Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who said he would stay on the sidelines during this election, will spend $45 million per month to elect Donald Trump, a presidential candidate who has repeatedly targeted EVs during his campaign and who has promised to end EV incentives in exchange for a billion dollars in bribes from the oil industry.
Just weeks after winning a shareholder advisory vote to reinstate his stock grant, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has apparently figured out another great way to waste money.
According to the WSJ, Musk is committing $45 million per month to a newly-formed Super PAC intended to increase republican voter turnout in swing states, with the goal of electing former reality TV host and three-time republican nominee Donald Trump to the presidency.
The move comes as Musk has shown little interest in electric cars lately, spending much more attention on various culture war causes that he has picked up on while scrolling through Twitter – the company he bought for $44 billion which has since lost 72% of its value.
Since his acquisition of Twitter, Musk spent little attention managing Tesla, instead spending most of his time on social media.
But to purchase Twitter, Musk sold several tranches of Tesla stock, reducing his ownership percentage in the company and depressing Tesla’s stock price.
This led to a desperate campaign to have Tesla shareholders vote to advise to reinstate his previously-voided illegal pay package. In the runup to the vote, Musk spent more time with a flurry of activity at Tesla, engaging in puzzling and self-destructive actions like firing the most successful team in the company and canceling an upcoming mass market EV, all while threatening to do (what he perceives as) harm to his company if he doesn’t get his way.
In the end, most of shareholders who hadn’t been turned off by Musk’s arbitrary management style were convinced, and voted to advise that his package be reinstated.
Now he’s using a chunk of that newfound (potential) wealth and investing it into something quite puzzling, for a man whose wealth was built by electric cars: trying to defeat electric cars.
Trump campaign makes harming EVs/environment a major priority
Trump has repeatedly signaled his intent to harm the electric vehicle market during the campaign and prior.
Not only has he made EVs a target several times in his campaign, primarily through ridiculous rants that show little understanding about how anything works, but he has also signaled his intent to reverse the Inflation Reduction Act, a bill signed by President Biden which has been phenomenally effective at bringing manufacturing jobs to the US and has helped to lower the price of EVs for consumers.
In addition, Project 2025, a conservative playbook for the election, includes several action items which would harm EV policy and result in dirtier air and water and more climate change. The Heritage Foundation, the organization that has worked to advance Project 2025, boasts that Trump attempted to institute most of their policy recommendations in his last tour of the White House, so it can be expected that many of the Project’s ideas would make their way onto the president’s desk should America make the mistake of electing him.
And it stands to reason that a potential Trump administration might try to implement these action items, because many of them were already attempted in the past.
The last time he found himself in the White House, his EPA attempted to undertake a number of illegal actions to increase pollution – many of which, thankfully, were stopped by the courts (the Natural Resources Defense Council won 92% of its cases against Trump’s anti-environment actions, for example).
The promise of courts being sensible and following the law is less certain this time around though, given the US “Supreme” Court’s recent history of just making it up as they go along.
One of Trump’s anti-EV actions which we covered extensively on Electrek was over California’s EPA waiver, a provision of the Clean Air Act which Trump’s EPA tried to repeal. California eventually won that fight, allowing it to remain the United States’ testbed for advanced vehicle technologies and clean air regulation, leading to boons in clean air nation- and indeed world-wide.
Even today – the same day that Musk committed 8 figures per month to the campaign – we heard more news about the Trump campaign’s hostility to EVs.
Trump’s VP pick is J.D. Vance, another faux-populist who, among other things, has introduced legislation to make EVs more expensive and gas cars cheaper, aiming for a swing of $15k in subsidies per vehicle compared to current prices. This would be on top of the tens of thousands in implicit subsidy already afforded to gas vehicles over their lifetime due to the ignored costs of pollution (which Musk himself favors a correction for in the form of a carbon tax, but it’s not too popular with his fellow far-right loons).
President Biden, in contrast, has supported EVs and Tesla
In contrast, President Biden’s policy has supported EVs and Tesla significantly.
Not only does the Inflation Reduction Act reduce prices of all sorts of green solutions for American consumers and businesses, it has also led to a renaissance in American manufacturing with hundreds of billions invested and hundreds of thousands of jobs created.
The Inflation Reduction Act is also limited to vehicles assembled in North America, which most of Tesla’s vehicles are, and which use a lot of US-sourced parts, which Tesla tops the list of. While you can bypass most of the IRA’s restrictions by leasing, this law has still disproportionately benefitted Tesla given its American roots, enabling the Model 3 to become a fantastic deal right now (and it’s a great deal when leasing too).
Musk’s donations aren’t just directed towards the opponent of the President who campaigned for and signed this law, but they go to a republican ticket that have both independently stated their intent to repeal this law that benefits Tesla.
Moving on to Biden’s infrastructure plan – something which Trump was never able to pass – this includes a provision called NEVI, which grants billions to EV charging companies.
Notably, the biggest EV charging company in America happens to be run by Elon Musk: Tesla. But originally, Tesla wasn’t going to qualify for NEVI funds due to its proprietary system – NEVI requires that chargers be usable by anyone, not just a single make of car.
This catalyzed Tesla to create the NACS charging standard in the hope of attaining some of those federal dollars. Then, due to the actions of Rebecca Tinucci and her Supercharger team (which Musk fired unceremoniously despite their success), Tesla was able to shift the entire industry over to Tesla’s NACS plug.
As a result, Tesla could now qualify for billions in federal dollars to help them expand their Supercharger network, and Tesla can sell energy, at a profit, to vehicles of other makes, leading to potential profits of untold billions if Tesla is able to keep its massive lead in fast charging. And none of this would have happened without Biden’s NEVI.
Musk seems to forget himself, even
In the early days of Tesla, the company was relatively mature in terms of its participation in politics. Neither the company nor its executive made many political statements, wanting to encourage EV adoption for the good of everyone.
It’s clear that EVs benefit air quality and the world in many ways, and Musk claimed many times that the reason he got into EVs is because he saw sustainable transport as key to survival of the human race.
On this point, he was correct – transportation is the largest sector of emissions in rich countries, and the vast majority of polluting and unsustainable oil is used in vehicles with internal combustion engines.
Over time Musk cultivated an independent persona around himself, suggesting that he didn’t like to get involved in politics.
One example of Musk’s desire to portray his independence was when Trump tried to pull out of the Paris Agreement against public support for staying in. Trump justified the move with a number of falsehoods that showed his lack of understanding of even the most basic aspects of international relations, science, and finance.
Prior to that move, Musk had been on Trump’s “advisory council”, but he immediately dropped out after the Paris announcement, rightly recognizing that “Climate change is real. Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world”.
Even this year, Musk wanted to be “super clear” that he would not donate money to either candidate for President, in a tweet that is still up on his twitter page.
One could suggest that this massive donation is an attempt to get himself at the table, so that he can have some influence to reduce the anti-environment tendencies of this prospective administration. But if that were the case, it would be more likely that he would donate to both candidates, who are currently 50/50 in the polls, so that he can have influence in either administration.
Indeed, given his behavior and advocacy lately, it actually seems that his far-right twitter feed has taken him over, and swept him away from any sense of rationality, self-preservation, or responsible corporate leadership, with his commitment of massive amounts of money to harm EVs – and Tesla’s core business, for the shareholders who granted him this money – and to ensure the world have a difficult time becoming more sustainable.