Two major news outlets have reported that Elon Musk is set to give $45 million a month to a Super Pac focused on electing Donald Trump in the upcoming election.
In the United States, a political action committee (PAC) is a tax-exempt organisation that pools campaign contributions from members and donates those funds to campaigns for or against candidates.
The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg have both reported that the X (formerly Twitter) owner is contributing sizeable amounts to one such fund, thought to be in the tens of millions of dollars per month.
With an estimated net worth of $252 billion, Musk is one of the richest people in the world, and sets to benefit handsomely if Trump comes good on promises made to billionaires in the run-up to the election.
Trump’s 2017 tax cut reduced income tax rates for the vast majority of Americans, including top earners and most lower-income workers.
Many of its provisions are set to expire in 2025, including a break for owners of so-called pass-through businesses – entities that are not taxed because the profits flow through to the owners, who are individually taxed – that are favoured by hedge funds, private equity partnerships and privately held companies.
If Musk follows through with a donation of this scale, it would be “an extraordinary sum”, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing the largest known donation of the 2024 cycle so far as the $50m contributed to a Super Pac supporting Trump “by the great-grandson of banker Thomas Mellon”.
As of 30th June, Musk had not made any donations to the Super Pac, according to a review of records by the New York Times.
But the America Pac has already been backed by some of Musk’s friends and allies in the tech world, including Joe Lonsdale, who co-founded the software company Palantir with Peter Thiel, a major political donor to Trump’s newly named vice-president, the Ohio senator JD Vance.
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