By Don Hazen* – LA Progressive
Trump’s “dirty, dangerous dozen” of billionaire supporters starts with number one, Elon Musk.
The Democrats had a wildly successful convention in Chicago. But a few weeks earlier, a three-part political earthquake struck the Republican side that will have a very large impact on the remaining days of 2024’s presidential race and should give Democrats pause.
Here is what happened:
The first earth shaking occurred when Elon Musk, and especially Peter Theil, the libertarian venture capitalist, convinced Donald Trump to pick J.D. Vance, the recently elected U.S. senator from Ohio, as his vice president running mate. The choice seems like a coup for Silicon Valley’s right wing and a slap in the face of the East coast bankers and Wall Street, who are regular targets of Vance’s faux populism. Vance is part of the hyper-elite tech bros cartel. He appears to have scorn for the old-school capitalists of Wall Street and hedge funds, although as has been apparent since his selection by Trump, it is hard to know what Vance believes.
Two weeks later, on July 30th, on the day of the attempted assassination of Trump, despite avowals of not getting involved and not giving money, Musk whole-heartedly endorsed Trump for President.
Then it was quickly revealed that Musk, despite denials, had been working behind the scenes for months to launch a new super PAC called “America PAC” with the help of a gaggle of fellow traveler billionaires and other very wealthy libertarian crypto-crazed venture funders.
Then, also surprisingly, it was disclosed that America PAC is not focused on TV ads as other PACS, but rather devoted to field operations in the seven presidential battleground states. The goal is identifying hundreds of thousands of new or irregular voters, getting them registered, and delivering them to the polls to vote for Donald Trump.
As TheVerge.com reported, “Several close friends of Elon Musk, including Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, venture capitalist Doug Leone, and investor and podcast host David Sacks, have donated lavishly to” America PAC. (Palantir is a big data surveillance and analytics company whose clients include the U.S. and foreign militaries, including governments with poor human rights records.)
Lonsdale apparently led a takeover of Trump field operations by the PAC and the pushing out of a number of previous staff. This new PAC ironically would include focusing on registration, early and absentee voting. Those last two voting options, which most states offer in addition to Election Day voting, have been repeatedly attacked by Trump as anti-Democratic and anti-American.
The Boom in Billionaires
Much of this article is about billionaires and reflects the booming business in becoming a billionaire in America. The boom is accompanied by the media’s preoccupation with who is the richest, the most powerful, and who has the biggest yacht. But my primary focus is on how billionaires — led by Musk — will influence the 2024 election.
According to Forbes, the U.S. now boasts a record 813 billionaires worth a combined $5.7 trillion, with Forbes producing its list of “elite 400” billionaires. In 2020, only one billionaire — Jeff Bezos — had $100 billion or more. Today, the entire top ten are centi-billionaires, In the last few years, eight tech moguls added $10 billion or more to their fortunes. Of course, the richest of them all, with wealth hovering around $250 billion, is Musk.
The “dirty, dangerous dozen” of Trump’s billionaires.
Understanding the kind of billionaires who are supporting Trump provides a blueprint for what the super-rich want from Trump in trade for their campaign cash and Super PAC resources.
To frame a clear picture of some of Trump’s big money sources, I created the “dangerous, dirty dozen” of Trump billionaire supporters. These are people whose fortunes are mainly derived from casino gambling, oil and gas (fossil fuel), as well as speculative versions of extreme capitalism, including libertarian tech-venture funding, hedge funds, crypto currency, and the massive private-equity sector.
But Wait…
As I was constructing the “dirty, dangerous” dozen, a fundamental reality became strikingly clear. Musk (and his deep team of VC co-conspirators, billionaires, and investors) dwarfs the other 11 billionaires on the list. Musk is uniquely positioned with money, power, and influence over Trump, the tech sector’s brain power, and the internet’s ability to surveil, target and reach very large audiences instantly with X (formerly Twitter). Moreover, the media’s persistent coverage of Musk echoes its obsessive coverage of Trump.
So, I peeled off number one — Musk — for special attention. The other 11 billionaires are powerful, dangerous, and destructive in many ways. I will profile them in a follow up article.
Looking closely at Musk led me to think that he is probably the most dangerous “political” billionaire in history. He certainly is unique. Musk’s vast business holdings are essential to many operations of government. He cannot be ignored by powerful politicians. For example, Ukraine has relied on Musk’s satellites for its military communications, which, he notoriously blocked from being used by Ukraine in Russia-occupied Crimea. Simultaneously, Musk is the beneficiary of many billions of government funds. And, of course, he owns the social media site, X.
