Elon Musk and a group of Silicon Valley allies have built a shadow campaign to put Donald

By Jonathan Mahler, Ryan Mac and Theodore Schleifer

Jonathan Mahler reported this article over two months from New York and San Francisco with Ryan Mac, who covers corporate accountability in the tech industry, and Theodore Schleifer, who covers billionaires’ influence on American politics.

Oct. 18, 2024

Last February, the billionaire financier Nelson Peltz summoned a group of about 20 wealthy, predominantly Republican donors and a handful of G.O.P. strategists to dinner at his $334 million waterfront estate in Palm Beach, Fla. There were plenty of people in the room who had publicly disavowed former President Donald Trump after the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol — Peltz among them — but it was pretty clear now that he was going to be the candidate, and it was time to get onboard and figure out how to help him win. There were a lot of problems. An especially uncomfortable one was that a lot of donor money was going to paying Trump’s mounting legal bills rather than building a serious political campaign.

Peltz, who was 81 at the time and made his fortune via junk bonds and leveraged buyouts, had gathered some traditional high rollers, including the hedge-fund manager John Paulson and the Las Vegas casino tycoon Steve Wynn, as well as Ronna McDaniel, then the chair of the Republican National Committee. He had also invited Elon Musk.

For much of his career, Musk gave modestly to candidates of both parties. He was drawn to President Barack Obama, making several visits to meet with him in the Oval Office and inviting him to Cape Canaveral to see SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. But he didn’t really like spending time with politicians, and never aspired to be a political power broker, at least in the traditional sense. His business empire spanned the globe, and administrations everywhere came and went. He seemed to view himself as being bigger than any party.

In the years since the 2020 election, though, Musk had been following a number of his friends in the tech industry — some dating back to his earliest days in the business, when he helped found the company that became PayPal — on a journey to some of the more baroque regions of the far right. He was becoming increasingly outspoken about his views but had less to say about the daily scrum of partisan politics. He had quietly given more than $50 million to fund advertising campaigns attacking Democrats in the 2022 midterms, The Wall Street Journal has reported, and in 2023 he donated $10 million to an outside group that helped fund the presidential bid of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. Now he seemed open to doing a lot more.

Peltz gave Musk the honor of speaking first. He told the group that he had always been a Democrat, but no longer. And, despite being new to political campaigns, he had some ideas to share. What worked with his electric car company, Tesla, he said, was not paid advertising but word of mouth. If everyone in the room told two friends to vote for Trump — and told them to tell two friends — he would win. Then Musk underscored what he saw as the real stakes of the presidential race.

Musk was born in South Africa, became a Canadian citizen and once admitted that his immigration status was in a “gray area” when he founded his first company in the United States. But in recent months, he became obsessed with a conspiracy theory that Trump and his followers were promoting: that Democrats were allowing immigrants to pour into the country to create more Democratic voters, in effect stealing the election. In the months leading up to the gathering at Peltz’s home, Musk helped spread the idea — a central plank of MAGA’s election denialism — across his own social media platform, X. (Musk did not respond to a detailed request for comment.)

Now, over a dinner of shrimp and lobster tails, he put the matter in stark, existential terms: Were Biden to win in November, the Democrats would use the ongoing flood of immigrants to create a permanent majority. If they failed to get Trump into office, Musk said, this would be America’s last free election.

Musk has always seen himself as the protagonist of his own science-fiction novel, on a hero’s quest to save humanity. It’s the legacy of a childhood as a geeky bookworm but also of his years in Silicon Valley during the great tech boom of the early 2000s. He and his fellow tech leaders were not just businessmen; as they saw it, they were visionary founders reinventing the world. They knew what to do and how to do it. The hundreds of billions of dollars that they accumulated along the way only confirmed the importance of their mission and validated their unique ability to carry it out.

Over the course of this election cycle, a group of these men have coalesced around a new mission: putting Donald Trump back in the White House. They are the Republican Party’s ascendant donor class, and they operate on a plane very different from that of the donors who preceded them. They have not only a seemingly limitless amount of money to help make this particular vision a reality but also their own media profiles and platforms to use toward that end. They are the opposite of private, dark-money donors, making a public show of their support for Trump and even sometimes announcing their donations on social media. It’s an ambitious and highly motivated group, powered by self-interest and self-regard and unencumbered by self-doubt.

