Elon Musk’s $100 Million-Plus Gift to Trump
Mother Jones illustration; Evan Vucci/AP
Billionaire-troll Elon Musk is dumping untold millions of his $240 billion fortune into helping Donald Trump regain the White House. In the final sprint of the campaign, he’s doling out (perhaps illegally) $1 million checks to registered voters in swing states who have signed a petition sponsored by America PAC, which he created and funded with at least $75 million. It’s possible he’s contributed additional millions through untraceable donations to pro-Trump dark money groups (which he has done in the past). And there’s another way Musk is boosting Trump: He’s essentially providing him tens of millions of dollars’ worth of social media posts for free.
Every day, Musk, who tweets and retweets dozens of posts on X, the social media site he bought two years ago for $44 billion. (It’s now estimated to be worth $9.4 billion). In recent weeks, many of his X posts have been about the 2024 election and have avidly promoted pro-Trump messages. With Musk’s 202 million followers (more than twice the number of Trump’s followers on X) and with an algorithm Musk asked to be rigged to boost his own tweets, these posts have racked up a large number of impressions—the number of times a tweet is seen by a user on the platform. Each of his posts can draw tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, or tens of millions impressions. That’s a lot of reach.
I examined Musk’s timeline for several days this month (October 19, 21, and 22) and focused on tweets that explicitly advocated the election of Trump or that advanced pro-Trump themes—and that each drew at least 1 million impressions. These were posts that could have served as Trump campaign ads. This group totaled 54 tweets.
The posts in this subset covered various aspects of the election. Musk reposted a tweet that declared that if the Democrats win in 2024, there will be no “meaningful elections in the future” (17 million impressions). Another featured video of him saying the media was manipulating the government to help the Biden-Harris administration (23 million impressions). In one, Musk called for people to put up Trump yard signs and wear MAGA merchandise (38 million impressions). He retweeted former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard proclaiming a Kamala Harris victory will be “the end of democracy in the United States” (53 million impressions). One post exclaimed, “Kamala hates Christians” and amplified the baseless claim that she had disparaged rally attendees because these disrupters shouted “Jesus is Lord” (43 million impressions). Another featured video of Musk at one of his pro-Trump events in Pennsylvania (28 million impressions). A post spread the false assertion that Michigan had more registered voters than eligible voters (32 million impressions). In another, Musk shared a meme stating that the Republican platform included multiple issues—such as free enterprise, secure borders, honest elections, real journalism, and moral standards—and the Democratic platform had only one: “Hate Trump” (79 million impressions).
One popular Musk post featured an AI image of Donald Trump as a beefed-up Pittsburgh Steeler (83 million impressions). He retweeted a meme showing a Venn diagram for “[Jeffrey] Epstein’s Guest List” and “Diddy Guest List,” with the overlap labelled as “All the celebrities coming out to support Kamala Harris” (97 million impressions). He put up a photo of him, Trump, and a Tesla race car (75 million). He boosted a post with a chart predicting a Trump win (65 million impressions). In one post, Musk urged people to vote early (25 million impressions). He retweeted a post that assailed Minnesota governor and vice presidential candidate Tim Walz (18 million impressions) and one claiming the Democratic criticisms of Trump are “all basically lies” (24 million impressions).
During these days, Musk also posted regularly about about many contentious issues and subjects—government spending and regulation, abortion, woke-ism, censorship, the media, vaccine skepticism, and transgenderism—in a manner that would bolster the case for Trump. As Bloomberg reported recently, Musk is now X’s “biggest promoter of anti-immigrant conspiracy theories” and “debunked theories of undocumented voters swaying the US election.”
What might be the financial value of all Musk’s tweeting for Trump?
Let’s start with the impressions Musk received for his posts. The 54 election-related tweets that each collected over a million impressions during these three days—and there were many other posts concerning the election that drew fewer impressions—totaled 1.273 billion impressions.
How much would it cost someone to obtain so many impressions? There are two ways for an X user to buy impressions. You can purchase ads or you can pay X to promote a post.