A revealing report, “Elon Musk to the Rescue,” in The Atlantic’s August 25 edition told a revealing story of the U.S. government’s dependency on him. “Musk’s company, SpaceX, will bring home two stranded astronauts, consolidating its position as America’s dominant space company, and demonstrating just how much America’s space agency has come to depend on SpaceX,” it noted, “and, for better or worse, Musk.”
The Trump pick of JD Vance as his VP candidate
Trump’s choice of JD Vance for VP has been hailed as the libertarian venture world’s great victory. As The Nation’s Jacob Silverman explains, “For the tech industry, whose rightward swerve has been hard to ignore this campaign cycle, the Vance selection was sensational. ‘We have a former tech VC in the White House,’ crowed Delian Asparouhov, a partner at Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund.” Musk, who had reportedly been agitating privately for Trump to choose Vance, celebrated the pick on X. “Resounds with victory,” he wrote.
Some see Vance’s striking rise as potentially earth shattering because it symbolizes the political ascension of the philosophy of libertarian tech extremism, away from the more traditional “free enterprise” deregulation-embracing conservatism..
True, Vance has been ridiculed by Democrats and has stumbled in many ways in the month following his nomination, suggesting he is not ready for the political “big time.” With Theil providing the mentoring and then a boat load of cash, Vance leaped over every step of political experience and dues paying, direct to running for the Senate on the heels of his popular book, Hillbilly Elegy, and his time as a venture capitalist. His political inexperience shows, as many clumsy remarks attest. However, with the race close, and likely to remain that way through November, Vance can become a young vice president to the oldest president in history.
The Musk endorsement of Trump
Musk jumping into the election on Trump’s side makes for a complicated, potentially massively conflicted campaign. It would be challenging to ascertain where the line is drawn between a public-elected Trump and the private-enterprising Musk.
As one example, almost immediately after Musk endorsed him, Trump flipped his position on electric vehicles. As Politico reported, “After more than a year of denigrating Biden’s EV policies as “lunacy” and calling for electric car supporters to “rot in hell,” Trump told a rally in Atlanta in August that he’s for “a very small slice” of cars being electric. “I have to be, you know, because Elon endorsed me very strongly,” Trump said, ever the transactional candidate.
As mentioned, The U.S. is very dependent on Musk because of his success with Space X, which is worth in the range of $180 billion, and essential to the nation’s space program. His Starlink business has put hundreds of satellites into space to bring the internet to more remote places on the globe. Starlink became essential for Ukraine’s military fighting the Russian invasion.
Over the years, Musk’s companies — Tesla Motors, SpaceX, and SolarCity — have received billions of dollars from government loans, contracts, tax credits, and subsidies. According to an investigation by The Los Angeles Times. His companies received an estimated $4.9 billion in government support by 2015, and they’ve gotten much more since.
The Tech Libertarian Universe
Part of Musk’s clout comes from the gaggle of Silicon venture investors, at his beck and call, all seemingly having bought into the overarching libertarian vision, and now fully backing Trump.
Many are billionaires. Some often fund each other’s venture projects. Others are investors in X. As mentioned, Theil, worth $7.5 billion, is a central figure. He funded JD Vance’s successful run for Senate from Ohio, spending $15 million dollars, the largest individual expenditure on a U.S. senate campaign.
Theil previously said that he was disillusioned with politics. But apparently, like Musk, he has changed his mind. The bottom line is that Vance’s political ascent is a Thiel creation. And like his billionaire benefactor — whose 2009 Cato Institute essay declared, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Vance embraces a radical ideology that reimagines democracy far different than the liberal participatory democracy that has more or less dominated the U.S. over the past century.
The Musk world of venture capitalists includes a slew of similar libertarian thinkers like David Sacks, Marc Andreesson, Ben Horowitz, and others who could easily make up a “dirty dangerous dozen” billionaires of just venture dudes.
The aim of many of the VC billionaires is to reshape society in ways that smack of authoritarian thinking — led by their ilk. The future they seek includes artificial intelligence, bit coin/crypto currency, inhabiting Mars, living to 200 years old, and motivating dependence on the Metaverse — a virtual reality sphere detached from the web of real life. (To be clear, there are many Kamala Harris-Tim Walz supporters in Silicon Valley, and Google, Apple, and Meta are not hotbeds of Trump supporters. But the Musk crew are the libertarian oligarchy.)
Media’s Silicon Valley “pack mentality”
During the 2024 campaign the media has intensely covered Silicon Valley billionaires, and especially, tech’s moguls. The message the media has been hyping is “previously progressive” Silicon Valley has suddenly gone MAGA, or enough of it has moved into Trump’s orbit.
However, as Jonathan Taplin reminds us in his brilliant book The End of Reality: How 4 billionaires are selling a fantasy future of the Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto, “Silicon Valley was never liberal or progressive.” In fact, many well-known Silicon Valley oligarch values are techno-libertarian. Among this group are acolytes of Ayn Rand — the author whose heroes were self-made masters of the universe, aggressive monopolists, and quasi fascists (where corporate control and governmental power overlap).
