Elon Musk’s PAC giveaway raises legal concerns
Billionaire and “X” owner Elon Musk has said his social media platform must remain “politically neutral” in how it treats both the left and the right. But as a private citizen, Musk has his own views, and he’s sharing them widely.
Musk is now using his X posts, influence and money in a push to elect Trump.
His enthusiastic support for the Republican nominee was perhaps no better illustrated than when Musk, a 53-year-old father of 12, gleefully jumped around on stage behind Trump as the candidate spoke at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, earlier this month.
“As you can see, I’m not just MAGA, I’m dark MAGA,” Musk joked as he flashed his black “Make America Great Again” hat to a cheering crowd.
Musk, the richest man in the world with a net worth of $242 billion, according to Forbes, has pledged to give away $1 million a day to voters for signing his political action committee’s petition backing the Constitution, a pledge experts say raises legal questions.
“Though maybe some of the other things Musk was doing were of murky legality, this one is clearly illegal,” wrote Rick Hasen, a UCLA Law School political science professor, at the Election Law Blog, about the $1 million per-day giveaway.
He’s also donating an undisclosed amount of cash through that political action committee, America PAC, which he formed this summer to support Trump. Musk has contributed about $75 million to his America PAC since he founded it in May, including $30 million in September alone, according to Federal Election Commission filings.
Musk ventures into politics
Musk hasn’t always been so overtly political, although he did express support for former President Barack Obama in both 2008 and 2012. He also made financial contributions to Hillary Clinton during her 2016 presidential campaign, according to data from Open Secrets, a nonpartisan research group that tracks money in politics.
In more recent years, Musk’s disdain for Democratic politics has been no secret.
The Wall Street Journal analyzed Musk’s tweets and found he rarely tweeted about President Biden or Trump before acquiring X, formerly Twitter, in October 2022, posting far more about his famous electric vehicle company, Tesla.
But in 2023 and 2024, his posts began to mention Trump and Biden far more frequently, to the point that he has, in recent months, often written more posts mentioning one or the other than he has Tesla. In July, the Journal recorded 315 Musk tweets mentioning Trump or Biden, and 129 mentioning Tesla.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declined to comment on Musk’s increased political involvement.
“I have no response, no comment on that at this moment,” Jean-Pierre told reporters last Monday.
X and Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
How Musk is using Twitter to promote Trump — and disinformation
Musk’s public messaging may help Trump even more than his fortune.
When Musk took over Twitter, he said he did so because it wasn’t living up to being a “platform for free speech.”
Since then, Musk has fired the teams tasked with combating deceptive content, and in the name of free speech, he reinstated accounts that were banned, like that of right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
Not only is Musk using his platform to push for an “absolutely decisive victory” for Trump — he’s been echoing the disinformation Trump and some Republicans are promoting.
At a campaign appearance supporting Trump in Pennsylvania last Thursday, Musk repeated debunked claims raising doubts about the integrity of Dominion voting machines. Spreading misinformation about Dominion cost Fox News a $787 million settlement in 2023.
“When you have mail-in ballots and no proof of citizenship, it’s almost impossible to prove cheating,” Musk told the crowd. “Statistically there are some very strange things that happen that are statistically incredibly unlikely. There’s always this question of, say, the Dominion voting machines. It is weird that, I think, they were used in Philadelphia and in Maricopa County [in Arizona] but not in a lot of other places. Doesn’t that seem like a heck of a coincidence?”
In September, Musk posted an AI-generated, obviously fake image showing a woman intended to be Harris wearing a red communist uniform, holding a hammer. “Kamala vows to be a communist dictator on day one,” Musk wrote. “Can you believe she wears that outfit?” The post appeared to violate his own company’s rule on manipulated content.
After the second apparent assassination attempt on Trump in September, Musk wrote on “X” that “no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” with a raised eyebrow emoji. He deleted the post, later insisting his post was a “joke.”
Musk also came under fire in November 2023 for calling an antisemitic post on “X” the “actual truth,” prompting major advertisers such as Coca-Cola and Disney to pull advertising spending from the platform. The original X post claimed Jews “have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.”
