Who Elected Elon Musk?

No one. But Musk elected Trump

During the last presidential campaign the Wall Street Journal ran a story declaring that Tesla CEO Elon Musk was going to donate 45 million a month to the Trump campaign through a PAC, maybe more than one. Musk denied this story saying that it was typical Wall Street Journal rumor mongering. (The Guardian, 7/23/24, story by Helen Sullivan)

Musk was technically correct, but he was still being quite deceptive. The story was wrong but only in the estimate quoted. Musk ended up donating much more than 180 million, in fact some estimates put the amount at over 200 million. The Washington Post placed the amount at close to 300 million, 288 million to be exact. (Story of 1/31/25, by Trish Thadani, Clara Morse, and Maeve Reston) This sum was based on an analysis of year end FEC filings.

If anything shows the faults in the American electoral system, that colossal sum--and the result of it--illuminates those faults under stadium lighting. To my knowledge no single person has ever approached that sum in modern electoral history. One would have to go back to the days of Mark Hanna and his work for the Rockefellers and Morgans in 1896 to defeat presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan for a parallel. Even allowing for inflation, I don’t think any donation from any member of either family could match that sum. And when one adds in the money Trump got from Miriam Adelson, which was reportedly 100 million, that makes for an amount of over a third of a billion dollars given to Trump from just two persons.

Musk took advantage of a little known FEC ruling in the early spring of last year which allowed closer contact between campaigns and Super PACs. What Musk’s America PAC did was to contribute mightily to a get out of the vote effort for Trump. This went as far as offering a million dollar daily lottery as a mechanism for his voter recruitment drive. In just recruiting new voters, Musk spent almost 52 million dollars for Trump. (ibid, Thadani) Musk targeted this effort in what are usually considered battleground states i.e. Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and North Carolina. Musk also allowed small bounties for voters who signed up people in other states. Many felt that these schemes were illegal. Since they amounted to paying people to vote.

To put it mildly, Musk’s investment has paid off handsomely. His personal wealth has soared, since Tesla stock has seen massive gains since the election. One estimate places the yield at 200 billion, a remarkable rate of ROI. Partly, this is because many expect Tesla to benefit from streamlined regulation on self-driving vehicles under Trump. (Washington Post, 12/15/24, story by Faiz Siddiqui)

But beyond that, Trump created a new body of government called DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency. Its task was to cut government spending. Musk helms that department. He does this under the status of something called “special government employee”. Which is a temporary status which limits his work to 130 days per year. What Trump did was rename the United States Digital Service to DOGE and he moved it from the Office of Management and Budget to reporting to the White House Chief of Staff. The whole mission of the Digital Service was altered radically into an 18 month agenda of cutting costs and streamlining government operations. Trump also allowed access to all unclassified agency records, computer systems and IT software within departments under investigation. But Musk has also tried to encourage thousands of employees to resign with a severance package. (NPR, 2/7/25/ story by Shannon Bond)

How has Musk operated? He has placed certain of his private employees and colleagues into senior roles at certain government agencies, e.g. Tim Krause, who was placed in charge of the Treasury Department’s system that accounts for trillions of dollars in payments every year. As Deborah Pearlstein, a specialist in public policy from Princeton, has noted, “One of the reasons we can’t tell what’s going on and what power they have is because they haven’t really made what they’re doing public at all.” (ibid)

But like the clever businessman he is, Musk uses his social network, Twitter, which he now calls X, to broadcast what he considers the triumphs of DOGE. Because most of what he does is not made clear in documented form, those messages then get amplified—and distorted--through the rightwing media network. For instance one said that US AID paid fifty million a year for condoms in Gaza. This was repeated by Republican congressman Don Bacon and then amplified by Trump himself who said the condoms were for Hamas, and they used them to create bombs. How condoms were being used in bomb making went rather skimpily explained. But it did not matter since this was exposed as being false by Senator Chris Murphy: there was no such funding for condoms in Gaza. And the Post said that amount is three times what the government spends per year for the entire world. (MSNBC, report of 1/29/2025, by Steve Benen)

Trump also tried to say that US AID was actually funding leftwing media like Politico. First, the last thing I would call that online ‘zine would be leftwing. But since it’s a free ‘zine how could the government be funding it? Politico does have an upper tier service which one has to subscribe to which is called Politico Pro. But the so called funding for those were actually subscriptions and the sum was nowhere near what Trump and Musk were saying it was. (ibid, report of 2/6/25)

Coupled with Musk’s incursions into slashing operational costs, Trump has tried to extract revenge on those who were involved in the whole ersatz Russia Gate scandal. Also, he has gone after those agents and lawyers who prosecuted the insurrectionists for their violence on January 6^th, i. e. the convicted people Trump pardoned. Therefore the president has trained his eye on the FBI and the Department of Justice. There have been reports that people have literally been walked out of the FBI building. A dozen prosecutors at DOJ who worked on Trump’s role in the insurrection, plus the stolen documents at Mar-A -Lago, have been targeted. That is they have been reassigned or demoted. At the FBI, there have been requests to file a list of all agents who worked on the 1,500 insurrectionist cases.

