When Donald Trump declared his “magnificent victory” as the US presidential election results trickled in, he reserved special praise for one man who helped catapult him back to the country’s top spot.

“A star is born, Elon,” he said in a speech in West Palm Beach, Florida, referring to his biggest ally in the race to become president: the billionaire owner of Tesla, SpaceX and X (formerly Twitter), Elon Musk.

Musk has indeed played a major role in Trump’s comeback. Not only has he pumped millions of dollars into Trump’s campaign, but he has also served as a policy advisor and promoter, essentially turning his X social media platform into a Make America Great Again (MAGA) mouthpiece.

“The future will be fantastic,” Musk wrote on X when it became clear that Trump would return to the White House.

The future will be fantastic pic.twitter.com/I46tFsHxs3

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 6, 2024

The billionaire’s star could indeed rise high under Trump, who previously suggested his ally could become “secretary of cost savings” in his Cabinet. Experts have warned that Musk, whose Space

While the dust settles, here’s everything you need to know about how the world’s richest man helped fuel one of the wildest political comebacks in history. How did Musk use his money and influence to put Trump back on top, and why?

How much did Musk donate to Trump’s campaign?

To be clear, billionaires played a bigger role than ever in both the Democratic and Republican presidential campaigns. Microsoft’s Bill Gates and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg both endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. But it was Musk’s multi-faceted support for Trump that really made the difference.

Musk donated an estimated $132 million to Trump and other Republicans ahead of the 2024 election, according to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) in its final disclosures before Election Day last month.

Two of the largest donations – $43.6 million and $75 million – went directly to the Trump campaign machine, specifically the America PAC (political action committee), founded by Musk himself.

Controversially, Musk has launched a cash giveaway in key swing states, involving registered voters who agreed to sign a petition in support of the First and Second Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which respectively protect freedom of speech and the right to keep and wear protect weapons, get the chance to win $1 million a day.

“We’re going to randomly award $1 million to people who sign the petition every day from now until the election,” Musk said at a campaign event on October 19.

The move was challenged in a Pennsylvania court after the U.S. Department of Justice warned that the group could violate election laws, which prohibit paying people to register to vote. However, judges ruled Monday that the operation could go ahead after Musk’s lawyers argued that the winners were vetted spokespeople and not chosen at random.

Now Musk is being sued in a class action lawsuit by voters who claim he convinced them to sign the petition under false pretenses that they had a chance to win the $1 million. The suit was filed Tuesday by Arizona resident Jacqueline McAferty, who also accused Musk of using the giveaway to collect valuable personal data and drive traffic to X.

FEC documents also showed that Musk donated $10 million to the Senate Leadership Fund, a PAC charged with “protecting and expanding the Republican Senate majority,” which could help Republicans regain control of the Senate in this election. regain success.

Musk has also reportedly made other unreported donations to Republicans.

How was X used as a MAGA mouthpiece?

As strange as it may seem now, Elon Musk was once seen as a liberal and advocate of renewable energy, who claimed to have voted for Democrat Joe Biden in 2020. This image has changed since 2022, following his acquisition of the social media platform Twitter. now renamed X.

After promising to turn Twitter into a “politically neutral” forum, Musk fired employees responsible for monitoring disinformation. He also reinstated more than 62,000 suspended accounts, including white nationalist and neo-Nazi accounts accused of spreading hate speech and conspiracy theories.

Crucially, he also reversed the ban on Trump’s account, which was halted by the platform following the attack on the US Capitol in January 2021, which many say Trump encouraged.

By the time the election came around, critics said X had essentially become an unofficial House platform for the MAGA wing of the Republican Party. The owner himself was accused of “fanboying” Trump and spreading misinformation among his 200 million followers, with his influence amplified by X’s algorithm.

One example was the promotion of a spoofed video of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, with a fake voiceover saying, “I was selected because I am the ultimate diversity hire.” Musk reposted the video in July with the words “this is awesome” and a laughing emoji, gaining 136 million additional views for an item that wasn’t marked as a parody.

