Musk is about to find out what Trump’s $130 million will bring him

No billionaire did more to help Donald Trump win the US presidential election than Elon Musk. To the head of Tesla Inc. and SpaceX now has to figure out whether it will pay off or whether it will eventually go under.

Musk, whose growing political apparatus has already proven its strength, will gain more than just an ally in the White House. Trump has offered him an official role in cutting government spending, and with it the ability to influence policy and the federal agencies that control his vast empire of companies.

“He’s a character. He’s a special guy. He’s a super genius,” Trump said of Musk while addressing his supporters in the evening. “We must protect our geniuses. We don’t have many of them.”

Tesla shares are already rising. Shares rose 15% in early US trading as investors look to cash in on Trump’s return to the White House. Early Wednesday morning, Musk also posted a graph that he said showed record usage of X, his social network.

“Let that sink in,” he said on X, posting a fake photo of himself carrying a sink into the White House Oval Office—a nod to the time he brought a sink to Twitter headquarters after taking over the social media company networks.

Over the past few months, Musk has been Trump’s most aggressive surrogate. The world’s richest man endorsed Trump at X, hosted a town hall in the critical state of Pennsylvania and showed up at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally with even higher billing than Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance’s own.

Musk has spent more than $130 million on Trump and rejected Republican votes in competitive House races, putting him in the top echelons of donors this election cycle. On Election Day, Musk voted in Texas and then flew his private jet to Florida to watch the election results at Mar-a-Lago with Trump and his family. His PAC posted a photo of him sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with Trump and Dana White, UFC CEO, at the celebration.

“Musk is new to politics, but it would mean a lot for a billionaire tech mogul to go all in for President Trump,” said Jondavid Longo, Pennsylvania state director for Early Vote Action, a Republican voter registration organization. Trump’s victory in Pennsylvania was key to his victory, helping him flip states he lost in 2020 but won in his first presidential race in 2016. Musk donated $1 million to the group.

Musk has a lot to gain financially from the new administration. He oversees an empire of six companies, some of which have close ties to the US federal government. SpaceX has become an increasingly important partner of NASA and the US Department of Defense, with contracts worth billions of dollars. Tesla has bet its financial future on the move to autonomous robotaxis, a risky venture that faces significant regulatory hurdles. X remains extremely influential.

Musk’s personal wealth has fluctuated wildly during Joe Biden’s four years in office, reaching between $340 billion and $124 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. However, overall it is trending upward. As of Election Day, his net worth was $263.8 billion.

During the election campaign, Musk offered himself a job as head of an agency responsible for cutting government bureaucracy and waste. Trump wholeheartedly supported the idea and mentioned it regularly during the campaign.

“I’m going to pick up Elon. And he’s great at it. He will cut our spending,” Trump said at a campaign rally in Michigan in late September. Trump calls the new position “cost-cutting secretary,” and Musk has joked that he will head DOGE, what he calls the Department of Government Effectiveness, in a nod to the cryptocurrency he has long promoted.

In that role, Musk promised to help cut the federal budget by an unprecedented $2 trillion. He has not specified which agencies he will pursue but regularly criticizes regulators overseeing his own companies. In a lengthy diatribe on Joe Rogan’s podcast this week, he described a SpaceX rocket that sat on the launch pad for two months awaiting regulatory approval.

“We could build a rocket faster than they can approve the paperwork,” he said. “It’s like Gulliver is being tied up with a million little strings. It’s not that the problem is with any one string, but you have a million of them.”

The sweeping powers would give the boss of Tesla, SpaceX and X leverage to overhaul the federal agencies that both regulate and have the power to investigate his many companies. He has already said he will use any power he gains to push for federal approval of fully autonomous vehicles. Current regulations prevent manufacturers from putting more than a couple thousand cars on the road a year without a steering wheel or other controls.

It’s not uncommon for US presidents to tap CEOs and business leaders to fill their administrations, but none of them are quite like Musk. During his first term, Trump appointed Steve Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executive who served as his campaign’s finance chief, as Treasury secretary. The role of cutting government spending is not expected to be carried out at the Cabinet level, meaning Musk will not have to give up his duties as CEO.

Musk’s support has already influenced the president-elect. Since the billionaire’s endorsement in July, Trump has changed his stance on electric vehicles. Trump has gone from outright protesting what he called “Crooked Joe’s crazy electric vehicle mandate” to at times praising electric vehicles.

“I am for electric cars. I have to be like that, you know, because Elon has been very supportive of me, Elon. So I have no choice,” Trump said during an August rally.

Trump has also backed Musk’s ambitions to reach Mars using SpaceX rockets by 2028, or the end of the Republican’s term. “We will land an American astronaut on Mars. Thank you, Elon. Thank you. Come on, Elon,” Trump said at an October rally.

Musk’s political interests extend beyond those of his companies. Like Trump, he has spread conspiracy theories and misinformation about immigrants to his more than 200 million X followers.

But it’s one thing to campaign together. It’s another thing to work together. The president-elect is known for attacking even his most loyal friends and colleagues. Musk and Trump may be united for now, but there could be points of tension between two men known for their egos.

In the electric vehicle business, for example, Tesla received billions from President Biden’s policies that Trump promised to reverse. The two are rival social media companies, and it wasn’t long ago that Musk urged Trump to “hang up your hat and ride off into the sunset.”

Whatever happens between these two men, Musk will emerge from this election cycle with a powerful political machine that he can use not only to prop up his business but also his pet political desires.

“The American PAC will continue to operate after this election,” Musk said Tuesday at X Spaces. Musk said the group is “preparing for the midterms and any midterm elections at the district attorney level and at some judicial level.”

Musk’s America’s Committee, which spent $153 million on Trump’s behalf, now has contact information for dozens of voters it can use moving forward.

Democrats are portraying Musk as their billionaire opponent, echoing Harris’ campaign warning that “Trump buddy Elon Musk is spending huge sums of money on his own ads, taking shots at the vice president.” They pleaded with voters not to let the richest man on the planet buy the election.

But in many ways he did.