Peltz and the rest of the anxious, old-money Republicans had gathered in Palm Beach to strategize about how to elect Trump. The answer was quite possibly Elon Musk and the new breed of high-tech billionaires.

For many years, Silicon Valley’s reactionary right orbited around one man: the venture capitalist Peter Thiel. Thiel was a right-wing libertarian before he was a billionaire. As an undergraduate at Stanford in the 1980s, he brought the “PC wars” to the West Coast, helping to found The Stanford Review, a student-run conservative newspaper whose many acts of editorial provocation included defending the conduct of a senior who pleaded no contest to the statutory rape of a first-year student. (Thiel declined to comment for this article.)

The author of that story was one of Thiel’s protégés at Stanford, David Sacks, a fellow ideologue on the make. In 1995, the two men jointly wrote a book attacking multiculturalism, “The Diversity Myth.” Several years later, they reunited at a company called Confinity, which became PayPal after merging with a competitor founded by a young Musk. Their revolutionary, techno-utopian vision was baked into the business plan: PayPal was designed to render the dollar obsolete. The road to utopia was rocky; Sacks led a coup to oust Musk and replace him with Thiel. But they soon sold the company to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2004, making them all fantastically rich and sending a diaspora of entrepreneurs and investors across Silicon Valley — the “PayPal Mafia” — to build more revolutionary, billion-dollar companies like YouTube and Yelp.

David Sacks beating Peter Thiel when Thiel played his colleagues in 10 simultaneous games of chess on the day of the PayPal I.P.O. in 2002. It was the only game Thiel lost. The story, and this photo, have been featured on Sacks’s podcast and have become part of tech-world lore.

As the internet blossomed, Thiel began to encourage a new set of even more provocative thinkers. At their center was an ex-programmer named Curtis Yarvin, who blogged under the nom de plume Mencius Moldbug, sketching out the framework for a nascent reactionary movement — later called the new right — aimed at deposing the cabal of liberal elites running the country. Yarvin saw democracy as a “destructive” form of government, instead proposing a techno-monarchy run by a national chief executive. Americans, he said, had to “get over their dictator phobia.” He and Thiel grew close; Yarvin stayed in Thiel’s homes, and they watched the 2016 election returns together.

As Thiel became wealthier and more powerful, he continued to help like-minded men accumulate their own wealth and power. They included a lot of Stanford Review alumni, like Josh Hawley, now the 44-year-old senator from Missouri, but also others who came to him via different routes — most prominently JD Vance, who has cited Yarvin as an influence himself. Vance reached out to Thiel after hearing him deliver a talk at Yale Law School, and following his graduation, Thiel helped set him up in Silicon Valley, first recommending him for a job at a biotech firm whose founder he was close with and later helping him raise $120 million for his own venture firm, Narya Capital. When Vance ran for Senate in 2022, Thiel was by far the biggest donor to his super PAC, giving $15 million.

Thiel embraced Trump in 2016, speaking at the Republican National Convention, donating $1.25 million to support the campaign and even working alongside Steve Bannon on Trump’s transition team. Two of his associates came along: Trae Stephens, who worked at his venture firm, Founders Fund, and Blake Masters, the chief operations officer of Thiel Capital, who would later run for the U.S. Senate. Another PayPal and Stanford Review alum, Ken Howery, served as Trump’s ambassador to Sweden.

These men became the nucleus of the tech industry’s MAGA mafia, and in recent months, quite a few more have joined them. They don’t represent a majority in Silicon Valley, but they are a high-profile minority. Some, like Joe Lonsdale, are members of Thiel’s extended network and have long been committed to the cause. Lonsdale, who was editor of The Stanford Review and interned at PayPal, has used some of the fortune he built as a founder of Palantir to create a conservative think tank called the Cicero Institute, which is lobbying states to criminalize homelessness, and the University of Austin, which he has described as an antidote to universities that have been overtaken by “radical, far-left ideologues.”

Others, like the venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, were Democrats troubled by the changing climate for tech investors. Not only has the Biden administration vigorously enforced antitrust laws, putting a damper on deal-making, but it has also sought to aggressively regulate the cryptocurrency sector. At the same time, the arrest and conviction of the crypto king Sam Bankman-Fried, the government bailout of Silicon Valley Bank and the rising, uncertain specter of artificial intelligence were all feeding a broader skepticism toward the tech industry in general. Personal fortunes were being threatened — Andreessen and Horowitz presided over a huge crypto fund — and so was the larger techno-utopian project. Late last year, Andreessen grew frustrated enough to pour out a 5,000-word “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” denouncing progress-impeding forces like “social responsibility” and “tech ethics.” For him, Biden’s proposed so-called billionaire’s tax, which would require that people whose wealth exceeds $100 million pay taxes on unrealized capital gains, was the ultimate threat. He called it “the final straw” tipping him to Trump; Horowitz said it smacked of Leninism.

