Elon Musk contributed more than $250 million to 2024 campaign groups backing Donald Trump

Bart Jansen, USA TODAY
Updated ·3 min read

WASHINGTON − Elon Musk, the world's richest person, contributed more than a quarter-billion dollars to campaign committees supporting President-elect Donald Trump, much of it in the final weeks of the 2024 race for the White House, according to new federal records.

Musk, chief executive of manufacturer Tesla and SpaceX and owner of the social media platform X, contributed $238.5 million to America PAC, one of the major political action committees supporting Trump's campaign, according to a filing Thursday with the Federal Election Commission. The contributions included a series of three weekly $25 million contributions in October.

Musk's contributions included $40.5 million in controversial daily $1 million payments to Trump supporters in seven swing states. He characterized the payments as a lottery for people who signed a petition to support the Constitution.

Federal law prohibits paying for votes. But a Pennsylvania judge rejected Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner’s attempt to block Musk's $1 million daily giveaways.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who are leading President-elect Donald Trump's proposed new Department of Government Efficiency, walk on Capitol Hill accompanied by House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., on the day of a meeting with members of Congress, as Musk holds his son on his shoulders, in Washington, on Dec. 5, 2024.
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who are leading President-elect Donald Trump's proposed new Department of Government Efficiency, walk on Capitol Hill accompanied by House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., on the day of a meeting with members of Congress, as Musk holds his son on his shoulders, in Washington, on Dec. 5, 2024.

Lisa Gilbert, co-president of the watchdog group Public Citizen, called Musk's campaign contributions to help Trump "obscene."

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"We learned that Elon Musk spent an obscene $250 million to put Donald Trump in office," Gilbert said in a statement on Friday. "Rich billionaires and corporate money simply ran the table in the 2024 election. They singlehandedly made the case for the aggressive campaign finance reforms we need to fix our system and get big money out of politics.”

Since winning the White House, Trump has named Musk an adviser on cutting government spending as co-leader of the newly established Department of Government Efficiency. Musk has been meeting with Capitol Hill lawmakers this week in Washington ahead of Trump's inauguration on Jan. 20 with a goal of cutting $2 trillion from an annual federal budget of $6.75 trillion.

"I think we just need to make sure we spend the public's money well," Musk told reporters Thursday, without going into details.

Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the incoming Republican majority leader, said lawmakers want to help Musk any way they can to cut spending.

"He's got, obviously, a big mission," Thune said after his meeting with Musk. "But we all think the effort they're undertaking is long overdue."

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In addition, the Elon Musk Revocable Trust contributed $20.5 million on Oct. 24 to the RBG PAC, a group that promoted Trump's opposition to a national ban on abortion. The group's website featured an image of the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a critic of Trump who had called him a "faker" during the 2016 presidential campaign.

The committee's website suggested that Ginsburg and Trump agreed on abortion policy by opposing having the federal government dictate abortion laws.

The site also featured a Trump tweet from Oct. 1 that said he didn't support a national abortion ban and would veto one if Congress approved it.

In his first term, Trump appointed three of the nine Supreme Court justices who voted in 2022 to overturn Roe v Wade, the 50-year precedent that established a right to abortion.

But after Democratic congressional victories in the 2022 midterm election, Trump distanced himself from legislating a national abortion ban supported by his former vice president, Mike Pence.

(This story has been updated with more information.)

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Elon Musk gave groups supporting Trump more than $250 million

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