Last week, The Wall Street Journal, citing its sources, reported that the richest man in the world intends to support Donald Trump’s election campaign extremely generously.
Musk is expected to join a number of conservative Silicon Valley technocrats who have expressed their full support for the former US president, including PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, Ben Horowitz (co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz), Joe Lonsdale (Palantir), and billionaire Doug Leone.
On Tuesday evening, Musk denied that he intended to support Trump with such large donations. In an interview with right-wing political commentator Jordan Peterson, he said that the WSJ reports were not true, although he also confirmed that he had created a committee, America PAC, through which he intended to donate smaller amounts to the election campaign.
I donate to America PAC, but at a much lower level, and the core values of the PAC are supporting meritocracy and individual liberty. Republicans are mostly, but not entirely, on the side of liberty.
– Elon Musk later added in one of the entries posted on the X portal.
A super PAC is a type of campaign committee that can raise unlimited amounts of money for campaign expenses, such as ads, but does not make contributions directly to the candidate. Such committees are becoming increasingly popular among both Democrats and Republicans.
‘I’m not a cult member.’ Musk distances himself from Trump
In his conversation with Peterson, Elon Musk distanced himself from Donald Trump several times. He said, among other things, that he had not “signed up for a cult of personality,” although he also admitted that Trump had shown “great courage” after the assassination attempt on his life.
“My goal is to promote the principles that made America great,” he said. “I wouldn’t say I’m an example of MAGA (Make America Great Again – a political movement supporting Donald Trump). I think America IS already great, so I’m closer to MAG – I want America to be even greater,” he added.
It is worth noting that Musk has previously shown much greater enthusiasm for Trump. Right after the failed assassination attempt on the former US president, he called him “the toughest guy since Theodore Roosevelt.” He had previously posted a series of posts on the X portal in which he expressed support for Trump, while sharply criticizing the policies of President Joe Biden.
Some commentators point out that Elon Musk distanced himself from Trump and the MAGA movement just after Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race and transferred his support to Kamala Harris, who will likely be the Democratic Party candidate in the upcoming elections.
Interestingly, Musk and Trump have never seen eye to eye in the past. In 2022, the former US president posted a post on the Truth Social website in which he ridiculed the billionaire Republicans, to put it mildly.
“When Elon Musk came to the White House asking me to help with all his grant projects […] telling me he was a huge Trump fan and a Republican, I could have said, ‘Get down on your knees and beg,’ and he would have done it,” Trump wrote at the time.
Musk has also repeatedly distanced himself from Trump. “It’s not that I hate him, but it’s time for Trump to hang up his hat and sail into the sunset,” Musk wrote in a post on X on July 11, 2022.
“Do we really need a bull in a china shop!?” Musk added. “I also believe the maximum legal age to start a presidential term should be 69,” he noted.
Source: Gazeta
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