Elon Musk Reverses Course on Pledge to Donate $45 Million a Month to Pro-Trump PAC

Elon Musk was cheered throughout the MAGAverse when The Wall Street Journal reported that he had pledged to donate $45 million per month to a Super PAC supporting former President Donald Trump’s campaign – but, like so many past Muskian vows, he’s now backing away.

The July 15 Journal article cited multiple sources “familiar with the matter” to report that Musk “has said he plans to commit around $45 million a month” to the “America PAC,” which he had founded along with other techworld supporters including Palantir Technologies co-founder Joe Lonsdale and the Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss.

As the Journal noted, Musk initially responded to the report with a “FAKE GNUS” meme, but then followed that up with a reply tweet about an hour later saying “Yeah” to a tweet bashing the “woke left” that stated “Elon Musk went from being an Obama voter to pledging $180 million to elect DJT.”

Musk then directly rejected this pledged largesse to the Trump campaign in an interview with podcaster Jordan Peterson that was posted on The Platform Formerly Known as Twitter on Monday evening.

From a report by Fortune summarizing the interview:

Elon Musk is not spending $45 million a month to elect former President Donald Trump, though he has created a new super political action committee (PAC) to fund the Republican candidate, the billionaire told conservative commentator Jordan Peterson during an interview Monday evening.

During the interview, which was hosted on Musk’s platform, X, Peterson asked Musk if he had “shocked” himself by donating a substantial amount of money to Trump’s campaign. Musk – who has previously criticized Trump, calling him a “bull in a china shop” – paused to correct the “media.”

“What’s been reported in the media is simply not true,” Musk said. “I am not donating $45 million a month to Trump.”

Pressed for further explanation by Peterson, Musk offered a bit of a diss to MAGA, Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan, saying that he was not a part of that, but instead did not want the America PAC to be “hyperpartisan” and viewed his own principles as “MAG,” or “Make America Greater.”

“I don’t prescribe to [a] cult of personality,” Musk added.

In May 2022, Mediaite’s Michael Luciano catalogued some of Musk’s extensive list of facetious claims, hyperbolic self-puffery, and other promises that failed to materialize into actual real world results, back before a Delaware Court forced him to actually complete his contract to buy Twitter at what most analysts describe as a wildly inflated price. Since that article was published, Musk has managed to get the Tesla CyberTruck into the driveways of consumers — albeit years late, already subject to multiple recalls, troubling technological issues, and with a design aesthetic that seems to attract raccoons mistaking the boxy steel gray vehicles for dumpsters.

It is, of course, possible for Musk to change his mind once again. He has had a similar reversal of feeling about Trump since 2022, when he tweeted that it was “time for Trump to hang up his hat & sail into the sunset” because if he ran in 2024, “Trump would be 82 at end of term, which is too old to be chief executive of anything, let alone the United States of America.”

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