As these new donors started gravitating toward Trump, he began making new promises on the campaign trail. He would make America “the crypto capital of the planet”; he would fire Biden’s Securities and Exchange Commission chair, Gary Gensler; he would steer more military contracts to the booming private defense-tech sector; he would repeal an executive order intended to provide some checks on the development of A.I. “In the matrix of people supporting Trump — a 2-by-2 matrix of ‘Are they purchasable?’ and ‘Can I purchase them?’ — Biden and Harris are not purchasable, and Trump is the most purchasable president in our lifetime,” says Reid Hoffman, one of PayPal’s early employees and a prominent Democratic donor.

Sacks is one of the group’s most outspoken members, unremittingly championing Trump these days on his podcast, “All-In.” After his time at PayPal, he did a stint as a Hollywood producer before returning to tech as an entrepreneur, executive and venture capitalist. In recent years, he has also leveraged his wealth to become a modern media personality with “All-In,” which he started during the early days of the Covid lockdown with three of his rich V.C. friends. They have since turned the voice of the tech bro — with its unbounded expertise on everything from Texas hold ’em to the war in Ukraine — into a media brand. The Besties, as he and his co-hosts call themselves, now run their own conference and sell a $1,200 Besties tequila. (Sacks declined requests for an interview.)

Musk was one of the last to take a fully reactionary turn. Since his PayPal days, he has moved into realms that transcend “technology” in the Silicon Valley sense, becoming a modern industrialist in the spirit of Henry Ford. But his ties to the tech industry and its pro-Trump moguls remain strong. He had been on his own journey over the last few years, pushed to the right by a confluence of forces. It started with what he described as California’s “fascist” Covid lockdowns, which forced him to temporarily close his Tesla plants, and continued with his outrage over Biden’s decision to exclude him from an electric vehicle meeting at the White House. In 2021, he moved from California to Texas, surrounding himself with a more conservative social circle. His reactionary anger was fueled, too, by the decision of one of his children to transition; he later said that he had been “tricked” into authorizing gender-affirming care for her.

Musk had left the dinner at Peltz’s house dissatisfied, according to two people familiar with his reaction in the subsequent weeks. He had started talking privately to Lonsdale, who was a member of his new friend group in Texas, and a few others about how he might take matters into his own hands. He didn’t want to publicly endorse Trump; the furthest he would go, he told friends, was an “anti-Biden endorsement.” Musk was doing things his own way. He started secretly building his own super PAC.

By the beginning of the summer, the Republican Party’s new donor class was moving toward Trump, and they had a new item on their wish list: They wanted him to put one of their own on the ticket.

JD Vance left his venture capital firm when he was elected to the Senate in 2022, but he brought the V.C. agenda with him into office. He went to bat for the crypto industry, argued against A.I. regulation and championed the breakup of Google — the holy grail for some venture capitalists who believe that it has become a monopoly and is crushing the start-up market. Thanks largely to Thiel, Vance had already risen remarkably swiftly, jumping straight to the Senate in his mid-30s, and now he was on Trump’s short list for vice president. But there was a problem: Trump had finished the Republican primary being badly outspent by Joe Biden, and his legal expenses were still a drain on resources. He needed a running mate who could help him raise money. Being so new to politics, Vance didn’t seem to offer much help on that front. The party’s new donor class was ready to prove otherwise.

Sacks, who once threw a “Let Them Eat Cake”-themed 40th birthday party for himself, complete with 18th-century-style powdered wigs, took the lead, planning a Trump fund-raiser in his 21,888-square-foot home in San Francisco, with Vance in attendance. Sacks had initially been a DeSantis man, squiring the Florida governor around Silicon Valley in search of donors. He had also thrown fund-raisers for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Vivek Ramaswamy. But in March, he made the pivot to Trump and seemed poised to become more than just another donor. Vance had served as the intermediary. After Sacks introduced him at an awards dinner in Washington, Vance took him to a private dining room at the Conrad Hotel to meet Donald Trump Jr. and personally communicate his support.

