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Why Elon Musk Is All In on Donald Trump
CNN One Thing
Oct 23, 2024
Tech billionaire Elon Musk has recently thrown his support behind former President Donald Trump, hitting the campaign trail and pouring tens of millions of dollars into his pro-Trump superPAC. However, he continues to promote election misinformation on his social media platform X. In this episode, we examine what Musk wants out of a second Trump presidency and why his promises to voters in battleground states may violate election laws.
Guest: Phil Mattingly, CNN Chief Domestic Correspondent
Episode Transcript
Former President Barack Obama
00:00:02
Hello, Pittsburgh. Are you fired up?
David Rind
00:00:10
We're at the point of this presidential campaign less than two weeks out now where the campaigns bring out heavy hitters to fire up the crowds and juiced turnout. We've seen people like former President Barack Obama, former Congresswoman Liz Cheney and even the singer Lizzo come out and stump for Vice President Kamala Harris.
Former President Donald Trump
00:00:29
We're honored to be joined tonight by one of the people who is going to help us build this incredible future.
David Rind
00:00:36
But there's been one person who has really been making a lot of noise on behalf of former President Donald Trump recently, both behind the scenes and on the campaign trail.
Former President Donald Trump
00:00:46
His name is Elon Musk.
David Rind
00:00:48
Yes. The world's richest man has gone all in on Trump.
Elon Musk
00:00:52
As you can see, I'm not just MAGA, I'm Dark MAGA.
David Rind
00:00:56
'Musk has already pumped millions of dollars into the pro-Trump super PAC he helped found. He sells two town halls in Pennsylvania. He's even promising to pay $1 million a day to random registered voters that sign on to his America PAC petition.
Elon Musk
00:01:11
Which, if you already believe in the Constitution, you're just signing something you already believe and you can win $1 million. That's awesome.
David Rind
00:01:19
Trump has even floated creating a position for Musk in the federal government. But for someone who leads multiple companies that do business with the federal government and a social media company where election misinformation is running rampant, what exactly is the play here? My guest is CNN's Chief Domestic correspondent Phil Mattingly. We're going to talk about what Musk wants out of a second Trump presidency and why those million dollar giveaways could be illegal. From CNN. This is One Thing, I'm David Rind.
David Rind
00:01:59
So, Phil, the other day I asked you to come on the podcast to talk about Donald Trump and Elon Musk because Musk has become such a visible presence on the campaign trail. I was like, We got to talk about this. And you said you had gone down a big rabbit hole in trying to figure out what is going on here. So what did you find?
Phil Mattingly
00:02:16
I don't think I've been trying to figure out a way to explain this to people kind of outside of our world in the last couple days, because I don't think the public has really gotten their heads around what's happening right now. And the fact that there is no precedent that I can think of, of a single individual putting this much money, this much effort, this much time into electing a president and, by the way, a single individual who stands to benefit financially from a business perspective if that individual wins.
Elon Musk
00:02:53
(Elon! Elon!) Wow.
Phil Mattingly
00:02:55
He seems to be everywhere always, whether it's on the platform that he now owns being X. But also, you know, I was just in Pennsylvania last week. He's everywhere throughout the state.
Elon Musk
00:03:07
Go Steelers.
Phil Mattingly
00:03:08
And it's not just him personally, although he very much is personally involved in this, but it's also his money, you know, and he created a superPAC to to support the former president, Donald Trump. And that superPAC over the course of the last eight weeks has dumped $109 million into the presidential race just on its own, which is an absurd like an obscene sum of money for that close to period of time, that type of a window of time. And then there's the person himself. Elon Musk was somebody who over the course of the last 20 years has really at least said that he's voted only for Democrats until 2022. Wasn't super politically involved is on the record in the past and past cycles talking about how he didn't really want to be involved in politics. And so his kind of personal political evolution, if you think back to 2017, he was on kind of an outside advisory board for Donald Trump in that first year of his administration. Musk resigned from that board after Donald Trump pulled out of the Paris Accords, the climate agreement. They were not friendly with one another as recently as two and a half years ago, where they were kind of in a back and forth on on Twitter now acts with one another, kind of attacking one another.
David Rind
00:04:22
So what changed?
Phil Mattingly
00:04:24
It's a great question. I think that there's there's a couple of different elements here. And with the kind of I would preface with I'm not a psychologist and don't try and understand what if there's a singular thing that is driving anybody's motivations here. What I can say is there's a couple of pieces of this that I think are important to keep in mind as you try and understand Elon Musk's evolution.
