Tech executive Elon Musk began 2024 by keeping a cautious distance from then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, but as the dramatic election-year events unfolded, Musk went through a political transformation.
The former proud Democrat found himself giving a full-throated endorsement of the former president following the first assassination attempt in Pennsylvania, and by November, Musk was labeled Trump’s “best buddy.”
The tech titan met with Trump in March 2024 but posted on X after the meeting that he had no plans of donating to any 2024 presidential candidates.
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“Just to be super clear, I am not donating money to either candidate for U.S. President,” he said on X at the time.
Throughout the year, Musk grew increasingly vocal about his evolving political views on his social media platform while not fully committing to any endorsements.
Just two years prior, in 2022, he bought Twitter, now known as X, for $44 billion. The acquisition of the social media platform led him on a journey to uncover the company’s previous business practices of using the site’s algorithms to censor free speech and accommodate political pressure.
During an interview with Joe Rogan, Musk expressed his astonishment at Twitter’s deplatforming of Trump.
“When they deplatformed a sitting president, when they deplatformed Trump, that was just insane,” he said.
Musk has spent decades rising to fame as an innovative tech entrepreneur. He has straddled the uber-left worlds of Hollywood and the rich elite of Silicon Valley.
The billionaire dated models and actresses while driving his fast, futuristic cars and building towering rockets with dreams of having a multiplanetary human civilization.
The SpaceX CEO’s celebrity status had grown to the extent that he was making movie cameos and became referred to as a “real-life Tony Stark,” which even led to a cameo in one of Marvel’s Iron Man movies.
His visionary electric-car company, Tesla, had him revered as being at the forefront of the environmental movement. It became a status symbol for celebrities to own one of Musk’s Tesla vehicles.
Embracing Republican MAGA politics had consequences in his celebrity world and would be a big gamble for Musk.
In October, before the election, Musk acknowledged in a sit-down interview with Tucker Carlson that he was aware of the level of risk for his businesses and himself to throw his support behind Trump.
“If he loses, man, what …” Carlson told Musk with a laugh. “You’re f***ed, dude.”
“I’m f***ed. If he loses, I’m f***ed,” Musk said as they both laughed, hinting at the lawfare and aggressive Department of Justice tactics of the Biden-Harris administration.
“How long do you think my prison sentence is going to be? Do you think? Will I see my children? I don’t know,” he added.
“They’ll try to prosecute the company, prosecute me. I mean, the amount of lawfare that we’ve seen taking place is outrageous,” Musk continued.
Musk had attempted to stay out of politics, except for occasional political donations and voting for Democratic Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
According to the billionaire’s biographer Walter Isaacson, Musk was an Obama “fanboy” who once waited in line for six hours to shake Obama’s hand.
Musk, however, shared with his biographer that he once had lunch with Biden when he was vice president but was not impressed.
“I went to lunch with him in San Francisco, where he droned on for an hour and was boring as hell, like one of those dolls where you pull the string and it just says the same mindless phrases over and over,” Musk told Isaacson.
In July, Musk shared criticisms of the Democratic Party for going “so far left.”
“The Democratic Party has moved so far left that the Republican Party is now closest to the center,” Musk said in an X post.
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In 2022, Musk had criticized the Democratic Party as “the party of division & hate” and said he planned to “vote Republican.”
The billionaire executive had increasingly been sharing his frustration with California politics on X. The state was home to where he grew his fortune with startups Zip2, PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX, but increasing lawfare and Democratic politics seemed to cloud his love of the state.
In July, he announced that he was moving his SpaceX and X headquarters from California to Texas, which he had done with Tesla in 2021. Musk also said in his exit announcement from the Golden State that his “final straw” was a new law that prohibited school districts from requiring teachers to notify families about their children’s gender identity changes.
The issue of gender identity hit Musk on a personal level as he struggled with having one of his children become transgender.
In an interview with psychologist Jordan Peterson, the X owner shared that he had been “tricked into signing documents for one of my older boys” during the pandemic for a gender-reassignment surgery.
“This was really before I had any understanding of what was going on, and we had COVID going on, so there was a lot of confusion, and I was told [Musk’s child] might commit suicide,” he said.
Musk added, “I lost my son, essentially. They call it ‘deadnaming’ for a reason. The reason they call it ‘deadnaming’ is because your son is dead.”
During the presidential campaign, the Trump campaign highlighted Vice President Kamala Harris showing support for the use of taxpayer dollars for sex-change surgeries for prisoners.
Musk’s support for Trump led to an influx of campaign cash, and the billionaire stumped for him in the battleground of Pennsylvania during the final stretch of the election.
Following Trump’s win, Musk was seen spending time with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, helping advise on Cabinet plans for the new administration. CNN’s Gloria Borger reacted to the close relationship between Trump and Musk by labeling him “first buddy” to the president.
“I think Musk is becoming like first buddy. He’s hanging around, foreign leaders call, Trump puts him on the phone with them. Think, in a funny way, Donald Trump is in awe of Elon Musk because he’s so rich,” she said on a CNN panel.
I’m happy to be first buddy!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 11, 2024
Musk responded on X to the video of her new nickname for him, and he embraced the title.
“I’m happy to be first buddy!” the X executive said with a laughing emoji.
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Trump later announced that he asked Musk and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy to help lead a newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to cut down the size of the federal government.
The duo were seen on Capitol Hill in December, talking to lawmakers to exchange ideas about how to reinvent the government. Two weeks later, the pair again teamed up on social media to unpack concerns over the massive spending bill in Congress, which upended the voting plans of congressional leadership just before Christmas.