Sacks, one of the most outspoken of the Silicon Valley Trump boosters, with JD Vance at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in July.Credit...Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times

Silicon Valley had not historically provided natural fund-raising terrain for Donald Trump. The last time he held a fund-raiser in the area, in 2019, the host withheld his name and address until hours before the event to avoid protests. This one, on June 6, was far more conspicuous: Sacks — whose house was in the heart of the Pacific Heights neighborhood, on a street sometimes known as Billionaire’s Row — boasted about it on his podcast, predicting that it would break the ice for more tech leaders to endorse Trump. One week earlier, Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to suppress a sex scandal. The day the verdict came down, Shaun Maguire, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist from Sequoia Capital, announced on X that he was giving $300,000 to Trump. But the real money was about to flow. The cheapest ticket to the fund-raiser was $50,000, and it was $300,000 to attend a smaller dinner with Trump after the opening reception. The money would go directly to the campaign via Trump’s main joint fund-raising committee with the R.N.C.

The guest list leaned heavily toward the crypto industry, and the event was carefully choreographed. Another person on the short list for vice-presidential candidate, Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota, was also in attendance, but it was Vance who introduced Trump before his remarks. Sacks seated himself next to Trump at the dinner that followed, taking the opportunity to make his pitch for Vance. One moment was unplanned: About two-thirds of the way through the meal, Trump asked the group whom he should choose as his running mate. Even though Burgum was sitting right there at the table, the response was unanimous: Vance.

A little more than five weeks later, Trump narrowly escaped an assassination attempt. The near miss brought an outpouring of support from his new allies in the tech world. In an instant, Musk was inspired to reconsider his reluctance to publicly support Trump. “I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery,” he posted on X less than an hour after the incident, with a video of Trump getting back on his feet, his ear bloodied, pumping his fist to the crowd. Sacks went a good deal further. “I KNOW A HERO WHEN I SEE ONE,” he wrote. “He has risked everything for this country.”

The Republican National Convention was now only days away, and tech’s MAGA cohort was ramping up its campaign for Vance. Musk called Trump on Vance’s behalf, telling him on the night before Vance was chosen that he would be a good “insurance policy” in case the next attempt on his life was successful. Thiel also made a personal call, and it was a tough conversation. He had been disappointed by Trump’s presidency, which he found insufficiently revolutionary, and he told friends that he was pained by the excommunication he suffered socially. In 2023, Trump asked him for a big donation; Thiel refused, and the two men hadn’t spoken since then. Now he encouraged Trump to not hold his anger at him against Vance. He also offered a form of penance, casually dropping into the conversation that he had in fact made a donation in the millions to a pro-Trump legal group.

On the opening afternoon of the convention, Trump posted on his social media platform, Truth Social, that he was going with Vance. His supporters in Silicon Valley could hardly contain their excitement: “WE HAVE A FORMER TECH VC IN THE WHITE HOUSE GREATEST COUNTRY ON EARTH BABY,” Delian Asparouhov, a partner at Thiel’s Founders Fund, wrote on X. With Vance on the ticket, Andreessen, who invested in Vance’s venture capital fund, and his partner Horowitz formally endorsed the ticket and immediately donated $2.5 million each to a Trump super PAC. “Sorry, Mom,” Horowitz said on their podcast, “The Ben & Marc Show.” “I know you’re going to be mad at me for this. But, like, we have to do it.” Sacks — who joined Vance, Don Jr. and Tucker Carlson in Trump’s red-and-white box before speaking during prime time — posted a list of 17 tech V.C.s and entrepreneurs who were supporting Trump on X, writing, “Come on in, the water’s warm.”

As was his self-lionizing, hands-on style, Musk was steaming ahead with his PAC, which he called America PAC. He was planning to provide the bulk of the funding himself — at least $140 million, he told vendors — in four tranches. But he also told friends throughout the year that when it came to supporting Trump, secrecy was very important to him. He wanted to wait until after July 1 to make his donations so that they wouldn’t become public until closer to the election. And so Lonsdale and his team, including his top adviser, Blake Brickman, set out in mid-April to start rounding up anchor investors to cover the initial costs. Lonsdale kicked in himself. Other initial recruits included Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who are being sued by the state of New York for their alleged role in defrauding 230,000 investors of more than $1 billion through their crypto exchange. And this was not going to be a traditional super PAC, steering the money it bundles toward paid media. It was going to play a vital, active role in securing the votes Trump needed to win.

