Elon Musk: Why he supported Trump

The world's richest man was central to 2024's presidential contest. Elon Musk has never been far from political commentary thanks to his business interests and public profile. But in 2024 he placed his considerable cultural and financial weight behind Donald Trump's successful campaign to become US President for a second time. 

The billionaire donated more than $119 million to a political action committee, or PAC, for electing Trump and spent weeks before the election encouraging voters in key battleground states to go to the polls, offering million-dollar prizes.

As a key Trump backer, observers suggest Musk, who currently has a net worth of around $290 billion, is now poised to benefit from a direct line to the White House. The question is how?

South Africa's richest export

Born in Pretoria, South Africa, to property developer, engineer and former local politician Errol Musk and Canadian model and dietician Maye Musk, the billionaire first emigrated to the US in the '90s.

He co-founded early internet businesses like online city guide, Zip2, and financial services platform, X.com, which later merged with a similar platform, PayPal. Today, he is probably best known for establishing private space exploration company, SpaceX, and providing the funding to establish electric car-maker, Tesla. He is the chief executive officer of both. He has also established tunnel constructor The Boring Company and brain implant developer Neuralink.

Musk believes that humanity needs to become a multiplanetary species and populate other planets. This ambition is pursued through SpaceX. Although it is a private enterprise it is increasingly entwined with the US' federal space agency NASA through billions of dollars in supply contracts, including the Starship Human Landing System which will be used with NASA's own Artemis moon missions. SpaceX may also support NASA's long-term plans for Mars explorations as well as pursuing Musk's own plans for colonizing Mars.

Musk has also said that he thinks low birth rates are a bigger problem than climate change — something scientists and demographers vehemently disagree with — and has fathered at least 12 children himself. 

Musk swings right 

Musk has not always supported Trump. He previously described himself as a moderate, halfway been the Democrats and Republicans. In 2022, he suggested Trump was too old to be President and that he should "sail into the sunset." Trump responded by saying Musk had "begged" him for subsidies while he was in the White House.

But by the end of the 2024 election, any enmity was gone and Musk had chipped in an estimated $119 million to the Trump campaign coffers.

Musk has long been an incendiary public persona. Much of that came through his high public profile on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. In 2022, he acquired the platform for US$44 billion and renamed it "X". During his time at the helm of the platform, Musk has also become a recognized purveyor of misinformation.He also fired many staff members, allowed banned, controversial users back onto the platform, including Trump, and alienated advertisers. This ultimately drove an exodus of other users from the platform and Twitter is now valued at around a fifth of the original price Musk paid. 

But that does not appear to concern Musk, who joined a group of several billionaires with a mass media platform when he bought Twitter. 

"There are rich people who … want to keep making money and see the world through the prism of their business interests and accumulating more wealth,” says David Faris, an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University, who has written about the influence of wealth on US politics. 

"And then there are people who are so rich, [they say] 'I don't care if I lose $44 billion buying Twitter.' [Musk] seems to be falling into that latter category. He's harnessing his wealth in a way that doesn't make any economic sense.”

Will Elon Musk enter politics?

Having been born in South Africa, he can't run for US president, but as a US citizen he could stand for a lower office. He could also simply work to influence policy through his Trump connections.

Steve Nelson, a political economist at Northwestern University, has observed the tendency of billionaires to pursue political office, although this has mostly been in autocracies. It's less common in democracies where partisans donate money to candidates they support instead.

"For somebody like Musk, it's probably the case that you have a very strong personal interest in pursuing a particular policy agenda that you don't think can be controlled in a more indirect fashion," Nelson told DW.

Trump has previously suggested Musk could be put in charge of a federal efficiency department – effectively a cost-cutting function for the government. 

Nelson can imagine Musk trying to gain political office because he may think he would be better placed to push certain objectives if he was actually in power, rather than relying on others. 

"For Musk, I think there's an almost messianic belief in his own efficacy and a really clear agenda around frontier technologies," Nelson told DW. 

SpaceX will likely thrive during Trump's second term but other Musk businesses may not. Trump has said he'll cut back on climate focused initiatives, including in electric transport — Tesla's bread and butter.

It's possible Musk's support of Trump may help buffer his companies against unfavorable policy conditions or create a more lucrative environment for them.

But some business experts think it's too simplistic to view the world's richest man through that lens.

"A lot of people, when they try to understand Elon Musk, they try to read his behaviors through the lens of business incentives," says Bhaskar Chakravorti, dean of global business at the Fletcher School at Tufts University.

"That's half of what's going on. This is an individual who's very much driven by a personal dopamine hit. [His] is very much a dopamine-driven enterprise and that ego often pushes him to start businesses and make promises and set goals that would be considered outlandish for anybody else."

"To a large extent, that's what explains many of his successes, and his excesses as well," Chakravorti concluded.