What Elon Musk stands to gain and lose from a Donald Trump presidency
As the news continued to reverberate worldwide that Donald Trump will return to the White House after a staggering political comeback to defeat Kamala Harris in the 2024 US election, one notable person quickly congratulated him.
“The people of America gave @realDonaldTrump a crystal clear mandate for change tonight,” Elon Musk wrote on X, which he owns, after the vote count on November 6.
Musk even spent election night with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. The president-elect duly singled out Musk in his victory speech.
“A star is born. Elon,” Trump said onstage, thanking the world’s richest person for spending two weeks campaigning in Pennsylvania.
The Musk-Trump bromance has blossomed over the past year. On stage at a rally for the Republican candidate in Pennsylvania, Musk leapt into the air with glee wearing a custom black Maga (Make American Great Again) hat. He regularly posted pro-Trump content on social media, including AI-generated images attacking Vice President Kamala Harris.
And crucially, he has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to fund one of the largest pro-Trump political action committees. In February, Musk — whose net worth is $264.7 billion (£208bn), per Forbes — held clandestine talks with fellow billionaires where he voiced his support for Trump. He founded America Pac, a political action committee funding the Republican candidate’s return to office. Initially, Musk flew under the radar, allowing his wealthy friends to publicly invest before he went public in July, donating $119 million (£93m) in the run-up to the election.
Controversially, Musk also backed a raffle in swing states where voters who signed the America PAC petition — pledging support for free speech and gun rights — would be entered with a chance to win $1m (£790,000).
But the relationship between the two men certainly wasn't love at first sight. Not very long ago they publicly declared that they didn’t like each other very much. "I don't hate the man," Musk tweeted in July 2022, "but it's time for Trump to hang up his hat & sail into the sunset." (The tweet was in response to Trump claiming that Musk was lying about his plans to buy Twitter).
Musk had previously described himself as "politically moderate", and was once a registered Democrat. But, in the run-up to the 2024 election, Musk had something of a Damascene conversion. He officially threw his support behind the Republican immediately after the first assassination attempt against Trump in July — and has been a regular fixture on his campaigns since.
So why has Musk backed Trump so vociferously and what does he stand to gain from the administration?
Slashing regulation and landing on Mars with Space X
SpaceX, the world’s most successful private spaceflight company, which Musk founded in 2002, has already secured contracts with NASA and the US Department of Defense to launch government satellites. With a firm ally in the White House, Musk is well-placed to strengthen these ties with government agencies further and continue to embed Space X within American governance.
Space X has also expanded into building spy satellites, just as the Pentagon and US intelligence agencies are about to invest billions of dollars in the technology.
One key point of agreement between Trump and Musk, which will likely impact all of Musk’s businesses, is their deep hatred for regulation. Musk has fought persistent battles with government agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Federal Aviation Administration. This could swing in his favour under a Trump administration likely to drastically cut their resources and weaken their authority.
Musk also bets that a Trump administration will help him fulfil Space X’s mission of getting to Mars. “Elon, get those rocket ships going,” Trump said on the campaign trail in September. “We want to reach Mars before the end of my term.”
Nasa has hired SpaceX to develop a version of Starship, its largest rocket yet, to send astronauts to Mars by the decade’s end. While the company has been launching Starship prototypes steadily over the past year, according to Musk, the Federal Aviation Administration is preventing them from testing Starship and sending commercial ships into space as quickly as they’d like, saying that SpaceX must meet certain safety requirements before each take-off.
Space X has also been in trouble with the US Department of Labour — one of the branches of government that Trump could give Musk the power to audit. A Reuters investigation found evidence of 600 worker safety violations at Space X, including lost limbs and electrocutions. It reported Musk didn’t want his workers to wear yellow safety jackets because he hates the colour.
In 2014, retired US Marine and former Space X employee Lonnie LeBlanc died of a head injury at the company’s Texas facility. Space X was fined $7,000 (£5,500) for his death by the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). In 2022, a Space X technician suffered a head injury that left them comatose for two months — this time, the company was fined $18,475 (£14,517).
The Environmental Protection Agency has also launched investigations into Space X over concerns that it has dumped unsafe amounts of wastewater into the ecosystem. Meanwhile, the FDA has cited Musk’s Neuralink brain implant company for animal welfare issues.
Tesla – gutting workers rights and safety concerns
In addition to benefiting Space X, Tesla could also reap rewards from an administration that Trump has said would be characterised by “the lowest regulatory burden”. Its share price jumped by more than 12 per cent on November 6 following Trump's victory.
