Elon Musk is planting himself in Pennsylvania, has brought his brain trust to help, and may even knock on doors himself.
In the final weeks of the presidential campaign, the richest man in the world has involved himself in the U.S. election in a manner unparalleled in modern history.
Elon Musk, seen over the weekend jumping for joy alongside former President Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, is now talking to the Republican candidate multiple times a week.
He has effectively moved his base of operations to Pennsylvania, the place he has recently told confidants he believes is the linchpin to Trump’s reelection.
He has relentlessly promoted Trump’s candidacy to his 201 million followers on X, the social platform formerly known as Twitter that he bought for $44 billion and has used to spread conspiracy theories about the Democratic Party and to insult its candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris.
Above all, he is personally steering the actions of a super political action committee he has funded with tens of millions of dollars to turn out the vote for Trump, not just in Pennsylvania but across the country. He has even proposed taking a campaign bus tour across Pennsylvania and knocking on doors himself, in part to see how his money is being used.
Taken together, a clear picture has emerged of Musk’s battle plan as he directs his efforts to elect Trump with the same frenetic energy and exacting demands that he has honed at his companies SpaceX, Tesla and X.
As early as February, Musk was speaking apocalyptically, in private, about what he considered the crucial need to defeat President Joe Biden. But even as he was meeting with advisers in Austin, Texas, in April to plot his super PAC, Musk sounded as if he considered Trump merely the lesser of two evils. He told friends in the spring that he wasn’t sure he even wanted to explicitly endorse Trump.
These days, in private conversations, Musk is obsessive, almost manic, about the stakes of the election and the need for Trump to win. He praises Trump’s courage under fire — he endorsed him on the night of the assassination attempt in Butler — and talks about how funny he is. One person who spoke recently to Musk recalled him saying, without any hint of irony, “I love Trump.”
Musk’s frenzied engagement reflects his view of this moment in U.S. history. On X, he has warned in dire terms about the effects of progressive policies and censorship. He has claimed, without basis, that Democrats are trying to fill the country with immigrants in the country illegally who would reward them with permanent power, warning that the 2024 race could be the last free election in the U.S.
It may be impossible to capture the financial value of all the support Musk is providing to Trump. This is in part because of his role on X, where he amplifies so much of the former president’s message. Trump has privately used grand — and unverified — terms to describe what Musk is donating to the super PAC, telling one associate recently that the figure is $500 million.
But friends and colleagues say Musk is adopting the same strategy he has used during other crises he has considered existential. Just as Musk worked late into the night as his companies teetered on the verge of catastrophe, tinkering with rocket designs at SpaceX, sleeping on a couch in the Tesla factory or making staff cuts at Twitter, Musk has deemed this an all-hands-on-deck moment.
And so, just as he recruited friends, family and trusted lieutenants to Twitter after he bought the company, Musk has done the same at America PAC, which he founded to help Trump. Most recently, Musk added Steve Davis, a former SpaceX engineer and the head of his tunneling company, to the group, with Davis reprising a sidekick role that he played after Musk’s takeover of Twitter.