The X Factor
In addition to Musk’s mega wealth, and his network of philosophically aligned billionaires, Musk of course controls X, which reports over 550 million monthly users, around 25 percent of whom are Americans. Most X users (58 percent) are under 35 years old and there is a two-to-one split of males to females.
As X’s owner, Musk is an extraordinarily engaged social media addict. As The Wall Street Journal reports, Musk’s political activism and endorsement of Trump represented a remarkable shift in his eagerness to weigh in on political debates compared with just a few years ago. He posted about 13,000 times this year through the end of July — almost as much as in all of 2023. That’s about 61 posts a day, compared with nine in 2019.
Musk is also a persistent prolific propagandist. He spreads deep fake videos and other disinformation on X. According to NBC News, Musk’s misleading election claims have had 1.2 billion views on X. Researchers from the Center for Combating Digital Hate said that “they identified 50 instances this year when Musk posted election claims that have been debunked by independent fact-checkers but spread widely on the app anyway.”
Musk’s control of the X algorithms means he can spread his personal posts widely, and throttle, or bury other posts not to his liking. The latest news reports say that he is manipulating the user-profiling algorithms to find and propagandize would-be Trump voters.
Transactional politics: Quid Pro Quos
Since quid pro quos — payoffs — are fundamental to Trump’s politics, it’s clear that is part of the motivation of the immense amounts of cash available among libertarian venture funders and their industries.
For example, as NBC News reported, hours after meeting with bitcoin miners in mid-June, Trump said on his Truth Social media platform that cryptocurrency users should “vote for Trump!” because he will stand up to “Biden’s hatred of Bitcoin.”
However, when Trump was in the White House, he said in a series of social media posts, “I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air,” and, “We have only one real currency in the USA… And it will always stay that way. It is called the United States Dollar!”
The huge crypto flip flop already seems to be paying off for Trump. One bitcoin mining executive who met with Trump told CNBC that his industry has “committed to raising over $100 million and turning out more than 5 million voters to help Trump this fall.” We’ll see if that boast turns into reality, but Trump is cultivating his base, which, unlike Harris, is anything but America’s middle-class.
Recently, billionaire twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, who founded the crypto company Gemini, announced they each had donated $1 million in bitcoin to boost Trump. “President Donald J. Trump is the pro-Bitcoin, pro-crypto, and pro-business choice,” Tyler Winklevoss wrote on X, adding, “It’s time for the crypto army to send a message to Washington. That attacking us is political suicide.”
As Taplin’s book reminds us, crypto intoxication is the latest fad of never-satisfied predatory capitalists and has no public purpose. Taplin quotes the European Central bank’s Fabio Panetta, who offers, “Bitcoin has no reason to exist. It delivers no meaningful benefit for society. It is a form of gambling, propelled by naked greed and generating vast quantities of CO2 emissions.” He adds, “Bitcoin and the whole realm of crypto currencies represent the ultimate triumph of libertarian magical thinking over reason.”
Trump’s embrace of futuristic libertarian authoritarian tech moguls is quite foreboding. The rate of technological change, and the results of massive tech dollars invested have led to widespread negative effects of technology overall and social media specifically. Companies with heavy investments from Theil and his ilk have created a large wasteland of electronica that burdens individuals and undermines democracy. The only thoughts that seem to dominate this elite sphere are exploiting new device-driven ways to make vast sums of money. As Taplin writes:
“The Tech companies that once made genuinely good and helpful products are becoming increasingly useless, overwhelmed by spam, scammy gimmicks, and other efforts to snake a few extra pennies from consumers without producing any value for their money. Google searches are wastelands of ads and AI-generated ‘answers’ that rarely answer your question. Social media is full of snake oil salesmen. Instead of the next cool product that will improve everyone’s lives, we first got cryptocurrency… Now we have ‘artificial intelligence,’ in which we’re falsely told we can replace human intelligence with machines that mimic language but have no actual thoughts of their own.”
America PAC ads and tactics.
It’s worth returning to the third less-known of the Trump-Musk earthquakes, the creation of America PAC. According to The New York Times, America PAC had ambitions to spend $180 million to hire thousands of paid canvassers and deploy them across the country. But the group has been plagued by internal drama as it seeks to follow Musk’s mercurial directions. It spent over $15 million to train and deploy canvassers who made about $500 a week in nine states. They were abruptly laid off after it was taken over by ex-aides to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
America PAC is also taking advantage of a recent Federal Election Commission ruling that allows political campaigns to coordinate their get-out-the-vote efforts with outside groups like super PACs.