Trump’s team had decided to do things very differently in 2024. It was doubling down on election denialism, using its campaign volunteers not to try to persuade voters but to lay a foundation for future legal challenges in districts won by Democrats. They would be trained to become poll watchers — standing outside voting precincts, tabulation centers and drop boxes. The work of getting out the vote would end up being largely done by paid canvassers, hired and run by Trump’s super PACs.

It was a novel strategy made possible by a recent opinion from the Federal Election Commission. Like most F.E.C. opinions, this one was not exactly front-page news, but its electoral implications were huge: For the first time, campaigns could share voter data with super PACs, and vice versa, enabling PACs to run their own field teams. Historically, this was the work that won — or lost — elections: Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 was driven primarily by a sprawling network of local volunteers recruited by the campaign and the D.N.C. to engage voters in their own communities. Now independent groups could take the lead, relying on itinerant paid canvassers known as carnies, after traveling carnival workers. Trump’s super PACs would be a big part of the campaign’s ground game, using the money they raised — a theoretically limitless sum, thanks to Citizens United — to run their own field teams. And America PAC would be the biggest of the bunch.

Musk envisioned an army of 5,500 canvassers turning out 800,000 to 1 million Trump voters across all the battleground states — quite possibly enough to swing the election. The emphasis would be on those who were either unregistered or had a spotty record of getting to the polls. The canvassing business is notoriously vulnerable to waste and overbilling; at one point, Musk reached out to Tucker Carlson for advice on how to ensure that his PAC didn’t become a gravy train for consultants.

Musk started pulling it together in April, initially turning to a fellow Texan, Dick Weekley, for guidance. Weekley had little in common with Musk. He was a 78-year-old Houston homebuilder and fixture of Texas’ G.O.P. establishment. But he had some experience with super PACs. In 2019, he ran one called Engage Texas, which had a goal of registering one million new G.O.P. voters in the state before the 2020 election. The PAC shut down prematurely, having spent $7.2 million to register just 100,000 voters — an unsustainable rate of $72 per voter. To help with the new project, Weekley brought aboard Denis Calabrese, a local Republican consultant and frequent collaborator with a checkered past. Calabrese had only recently emerged from prison for tax evasion; he had since settled a lawsuit brought by his longtime employer, the Arnold Foundation, for taking millions of dollars in kickbacks from the foundation’s contractors. (Neither Weekley nor Calabrese responded to requests for comment.)

Weekley and Calabrese started building out their team of canvassers. Musk cleared his calendar every Friday morning for 30 to 60 minutes to meet with them and the leaders of the team they assembled, whether in person from a home in Austin or via video call from one of his private jets, asking about the website, the super PAC logo and everything else. How many doors had been hit? How many voters registered? Could he hear a recording of the script the canvassers were using? Why not use more humor? When confronted about the labor-intensive scale of the task before him, Musk would wax romantic about state fairs as venues where ordinary Americans with clipboards could organize their neighbors.

As is often the case in a start-up, management hit some rough patches. A few weeks after he requested memos from all the PAC’s vendors, Musk began to grow frustrated with the pace of the progress, a friend said, and Musk decided to make some changes. In July, he brought aboard two Republican operatives who had been cultivating him since the days of the DeSantis campaign, Generra Peck and Phil Cox. They led a sprawling communication and public affairs firm and had been intimately involved in DeSantis’s much-criticized decision to largely outsource his field operation to a super PAC, Never Back Down; it was an arrangement similar to what Musk was executing for Trump.

Peck and Cox quickly took control, firing the company running America PAC’s field operation, which had already been paid about $20 million, and stranding hundreds of carnies across the country. It was effectively dormant for several weeks in July and early August, as Peck and Cox worked to bring in canvassers mostly from their own affiliated firm, Blitz Canvassing. Musk’s defenders and friends say that he was doing what very few megadonors are willing to do and what Musk is famous for doing: fire people who he believes are failing. All that mattered was better positioning the PAC to help Trump win in November, and Musk was making that happen.

Musk was beginning to realize that he might need some additional help with his foray into politics. In late August, he hired an experienced G.O.P. field operative, Chris Young, to help him oversee the PAC. In September, after Young visited Nevada, America PAC shook things up again, cutting ties with the subcontractor it had hired to canvass both there and in Arizona because it believed the group wasn’t hitting enough doors. In October, it effectively acquired the Wisconsin assets of another Trump-aligned super PAC, Turning Point USA, taking on about 200 new canvassers in the state.

