The Journal. - Uncovering Elon Musk's Secret Political Donations

Episode Date: October 9, 2024

Elon Musk's financial support for Republican causes has been much more extensive and started earlier than previously known. WSJ’s Dana Mattioli reports on Musk’s rightward political shift and explains how he hid his donations.  Further Listening: - Elon Musk and Silicon Valley Turn Towards Trump  Further Reading: - Elon Musk Gave Tens of Millions to Republican Causes Far Earlier Than Previously Known  - Inside Elon Musk’s Hands-On Push to Win 800,000 Voters for Trump  - How Elon Musk Broke With Biden and the Democrats Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Two years ago, in the final stretch of the 2022 midterm elections, a flood of mysterious ads started showing up on TVs, radios, and billboards across the U.S. And it wasn't clear who was behind them. Joe Biden and his soft on crime policies are setting predators free in our communities. A lot of the ads centered around anti-immigration, anti-woke policies. That's our colleague Dana Mattioli. They're very critical of gender affirming care for children and teenagers. Biden and progressive leaders promote puberty blockers to keep kids from developing to normal

men and women. And these ads ran in battleground states just days before the midterm elections and really attacked the Democratic Party. Raphael Warnock and Joe Biden believe men can get pregnant. They believe a boy can become a girl. These attack ads were traced back to a conservative nonprofit group called Citizens for Sanity.

And it ran $90 million of ads in battleground states and no one really knew who funded it. It was this mystery. And you solved that mystery. Yes. We were able to learn that Elon Musk gave more than 50 million dollars to funding those ads that were very explosive. Elon Musk, the richest man in the world. — It's hard to pin down an exact amount of money that Elon has contributed to Republican causes because he's gone to great pains to keep much of it secret. — Dana and a team of reporters discovered

that Musk's contributions to Republicans are larger and have been going on longer than previously known, making him one of the biggest donors to conservative political causes. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudson. It's Wednesday, October 9th. Coming up on the show, Elon Musk's secret political contributions. What does possible sound like for your business? It's having to spend to power your scale with no preset spending limit. Redefine possible with Business Platinum.

That's the powerful backing of American Express. Terms and conditions apply. Visit amex.ca slash business platinum. Over the last few months, Elon Musk has gone all in on Donald Trump. Musk endorsed Trump in July, and in August, hosted a live conversation with him on X. This past weekend, he even joined him on stage at a rally. He jumped up and down as he walked out, wearing a black Make America Great Again hat. As you can see, I'm not just MAGA, I'm Dark MAGA. Musk has also been doing interviews with conservative personalities, like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson.

And on Monday, Musk talked about Trump in an interview with Tucker Carlson. If he loses, it's going to be hard for you to pretend you never supported him. All in. All in. In the deep end. No, you are definitely in the deep end. You cannot touch bottom. How would you, I guess in one sentence,

describe Musk's politics. Complicated. He's gone through one of the most stunning political transformations I think I've ever seen. Musk has said that until recently, he always voted for Democrats, and climate change seemed to be his number one issue. But over the past few years, he's moved more and more to the right. Elon has become increasingly prolific on his own website X. And the journal did this major analysis.

They went through 300,000 of Musk's tweets over the years. And if you study them, you could see this rightward shift playing out in real time. Musk's rightward turn is a result of a few different factors. It began with him feeling alienated by Democrats. What happened over the last few years is really interesting. The party that he was voting for sort of started shunning him. Around the time of COVID, Elon Musk became the world's richest man.

And at that point, some of the more progressive parts of the Democratic Party, people like Elizabeth Warren, started publicly picking on him and sort of made him the face for corporate greed. Who's going to have the power in our country? Are we going to make these decisions as a democracy or is this going to be Elon Musk all by himself, off in a room, a bazillionaire who just plays by his own set of rules. Things got worse when President Joe Biden took office.

Joe Biden, he came into office and he positioned himself as one of the most pro-union presidents in history. Elon is famously anti-union. He does not want his workers at Tesla being unionized. And there's this one seminal moment where Biden is at a General Motors plant in Detroit and their CEO Mary Barr is there and he turns to her and says that she was sort of single-handedly electrifying the auto industry. You did, Mary. You electrified the entire automobile industry.