Elon Musk
00:04:47
This is this is no ordinary election. The other side wants to take away your freedom of speech.
Phil Mattingly
00:04:54
One is, I think, like a lot of people in the Silicon Valley community, in the wake of Covid, in the wake of what they saw, both in the kind of tech side of things in that space, but also just kind of how they view government. There's been a pretty dramatic shift in the political leanings of Silicon Valley. Not that there are a monolith, but in the sense of it used to be a heavily democratic part of the country, which is now splintered. And I think there are a lot more Republicans there than there used to be. And I think Musk very much tracks along kind of that course.
Elon Musk
00:05:24
You know, it's sort of shocking that I think there's something like 428 federal agencies that that's almost two agencies per year since the founding of the country.
Phil Mattingly
00:05:34
The second is you can't look at Musk and look at his involvement here and not understand that there's very real business implications with all of this. You know, he's got billions of dollars in federal contracts across his companies. We think of Tesla, but also SpaceX as well. He's complained often about investigations that the government has had into his companies bureaucratic issues and regulatory issues that he's had with it.
Elon Musk
00:05:59
With the Trump presidency, we have real opportunity to reduce the size of government, to have a sensible regulation and and and really free the American people to do what they want to do.
Phil Mattingly
00:06:14
And I think Musk is one where if he locks in on something, when you talk to people who've worked with him on the business side of things, when he becomes when he goes all in on something, he becomes like a manic obsessive on some level. And that's why he's been so successful in business. And you can't argue with that even if you don't like how he's done things, where he is all in and all in really means it.
Elon Musk
00:06:34
Get everyone you know to register to vote. And we have a swatch sort of the vote.com I believe that's the site if you and double check that your registration is good don't take it for granted.
Phil Mattingly
00:06:43
His every day is focused on how do I get Donald Trump to the White House.
Elon Musk
00:06:47
I'm just being repetitive about this point because if there's one takeaway for anything that will matter is getting those registrations and then and then getting everyone, you know, to actually vote.
Phil Mattingly
00:06:59
We've seen plenty of billionaire donors drop tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars in elections in the past. It's not that they're giving money that that is not new. It's the scale and the all consuming involvement of Elon Musk and the fact that what he's doing is not just giving money to a political organization. He has started his own political organization, which is entirely focused right now on registering new voters and converting those registrations into actual votes, doing it in a way that is really in a gray area from a campaign finance law perspective and doing it in like kind of layered incentive structures that we've never seen before in the sense of sign this petition. And if....
David Rind
00:07:41
Yeah flesh this out, I've seen him have these big giant paper checks on stage, literally giving people $1 million. Is that just not paying for votes?
Phil Mattingly
00:07:48
So it's technically not in the sense of he has good lawyers around him that are trying to keep this in the realm of the legal system.
Elon Musk
00:07:58
So one of the things we're doing is we want to try to get over a million, maybe 2 million of voters in the battleground states to sign the petition in support of the First and Second Amendment because and.
Phil Mattingly
00:08:15
So this actually started with if you referred somebody to this petition, it's a petition that says you support the first and Second Amendments, your referral, if it is an individual in one of these battleground states, Pennsylvania is the one he's really focused on. Then you get $47 for the referral. Now, what this is doing is he's not paying for registration, which would be illegal. He's paying for the referral to a petition.
Elon Musk
00:08:43
We really want to try to get as many people as possible to to sign this petition. So I have a surprise for you, which is that we are going to be awarding $1 million to randomly to people who have signed the sign, the petition every day from now until the election.
Phil Mattingly
00:09:14
Now he's offering $1 million a day to an individual that has done something similar, signed the petition, referred to somebody to a petition as well.
Elon Musk
00:09:22
So today's person is John Drayer.
Phil Mattingly
00:09:29
Again, he's not paying them for registration.
Elon Musk
00:09:31
By the way, John had no no idea.
Phil Mattingly
00:09:36
But what this does is this is getting a bunch of people who either aren't paying attention to the election, aren't registered, aren't necessarily in this game right now to pay attention to it.
Elon Musk
00:09:45
The only thing we ask for the million dollars is that you be a spokesperson for for the petition. And that's it, really. That's the whole. That's it.