As the Times noted, “This transformation [vastly privatizing get-out-the-vote operations] is a consequence of a surprise decision by the Federal Election Commission earlier this year…..” This deregulatory decision happened due to a flip by an appointee of President Joe Biden, who joined with Republicans, in order to break the FEC’s ongoing 3–3 stalemate. The bottom line is the massive money collecting machines, the Super PACS, are newly empowered to intervene in all federal elections, starting with the presidency.
America PAC is busy with internet ads on social media and search. According to NBC News, here is what happens. If a voter in Michigan performs a Google search, a somewhat shocking ad might pop up. The ad shows a young man lying in bed late at night when someone else texts him, “Hey you need to vote,” and then sends the man a video of the attempted assassination of the former president. The man can hear the gunshots and people screaming in the background. As Trump is rushed off stage with blood pouring down his face, the man watching the video types in response, “This is out of control. How do I start?”
NBC reported:
“The ad then displays a website for a group called America PAC. The website says it will help the viewer register to vote. But once a user clicks “Register to Vote,” the experience he or she will have can be very different, depending on where they live.
“If a user lives in a state that is not considered competitive in the presidential election… they’ll be prompted to enter their email addresses and zip code and then directed quickly to a voter registration page for their state, or back to the original sign-up section. But for users who enter a zip code that indicates they live in a battleground state, like Pennsylvania or Georgia, the process is very different.
“Rather than be directed to their state’s voter registration page, they instead are directed to a highly detailed personal information form, prompted to enter their address, cell phone number and age.”
This operation is all part of an aggressive data collection process aimed at ascertaining the likelihood to be potential Trump voters, and how to motivate them to the polls.
Whether venture thinking can translate amping up an intense field operation in support of Trump is the question. In an interview with The New York Times’ Ezra Klein, the gambling and polling guru Nate Silver explains how venture capitalists get rich and richer.
“Look, in some ways, these V.C.s are obviously incredibly deeply flawed people. So why do they succeed despite that? I think because the idea of having a longer time horizon, №1, and being willing to make these positive expected value, high-risk, but very high upside bets and gathering a portfolio of them repeatedly and making enough of these bets that you effectively do hedge your risk, right? Those two ideas are so good that it makes up for the fact that these guys often have terrible judgment and are kind of vainglorious assholes, half of them, right?”
In the case of the Trump campaign field operation, it is the opposite situation than typical of VC investing. As of this writing there are only 70 days left in the campaign, and Trump is their only investment, so win big, or go home.
All is Not Rosy for Musk. There are a lot of bots and a lot of debt.
The Musk picture is not all rosy. Musk claims roughly 190 million “followers” on X, including legions of loyal fans or so it seems. It is important to add a caveat here. The media slavishly, and often obsessively, reports numbers of followers of any celebrity or influencer as fact, when often that is only a part of the story. In Musk’s case, according to Mashable, Musk’s X follower count is bloated by millions of new, inactive accounts.
In 2023, Mashable reviewed new data collected by third-party researcher Travis Brown on all of Musk’s (then) more than 153 million followers. It reported, “Millions of Musk’s followers appear to be inactive or fake. Just over 42 percent of Musk’s more than 153 million followers have no followers. More than 40 percent have zero tweets posted on their account… Many of these accounts can be fake accounts or bots… Or can simply belong to inactive users or people who set up an account and rarely if ever return.”
Nonetheless, Musk still has a huge number of followers and widespread influence. He will, along with his tech-oligarch allies, use X aggressively as a powerful campaign vehicle to propagandize about Trump.
Also, it’s been reported that Musk’s Twitter purchase has ended up being the worst buyout financing deal for banks since the 2008 recession, according to The Wall Street Journal. The $13 billion in loans Musk took out to fund his takeover of the social media platform have remained stuck on the balance sheets of the seven banks that financed the deal, largely due to the poor performance of the company, the Journal reported on August 20.
Trump and Musk
In reflecting upon the many dangers that Musk represents, it seems clear that Democrats have to take Musk on, perhaps the same way that they are taking Trump on — with attacks, trolling, anything that might give him pause, overreact, limit the massive funding flow from the government, etc.
If Trump in the White House and Vance is by his side, the power and influence of Musk and high tech’s libertarians and authoritarians will only grow. We can already see how Musk is using Silicon Valley’s surveillance economy’s tools to spy on would-be voters and provoke them with pro-Trump propaganda. We can see how a handful of billionaires are privately funding super PACs to privatize battleground state get-out-the-vote operations.
The Democrats had an energizing, mobilizing convention in Chicago. But now they must counter the billionaires betting on Trump’s return to power — starting with Musk.
*Don Hazen is the former publisher of Mother Jones Magazine, and former longtime editor of Alternet.org.