I'm serious. And that was like just a slap in the face because at that point GM had a very small market share of EVs and Tesla was, is the number one maker of EVs in the country. And it just felt like to Elon, you know, this party was shunning him. But the issue that Musk has been talking about the most is what he calls the woke mind virus. So it actually amplifies, woke virus, mind virus in my view, amplifies racism, amplifies

frankly sexism and all the isms. And while claiming to do the opposite, it's- I think there's this broader rhetoric from like the far right part of the party where they assign this woke mind virus or being woke to liberal causes. And for them, that's about, you know, they don't like political correctness. They think that speech should not be censored. That's a big, big issue for Musk. That's part of why he bought Twitter

is because he didn't want speech to be censored. So he says, they don't think that people should, you know, identify themselves as pronouns. That's something that they consider woke. The origins of Musk's interest in these issues stem partly from his estrangement from one of his children. He said that his transgender daughter Vivian

asked for puberty blockers during the pandemic while she was a minor, and that he signed the documents without fully understanding the ramifications. He spoke about it in an interview with Jordan Peterson. And so I lost my son, essentially. When Vivian turned 18 in 2022, she legally cut ties with Musk

and filed a petition to change her last name to Wilson. — And she's spoken out publicly about how, pre-transition, Musk was pretty critical of her more effeminate nature and would mock her. She also said, you know, she wants to make sure one thing's absolutely clear. I disowned him, not the other way around. In that interview with Jordan Peterson, Musk said that because of what happened with his daughter, he vowed to destroy the woke mind virus.

We know that this is something that's really motivated him. He's someone that has spoken out against gender affirming care. He is someone that has spoken out against diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. He thinks that we should have more of a meritocracy in society where you're elevated based on merit. And so I think more culturally, these are things that have also weighed on him. Why should anybody care about what Elon Musk does or says when it comes to politics? I mean, arguably the selection cycle, he's one of the most powerful and influential people there is. And he's got a bigger microphone than most of legacy media. He owns Twitter now known as X and he has more followers than I think anyone else on

that platform. And, you know, he went from using his microphone in a more traditional CEO way of, you know, interacting with his followers to now being a big booster of Donald Trump and other Republican initiatives. And Musk hasn't just been supporting Republicans with tweets and campaign appearances. He's been backing them with a lot of money. This is the world's richest man, so he's got a lot of money and not only is he rich, he's using it in this race. So where is Musk's money going? That's after the break. Okay, so let's talk about what I think is everybody's favorite subject, which is campaign

finance. Can you give me sort of like the lay of the land here? I mean, don't political donations need to be public in some fashion? That's like the million dollar question when you and I make a donation because we're just ordinary people it is public When you say regular people like you and I donate though Dana Regular people who don't work at the Wall Street Journal because we don't make Journal yes, thank you for the clarification. That's exactly right. We are a neutral party But there's a secret world for billionaires and wealthy people

where they could obscure their political donations by moving their money through different organizations such as C4s. The IRS calls them 501 C4s, and sometimes they're called social welfare organizations or dark money groups. And they are exempt from disclosing their donors and they could raise unlimited amounts of money

from people and companies. And that's typically what Musk tends to use when he gets involved in politics. Because Musk uses these kind of nonprofit organizations, it's very difficult to figure out where his money is going. These organizations can spend unlimited amounts of money and aren't required to disclose their donors. So how did Dana and her colleagues figure it out?

It started with a tip. It had to do with Citizens for Sanity, that organization that paid for all those attack ads we talked about earlier in the show. And it was a very hard tip to confirm because very few people knew about it. This was discussed in signal messages, not on email, to keep Elon's identity private. So this was very much a reporting exercise with my colleague Joe Palazzola, who's really brilliant with this stuff, and we were able to get it across the finish line.

