profit lots financially from the brand new government. He runs an empire of six corporations, a few of that are closely linked to the US federal government. SpaceX has grow to be an increasingly vital partner of NASA and the US Department of Defense with contracts value billions. Tesla has staked its financial future on the shift to autonomous robotaxis, a dangerous enterprise that faces serious regulatory hurdles. X stays hugely influential.
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Musk's personal wealth fluctuated widely during Joe Biden's 4 years in office, reaching between $340 billion and $124 billion. Nevertheless, the trend is essentially upwards. As of Election Day, his net value was $263.8 billion.
During the campaign, Musk applied for a job as head of an agency tasked with cutting government bureaucracy and waste. Trump warmly welcomed the concept and mentioned it usually through the campaign.
“I’m going to get Elon. And he's great at it. He will be our cost cutter,” Trump said at a campaign rally in Michigan in late September. Trump calls the brand new position “Secretary of Cost Reduction,” while Musk joked that he’ll lead a DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency as he calls it, in reference to the cryptocurrency he has long promoted.
In this role, Musk has vowed to assist cut the federal budget by an unprecedented $2 trillion. He didn’t specify which agencies he would contact, but he usually rails against the regulators that oversee his own corporations. In a protracted diatribe on Joe Rogan's podcast this week, he described a SpaceX rocket that sat on a launch pad for 2 months awaiting regulatory approval.
“We could build the rocket faster than they could approve the paperwork,” he said. “It's as if Gulliver is bound by a million little threads. It’s not that one string is the problem, it’s that there are a million of them.”
A broad range of tasks can be given to Tesla, SpaceX and He has already said that he’ll use all of the forces at his disposal to push forward a federal approval process for fully autonomous vehicles. Current regulations prevent manufacturers from putting greater than just a few thousand cars on the road every year without steering wheels or other controls.
It's not unusual for U.S. presidents to tap executives and business leaders to staff their governments, but none are quite like Musk. During his first term, Trump appointed Steve Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executive and his campaign finance chairman, as Treasury secretary. The role in cutting government spending shouldn’t be expected to be a Cabinet-level job, meaning Musk wouldn’t be required to step down from his CEO duties.
Musk's support has already influenced the president-elect. After the billionaire's endorsement in July, Trump modified his mind on electric vehicles. In addition to railing against what he called “Crook Joe's crazy electric vehicle mandate,” Trump also sometimes praised electric vehicles.
“I am for electric cars. It must be me, you know, because Elon has been very supportive of me, Elon. So I have no choice,” Trump said during a rally in August.
Trump also welcomed Musk's ambitions to succeed in Mars with SpaceX rockets by 2028, or by the tip of the Republican's term. “We will land an American astronaut on Mars. Thanks, Elon. Thank you very much. Here we go, Elon,” Trump said at a rally in October.
Musk's political interests transcend the interests of his corporations. Like Trump, he has spread conspiracy theories and misinformation about immigrants to his greater than 200 million followers on X.
But it's one thing to campaign together. It's different to work together. The president-elect is understood for turning against even his most loyal friends and colleagues. While Musk and Trump are on the identical page for now, tensions could arise between two men known for his or her egos.
In electric vehicles, for instance, Tesla received billions from President Biden's policies that Trump sought to reverse. The two rival social media corporations and never way back Musk urged Trump to “hang up his hat and sail off into the sunset.”
“America PAC will continue after this election,” Musk said on X Spaces on Tuesday. Musk said the group was “preparing for the midterm elections and any midterm elections at the district attorney level and some sort of judicial level.”
Musk's America PAC, which spent $153 million on Trump's behalf, now has contact information for varied voters that it may well use in the long run.
Democrats are portraying Musk as their billionaire counterpart, echoing a warning from Harris through the campaign that Trump's “pal Elon Musk is spending huge sums of money on his own ads denigrating the vice president.” They had asked voters to not allowing the richest person on the earth to purchase the election.
But in some ways he did.
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