What makes this last rather odd is that the employees who worked on these cases were not political appointees. And career hires are supposed to have rights against this kind of unfair termination process. But according to at least one expert on this subject, no such protocol was followed. (See article in The Hill, by Rebecca Beitsch, 2/5/25) Agents from the FBI have filed suit over these actions.

During his campaign Trump made these kinds of outlandish vengeance themed declarations, which few people took seriously at the time. He threatened the whole legal apparatus involved in his criminal and civil cases. Many people considered this campaign rhetoric. (NPR story of 10/21/24, by Monika Evstatieva and Brianna Scott) It apparently was not. And the man who Trump installed as Director of OMB, Russell Vought, said previously that the DOJ was not an independent agency. He further added that no one in the White House should believe such a thing. To exemplify this attitude, Trump fired Hampton Dellinger the head of the Office of Special Counsel. In opposition, Dellinger has filed a lawsuit. (NPR, 2/10/25, story by Stephen Fowler)

Vought is a piece of work in himself. Unilaterally, he has tried to literally close down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Their actions were therefore put on hold, and they were given notice that their HQ building would be closed this week. In addition Vought allowed a three man team from Musk’s DOGE to have access to non-classified CFPB systems. Beyond that Vought then announced on Musk’s X that he informed the Federal Reserve that the “CFPB will not be taking its next draw of unappropriated funding because it is not reasonably necessary to carry out its duties.” (NBC News, story of 2/9/25, by Megan Lebowitz)

Again, this was met by an employee lawsuit. Which was founded on the basis that DOGE should not have access to employee information on the grounds of privacy interests; and the irreparable harm that could be done if the information is then disclosed.

Vought started in Washington as an assistant to congressman Phil Gramm, the man much responsible for originating the concept of derivatives in the market place. It was those wild inventions that helped cause the Great Recession of 2008-09. Vought was also one of the leaders of the Project 2025 document prepared by the Heritage Foundation. He is a self-described Christian Nationalist who opposes critical race theory. (The Economist, 1/23/25). And one can fairly say that what Trump and Musk are doing was more or less outlined in the Project 2025 playbook. That 900 page document mapped out plans to increase presidential power and to use it in unprecedented ways. (NY Times, 7/17/23 article by Maggie Haberman, Charlie Savage, and Jonathan Swan) Specifically by doing away with certain agencies like the EPA, and taking away the rights of federal workers by reclassifying them as political appointees. (AP story by Ali Swenson, 7/23/24). So when candidate Donald Trump claimed to know little or nothing about Project 2025, it makes it quite ironic that he is hiring one of its leading lights and following the book’s dictates quite closely. (Forbes, story by Alison Durkee, 2/6/25)

Miriam Adelson is getting what she wanted also. She is the widow of Las Vegas billionaire Sheldon Adelson. She is a very prominent Zionist worth about 32 billion. She has said she got stuck in America after meeting her husband--she really belonged in Israel. (Fortune, 3/30/2018). She once labeled pro Palestinian and Black Lives Matter demonstrators as “our enemies” who would do anything to eradicate Israel from the Middle East, “and, as such, they should be dead to us.” (Forbes, 11/18/23). Her 100 million donation came with a contingency of Israel annexing the West Bank. (Haaretz, 8/23/24) This is the kind of woman upon who Trump bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Make no mistake, with his plan to move Palestinians out of Gaza and turn it into a Riviera type resort, Trump is making good on her money.

What Adelson’s and Musk’s roles in the Trump administration signify is pretty simply stated. This will be rule by oligarchy. There will be some sops to the working class, like no taxes on tips. But if you saw the quartet of Sundar Pichai, Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckenberg close to the front row at Trump’s inauguration, you get the idea of what is really going on. Google, Tesla, Amazon and Facebook all at ringside. The market cap of those four companies exceeds 8.5 trillion. As George Carlin once said, “It’s a big club and you aren’t in it.” There will be no Lena Khans in this administration.

Let us make two last observations about what Trump has done in less than one month of being formally in office. In the continuation of his role as the star of The Apprentice, Trump also fired Colleen Shogan, who ran the National Archives. Trump had threatened to do this last month. No formal reason was given, but many suspect this was for her role in the criminal case that involved Trump’s theft of government classified documents and spiriting them away to the bathroom and shower at Mar-A-Lago in Florida. (NBC News, story of 2/7/25 by Racquel Coronell Uribe; CNN story of 6/9/23, by Hannah Rabinowitz and Dan Berman)

Perhaps the capper in this real life rerun of Trump’s business reality show was his firing of the Kennedy Center board of trustees and naming himself the new chairman. The chairman for the last 14 years was David Rubinstein. It is interesting that during his first term, Trump did not attend any of the Kennedy Center programs. (AP story by Will Weissert, 2/8/25)

The Kennedy Center began under Dwight Eisenhower. He thought there should be an auditorium for the arts and culture in the DC area. In 1962, John Kennedy and his wife launched a 30 million fundraising campaign. When Kennedy was killed President Johnson signed into law that the Center should be named after JFK. As the Center has noted what Trump has done, removing the Board, is unprecedented in their 55 year history. As was Trump naming himself as the chair, which is supposed to be done by a vote of the board.

If this is not a violation of freedom of speech and expression, then what is it?