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Elon Musk Is a New Kind of Political Donor

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2024 › 10 › elon-musk-is-a-new-kind-of-political-donor › 680364

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Over the past three months, Elon Musk has mobilized his many resources—his exceptional wealth, far-reaching online platform, and time—for a cause that could have profound effects on his personal fortune and American society: electing Donald Trump.

Musk is going all in: In addition to donating $75 million to America PAC, a group he founded that backs Trump, he has also temporarily relocated to the all-important swing state of Pennsylvania to effectively run Trump’s get-out-the-vote strategy from a war room he set up in Pittsburgh. He has stumped on the trail, hosting a Trump town hall in the auditorium of a Pennsylvania high school last week and telling locals to go “hog wild” on voter registration. And, in his latest stunt, he has offered $1 million a day to registered voters in swing states who sign an America PAC petition backing the First and Second Amendments—a move that the Justice Department reportedly said might be breaking election laws. His efforts may prove consequential: As my colleague Franklin Foer wrote this past weekend, “If Trump wins, it will likely be by a narrow margin that can be attributed to turnout. Musk can tout himself as the single variable of success.”

Musk is far from the only major donor in this race. Bill Gates has reportedly given $50 million to Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, and various billionaires publicly support Harris or Trump. What distinguishes Musk though, beyond his on-the-ground efforts, is his ownership of X. He can spread information (and disinformation) with ease, and stifle views he doesn’t like, Sophia Rosenfeld, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania, told me in an email. Media owners have always been influential in American politics (Rupert Murdoch, for example, played a prominent role in past elections through his leadership of Fox News). But Rosenfeld noted that Musk’s particular combination of wealth and media control is “unprecedented.”

Musk’s audience is massive on X: His posts, many of which have amplified false and inflammatory rhetoric, get billions of views. Over the weekend he boosted the baseless claim that Michigan had more registered voters than eligible citizens. After Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said that wasn’t true—and that Musk was spreading “dangerous disinformation”—Musk doubled down and accused her of lying to the public. This disinformation had a swift real-world impact: Benson told CBS that her team received harassing messages and threats after Musk’s post. Such rhetoric has the potential to warp how much voters trust election processes. Musk’s America PAC has also been urging people to report examples of “voter fraud” through what it calls the Election Integrity Community on X. Though such fraud remains exceptionally rare, his efforts could further sow distrust in election integrity and lay the groundwork for future claims of a stolen race. (America PAC did not immediately respond to my request for comment.) So prominent is Musk’s role in the MAGA movement that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz joked archly at a recent rally: “I’m going to talk about [Trump’s] running mate …. Elon Musk.”

Musk wasn’t always aligned, at least in public, with such zealotry. He reportedly said that Trump was a “stone-cold loser” in 2020, and he supported Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. Still, as my colleague Charlie Warzel told me last month, Musk’s feelings of being aggrieved and attacked escalated when he faced pushback from liberals after his Twitter takeover; soon after, he began using X as a megaphone for MAGA. And, though his Trump endorsement seemed out of step with his long-standing image as a climate innovator, it is consistent with his rightward drift: Over the past few years, he has reportedly been quietly donating to Republican causes and candidates, including giving $10 million to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis last year for his ill-fated primary run.

The wealthy have long played an outsize role in politics—but Musk, as he so often does, is venturing to new extremes. If Trump wins, Musk’s gamble may pay off handsomely: In addition to a promised role in Trump’s government, he is poised to receive epic government contracts for his companies. But even if Trump doesn’t win, Musk could set a precedent for uber-rich donors getting more directly involved with political campaigns; that could intensify the “oligarchic side of modern American democracy,” Rosenfeld warned. Though Musk’s hands-on, incendiary campaigning methods are chaotic—and possibly illegal—his efforts during this election may pioneer a model for other megadonors looking to reshape a race.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

If Trump loses, will his supporters believe it? Are you a Platonist or an Aristotelian? Michel Houellebecq has some fresh predictions. Be afraid.

