To see the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, dancing and jumping like Mick Jagger on the Trump campaign stage, showing off his midriff and belly button, is to be reminded of the truism: Money is the mother’s milk of politics.
That is hardly to say that gargantuan sums are only the remit of the Republican Party.
The Democrats have far out-raised Team Trump this year, bagging a cool billion since Kamala Harris joined the race. Big donors helped force Joe Biden off the ticket — even the presidency was no match against them.
The difference is that Donald Trump – a candidate whose chief calling card is his own wealth – has always made an effort to personalize his billionaire patrons.
In the last Trump White House, Wilbur Ross (Secretary of Commerce), Steve Mnuchin (Secretary of the Treasury), Betsy DeVos (Secretary of Education) and Linda McMahon (Small Business Administrator), all became personalities in their own right, as well as power centers.
To see the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, dancing and jumping like Mick Jagger on the Trump campaign stage, showing off his midriff and belly button, is to be reminded of the truism: Money is the mother’s milk of politics.
Donald Trump – a candidate whose chief calling card is his own wealth – has always made an effort to personalize his billionaire patrons.
They also all got their jobs principally because they showered Trump with cash.
In the past, big donations might have bought you an ambassadorial title, under Trump you could buy real power.
It is one of the stark and bewildering contradictions of Trump’s politics and persona: he is the populist candidate speaking to the economically disenfranchised working man, who at the same time surrounds himself with and courts the attention of some of the world’s most brutish billionaires.
Trump’s most fundamental personal identity is as a billionaire, and his personal comfort zone – on the golf course, at his various clubs, and while cutting business deals – is among them.
Cut to 2024 – and the ascendant billionaires in Trump’s circle include John Paulson, now frequently discussed as a possible next Secretary of the Treasury. Paulson had been a little-known investor before the 2008 financial crisis. But then, by betting against the house market, he made $4 billion nearly overnight.
Making money is substantially different – indeed, bears no resemblance – to regulating the economy and funding government, but Paulson has lavished his wealth on the three Trump presidential bids and now often travels as part of Trump’s entourage.
In April, Paulson hosted a dinner at his $110 million Palm Beach mansion for a long list of other billionaires that netted the Trump campaign more than $50 million.
Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox News, washed his hands of Trump after January 6 and even tried to keep him off Fox’s airwaves, but is now thought to be in regular contact with him, back in the fold – with Trump once again the star of Fox News.
For my podcast (‘Fire and Fury — the Podcast’, hosted with James Truman), I recently interviewed media mogul Barry Diller, who chided his fellow plutocrats for being willing to overlook Trump’s character solely out of their own economic interests.
About Murdoch specifically, Diller – who helped Murdoch start the Fox network – said ‘while Rupert has been, for his entire life, anti-establishment, he has also toadied up to whatever the establishment of the moment is, in the most toady ways.’
Jeff Yass – the Pennsylvanian investor whose secretive wealth may place him near the very top of the billionaire pile – is one of the largest investors in TikTok, a Chinese controlled company, which Trump had long assailed, calling for it to be banned in the U.S. or separated from its Chinese overloads.
After Yass become one of the biggest outside investors in Truth Social – the social media network in which Trump personally holds a 60 percent interest – Trump suddenly became a TikTok booster.
But returning to Elon Musk, who, with $247 billion in the bank, may be in a new league entirely. Musk is copiously funding a variety of Trump-related super PACs, as well as his own vast ‘get out the vote’ effort in Pennsylvania – offering Americans $47 for every swing-state voter they recruit to the MAGA cause.
This is how he got his invitation to take the stage at the ‘Return to Butler’ rally earlier this month.
What does Elon want?
Musk is said to have made his support for Trump contingent on Trump picking JD Vance, who is only 40-years-old, as his running mate.
Trump was originally against electric vehicles, which, as the founder of Tesla, are the basis of Musk’s fortune. But now Trump is for them.
However, Musk, the visionary, likely sees farther than that.
Every election tends to accentuate the alignment of a particular demographic, or strength of a new power center. 2024 may be remembered as the year of the tech bros – a group, billionaire Trump-donors Peter Thiel and Larry Ellison among them, with perhaps more individual financial clout than any before it.
Curiously, there is a belief that it is not so much Trump who the tech bros are supporting but his Vice President JD Vance, whose career has been nurtured by tech money.
Musk is said to have made his support for Trump contingent on Trump picking Vance, who is only 40-years-old, as his running mate.
So consider this: on day one of a new administration, Trump becomes a lame duck – unable to run for a third term – and the jockey to replace him begins, with eyes already focused on Vance.
Diller, in his recent interview with me, described Musk’s mind as ‘capacious, but often addled’. By capacious he meant that Musk has been a visionary able to correctly imagine the contours of the future. Musk sees the steady advance of tech power in the new AI world and is already, perhaps, looking ahead to the complicated regulatory war with government that the tech bros will need to wage in order to come out on top.
That is the strategic power game he may be playing, with Vance as his proxy.
But then, too, you have the ‘addled’ part of Musk’s mind. There are the drugs that he proudly consumes, the lifestyle of multiple women producing his dozen children, and the $44 billion he splurged on Twitter to alienate half his audience.
$247 billion likely makes you believe you can do anything – and that no one can stop you. Billionaires are not subject to the same rules as the rest of us.
As Musk pranced and gyrated and his t-shirt rose to his chest on the stage in Butler, Trump seemed to look at him with bafflement and even horror.
What happens if the megalomania of your billionaire supporters turns out to be even greater and more demanding than your own? Is that the new world Trump was glimpsing on the Butler stage?