Phil Mattingly
00:09:58
And the hope being that when you sign the petition, what you're doing is you're giving his superPAC your data, right? Then they can chase you. So that in and of itself is kind of a fairly tried and true campaign organization tactic. The way he's doing it, though, the incentive structures he's put around it and the layers of different incentives that he has here are both very much in a gray area. $1 million a day going in a very large check to an individual is not something we've seen a campaign or a donor do before.
David Rind
00:10:25
Yeah. And in the last few days, Musk has kind of reframed this $1 million giveaway as sort of a job opportunity. But the fine print of this arrangement hasn't really changed. So the legality of this is still kind of unclear. But in terms of Musk's companies, space, SpaceX, Tesla, like those companies, do business with the federal government. And Trump has floated this idea of including Musk in the federal government in some kind of non cabinet level post. But wouldn't that just be a huge conflict of interest then?
Phil Mattingly
00:10:55
I mean, yes. And I think that the what's interesting about all this is, okay, so you have, you know, 3 billion, roughly $3 billion across 100 different contracts tied to 17 different agencies in government for Elon Musk's company. So there's a conflict of interest. Whatever Elon Musk is doing with the government, were he to join the administration, which is not a sure thing at this point. But obviously Elon Musk has suggested this Department of Government Efficiency, which could be shortened to Doge, which is a play on cryptocurrency....
David Rind
00:11:31
I didn't even catch that. Good lord.
Phil Mattingly
00:11:33
Dude, this is so I told you I would go down a rabbit hole here. Like there's so many different love. This is literally a meme cryptocurrency that became like, I don't know, it's kind of like a running joke and ended up becoming kind of a meme stock on some level in the crypto space.
Former President Donald Trump
00:11:50
He's a great business guy and he's a great cost cutter. You've seen that. And he said, I could cut costs without.
Phil Mattingly
00:11:56
Effect, but if you put Elon Musk in charge of efficiency in the government, putting together a commission to make cuts and decide which agencies should exist and which agency shouldn't.
Former President Donald Trump
00:12:06
We have a new position. Secretary of cost cutting. Okay. Elon wants to do that and we haven't.
Phil Mattingly
00:12:12
Yeah, there's there's clearly conflicts there because you can't tell me and Musk has never said I'm going to separate my business interests from government. And he has always kind of commingled the two together. And so I think when people look at this from a well, if Trump wins and wants Elon to run this commission and Elon accepts and certainly moves into this position, there are a lot of issues here.
David Rind
00:12:48
'So you mentioned that Musk is kind of doing all this stuff in battleground states to try to, you know, ramp up the ground game, get people out to vote. But at the same time, he is on the social media platform. He owns eggs peddling election misinformation. Like, doesn't that seem to be at cross-purposes that he's kind of digging the trust of the election, but at the same time still wants people to get out there and vote? Like, I don't get it.
Phil Mattingly
00:13:13
You know, I think the hard part about this and this isn't just what he's doing on access, although that's clearly kind of the most prevalent platform for him. It's also what he's done during these the speaking series that he's been doing in Pennsylvania, this series of town halls.
Elon Musk
00:13:26
You know, when you when you have mail in ballots and no no sort of proof of citizenship, it becomes almost impossible to prove cheating is the issue.
Phil Mattingly
00:13:36
That one of these town halls. You know, anybody can ask any question. He was asked about Dominion Voting systems. And if you forget about Dominion voting systems as Fox News, how they feel about Dominion voting systems, they lost a couple hundred million dollars because of spreading falsehoods repeatedly over the course of the weeks following the 2020 election. Elon has decided to dive right back into that and continue to raise questions.
Elon Musk
00:14:00
As a sort of question of like, say, the Dominion voting machines. It is weird that the you know, I think they're used in Philadelphia and in Maricopa County, but not in a lot of other places. And that seemed like a heck of a coincidence.
Phil Mattingly
00:14:15
So the real tangible risk at this moment in time, both from the speaking series but also from what Musk has been tweeting on a regular basis, is he is framing everything through the lens of there is no way Donald Trump can lose this election unless there is fraud. There is no way Donald Trump can lose this election unless there is cheating. There is no evidence and I want to make this is abundantly clear as possible that there is any fraud or any cheating happening right now. And I think the risk there, you only need to go back to 2020. And I think so much of what's happening right now is framing things through the lens of there are millions of people in this country who, if they wake up at the end of election week because we don't really do election night anymore and see that Kamala Harris has won, they will only have one view. And that view is that this was stolen. And that is a huge problem, not just for trust in government and the country and all that type of stuff. It is a huge problem in the sense of like what happens after that.