— Joe and Dana couldn't see where Citizens for Sanity was getting its money, but their reporting led them to another organization called Building America's Future. And when they looked at Building America's Future's tax records, they could see that it had given tens of millions of dollars to Citizens for Sanity. And according to Dana and Joe's sources,

it was Musk who gave Building America's Future money. Building America's Future, it was a repurposed C4 that had been around for a long time. And that's the, in the world of dark money, sometimes these packs are sort of like shell companies that are used for different purposes, then shelved again and then brought back out, and they could just be reused and repurposed. So he didn't create this C4, but he contributed it for the purpose of it being transferred to Citizens for Sanity. Musk used similar organizations to funnel money

to other conservative causes. For instance, as Dana continued looking into Musk's political contributions, she found another previously unknown donation. I found out that Musk, in 2023, made a very significant contribution to Governor Ron DeSantis' presidential bid. Last year, DeSantis announced his presidential bid in a conversation on Twitter with Musk, who had stated his support for DeSantis previously.

But it wasn't known that Musk was also giving DeSantis money. Dana and Joe found out that Musk was also giving DeSantis money. Dana and Joe found out that Musk had actually given $10 million to support DeSantis. So he funneled the money through an organization, another C4 called Faithful and Strong Policies. That's something that we were able to dig up through our sourcing.

It wasn't publicly disclosed. It was also more dark money. After DeSantis dropped out of the race, Musk started spending money to help get Trump elected. He launched a super PAC called America PAC in May of this year. This summer, The Wall Street Journal reported that Musk had told associates he planned to commit $45 million a month to the organization.

He has since said on X that he's donating at a lower level. The PAC is meant to help the Trump campaign get out the vote. They have a goal of turning out 800,000 low propensity voters in swing states. They're doing things like door knocking and canvassing. And he told the donors that he would fund the majority of the group's expenditures. And did he hide those donations initially as well? Initially he did. When the America PAC was started, he did not want his name to be associated with it.

And his plan was to not to contribute to the PAC until July 1st or after so that it wouldn't show up for another three months. And those filings should come out later this month on October 15th. So how much money do we know for sure Musk has contributed to right-wing causes? It's really hard to say. I don't even know if we fully have the full picture yet because so much of it is traveling through dark money channels. We'll get a better picture of his spending for the America PAC when those filings are

made. But that's just one area, as we know, it wasn't just about Trump, that there are other candidates that he has supported. There are other initiatives like Citizens for Sanity that he's been behind. And it's sort of impossible to trace it. That's the whole point of these mechanisms. Right. Isn't it possible that there's also even more money that we just don't even know about? And it's sort of impossible to trace it. That's the whole point of these mechanisms. Right, isn't it possible that there's also even more money

that we just don't even know about? Oh, it's very possible. Was Musk going to unusual lengths to try to keep his donations secret? I think he was going to the lengths that a lot of billionaires go to to stay behind the scenes. This happens on both sides of political parties. There are donors that do this on both sides

because they don't want to be prominently attached to certain candidates or political causes. While Musk has been putting millions of dollars into right-wing causes, the money hasn't necessarily gotten him the results he wanted. In 2022, when he spent $50 million on those attack ads before the midterms, many of the high-profile Democrats he was going after still won. And earlier this year, when Musk spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on ads attacking Austin's

district attorney, those ads didn't work either, and the prosecutor kept his seat. That raises the big question about his current PAC, the Samaritan PAC, which could have really tons of money attached to it and is handling Trump's ground game is, you know, if that follows a similar trajectory as to some of his other political pursuits, it doesn't bode well for the Trump campaign. Representatives from Musk and DeSantis didn't respond to requests for comment. It's just sort of amazing to me that it took all this reporting from you and several of our colleagues to figure out even just like a general ballpark of how much the richest

person in the world is putting into this election. And it's not something that just like has to be disclosed. Well, I think, you know, I've dealt in the world of publicly traded companies that have to disclose quarterly earnings and, you know, have traded companies that have to disclose quarterly earnings and have accounting regulations that have to be very buttoned up. And I think what's most surprising to me coming into this vein of reporting is just how much things are obfuscated by design. And that's not illegal. It's perfectly normal in this world that you could move vast sums of money behind the scenes without really many people knowing.

And how it's almost like this, you know, two class system, where there's like the average Joe's making their $10 of donations, that it comes up in the public registrar. But billionaires could move hundreds of millions of dollars and no one has to know. That's all for today. Wednesday, October 9th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by Joe Palazzolo,

Emily Glazer, and Khadijah Safdar. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.