Elon Musk is going to spend the rest of this week stumping for former President Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, a battleground state that could decide the fate of the 2024 presidential election.
Musk won’t be giving public speeches. Instead, he said he’ll be holding a “series of talks” in the swing state, which will be free to attend for anyone who has voted in the election and signed a petition being circulated by Musk’s America PAC. (Pennsylvania early voting began on October 15th.) Musk’s super PAC — to which he claims to have contributed $75 million —is also giving voters in swing states $47 for each registered swing state voter who signs the petition. This is somehow not illegal.
It’s possible that Musk, who has become obsessed with immigration and birth rates in recent years and often espouses the great replacement conspiracy theory, has found a political kindred spirit in Trump. Earlier this month, he spoke at Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, where the former president was shot at in July. According to the New York Times, Musk is “obsessive, almost manic about the stakes of the election” in private conversations. But the two men used to be at odds: Trump once said he could have told Musk to “drop to your knees and beg” for government contracts “and he would have done it.” More recently, Trump has said he’ll consider ending tax credits for electric vehicles if reelected, which could hurt Musk’s bottom line.
In some respects, Musk, arguably one of this country’s biggest beneficiaries of government spending, has a lot at stake in this election. But he’ll likely keep raking in federal funds regardless of who’s in the White House — so there’s not necessarily much downside to supporting Trump.
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