Musk aims for pinpoint landing on the White House

Would Donald Trump’s supporters vote for Elon Musk?

Musk’s name isn’t on the ballot, but as Election Day nears, this has emerged as one of the most intriguing questions of this year’s presidential campaign.

The world’s richest man has said he voted for his first Republican in 2022. He began this year as a supporter of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and didn’t publicly endorse Trump until after the failed assassination attempt in July. But as the New York Times outlined in a lead story Sunday, Musk in recent months “has involved himself in the U.S. election in a manner unparalleled in modern history,” pouring gigantic sums into the effort to re-elect Trump, and coordinating X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, with the former president’s campaign.

Musk has become so enthusiastically involved in the campaign of someone he’s never voted for that he’s set up a war room outside Pittsburgh and, according to the Times, is contemplating making his own campaign bus tour across Pennsylvania.

Which brings us back to the question we started with. Would the Trump campaign really be comfortable with Musk, who described himself as “dark MAGA” at a rally last week, rolling around this election’s most crucial state making the final campaign pitch?

In many ways, Musk is the sort of brilliant yet brutal businessman that Trump only played on television. In other ways, he could give new energy to the Democrats’ “weird” riff.

Musk is much more interested in promoting cryptocurrencies and colonizing Mars than that issue you see in virtually every Trump ad. Immigration might, in fact, be a touchy question for Musk, a South African who arrived in this country through Canada. So there are reasons why Trump’s advisors might flinch at Musk’s more public involvement in this campaign.

It’s an understatement to say Trump will owe Musk big time if he wins. Virtually all the Republican canvassing activities that previously were handled through the Republican National Committee have been outsourced to Musk’s America PAC. In eight battleground states, America PAC is offering canvassers $47 for every signature they get on a petition pledging support for the First and Second Amendments as a way to identify likely Trump voters. And in a sense, the entire $44 billion Musk spent to buy Twitter could be considered as an investment in the Trump campaign’s media outreach.

When Maria Bartiromo asked Trump on Fox News Sunday how he’d cut government waste in a second administration, he deferred the question to his newfound ally.

“Let me have you ask another person that, because I’m going to have Elon Musk, he is dying to do this, you know, he’s a great business guy, actually,” Trump replied. Musk “doesn’t want to be in the cabinet, he just wants to be in charge of cost-cutting,” he continued. “We’ll have a new position. Secretary of Cost Cutting. OK? Elon wants to do that.”

So who shows up for the first day at this new post, the brilliant entrepreneur who heads SpaceX, which performed the pinpoint landing of a booster rocket last weekend, or the would-be world influencer who fired half Twitter’s global staff within a week of buying the company, changed its name to X, and so far has lost $25 billion on his investment?

No doubt, Musk also wants a lot of things that don’t involve showing up for work at the White House. SpaceX has already been the recipient of more than $10 billion in various subsidies, contracts and tax breaks. India’s space program, just for comparison, pulled off a soft landing on the moon last year for a total of about $150 million. Then there’s Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency, Dogecoin, and of course Tesla, Neurolink and Musk’s plan to land spaceships on played-out oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.

If he did accept some kind of special position in a second Trump administration, Musk would have a strong ally in J.D. Vance, a protege of Peter Thiel, Musk’s sometimes partner and occasional rival. And as Trump put it, he’s dying to do this. The question returns again: Is this who the average Trump voter would want to be running things if they had a say?