Today’s News

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that U.S. and Israeli negotiators will travel to Qatar in the coming days for Gaza cease-fire talks. Former President Barack Obama joined Kamala Harris at a rally in Atlanta tonight. A Los Angeles prosecutor is recommending the resentencing of Erik and Lyle Menendez, who were convicted in 1996 for the murder of their parents, after new evidence surfaced suggesting that their father sexually abused them.

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The Weekly Planet: Cheap solar panels are changing the world, Zoë Schlanger writes. Time-Travel Thursdays: The myths that fueled marijuana’s criminalization have deep roots, Malcolm Ferguson writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Ratpocalypse Now

By Annie Lowrey

Has any man in history talked about “how much he hates rats” more than New York City Mayor Eric Adams? Adams himself posed that question at the city’s inaugural National Urban Rat Summit last month. “Let’s figure out how we unify against public enemy number one: Mickey and his crew.”

Mickey is, canonically, a mouse. But Adams’s campaign against the city’s endemic brown-rat population might be the most effective and highest-profile initiative of his scandal-ridden mayoralty.

Read the full article.

Why Trump and Harris Are Turning to Podcasts

found 9 Oct The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2024 › 10 › why-trump-and-harris-are-turning-to-podcasts › 680199

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Kamala Harris is in the midst of a media blitz this week, including an interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes yesterday evening and an appearance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert tonight. But she is also dipping into the world of mega-popular, not straightforwardly journalistic podcasts—notably appearing on the show Call Her Daddy last weekend. I spoke with my colleague Helen Lewis, who covers the podcast-sphere, about why Donald Trump and Harris are both spending time on these sorts of shows, what these interviews avoid, and how independent podcasters became major players in political media.

The New Mainstream

Lora Kelley: How does the value to the viewer of a traditional press interview—one focused on the specific issues and policies of the race—differ from that of a lifestyle podcast?

Helen Lewis: Roughly speaking, there are two types of sit-down conversations in politics: the accountability interview and the talk-show appearance. One focuses on pinning down candidates on their past statements and their future promises; the other, which most podcasts fall into, tries to understand the candidate as a person. The latter aren’t necessarily soft options—being charismatic and engaging while making small talk or fielding deeply personal questions is a skill in itself. (And I found Donald Trump’s appearance on Theo Von’s podcast, where he talked about his elder brother’s struggle with alcoholism, very revealing indeed.)

But only with the accountability interviews do you get candidates pressed repeatedly on questions that they’re trying to dodge. On Logan Paul’s podcast, Impaulsive, Trump was asked about the transmission of fentanyl over the border, and he got away with rambling about how “unbelievable” the German shepherds Border Patrol officers use are. On Lex Fridman’s podcast, Trump asserted that he could easily sort out the crisis in Ukraine—and that was it. Who needs details? When Kamala Harris went on Call Her Daddy, the host, Alex Cooper, gave her a chance to lay out her message on reproductive rights but didn’t, for example, challenge her on whether she supports third-trimester abortions, which are deeply divisive.

Lora: From the perspective of a political campaign, are there any downsides to appearing on a podcast such as Call Her Daddy?

Helen: The obvious criticism of Harris appearing on Call Her Daddy, which has a young, female audience, is that she already has a big lead among young women aged 18–25. You can say the same about Trump appearing on podcasts that are popular with young men. But both groups contain many people who will be undecided about whether to vote at all.

Lora: Harris has done some traditional press interviews during this campaign cycle, including her 60 Minutes interview yesterday. But are we in a new era in which chats with friendly podcasters rival (or even overtake) traditional media interviews?

Helen: Well, quite. An article I think about a lot is John Herrman’s 2015 “Access Denied,” in which he asked why an A-lister—someone like Kim Kardashian—would give an interview to a celebrity magazine if she had something to sell, instead of simply putting a picture on Instagram. Why cooperate with the old guard of media when they are no longer the gatekeepers of attention? Herrman argued that the traditional media was suffering a “loss of power resulting in a loss of access resulting in further loss of power.”