America PAC was becoming increasingly central to Trump’s ground game, which worried some people around the campaign. Some senior Trump advisers were privately sharing concerns with one another about America PAC playing such an outsize role in turning out voters. Even Musk was acknowledging that there were problems with his field operation. When one canvasser posted on X about a pay dispute, he replied: “Sorry, so many dumb things happening. Working on fixing.”

Of course, Republican operatives and strategists expressed almost identical anxieties eight years ago. The Trump campaign had virtually no field operation in the 2016 election. It relied instead on free media and in particular on social media, where Trump could reach many millions of voters directly multiple times a day. Twitter and other social media companies had also embedded some of their employees in the Trump campaign, free of charge, to help it more effectively target voters using their platforms. (Twitter offered to do the same for the Clinton campaign, but it declined.) “Facebook and Twitter were the reason we won this thing,” Trump’s digital media director, Brad Parscale, said after the 2016 election.

A very different Republican narrative surrounded 2020. In the intervening years, amid a growing backlash against the deluge of false information and propaganda on social media platforms, Twitter had recalibrated. It banned political advertising and stepped up its efforts at content moderation, seeking to find a balance between free expression and disinformation, misinformation and hate speech. For several days in the run-up to the election, the platform blocked users from linking to a questionably sourced story in The New York Post that featured emails extracted from Hunter Biden’s laptop purporting to show that he had arranged an undisclosed meeting between his father and a Ukrainian executive with whom he worked. (The company at the time wrongly believed that the emails had been obtained by a foreign hacking operation, and it later acknowledged that it was a mistake to block the link.) A right-wing organization, the Media Research Center, subsequently issued a poll claiming to show that the decision cost Trump the 2020 election. Republicans eagerly embraced its findings, turning them into another plank of MAGA’s election denialism. Vance often cites it on the campaign trail when asked if he believes Biden’s election was legitimate.

But now Musk controlled the dial. His Silicon Valley friends were ecstatic when he bought Twitter in late 2022 for $44 billion. Andreessen kicked in $400 million, and Sacks temporarily joined Musk’s leadership team, overseeing the release of the Twitter Files, the internal communications leaked to a handpicked group of sympathetic journalists in late 2022 and early 2023. Among the goals was to prove that the decision to block The Post’s Hunter Biden story was part of a larger collaboration between Twitter and the Biden administration to suppress potentially damaging content to his campaign. In the months that followed, Musk radically remade the platform, which he renamed X, significantly shrinking the large team of trust and safety employees whose job was to prevent disinformation and hate speech from spreading across the platform; restoring the accounts of users who had been barred for violating the platform’s rules; and bringing back political advertising.

Signs of X's new pro-Trump bias became increasingly apparent over the summer. Following the July assassination attempt, a custom-designed mini emoji of Trump raising his fist began appearing next to the hashtag #MAGA; after Harris replaced Biden at the top of the ticket, X’s artificial intelligence bot, Grok, wrongly informed users that the ballot deadline had already passed in nine states, including Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Some of the pro-Trump influencers whose accounts Musk had restored shared baseless rumors that the assassination attempt on Trump was orchestrated by Democrats and spread false stories of voter fraud.

Musk, of course, was the platform’s most powerful driver of pro-Trump content. Trump, at his peak, had about 88 million followers. Musk has more than 200 million. And as the owner of X, he has free rein on the platform. On July 26, he reposted a deepfake video of Harris — in an apparent violation of X’s manipulated-media policy — in which a phony voice-over says, “I was selected because I am the ultimate diversity hire.”

With no meaningful guardrails to stop him, Musk freely championed MAGA’s election-denial crusade, falsely accusing the Democrats of flying illegal voters into swing states and claiming that Arizona was refusing to remove migrants from its voter rolls. In mid-August, he gave Trump two-plus hours of free, friendly media in the form of a livestreamed conversation during which Trump made numerous unchecked false claims. Trump also used the forum to propose that Musk join his administration to lead a “government efficiency commission.” The suggestion excited Musk, whose companies are currently under at least 20 federal investigations and inquiries by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the S.E.C. and other agencies, according to an analysis by The Times. The Trump campaign and X cross-promoted the event, with the campaign running banner ads on the platform’s main page for trending topics and X sending a notification to users featuring Trump’s picture, encouraging them to subscribe to the platform’s streaming service. Even as Musk was operationalizing his company to serve his political agenda, it did not appear to be serving his financial interests. According to an internal corporate document, U.S. advertising revenue, which had already dropped precipitously since his takeover, was $173 million for the three months ending Sept. 30, down 31 percent from the same period last year.

