- Elon Musk went all-in on Donald Trump this year. Now he has Trump’s attention.
- But that doesn’t mean Musk can compel Trump to do everything he desires.
- A look at Musk’s Twitter feed shows his influence has limits.
Two big, related questions we have about Trump 2.0:
This is a case where predictions don’t do us a lot of good. For starters, because both Donald Trump and Elon Musk are unpredictable characters. Past performance — and, in their cases, statements they’ve made — are no guarantee of future results.
Also, whatever does happen, we may never get clear-cut answers, anyway. For instance: Reuters reports that although Elon Musk has been spending a lot of time using Twitter to promote candidates for Trump 2.0, he doesn’t always get what he wants.
In some cases, Reuters’ Helen Coster and Alexandra Ulmer note, “Musk backed people who either lost out on the roles or withdrew from consideration, suggesting some early limits to the Republican mega donor’s influence even as he has emerged as one of Trump’s most powerful allies.”
Reuters says Musk has posted about Trump’s cabinet picks more than 70 times between November 7 and November 20. That’s a small slice of his frenzied Twitter output. But part of the premise of buying Twitter for $44 billion was that the platform was an important way to inform and persuade people. So the fact that Twitter’s owner, and most popular user, was using it to stump for candidates he likes is meaningful.
Musk was most enthusiastic about Matt Gaetz, the former Congressman who Trump put forth as his attorney general nominee. But Gaetz, who reportedly faced fierce opposition from some Senate Republicans, withdrew his name for consideration days after Trump nominated him.
Reuters also notes that Musk didn’t get his way when it came to Trump’s pick for Treasury Secretary, or for who Republicans chose to become their Senate majority leader.
Again, this doesn’t mean all the time and money Musk has invested in Trump isn’t paying off for him. For starters, there’s the DOGE cost-cutting/restructuring commission he’s supposed to run along with Vivek Ramaswamy, which Musks says he’s still kind of surprised to learn is actually going to happen:
Then there’s whatever is going to happen behind the scenes when Musk and his allies are in Trump’s ear. But one thing we saw in Trump 1.0 that is likely to happen again is that Trump won’t listen to a single person, but to a variety of people in his orbit. And of all the media outlets that could influence him, the one he seems most attuned to is Fox News, where he seems to be sourcing many of his candidates. We’ll definitely be revisiting this one.
