Musk Plans to Gift SpaceX Shares to Kids Through Trump Accounts

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You're listening to Bloomberg Businessweek with Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec on Bloomberg Radio.

Tim Stenovec (0:15)

All right, so he may not be brandishing a chainsaw on stage at campaign events for the GOP. He is, though, opening up his wallet big time for Republicans, giving $158 million to the GOP's main super PAC, backing Senate candidates in September, making the world's richest person, the biggest US political donor for the second straight election cycle. That's according to the latest filings from the Federal Election Commission. We are talking, of course, about Elon Musk. Here to talk about the intersection of money and campaign finance. Bill Allison, he's campaign finance reporter at Bloomberg News. He's there in our Bloomberg News DC Bureau. Bill, good to have you back with Nora and me. Elon, not up on stage, as I said, brandishing that chainsaw. He's doing a lot behind the scenes, certainly financially. Give us an update on what we know.

And is he done? Or we don't know. Who knows?

Bill Allison (1:07)

What we do know is he's poured in just a ton of money of late.

The 158 million you mentioned was not the only donation he made towards the end of September. He also put money into his own super PAC, America PAC. This is the one that does sort of the door-to-door canvassing, knocking on doors. He put $90 million into that. He gave $20 million to the House Republican Super PAC, the Congressional Leadership Fund. So he's really kind of putting a lot of money in late. And really the only time we've ever seen something like this before is when he did this in 2024

Other donors sometimes will come in late with 25, $50 million. The amount of money is really unprecedented.

Carol Massar (1:50)

Yeah. I mean, it seems like this is quite a very unusual thing, especially when you think about the fact that it's more than $330 million for this cycle. Was there any discussion? You mentioned that he donated a lot of money back in 2024 Was there any discussion heading into this season as to whether or not this is a pattern expected to continue?

Bill Allison (2:10)

There was actually a lot of question about that. Obviously, you may remember he had the large falling out with President Donald Trump over the one big beautiful bill and Elon Musk wanted the deficit to be cut much more quickly. They had a very public feuding over social media, Musk on X and Trump on social trading, all kinds of barbs one after the other, Trump threatening to cancel all the SpaceX's contracts.

This eventually calmed down or cooled down, but Musk seemed to be cool to politics. He'd already signaled in May of that year that he was going to spend a lot less money on politics, but here he is. He's back with a vengeance spending more than he did in 2024

Tim Stenovec (2:56)

Who else is spending big time in terms of the GOP?

Bill Allison (3:01)

There are some other big donors. There's Richard Uline, who's the founder of Uline Company, which is a distributing and packaging goods company. He's put in close to, I think now he's crossed $100 million. We've also seen a lot of money from Mark Andresen and Ben Horowitz, who put a lot of money into different super PACs, including Republican super PACs like MAGA Inc., which is Donald Trump's super PAC. There's some traditional donors. There's Jeffrey Yass, who puts in a lot of money into Club for Growth. So we're seeing a lot of the traditional donors who give before. We're seeing newer donors like Elon Musk.

And we're also seeing there's a lot of crypto money that's come in in small Republican super PACs, $10, $20 million from the Winklevoss twins here and there. So it's a pretty diverse group with different interests, but they're all right now putting money in trying to help Republicans avoid what looks like it was going to be a very tough midterm for them.

Tim Stenovec (4:03)

So how much is, and to be fair, I think it happens on both sides of the political aisle, how much is tied to companies who believe that this president, this White House is going to continue to help them in terms of policy? We've seen a lot of crypto executives. We've seen a lot of tech executives. We've certainly seen Elon at the White House, obviously.

So I'm just curious how much of it is just kind of politics as usual.

Bill Allison (4:31)

I think this is really unusual.

Traditionally, I think that super PACs in the past have largely been ideological vehicles. Like when the Adelsons were giving, and obviously Miriam Adelson is still a big donor, but they were really interested in US-Israel policy. There were a host of other things. And their casino interests really weren't driving their big giving. They wanted to. They were very concerned about US society. They're concerned about Israel and foreign policy. And that drove a lot of their giving. And I think that I'm just using them as an example, but most donors are like that. If you want to effect a change in Washington, you can hire a lobbyist and donate to a few members of Congress, which is a lot cheaper than giving hundreds of millions of dollars to a super PAC.