On 13 July this year, an assassin’s bullet grazed the ear of Donald Trump as he turned his head on stage in Butler, Pennsylvania. The whole world saw it and his response: ‘Fight, fight, fight.’ For Elon Musk, this was not just a news event but a galvanising and clarifying moment. He immediately posted a video of the shooting to X and wrote: ‘I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery.’
Musk is different from most people. For him, going all-in really means going all-in. When Trump returned to Butler last month, he was joined on stage by the billionaire. Musk is now one of the most important figures in the team around the President-elect as he prepares his new administration.
From the moment he expressed his support for Trump, Musk not only committed tens of millions of dollars of his own to the campaign, but went around encouraging others to put their own money into it too. His financial resources helped, of course, but it was clear from the moment Musk started funnelling money to Trump that something much more important was afoot.
If the world’s most successful entrepreneur is on your side it’s hard to be portrayed as ‘losers’
In 2016 Musk’s PayPal co-founder, Peter Thiel, expressed his support for Trump at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio. At that point Thiel was an outlier in Silicon Valley, which has historically been dominated by tech or business geniuses whose politics tend to be some way behind the rest of their developmental process.
It was always assumed that if you were in tech you were a Democrat or a libertarian. Thiel broke the taboo of coming out for a Republican candidate – and Trump at that. By the time Musk joined the Trump-train earlier this year, the weather had changed.
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