Elon Musk’s Super PAC Has Spent Over $50 Million to Elect Trump
The tech mogul’s political operation is one of the top spenders in the country this cycle.
By Donald Shaw and David Moore, Sludge
The super PAC formed by tech billionaire Elon Musk to support the election of Donald Trump has already spent more than $50 million to back Trump and oppose Democratic nominees Kamala Harris and Joe Biden.
The group, called America PAC, crossed the $50 million spending mark on the presidential contest on September 6, according to Federal Election Commission records. Its total spending on the presidential race currently stands at $53.9 million, making it currently the fourth-highest spending super PAC on federal elections in the 2023-24 cycle.
With initial funding from Musk’s close associates, including several billionaire Silicon Valley Trump supporters, the outside spending group America PAC has rushed in to fill areas of need for the Trump re-election campaign. For one, the group is writing big checks for door-to-door canvassing operations, shouldering the cost for a Trump campaign that is lagging behind Harris in direct fundraising. For another, Musk’s super PAC is hugely ramping up its spending on digital ads geared toward helping to get out the vote by encouraging supporters of Trump to get registered or request absentee ballots.
Musk created America PAC in May, and it is co-led by Musk’s close political confidante Joe Lonsdale, a venture capitalist and the co-founder of Palantir. Lonsdale Enterprise has donated $1 million to the group. Other close friends and associates of Musk have also given to the group, including his companies’ investors such as former Tesla board member Antonio Gracias, venture capitalist John Hering, billionaire investor Doug Leone, and Sequoia Capital general partner Shaun Maguire.
The donors who have provided the vast majority of America PAC’s funding are unknown and will likely remain that way until it is required to file disclosures on October 15. In July, the Wall Street Journal reported that Musk was planning to give the group $45 million per month until the election, but the Tesla and SpaceX owner has denied that report, saying on X that he is “making some donations to America PAC, but at a much lower level.”
The America PAC has also begun spending more than $2 million on digital ads to help Republican candidates in more than a dozen swing seats in the House of Representatives, according to Business Insider.
Musk has never before been a major donor to political groups. His largest ever political donations are $50,000 that he gave to the McCarthy Victory Fund in 2017 and $35,800 that he gave to the Obama Victory Fund in 2011, according to Federal Election Commission records. Musk’s political giving has crossed both sides of the aisle, but in the past five or so years he has moved solidly behind the Republican Party. Musk, with a net worth of $250 billion according to Forbes, has recently embraced the idea of serving in a Trump cabinet, a proposal floated publicly by Trump soon after the oligarch hosted the former president in a friendly X interview last month.
According to an Aug. 2 report from CNBC, America PAC’s voter registration ads were being used to harvest data and did not actually help some people get registered. For people in solid blue or red states, the ads’ landing pages would direct them to voter registration pages for their states, but for people in competitive states, the webpages would ask them to enter personal information and then simply direct them to a “thank you” page or back to the start page.
Last month, after election officials in Michigan and North Carolina said they would investigate the PAC’s website practices, America PAC dropped any mention of voter registration from its homepage and now simply asks visitors to pledge to vote. The landing pages for America PAC’s targeted social media ads now appear to direct people in battleground states to government websites where they can begin the voter registration process.
America PAC has stepped up its spending in the past month or so, shelling out more than $32 million on the presidential race since restarting spending on August 12 following a mid-summer lull. Overall, canvassing costs have taken up nearly two-thirds of America PAC’s independent expenditures, more than $34 million so far, according to FEC data.
The Trump campaign has reportedly outsourced to America PAC much of its canvassing and get-out-the-vote operation, a form of coordination between campaigns and ostensibly independent super PACs that was given a greenlight in an FEC opinion earlier this year. In typical fashion, Musk’s super PAC has not been without its share of shake-ups. In mid-July, America PAC dropped much of its roster of consultants and tapped former staffers for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, including former campaign manager Generra Peck, who has reportedly become aligned more closely with Musk, as well as former DeSantis adviser and super PAC head Phil Cox.
America PAC has spent more than $7.3 million so far on digital media ads championing Trump and attacking “radical” Kamala Harris, much of it on Meta platforms, where the group has spent nearly $1.7 million, largely on Facebook, according to data from the company’s Ad Library. In the past week, America PAC has been one of the top 10 political advertisers across Meta platforms, where it is targeting ads at users in swing states like Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
In a sharp contrast with the 2020 presidential contest, many of America PAC’s ads tout Trump’s support for absentee voting and early voting by Republicans—a sudden shift after Trump for years had attacked mail-in voting, claiming without evidence that it would encourage “fraud.” One America PAC ad on Meta reassures users: “President Trump said it best: Absentee Voting, Early Voting, Election Day Voting — Are ALL good options to ensure your vote is COUNTED this November!” Another Meta ad reads, “President Trump is the American Badass we need back in the White House. Stop the weakness. Elect Badass American, Donald Trump, this November.” A third ad proclaims, “Donald Trump took a bullet for our country. He needs your vote to save America.”
A trickle of America PAC spending is finding its way to Musk’s social media platform X: the group has spent about $87,000 on nearly 40 X posts to target users in swing states including Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan, according to data from X’s political ad disclosure. America PAC’s X ads have received more than 19 million impressions.
America PAC is also spending millions of dollars on pro-Trump and anti-Harris ads delivered through paid mail, text messages, and phone calls, not to mention around $190,000 on shirts, hats, and signs.
The individuals behind only about 17% of the amount America PAC has spent so far in 2024 races were disclosed in the super PAC’s first quarterly filing with the FEC, which identified the donors giving a total of $8.75 million to the group through June 30. Some of America PAC’s initial donors have also been among the dozens of billionaires donating to Trump’s campaign groups, with figures like Lonsdale and Maguire seeking to cultivate a base of MAGA supporters in Silicon Valley.
Other donors to America PAC include Gemini cryptocurrency exchange co-founders Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss ($250,000 each), coal company Alliance Resources CEO Joe Craft ($1 million), Jimmy John’s founder James Liautaud ($1 million), Jack Link’s CEO Troy Link ($500,000), and PayPal co-founder Kenneth Howery ($1 million). Howery, a member of the “PayPal Mafia” of early employees, was formerly a Trump administration ambassador to Sweden. The Winklevoss twins, who recently donated around $1 million apiece in Bitcoin to a Trump joint fundraising committee, reportedly attended a June fundraiser with Trump and J.D. Vance in San Francisco that was hosted by venture capitalist and podcast co-host David Sacks.