That dynamic has now migrated to politics. The legacy brands no longer have a monopoly on people’s attention, and the online right, in particular, has been extremely successful in building an alternative, highly partisan media. Fox News is no longer the rightmost end of the spectrum—beyond that is Tucker Carlson’s podcast, or the Daily Wire network, or Newsmax, or Elon Musk’s X.

Now candidates tend to talk to the traditional media only when they want to reset the narrative about them, because other journalists still watch 60 Minutes or whatever it might be. There’s still a noisiness around a big legacy interview that you don’t get with, say, Call Her Daddy—even if more people end up consuming the latter.

Lora: Are these podcasts really doing anything new, or are they largely replicating traditional media interviews without the same standards and accountability?

Helen: The better ones strive for impartiality and don’t, for example, reveal their questions in advance—but many political podcasts are wrapped in an ecosystem where big-name guests mean more advertising revenue, and thus bigger profits for the hosts personally; plus, their only hope of getting a second interview is if the candidate feels the first one was sympathetic. Compare that with 60 Minutes, which interviewed Trump so robustly in 2020 that he has asked for an apology.

I’m as guilty as anyone, but we need to stop treating these podcasts as the “alternative” media when they are absolutely the mainstream these days. The top ones have audiences as big as, if not bigger than, most legacy outlets. If they don’t want to hire all the editorial infrastructure that traditional journalism has (such as fact-checkers, research assistants, etc.), or risk being unpopular by asking difficult questions, that’s on them. Joe Rogan renewed his Spotify contract for $250 million. Alex Cooper signed a deal with SiriusXM this year worth $125 million. We should stop treating the mega-podcasts like mom-and-pop outfits competing with chain stores. They’re behemoths.

Lora: You recently wrote about The Joe Rogan Experience, which is the top-listened-to podcast on Spotify and arguably the most influential behemoth of them all. Why haven’t the candidates gone on the show yet? Who from each ticket do you think would make the most sense as a guest?

Helen: As I understand it, Team Trump would love to get on The Joe Rogan Experience. The two politicians that Rogan adores are Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who are now both working with the Republicans, and Team Trump would hope to encourage some of Rogan’s audience of crunchy, COVID-skeptic libertarians to follow them in moving from the independent/Democrat column to the GOP. But Rogan isn’t a full MAGA partisan like some of his friends, and Trump recently said that Rogan hasn’t asked him to appear.

In any case, I think Rogan would prefer to talk to J. D. Vance, who is very much part of the heterodox Silicon Valley–refugee tendency that he admires. For the Democrats, Harris might struggle to relax into the stoner-wonderment vibe of Rogan, given the tight-laced campaign she’s running. Rogan and Tim Walz could probably have a good chat about shooting deer and the best way to barbecue.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Milton is the hurricane that scientists were dreading. David Frum: Behind the curtain of Mexico’s progress Donald Trump flirts with race science.

Today’s News

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced that roughly 8,000 National Guard members will be mobilized by the time Hurricane Milton, a Category 5 storm, makes landfall this week. The Supreme Court appears likely to uphold the Biden administration’s regulation of “ghost gun” kits, which allow people to buy gun parts and build the weapons at home. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that the Israeli military has killed the replacement successors of the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in an Israeli air strike last month.

Dispatches

Atlantic Intelligence: The list of Nobel laureates now contains two physicists whose 1980s research laid the foundations for modern artificial intelligence, Matteo Wong writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

They Were Made Without Eggs or Sperm. Are They Human?

By Kristen V. Brown

The little clump of cells looked almost like a human embryo. Created from stem cells, without eggs, sperm, or a womb, the embryo model had a yolk sac and a proto-placenta, resembling a state that real human embryos reach after approximately 14 days of development. It even secreted hormones that turned a drugstore pregnancy test positive.

To Jacob Hanna’s expert eye, the model wasn’t perfect—more like a rough sketch … But in 2022, when two students burst into his office and dragged him to a microscope to show him the cluster of cells, he knew his team had unlocked a door to understanding a crucial stage of human development. Hanna, a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, also knew that the model would raise some profound ethical questions.

Read the full article.