Elon Musk, the multibillionaire businessman, said on Wednesday that he would not be contributing to the presidential campaigns of Donald Trump or Joe Biden.
The Trump campaign is attempting to gather funds to bridge a fundraising deficit with the Biden campaign, according to a story published in the New York Times on Tuesday night mentioning that Elon Musk and Trump had just met. That encounter has not been verified by NBC News. Musk met with representatives of the Biden administration in September.
On X, the social media site he acquired as Twitter in 2022, Musk has been spreading far-right conspiracy theories about the Biden government daily in recent months. Additionally, he persuaded Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to use the forum to declare his candidacy for president.
According to an NBC News investigation, Elon Musk is involved in at least 11 legal and regulatory battles with independent federal agencies and the Biden administration. He may find some of these battles resolved if Trump were to win back the White House.
Musk, who was formerly well-liked by Democrats for his alarming remarks about climate change and his declaration that he would rather stay out of politics, has suddenly shifted to the right in his public remarks in recent years. He said in 2022 that he had been a Democratic voter before switching to a Republican one.
Trump and Musk, meanwhile, have not always gotten along. The two also traded jabs in public in 2022, with Trump accusing Musk of creating “rocketships to nowhere” and “driverless cars that crash.”It was “time for Trump to hang up his hat & sail into the sunset,” Musk said.
The far-right and Republican positions on immigration that Musk has most enthusiastically supported are those that have been equated to the fringe “great replacement” hypothesis, which has been connected to massacres with racial overtones.
Elon Musk has contributed comparatively small sums of $15,013 to Republicans and $11,218 to Democrats in 19 separate political contributions since 2020, according to information submitted to the Federal Election Commission.
Elon Musk’s greatest donor is the former Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, a Republican from California. According to the records, Musk contributed $98,000 to McCarthy between 2011 and 2017.
Campaign finance regulations place restrictions on Elon Musk’s contributions; under the legislation, a person may only give $5,000 to a leadership political action committee and $6,600 to a campaign.
Source: NBC NEWS
