Tesla CEO Elon Musk has denied reports that emerged last week that he was planning to donate $45m a month to a Super Pac focused on getting Trump elected.
On Tuesday, Musk appeared on Jordan Peterson’s show, where he said the claim was “simply not true”. “I am not donating $45m a month to Trump,” he said.
“Now what I have done is that I have created a Pac or Super Pac or whatever you want to call it,” he said. It is called the America Pac.”
Super Pacs, short for Political Action Committees, are independent political organisations to which donors can give unlimited amounts of money, while donations to individuals or non-Super Pacs are capped.
After the Peterson interview, Musk replied on X to a clip from the interview saying, “Yeah”, and to another tweet referencing the reports saying, “Yeah, it’s ridiculous. I am making some donations to America PAC, but at a much lower level and the key values of the Pac are supporting a meritocracy & individual freedom. Republicans are mostly, but not entirely, on the side of merit & freedom”.
The denial comes days after Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race, endorsing his vice-president Kamala Harris, who now has enough delegates to claim the Democratic nomination in August.
Also on Tuesday, the New York Times reported that the Super Pac was being staffed by former aides to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign. “The Super Pac has acquired an air of mystery in the Trump orbit, with other outside groups largely in the dark about its plans,” the Times reported.
But the aides, Generra Peck, who initially managed the DeSantis campaign, and Phil Cox, a former head of the Republican Governors Association, “may help legitimize it within the Republican establishment as it aims to become one of the leading groups on behalf of Mr Trump.”
“The intent is to promote the principles that made America great in the first place,” Musk said on Peterson’s show. “I wouldn’t say that I’m for example Maga,” he added, referring to the Trump catchphrase. “I think America is great. I’m more M-A-G, make America greater.”
Musk did not clarify how much he intends to donate to the Pac.
The America Pac has already been backed by some of Musk’s friends and allies in the tech world, the Times reported, including Joe Lonsdale, who co-founded the software company Palantir with Peter Thiel, a major political donor to Trump’s newly named vice-president pick, the Ohio senator JD Vance.
The Winklevoss twins, cryptocurrency entrepreneurs who have attacked Joe Biden for waging what they called a war on cryptocurrency through regulation, have also reportedly contributed to the effort, the Wall Street Journal reported. They hailed Trump as “pro-Bitcoin, pro-crypto, pro-business” in June.