Throughout the years, Musk has been accused of blocking Tesla workers from unionising and disregarding workers’ rights. The United Auto Workers filed unfair labour practice charges against Trump and Musk after the pair discussed Musk supposedly firing striking workers during a conversation on X earlier this year. He also pushed people back to work at Tesla plants at the height of the pandemic — about 450 people reportedly got infected. In 2021, a federal jury ordered Tesla to pay $137m (£108m) to an African-American former employee at the EV maker’s factory in California, who said that Tesla turned a blind eye to racial abuse.
Musk has expressed a desire to slash regulations on workers’ rights and environmental protections — and raise import tariffs. “I can’t wait. There is a lot of waste and needless regulation in government that needs to go,” he wrote on X.
Tesla is being investigated by federal prosecutors and the Securities and Exchange Commission over its self-driving car functions. The US agency that regulates road safety has revealed it has probed Tesla’s autopilot function. Those investigations could slow approval of true self-driving Tesla cars being allowed on roads, despite Musk’s widely disputed claim that Teslas using FSD are already safer than those humans drive.
Musk's ongoing conflicts with government regulators have prompted him to advocate deregulation and a full federal government audit. Trump backed the idea and in September, he revealed plans to establish a government efficiency commission led by Musk, tasked with auditing federal agencies to identify areas for cuts. Musk has suggested naming the commission the Department of Government Efficiency, or "Doge", referring to one of his favourite memes and the cryptocurrency he has popularised.
Shifting rightwards and buying Twitter to destroy the “woke mind virus”
But Musk’s shift towards increasingly extreme right-wing beliefs and his support for Trump are also personal.
In 2022, when one of the twins he shares with his first wife turned 18, one of them told Musk: “I hate you and everything you stand for.” His child, who is transgender, petitioned a California court for a name change from Xavier to Vivian Jenna Wilson, citing, as the reason for the petition, “gender identity and the fact that I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.”
He blamed the estrangement of his daughter on what the Financial Times described in an interview with him as "the supposed takeover of elite schools and universities by neo-Marxists". He has said that her gender transition is primarily what sparked his drive to "destroy the woke mind virus", and latently, to take over Twitter.
When Musk decided to buy the social media platform, his reason was similar to his biographer Walter Isaacson. “Unless the woke-mind virus, which is fundamentally antiscience, antimerit, and antihuman in general, is stopped, civilisation will never become multiplanetary,” he said.
In January 2022, Musk began purchasing stock on the social media platform. That year saw a rollercoaster exchange between Musk and the company, which eventually led to him securing a $44bn (£34bn) deal to take over the platform in October.
After Musk’s takeover, he immediately fired the Twitter teams battling misinformation. He subsequently implemented a “general amnesty” to thousands of accounts that had received permanent bans, including neo-Nazis, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and far-right activist Tommy Robinson, often engaging with these people himself.
Misinformation, climate change, the war in Gaza, the pandemic and elections have metastasised, alongside violent hate speech, often spilling out into real-world events. And, while his platform has become more and more extreme, so has Musk. His pivot towards hard-right, conspiracist ideology has led him — X’s most followed user — to amplify these claims recklessly to his audience of more than 200 million. Musk has made more than 50 posts viewed 1.2 billion times since the beginning of the year, which have been debunked by independent fact-checkers, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate (per the Financial Times).
Musk could also suffer, though…
However, there are some ways in which Trump and Musk make rather incompatible bedfellows. Trump has consistently and overtly opposed electric vehicles throughout his career, saying that their supporters should “rot in hell” and that helping the burgeoning industry is “lunacy”.
He has slammed them as too expensive and warned that President Joe Biden’s embrace of them would bring a “bloodbath” to the US auto industry. He also falsely claimed that battery-powered cars don’t work in cold weather and can’t travel long distances. He has vowed to end what he called Biden’s EV mandate,” even though no such mandate exists.
Under Biden’s administration, the government has provided substantial support for developing and buying EVs. This includes billions in loans to encourage automakers to invest in EV and battery factories in the US; funding for charging infrastructure; and a $7,500 (£5,893) tax credit for many EV buyers.
Many industry experts believe Trump could end these programmes in his new presidency. He could direct the Treasury Department to alter tax credit rules, potentially restricting its availability for car buyers. Alternatively, if Trump has a Republican-controlled Congress, he could push legislation to eliminate the credit.
However, Musk is confident that the end of the tax credit would not significantly affect Tesla. He views it as primarily benefiting legacy automakers by encouraging their entry into the EV market, thus increasing competition.