David Rind
00:15:12
And we've seen how Republicans have pressured the social media companies like X to kind of cut down on the moderation of this election, misinformation in recent years, which is obviously a huge problem. But I guess I'm wondering, those conversations that are taking place online, the social posts that Musk promotes, are they being seen by the persuadable voter out there in Pennsylvania or Georgia or somewhere like that? Like how much does the online gravitate offline and into the voting booth?
Phil Mattingly
00:15:41
It's a really good question, and it's something that I've asked kind of almost everybody I've spoken to when we've been out on the ground, like, how much are you on X? Do you care when any of these people are saying? And I think being on the ground in Pennsylvania, particularly last week, now that Musk has really kind of gone all in there, the question is, what impact is this? Right?
Phil Mattingly
00:16:00
What does Elon Musk's presence at one of those rallies do? We've never seen it before. He's never done it before.
Rico Elmore
00:16:06
That's true. So what does Elon Musk being present at this rally, it showed that you can't change because Elon Musk wasn't someone who was 100% behind President Trump before.
Phil Mattingly
00:16:22
And the way one Republican who's working on the ground there framed it to me is they're not totally sure that at this stage in the race, this kind of money will actually change the game to run an effective ground game, to really reach voters, to really connect, boost registration, turn that registration converted into actual votes. You need to have been working over a period of months. What they seize on is the fact that, like for the Republican Party, Elon Musk is a celebrity.
Rico Elmore
00:16:48
I think it just revitalizes the whole movement. And that goes to reinforce. Knocking on doors is important.
Phil Mattingly
00:16:54
Elon Musk is somebody that people are drawn to. And so what they think is most important in this whole thing is that it will draw more eyeballs, it will draw more attention, and therefore that should translate into more registrations. And their hope is those registrations can be converted.
David Rind
00:17:11
And for Trump, it's the money is great. But just having somebody recognizable who has a fan base. Yes. Where's that is the even say like that's that's the thing.
Phil Mattingly
00:17:20
That's the thing. And it's real and it very much and I think this is a kind of a broader how the the ground game quilt for the Trump operation is actually working that people haven't totally put together yet in the sense of when Trump's doing these podcasts with kind of influencers that aren't necessarily the people you would think would be civic minded necessarily all the time. All of those podcasts, all those showing up, the UFC, showing up at a Steelers game. So like, those are targeted. Those are intentionally going after a cohort in the electoral landscape that Trump does very well in in polling, but also doesn't often vote. And I'm thinking particularly here with younger men and that they're hoping to be able to turn that into an operation where these people register, these people vote because they have these influencers that are validating the idea of. And I think Musk very much fits into that category, although he's kind of his own his own entity here on some level.
David Rind
00:18:15
Well, you did tell me before we started that you went down a rabbit hole in this stuff. And I feel like I've come back out a little bit more clear understanding. So I appreciate that, though.
Phil Mattingly
00:18:23
I hope so. I would say the one thing I would say is that, like, we don't know how this is all going to end. But when you talk to people around kind of the Trump operation who are watching it on team work, they will all say to a person, hey, we'd rather have this than not, and we'll see what it actually amounts to in the end.
David Rind
00:18:47
Just two reminders before we go today. If you're listening to this on Wednesday, do not miss the CNN presidential town hall with Vice President Kamala Harris. Tonight at 9 p.m. Eastern. CNN invited Trump to do one as well. He declined. And remember, with early voting underway, if you have any questions about voter registration, mail in ballots, ID rules, anything at all related to this election? Head over to CNN's dot com slash vote for the CNN Voter Handbook. It's super helpful. You'll find something useful there. Again, that's cnn.com/vote.
David Rind
00:19:29
One Thing is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by me, David Rind. Our senior producers are Felicia Patinkin and Faiz Jamil. Matt Dempsey is our production manager. Dan Dzula is our technical director, and Steve Licktieg is the executive producer of CNN Audio. We get support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, Jon Dianora, Leni Steinhardt, Jamus Andrest, Nichole Pesaru and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks to Andrew Seger, Wendy Brundidge and Katie Hinman. We'll be back on Sunday. Talk to you then.
