Fact Check: Elon Musk Could Donate $45M Per Month to Trump Campaign for 462 Years?

Claim:

Elon Musk could sustain a monthly donation of $45 million to a pro-Trump super PAC for 462 years.

Rating:

Mostly True ( About this rating? )

What's True:

The exact number of years changes based on how Musk's wealth grows or shrinks on a day-by-day basis, but it is approximately correct as long as Musk maintains a net worth of around $250 billion. However …

What's False:

… to sustain such a donation, it would require Musk to spend every cent he owns on the Trump campaign and not on his other business or personal interests, which is extremely unlikely.

On July 16, 2024, The Wall Street Journal published an article reporting that Elon Musk, the owner of Tesla, SpaceX and social media platform X, said he would donate $45 million per month to a pro-Donald Trump super political action committee — best known as a super PAC.

Musk officially endorsed Trump just after the attempt on the former president's life on July 13. However, he responded to The Wall Street Journal's post on X linking to the article with a meme reading " Fake Gnus ."

Regardless, a user on Reddit crunched the numbers and calculated that Musk could sustain a $45 million donation to Trump's campaign every month for 462 years. Snopes readers emailed asking us whether this was true.

The most comprehensive source for the net worth of the world's richest people was Forbes' Billionaires List , which is updated in real time. As such, the calculations we performed were approximate. According to the list, Musk , currently the richest person in the world, had a net worth of around $244.7 billion at the time of this writing.

Elon Musk is donating $45,000,000/month to Trump's campaign. With his wealth he could sustain that for 462 years. Eat the rich.
by u/Ipoopoo69 in antiwork

By dividing the SpaceX owner's net worth by the proposed $45 million donation per month, we found that Musk could sustain the donation for roughly 5,438 months. Dividing that number by 12 converts it into years, which gave us a final approximation of 453 years and two months.

This was a bit lower than the 462 years suggested by the post on Reddit. However, doing the math in reverse, we found that when the Reddit user performed these calculations, Musk's net worth was approximately $249.5 billion.

Elon Musk was the world's richest person at the time of this writing, according to Forbes. (Forbes)

In one regard, these numbers could be taken as a minimum, not as a maximum — the world's richest person isn't just going to stop making money, after all.

However, sustaining such a donation would require Musk to spend every cent he is worth on the Trump campaign and not on his other business or personal interests, which, in reality, is extremely unlikely.

Given that $45 million is less than 0.02% of the billionaire's total net worth, it didn't seem out of the realm of possibility that he could make enough money to sustain a monthly $45 million donation indefinitely. Snopes attempted to look at trends in Musk's net worth to determine whether this was possible, but we could not find a suitable data source and were therefore unable to draw a conclusion.

Sources:

Conger, Kate, and Ryan Mac. "Elon Musk Enters Uncharted Territory With Trump Endorsement." The New York Times , 16 July 2024. NYTimes.com , https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/16/technology/elon-musk-trump.html. "Elon Musk." Forbes , https://www.forbes.com/profile/elon-musk/. Accessed 19 July 2024. Mattioli, Dana, et al. "Elon Musk Has Said He Is Committing Around $45 Million a Month to a New Pro-Trump Super PAC." The Wall Street Journal , 16 July 2024, https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/elon-musk-has-said-he-is-committing-around-45-million-a-month-to-a-new-pro-trump-super-pac-dda53823. "Musk Plans to Give $45 Mln a Month to New Pro-Trump PAC, WSJ Reports." Reuters , 16 July 2024. www.reuters.com , https://www.reuters.com/world/us/musk-plans-commit-around-45-million-month-new-pro-trump-super-pac-wsj-reports-2024-07-16/. Pequeño, Sara. "Elon Musk Makes It Official: He's All-in on Trump and Is Donating Money to Prove It." USA TODAY , https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2024/07/18/elon-musk-donation-trump-super-pac/74442804007/. Accessed 19 July 2024. "Real Time Billionaires." Forbes , https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/. Accessed 19 July 2024. 'X.Com'. X (Formerly Twitter) , https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1812256998588662068. Accessed 22 July 2024.