In the weeks since the 2024 election ended, Democrats have been soul-searching about how Donald Trump was re-elected under a cloud of scandal and court cases. Was it the economy that did it? A weak Harris campaign?
For former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, the answer is pretty simple. The main difference maker was Elon Musk.
“Elon and I disagree on some things, but Elon deserves his place at the table,” Bannon recently told Puck. “He stroked a $150 million check for the ground game, which is not sexy, at the exact moment we needed it. He came in with the money and the professionals. To be brutally frank, it’s the reason we won.”
The tech billionaire’s support means more than just money though, according to Bannon.
“This is what I like about Elon Musk. He and Vivek are talking about what we’ve been preaching on the War Room for years,” Bannon added, referencing his radio show. “They are down in the trenches with the hard part of how you actually start to turn the country around. That’s what I appreciate.”
Musk, despite initial shows of support for Trump challenger Ron DeSantis, eventually came out as perhaps the key backer for the former and now incoming president.
Musk’s super PAC ended up spending around $200m to support the Trump campaign, and Musk himself appeared on the campaign trail as an enthusiastic surrogate.
The Tesla co-founder’s efforts also included a $1m-a-day giveaway to voters who signed a petition supporting conservative issues, an effort critics saw as a vote-buying scheme for Trump.
Musk also helped the Trump campaign with get-out-the-vote efforts, part of the Republican’s unorthodox strategy of farming out large parts of his ground game to outside groups and volunteers.
Since the election, Musk has hardly left Trump’s side, and the pair have appeared together at Mar-a-Lago and a SpaceX rocket launch.
The billionaire is also the driving force behind Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a non-governmental effort to find and eliminate excess government spending, through which Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have promised to gut large parts of the federal budget.
