Most of America’s wealthiest citizens remain silent on X, formerly Twitter, about the elections. But some are very vocal indeed.

_{By means of Kyle Khan Mullins And Phoebe LiuForbes staff}

“America is a nation of builders,” Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, posted on X, the social media platform he owns, at 11:50 PM on Tuesday evening, hours before the Associated Press called the presidential race in favor of Donald Trump. Writing from Mar-a-Lago, where he spent election night with Trump, he added: “Soon you will be free to build.”

As the votes poured in, showing that the billionaire former president was on the verge of retaking the White House, some of his fellow conservative billionaires rallied behind X. Some were celebratory, like crypto billionaire Tyler Winklevoss, who posted, “ We are on the cusp of a new American Renaissance. .” Some began offering explanations for Trump’s rise, such as surrogate and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who claimed that “voters reject censorship, legal protections and unfairness.” Still others were impatient with the networks: “It is absurd that @cnn refuses to call states clearly won by @realDonaldTrump,” hedge fund manager Bill Ackman wrote at 11:40 p.m., even as millions of votes remained open around the world. then-uncalled states in the Rust Belt, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.

Liberal billionaires, meanwhile, appeared to be largely silent, a change from earlier on Election Day. LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman posted a video at 5pm Eastern in which he stated: “This election is not about petty disagreements over policy. It is about truth versus fiction, the rule of law versus chaos, and democracy versus fascism.” Businessman Mark Cuban, who had campaigned for Harris, wrote that he “loved facetiming students waiting in long lines @unccharlotte,” adding that voting for Kamala Harris “is worth it!” Neither posted anything election-related after 7 p.m., when polls began closing in key states, until Cuban congratulated Trump and deleted some of his pro-Harris posts, and Musk at 1:23 a.m. from 9 a.m. as congratulatory posts from pro-Trump billionaires continue to pour in, no other billionaire supporting Harris has spoken out on the platform.

The rich have always meddled in politics, but in the last decade their ability to do so has increased. They can now donate unlimitedly, so these days every election is more expensive than the last. And in the age of social media, they can talk directly to legions of people who find them worth listening to. Forbes analyzed posts since October 1 on X of the richest 200 US billionaires with accounts we could find. Billionaires often have large followings on X. Musk, the most followed person on his platform, has more than 200 million followers. In total, the more than 2,000 messages about the elections on these accounts have been viewed 10 billion times.

Of those messages, 472 mention Kamala Harris and 652 mention Donald Trump. Using RoBERTa, a machine learning model trained on over 100 million messages on Forbes also analyzed the sentiment of those messages. As of midnight Wednesday, posts mentioning Trump appeared to be slightly more optimistic, with 49% of those posts categorized as “positive,” compared to 35% for posts mentioning Harris, according to a sentiment analysis. (It’s possible, however, that Musk’s ownership of spent.)

Here are some of the most recent pro-Trump posts – many from Musk, Ramaswamy and Ackman. As of 9 a.m. Eastern, a billionaire has yet to post anything anti-Trump after the polls closed. (Forbes will continue to update this post with comments throughout the day):

Some of the most negative messages about Trump came from Democratic Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, venture capitalist Vinod Khosla and Mark Cuban of Shark tank fame, although Cuban has deleted his openly pro-Harris posts as of Wednesday morning. The only message indicating disappointment with the outcome of the election came from billionaire Mailchimp co-founder Ben Chestnut, who lives in Georgia – a swing state that turned red yesterday:

Of the 1,000 most recent posts about billionaires as of midnight Wednesday, here were several notable themes that skewed pro-Trump, according to a machine learning categorization (using a model trained on a large dataset of unstructured text, the Google Google developed BERT model and related topics). modeling technique BERTopic):

1. Encouraging people to vote, on both sides (72 messages)

2. Swing states and the role of undocumented immigrants therein, largely by Musk and Trump themselves (34 posts)

3. Economic issues, including national debt and tariffs (23 items):

4. Discussions about voter fraud (22 posts):

However, many billionaires chose Musk’s route to do more than just tweet or give money. Cuban became a frequent Harris surrogate on cable news and on the tree stump. Miriam Adelson wrote an op-ed in the newspaper she owns, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, endorsing Trump as “the right man – the only man – for the job,” while Hoffman endorsed Harris in the pages of The New York Times . Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and pharmaceutical billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong blocked the newspapers they owned — The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, respectively — from endorsing Harris.

And of course, some billionaires are talking about the election, just not on Mark Zuckerburg posts only on Facebook-owned Threads, perhaps X’s biggest rival, and stays away from politics (other than chastising the European Union over regulations), but did praise Trump as “badass” in a July interview .

At least one man believed that X had been predictive of what was to come, even resharing a post saying that X was more indicative than the polls. At 1:17 a.m., as things looked bleaker for Harris across the country, Musk wrote to his followers: “You are the media now.”

MORE FROM FORBES

ForbesThe billions behind the 2024 presidential electionBy means of Kyle Khan MullinsForbesAfter the 2016 election, Trump was short on cash and obtained a secret loanBy means of Daan AlexanderForbesHere’s how much money Trump owes – and who will collect itBy means of Daan AlexanderForbesHow Steve Ballmer spent $100 million on a new twist on political donationsBy means of Kyle Khan MullinsForbesElon Musk’s relentless trolling of Democrats is tarnishing TeslaBy means of Alan Ohnsman