Why he supported Trump

Elon Musk is the world’s richest man and a key ally of US President Donald Trump.

Throughout 2024, he placed his considerable cultural and financial weight behind Trump’s successful presidential campaign.

The billionaire created and pumped more than $119 million (about €116 million) into a political action committee, “America PAC,” to elect Trump and spent weeks before the election encouraging voters in key battleground states to go to the polls, at one point offering million-dollar prizes.

He contributed more than $280 million to Republican candidates at all levels in the 2023-24 election cycle.

As a key Trump backer, observers suggest Musk, who currently has a net worth of around $290 billion, is now poised to benefit from a direct line to the White House. The question is how?

South Africa’s richest export

Born in Pretoria, South Africa, to property developer, engineer and former local politician Errol Musk and Canadian model and dietician Maye Musk, the billionaire first emigrated to the US in the ’90s.

He co-founded early internet businesses like online city guide Zip2 and financial services platform X.com, which later merged with a similar platform, PayPal. Today, he is probably best known for establishing the private space exploration company SpaceX and providing the funding to establish the electric carmaker Tesla. He is the chief executive officer of both. He has also established tunnel constructor The Boring Company and brain implant developer Neuralink.

Musk has been outspoken about his concerns for the human population and the need to become multi-planetary. In 2022, he tweeted his belief that “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming,” a statement both climate scientists and demographers criticized. He has fathered at least 12 children.

He pursues his ambition to put humans on Mars through Space X, which is also in partnership with NASA to land astronauts on the red planet’s surface within the next decade.

Musk swings right

Musk has not always supported Trump. He previously described himself as a moderate, halfway between the Democrats and Republicans. His donation history shows contributions to candidates of both parties at the state and national levels.

In 2022, he suggested that Trump was too old to be president and he should “sail into the sunset.” Trump responded that Musk had “begged” him for subsidies during his first term in the White House.

But by the end of the 2024 election, any enmity was gone, and Musk had entrenched himself in Trump’s good graces.

Musk has long been an incendiary public persona. Much of that came through his high public profile on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. In 2022, he acquired the platform for $44 billion and renamed it “X”. During his time at the helm of the platform, Musk has also become a recognized purveyor of misinformation. He also fired many staff members, allowed previously banned, controversial users back onto the platform, including Trump, and alienated advertisers.

This ultimately drove an exodus of other users from the platform, and at the time of the election, X was valued at around a fifth of the original price Musk paid.

But that does not appear to concern Musk, who joined a group of several billionaires with a mass media platform when he bought Twitter. Others, such as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, have since followed suit.

“There are rich people who … want to keep making money and see the world through the prism of their business interests and accumulating more wealth,” said David Faris, an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University, who has written about the influence of wealth on US politics. 

“And then there are people who are so rich, [they say] ‘I don’t care if I lose $44 billion buying Twitter.’ [Musk] seems to be falling into that latter category. He’s harnessing his wealth in a way that doesn’t make any economic sense,” he added.

Will Elon Musk enter politics?

Having been born in South Africa, he can’t run for US president, but, as a US citizen, he could stand for a lower office. He could also simply work to influence policy through his Trump connections.

Steve Nelson, a political economist at Northwestern University, has observed the tendency of billionaires to pursue political office, although this has mostly been in autocracies. It’s less common in democracies where partisans donate money to candidates they support instead.

“For somebody like Musk, it’s probably the case that you have a very strong personal interest in pursuing a particular policy agenda that you don’t think can be controlled in a more indirect fashion,” Nelson told DW.

Even if he steers clear of politics, Musk’s relationship with Trump is set. He was made joint-head of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, effectively a consultancy panel designed to cut back US government spending.

Nelson can imagine Musk trying to gain political office because he may think he would be better placed to push certain objectives if he was actually in power, rather than relying on others.

“For Musk, I think there’s an almost messianic belief in his own efficacy and a really clear agenda around frontier technologies,” Nelson told DW.

SpaceX will likely thrive during Trump’s second term but other Musk businesses may not. Trump has said he’ll cut back on climate-focused initiatives, including in electric transport — Tesla’s bread and butter.

But it’s possible Musk’s support of Trump may help buffer his companies against unfavorable policy conditions or create a more lucrative environment. If so, it would further emphasize Musk’s tendency to anticipate and harness changing cultural and political tides for his interests.

This article was originally published on November 8, 2024, and was updated on January 20, 2025, following Donald Trump’s second inauguration.

Edited by: Davis VanOpdorp