Musk and his fellow techno-utopianists may be dreamers, but they are also pragmatists. When an independent journalist, Ken Klippenstein, published a hacked dossier that the Trump campaign compiled while vetting Vance and then tried to promote his story on X, the campaign reached out to the platform — which did exactly what the Republicans accused Twitter of doing in 2020, suppressing the potentially damaging information by blocking the link and suspending Klippenstein. (Musk later reinstated Klippenstein’s account, saying he wanted to “stay true to free speech principles,” according to messages seen by The Times.) Earlier this month, Musk used his account to solicit signatures, cellphone numbers and addresses for a petition on the PAC’s website, offering $47 to anyone who referred a signatory in a swing state.

Whatever was happening, or not happening, on the ground in the swing states, Musk had turned his social media platform into a 24-hour-a-day persuasion machine, pummeling voters with messages, images and videos on their electronic devices. There was no precedent for this. The Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United ushered in a new era in American politics, giving billionaires a previously unimaginable level of influence over candidates and elections. But this was the first time that one of those billionaires had used the largely unregulated modern communications platform he controlled to advance his political interests.

Musk was way ahead of America’s campaign finance laws, which have not been overhauled since the rise of social media. “If you look at the series of court cases that enabled all of this, one of the underlying assumptions was the reason to allow a corporation like X to spend unlimited amounts of money and say whatever it wants is because corporate America represents a giant sector of our society and our economy,” says Daniel Weiner, the director of the elections and government program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy institute. “But it doesn’t take into account a billionaire using this incredibly important communications platform as a tool to advance his own personal agenda.”

The new donor class had made their bet, though in the end it was a pretty modest one, given their collective wealth. As of the end of September, Sacks and his wife had given a total of $550,000 to Trump’s election effort, less than the price of a couple of tickets to Sacks’s own fund-raiser back in June. Musk had given $75 million to America PAC, a huge sum for anyone else, but not so much for a man now worth roughly $250 billion. “The hilarious aspect is that they are feeding Trump crumbs,” says Michael Moritz, a veteran Silicon Valley V.C. and one of the earliest investors in the company that would become PayPal. “It’s a fantastic return on investment.”

In mid-October, one member of the group had second thoughts about Trump. Ben Horowitz, who has been friendly with Kamala Harris for years, put aside his concerns about the Marxist specter of an unrealized capital gains tax and announced that he would make a “significant” donation to the Harris campaign. Having already given $2.5 million to Trump, he and his wife, Felicia, now donated about $5 million to pro-Harris groups.

The rest were soldiering on. As the election approached, Musk was out front as usual, moving with his senior team to a war room in a hotel in Philadelphia and then to Pittsburgh to focus full time on the campaign. He now speaks to Trump multiple times a week, is doing a series of in-person town halls across the state and has recruited lieutenants from his companies to join him in Pennsylvania.

He and the Silicon Valley MAGA cohort were finished with Democrats, regulators, stability, all of it. They were opting instead for the freewheeling, fortune-generating chaos that they knew from the startup world. They had big dreams and had made the calculus that Trump would create a more hospitable environment in which to realize them. They were going to plant devices in people’s brains, replace national currencies with unregulated digital tokens, replace generals with artificial intelligence systems and much more. “Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress and the realization of our potential,” Andreessen wrote in his manifesto. “We are not victims, we are conquerors.”

Additional reporting by Eric Lipton.

Jonathan Mahler, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, has been writing for the magazine since 2001.

Ryan Mac covers corporate accountability across the global technology industry.

Theodore Schleifer is a Times reporter covering campaign finance and the influence of billionaires in American politics.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5613642&forum_id=2Elisa#48211444)

These people are so MAF that they have a legit opposition now and the playing field is evening.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5613642&forum_id=2Elisa#48211554)

Oh nooooo billionaires are giving money and support to our team, that's bad, because billionaires are sinister and evil, or something

Just a bunch of total losers

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5613642&forum_id=2Elisa#48211670)