Musk has become increasingly vocal against Democratic politicians and their style of governance. He’s shunned California’s politics, and been shunned by California as well.
A California state commission recently rejected the Space Force’s efforts to increase SpaceX rocket launches along the state’s central coasts, citing environmental concerns. SpaceX has sued California regulators over the decision, claiming it was politically motivated.
Musk has also decried the level of regulation and taxes in California, and announced in July that he would move both X and SpaceX to Texas in response to a law signed by California Gov. Gavin Newsom that bans school districts from passing policies that require schools to notify parents about their children’s gender identity or sexual identification.
But there may also be a more pragmatic reason for Musk’s shift to Texas: The Lone Star state has no corporate income tax, while California imposes an 8.84% business tax, one of the highest in the nation.
Are Musk’s politics turning away Tesla buyers?
Meanwhile, Musk’s promotion of Trump and his policies may be turning away some would-be Tesla buyers, experts say. In the second quarter, Tesla’s vehicle sales slumped almost 5% compared with a year earlier.
“Musk doubling down on the Trump support is clearly not a huge positive relative to Tesla sales,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives told CBS News. “It’s on the edges, but it’s definitely had an impact.”
That’s because the biggest pool of potential electric-vehicle buyers are Democrats, with almost half saying they’re likely to buy an EV, Pew Research data shows. But only about 1 in 10 Republicans view themselves as likely to shell out for an EV.
And Tesla, one of the few EV choices when it started production in 2008, now has plenty of competition from major automakers such as Ford, Chevrolet and Volkswagen. That’s giving people who are uncomfortable with Musk’s politics but who want a green vehicle the option to shop elsewhere.
Musk may have been pushed toward Trump partly because of the Biden administration’s snub of Tesla vehicles when it first rolled out its EV tax incentives. Its popular Model Y qualified for the $7,500 tax credit last year after the IRS broadened its vehicle classifications.
“The Biden administration basically has viewed Musk as not relevant — he’s been left out of the conversation,” Ives added.
In 2023, Musk cut a deal with the White House to open Tesla vehicle charges to other automakers, in exchange for being able to access federal funds. Tesla won $17 million in EV charging grants from the bipartisan infrastructure law Mr. Biden frequently touts. But earlier this year, Musk fired his Supercharger team, upending and undermining the company’s charging strategy.
How Musk would benefit from a Trump presidency
Tesla investors are concerned about Musk’s political involvement because they’d like to see him more focused on his businesses, Ives said. Trump told the Economic Club of New York in a recent speech that he plans to appoint Musk to lead a new government efficiency commission that would audit the “entire” federal government. Ives has doubts about how feasible this would be.”Unless he recreates an AI version of himself, I don’t see how it’s done,” Ives said of Musk’s ability to take a government job on top of his leadership of Tesla, SpaceX and X, as well as roles in other businesses such as Neuralink and The Boring Company.
Ives was also suggesting that placing Musk in a government role could pose serious conflicts of interest, given Musk’s vast business empire.
Trump, who cut the corporate tax rate to 21% from the prior 35% through his 2017 Tax Cuts & Jobs Act, is now vowing to reduce the rate to 15% — potentially benefiting Musk’s business empire. Changing the tax code would require congressional approval, however.
Trump and Musk are both fighting against transgender issues
Trump has taken on transgender issues as a central theme of his campaign, vowing to withhold federal funding from schools that teach transgender matters, and insisting on keeping the genders assigned at birth separate in sports.
Musk has been vocal about his feelings on transgender matters, too. Reuters reported in 2022 that Musk has donated millions of dollars toward a group that runs ant-trans ads.
Musk has come under fire for calling his child who is transgender “dead.” Wilson transitioned several years ago, at 16, and has spoken out on social media condemning her father’s comments and behavior. Musk told far-right online figure Jordan Peterson that Wilson’s transition made him oppose gender-affirming treatments.
Alain Sherter contributed to this report.
Kathryn Watson is a politics reporter for CBS News Digital, based in Washington, D.C.