Misinformation also circulated on X about the voting of “illegal aliens” in the elections. This is despite studies by both conservative and left-wing organizations showing that the incidence of this crime, with penalties of up to a year in prison, a fine and possible deportation, was negligible.

A conspiracy theory that the Democrats imported illegal immigrants and granted them amnesty to expand their voter base in future elections was also allowed to circulate on X and amplified by Musk himself. “Dem. America would then become a deep blue one-party socialist state,” he said in a post in October.

The Democrats have imported huge numbers of illegal aliens into swing states. Triple digit increases in the last 4 years!

Their STATED plan is to give them citizenship as quickly as possible, making all swing states Dem.

America would then become a deep blue one-party socialist state. https://t.co/zxVmmR0GqO

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 25, 2024

After Trump’s televised debate against Harris in September, in which he repeated the false claim that Haitian immigrants in an Ohio town ate cats and dogs, Musk posted a meme of a cat holding a sign that read “Kamala hates me” with a laughing emoji.

Despite his open commitment to freedom of expression, Musk has left out some news stories, such as an article by journalist Ken Klippenstein detailing Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance’s weaknesses, reportedly obtained from leaked documents. Although the journalist’s account was later restored, links to the article were blocked.

A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in March this year confirmed the platform’s growing popularity among Republican supporters, showing that 53 percent thought it was “good for democracy,” roughly tripling the 17 percent who answered the same in 2021.

Why did Musk form an alliance with Trump?

A powerful merger of their fan bases has boosted the alliance between Trump and Musk.

Not so long ago, there was no love lost between the couple. In 2022, Trump called Musk a ‘bulls**t artist’ for allegedly lying about his support in the 2016 election. Musk responded on Twitter, saying it was “time for Trump to hang up his hat and watch the sunset to sail towards.”

Two years later, the tech mogul stood side by side with Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, wearing a black MAGA hat.

Musk’s swing to the right is sometimes attributed to the government-mandated closure of his Tesla factories during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, he reopened a factory in Fremont, California, and declared he was ready to be arrested, taking a stand against the “bureaucratic blob.”

His shift to the right has since been reflected in his relationships with anti-regulation leaders such as Argentine President Javier Milei. Musk has also become close to international right-wing leaders such as Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, India’s Narendra Modi and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu.

However, several US media outlets, such as Vanity Fair and the Washington Post, have pointed to a deeper motivation, fueled by the decision of one of his children to come out as transgender in 2022, cutting ties with Musk and using their surname changed to Wilson. . Musk claimed in an interview with Jordan Peterson that he was “misled” into signing off on their medical treatment and announced his crusade against the “woke mind virus”.

In 2021, Musk moved Tesla’s headquarters from Palo Alto, California, in Silicon Valley to Austin, Texas, and similarly changed his residence from California to Texas. In July this year, Musk said he would move SpaceX and

How has Musk helped Trump reach young men?

Observers say Musk and Trump, who both present themselves as rule-breaking, non-mainstream “alpha males,” appear to have tapped into a widespread sense of male frustration in America, stemming in part from the #MeToo movement and the feminist backlash against ” toxic masculinity ”, causing some men to say they feel stigmatized and marginalized.

Writing in the New York Times last month, John Della Volpe, head of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, called Trump’s play for the vote of young men a “master class in brother whispering.” The pursuit of the ‘bro voice’ seems to be paying off; a recent Harvard Youth Poll found that 35 percent of men aged 18 to 24 surveyed expressed support for Trump, a five percent increase from a 2020 survey.

It’s a sensibility that has found expression in so-called “bro” podcasts like the Joe Rogan Experience. Rogan endorsed Trump on Monday after an interview with Musk. “The great and powerful @elonmusk. If it weren’t for him, we’d be crazy. He makes, in my opinion, the most compelling case for Trump you will hear, and I agree with him every step of the way,” Rogan said on X.

The message clearly resonated.

Two days later, Trump was elected the 47th President of the United States.