The $120 million Musk muscle in the Trump torrent
Elon Musk's $120M backing of Trump's campaign merges finance and tech with politics, raising concerns about influence, transparency, and voter manipulation.
The richest man in the world has deployed all his power, in the most expensive election the world has ever seen, to help elect the most powerful president of the world’s most powerful country, with the explicitly stated aim of changing the nature of its government.
Elon Musk’s involvement in Donald Trump’s campaign represents an unprecedented fusion of financial and technological power with political power in any modern democracy.
The good thing is that it is relatively transparent. Musk has made his political preference clear -- American regulatory filing requirements mean that at least the visible components of his contribution are, well, visible; as a citizen, Musk is as entitled as any other American to contribute to any campaign as he wants; and Trump has already announced the role he envisages for Musk in a future administration.
The troubling question for many is how this tilts the political playing field, the grey legal zones in which at least a part of his contribution falls, the invisible behind-the-scenes promises that may have been made in return for support, and what it says about the nexus between American politics and capital and the degree of cronyism that exists.
The irony in a naturalised citizen, who reportedly spent time in the US without legal paperwork at one point, turning to Trump because of his stated anger against illegal immigration has been noted. Many have attributed Musk’s decision to his volatile years growing up in South Africa documented in Walter Isaacson’s biography, or his troubled relationship with a transgender daughter, or his growing anger against the liberal ecosystem and its cancel culture over the years, or the financial opportunity he senses in controlling policy under an amenable Trump. But all of this is speculative. What is known are the more tangible contributions he is making.
Musk’s voter mobilisation gameSo what is Musk doing exactly? His contribution is best understood through the prism of his financial, organisational, and messaging power.
Financially, Musk has given at least $120 million dollars to the America Political Action Committee (PAC). PACs are the mechanism through which political donations get channelled, with a Supreme Court verdict in 2010 enabled unlimited amounts to be directed to a campaign.
Organisationally, the key in any election, as Indian political parties and observers know only too well, is ensuring the voter turns out to actually press the button or cast the ballot. In the US, this broadly falls under “get out the vote” (GOTV) operations. Given that a majority of voters are registered with either of the two parties, and they have voted in the primaries of their respective parties, party managers have a sense of who their supporters are. One major part of GOTV ops then is focused on the core voters and ensuring they vote. The other part, however, is focused on the swing voters or independents or low propensity voters who can be persuaded. The door knocking and the phone banking is meant to target these voters.
Traditionally, it is the mother party — the Democratic National Committee or the Republican National Committee — that takes charge of the GOTV ops. But this is where the Trump campaign has been unique, for it has outsourced its most critical operation, the ground game, the exercise that will actually determine if a voter turns out, to outside groups, of which Musk’s America PAC is the most important.
America PAC declares that it supports “secure borders, sensible spending, safe cities, free speech, fair justice system and self protection”. It offers $30 per hour to those who join the team to help with voter registration and voter turnout and $47 for each registered voter they sign up who, in turn, signs a petition supporting the first and second amendment.
Musk, at a rally in Pennsylvania two weeks ago, announced that everyday till the end of the elections, one person who signs the petition will get a million dollars, in a promise that critics said amounted to outright bribery and the state’s governor general, Josh Shapiro, said law-enforcement should look into. Philadelphia’s district attorney, earlier this week, filed a lawsuit against the move, calling it an “illegal lottery scheme” to influence voters. PAC has already awarded $13 million, with four more days to go.
But there is a twist to the story. As deep as PAC’s resources are, and as impressive as Musk’s track record of managing major operations is, reports suggest that the replacing RNC, a traditional party structure, with a group that’s perhaps not rooted in the community and is influenced purely by financial incentives, may have had its downside. On Friday, NBC quoted nine America PAC canvassers as flagging the possibility of suspect data being submitted, suggesting that people may have pretended to knock doors and mobilise voters without having done so. It claimed that in Arizona, a quarter of the entries in early to mid October were suspect; in Nevada, this amounted to 46,000 entries.
If Trump wins the election, outsourcing the ground game to Musk will be hailed as a masterstroke, for who could plan an organisational operation better than one of the most innovative entrepreneurs of our times. But if Trump loses, Musk will have to take at least a part of the blame, and it will be seen as a lesson in how freelance operations cannot be a substitute for traditional party structures.
Musk’s messaging powerBut Musk’s value to the Trump campaign comes not just from the tangible financial and organisational contribution.
As the owner of X, and as someone with over 200 million followers on the platform, Musk’s ability to set the narrative, push an argument, amplify a point of view, peddle misinformation and conspiracy theories, promote a particular candidate, possibly play around with algorithms to ensure that timelines are structured in a manner to make certain posts and certain profiles more visible than the others, is unprecedented. And given X’s role in shaping the broader news agenda and public discourse, the manner in which he can use this power can alter the political conversation altogether.
Musk has done precisely this, and his own timeline offers a glimpse into the Trump campaign’s key talking points. But he has also gone a step beyond, making his debut at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania’s Butler, speaking independently at mass events, or addressing the mass rally in Madison Square Gardens where Musk introduced Trump’s wife, Melania. All of this lends Trump’s campaign a strong aura of legitimacy, especially in the tech world in Silicon Valley as well as among young voters who may see Musk as a role model given his pioneering contributions in space travel and electric vehicles.
In return, if Trump wins, at the very minimum, Musk will be appointed the czar of a commission on government efficiency where his stated aim is to slash American state bodies and government spending. This aligns well with the national libertarian strain of Trump’s movement which sees the regulatory state as an obstacle and as infringing individual rights. But how Musk, whose conflict of interests could not be more stark given the role of the state in regulating his businesses, approaches the job will be closely watched. His influence will also go well beyond the commission, in terms of both personnel choices and having the ear of Trump on a range of economic, foreign policy, tech and climate related policies, all of which will make the world’s richest individual also among the world’s most politically powerful.
If Trump loses, however, it will be striking to watch how a Kamala Harris administration deals with a business figure with explicitly oppositional views.
Either way, Musk is redefining the relationship between American politics and capital.
