Will Musk be the next Trump?

[L'Emmerdeur]

Why would the repulsive toad want to be the next Trump when he can buy as many puppets as he likes?

Elon Musk has quietly funneled more than $276 million into Republican groups and his super PAC since the start of July, building a huge turnout operation to help the party battle headwinds in the midterm elections.

The staggering amount of money makes Mr. Musk, the richest person in the world, by far the largest known donor in the midterms. Representatives for Mr. Musk supplied the previously unreported figures on his political giving to The New York Times before a federal filing deadline on Thursday.

In an effort to save Republicans’ Senate majority, gave a total of $158 million this summer to the Senate Leadership Fund, the main super PAC backing the party’s candidates for the chamber, according to his team. In sum, that is one of the largest political donations in American history, and more than the group’s Democratic rival raised from all of its donors that quarter.

Mr. Musk has also built a major Republican turnout operation through a super PAC he founded in 2024, America PAC. He donated over $76 million this summer to the group, which in turn spent that much on building a sprawling canvassing program to try to turn out hard-to-reach Republican voters. The group is active in seven Senate battlegrounds and nearly three dozen House races.

Mr. Musk has already given far more money, about $366 million, to federal committees during the 2025-26 election cycle than he did during the 2024 election, when he laid out roughly $290 million to help return President Trump and Republicans to power. He has given even more in undisclosed donations during both elections, according to people briefed on the giving.

The latest torrent of spending has helped give the Republican Party a financial advantage in the midterms, as well-funded outside groups like Mr. Trump’s powerful super PAC flood the airwaves with advertising in the final weeks. No Democratic billionaire is spending nearly as much as Mr. Musk, and money remains a central worry for the party in an otherwise favorable political environment.

[source]

[Brian Peacock]

He's also pouring moolah into European far-right causes too.

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In other news, Elon thinks humans are merely the organic bootloaders for the superior silicone intelligences to come.

[L'Emmerdeur]

Unsurprisingly execrable coming from him.

He does resemble Trump in a number of ways though. Stiffing people for instance:

'SpaceX is worth $2 trillion. So why hasn’t it paid this Bay Area chef the $70,000 it owes him?'

This year, SpaceX, the aerospace technology company founded by Elon Musk, went public and hit a record market cap of $2 trillion, making Musk the world’s first trillionaire. It recently launched its supersized Starship into orbit, bringing the company one step closer to sending astronauts to the moon.

But Bay Area restaurant owner Darryl Bell says SpaceX still hasn’t paid the roughly $70,000 that it owes him for two catered dinners at the Texas company’s Palo Alto campus.

In July, Bell’s Napa barbecue restaurant, Stateline Road Smokehouse, catered the first of what Bell had hoped would be six monthly dinners for 425 SpaceX employees. At the second dinner in August, Bell said SpaceX’s culinary team gave positive feedback.

Yet payment for the dinners, set at just over $35,000 each, or $78 a person, is now months past due, according to Bell.
In an Oct. 2 email reviewed by the Chronicle, SpaceX acknowledged that “Stateline has not been paid yet and is past their payment terms.”

Bell did not sign a written contract with SpaceX, but said he verbally agreed to the company’s terms of payment within 30 days. Two weeks before Stateline’s third scheduled dinner, Bell mentioned involving a lawyer to a SpaceX accountant and the company put his future events on hold “until the payment issue is resolved,” according to messages reviewed by the Chronicle.

...

The screening process was intense, Bell said, as his team had to complete numerous security checks and sign a non-disclosure agreement, which was also reviewed by the Chronicle. To staff the dinners, several of Bell’s employees agreed to work 14-hour shifts on what would have been their days off.

While Stateline usually requires a 50% deposit for events with more than 100 people, SpaceX had “no (deposit) structure like that,” Bell said. “I thought, ‘They’re a big company. It’s just how they run it.’”

[Elmo's minions proceed to give the restaurant the run-around.]