Ad rates may vary, depending on the customer and the nature and size of the advertising campaign. But there is a good point of comparison, and it involves Musk’s own PAC.
From early July through October 1, America PAC purchased 59 ads on X targeting swing states for more than $166,000, according to the social media platform’s political ad disclosure data. These ads yielded 32,058,424 impressions. Based on these figures, one can calculate that it costs about $5,000 to score a million impressions with a political ad. (Impressions will also be affected by how many users repost or engage with them.) This, of course, is a rough estimate. It’s possible that Musk’s super PAC got a family-and-friends discount or, on the other hand, that X charged it top dollar in order to transfer funds into the financially-challenged company.
There’s another way to calculate the cost of a million impressions. X offers users the opportunity to boost the reach of an individual post. You may have seen the “Promote” button that is attached to some tweets. When I recently clicked on it, I was informed that for $5,000 that particular post—which had political content—could be zapped to between 55,000 to 1.3 million people over the course of one day. That’s quite a spread, and the fine print read, “Estimated reach is approximate. Actual reach can’t be guaranteed.” But it seems that if I wanted to come close to placing my tweet in front of a million pairs of eyeballs, I’d have to part with $5,000. (Per the caveat, I might end up with far less.)
With these two calculations, it appears X views the monetary value of 1 million impressions as about five thousand smackers. X, which no longer responds to requests from journalists, did not reply to an email inquiring about this and Musk’s posts.
If that figure is approximately correct, the 1.2 billion impressions Musk’s posts gathered over those three days were worth about $6 million. Assuming these were normal days for Musk the tweeting-maniac, he’s putting up about $2 million worth of posts a day to help elect Trump. (That number would be much higher if you factored in the posts on the election that didn’t exceed a million impressions and the posts related to issues that are a boon for Trump.) Add this up over the entire election—Musk endorsed Trump in July—and the value of Musk’s pro-Trump tweets could top $100 million. It might even reach double that and approach a quarter of a billion dollars.
Media tycoons have always been able to assist their preferred candidates with endorsements and favorable coverage. (See Murdoch, Rupert.) What Musk is doing is of a different nature. He’s posting multiple endorsements a day and promoting disinformation that bolsters Trump on a site that claims to have no editorial or political position. While he once proclaimed Twitter should be politically neutral, his excessive, nonstop rah-rahing for Trump has tilted its playing field. Musk has also permitted prominent extremists, conspiracy theorists, and purveyors of disinformation once bounced from Twitter to return to the site, and this band of posters skews dramatically pro-Trump.
Musk’s posts are not technically ads or campaign donations. Nor are the millions of election-related posts tweeted by X’s users (myself included), which depending on their salience or creativity, might garner many impressions. And neither are the commentaries of cable news hosts or newspaper columnists who may favor or oppose a particular candidate. But Musk’s relentless posting for Trump—amplified by the algorithm of the platform he controls—functions as an ad campaign. In a way, he has turned X into his personal plaything, and he has been using it to influence the presidential race to benefit Trump, who has vowed to put Musk in charge of government cost-cutting and regulatory review if he wins the White House. This is oligarchy in action.
Musk is a fortunate fellow. He has the bucks that have allowed him to become one of the biggest donors of the 2024 campaign. The money he has poured into America PAC is financing what are supposed to be extensive get-out-the-vote operations for Trump in swing states. And there’s no telling whether Musk—a major government contractor who yearns for a federal government that will eviscerate regulations that affect his companies—is also slipping big amounts of dark money to other pro-Trump endeavors. Meanwhile, Musk is acting like Trump’s running-mate, leaping about at rallies and holding his own campaign events, as if he were on the ticket. He has broken new ground in American politics, for he has shown us what it might be like for a political candidate (or the backer of one) to control an entire social media platform. (Trump, with his flailing Truth Social site, doesn’t count.) In doing so, Musk has supplied Trump tens of millions of dollars—maybe much more—in free messaging. It might well be one of the biggest gifts in the history of US politics. Or is it more of a payment for future services?