Elon Musk acknowledged in a recent conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that, not having been born in the US, he could not become president — not “officially”, at any rate. Both men chortled.
The “techno-king”, as he has called himself, seemingly wants power behind the throne if he can’t have the throne itself. And he means to achieve it by putting Donald Trump back into the White House.
Musk has become a high-profile part of the Trump campaign, funding and personally orchestrating get-out-the-vote efforts in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and other swing states and acting as a Trump surrogate on the stump, parroting the candidate’s lies rather more articulately than the candidate himself.
Last week he insinuated that hacked voting machines may have denied Trump his re-election in 2020, a claim that cost the Fox “News” network $787.5m in damages for defamation. Trump, unable to match his opponent, Kamala Harris, in direct campaign contributions, has in effect outsourced his ground game — voter mobilisation — to Musk and his political action committee, America PAC, on whose fundraising and expenditures there is no legal limit.
Musk has put in at least $75m of his own, and reportedly plans to spend half a billion dollars. It helps, of course, that he owns and polices the X social media platform and has 200-million followers with whom to share the Trump message of fear and loathing.
John Miller, a former NBC television network executive who was in charge of marketing Trump’s “reality” show, The Apprentice, apologised last week for promoting the legend of Trump as a master of the corporate universe, as opposed to what he really is — a talented but narcissistic grifter.
“I discovered in my interactions with him that he is ... extraordinarily easy to manipulate. He is an unfillable compliment hole. No amount is too much. Flatter him and he is compliant. World leaders, including apparently Russian strongman Vladimir Putin and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, have discovered that too.”
As has Musk, a man of fluid political convictions who cozied up to Barack Obama, a Democrat, when that was useful, and hitched his wagon to Florida governor Ron DeSantis when he was thought to be shoo-in for the Republican nomination.
For now, Trump seems ecstatic to have Musk on his side, not to mention behind him, prancing about with Bacchic exuberance on a Pennsylvania rally stage, midriff exposed.
“He’s a great business guy, and he’s a great cost cutter,” Trump enthused to Fox’s Maria Bartiromo, a serious business reporter until she sold her soul to Rupert Murdoch. “We’ll have a new position: secretary of cost-cutting. Elon wants to do that.”
Then there’s Mars. Musk, whose company, SpaceX, inspired global awe earlier this month with the launch and safe recapture of a giant rocket booster, has Trump thinking he could be to landing a man on the red planet what John F Kennedy was to landing a man on the moon.
One suspects a good part of Musk’s motive for investing in Trump is related to his fixation with colonising Mars — give us the funding, get the regulators off our backs, and Space X will help you Make America Great Again by getting us to Mars before Russia and China and giving you the glory you so richly deserve, Mr President.
Mark Cuban, a billionaire tech entrepreneur who has sided with Harris and who Musk constantly trolls on X, has warned him that his dalliance with Trump will end badly. Such dalliances almost always do. As Rick Wilson, Republican operative turned Never Trumper, put it in a book title, Everything Trump Touches Dies.
It’s also not clear that Musk, for all his prodigious talent, is good at everything he turns his hand to. Reuters reports that America PAC’s efforts to mobilise “low propensity voters” — read feckless young men — have been “plagued by disarray”.
Canvassers paid $20 an hour and up to knock on doors have been lying about meeting their quotas. Keeping people has been a challenge. It is interesting that Team Trump has to pay while Harris’s supporters are happy to do for free.
Musk needs to be on friendly terms with the government of the day. His various companies have received about $15bn in federal contracts, with more in the pipeline, according to Politico, and benefit from subsidies worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
A California commission has refused to let him launch more rockets from Vandenberg Air Force base up the coast from Los Angeles. As one commissioner explained: “Elon Musk is hopping about the country spewing and tweeting political falsehoods and attacking [the Federal Emergency Management Agency] while claiming his desire to help the hurricane victims with free Starlink access to the internet.”
Musk has said if Harris wins, “I’m f...ed”. He probably isn’t. He has become indispensable. Sadly.
• Barber is a freelance journalist based in Washington.
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