Will Musk bankroll Trump? Billionaire holds meeting with ex-president

A meeting between Elon Musk and Donald Trump has sent speculation swirling that the Tesla boss could be about to bankroll the presidential hopeful’s campaign.

The two met on Sunday in Palm Beach, Florida along with a few wealthy Republican donors, according to the New York Times.

Trump and his team are desperately seeking a cash injection to boost his presidential campaign.

Musk is currently the second richest man in the world, with an estimated fortune of $200billion.

The former president has privately praised the tech mogul to his allies and hopes to secure a one-on-one meeting soon, according to a source.

While he has not endorsed any candidate, Musk has been highly critical of the Biden administration of late.

On Tuesday, he re-shared a DailyMail.com article which detailed how 320,000 unvetted migrants had been allowed into the US, and warned it is ‘highly probable that the groundwork is being laid for something far worse than 9/11‘.

Those close to Musk also confirmed he believes Biden needs to be removed from office in November, according to the NYT. 

However, his relationship with Trump has previously been somewhat tumultuous.

In 2017, he stepped down from two business advisory councils following Trump’s  decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement.

In 2022, Trump called him an expletive, with Musk responding it was time for the ex-president to ‘sail into the sunset‘.

Unlike other billionaires, Musk has not spent heavily on political donations and has previously given to both the Republicans and Democrats. 

He personally has provided funding to politicians including Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Marco Rubio, George W. Bush and John Kerry.

His companies Tesla and SpaceX, have benefited from federal government contracts and subsidies.

However in recent years Musk has seemingly leaned more towards the GOP.

This may be in part due to a snub by the Biden administration in 2021 after they failed to invited Tesla to a summit on electric vehicles.

‘Let’s not forget the White House giving Tesla the cold shoulder, excluding us from the EV summit,’ Musk wrote in December, more than two years after the sleight.

The following year he encouraged his followers on X, formerly Twitter, to vote in a Republican Congress ahead of the midterms.

But even before that he was revealed as one of the largest donors to a PAC aimed at keeping congressional Republicans in control of the House of Representatives in 2018.

More recently he appeared to criticize podcast host Bill Maher, who said he would vote for Biden over Trump in almost every circumstance.

‘Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) is a very real disease,’ Mr. Musk wrote on X on Monday.

After purchasing the social media platform in 2022, he reinstated Trump’s account after it was suspended in the wake of January 6.

Musk has generally railed against left-leaning ‘woke’ policies and has repeated right wing rhetoric on immigration. 

‘America will fall if it tries to absorb the world,’ Mr. Musk posted on X on Tuesday. 

He also suggested that Democrats are ‘ushering in vast numbers of illegals’ to commit voter fraud, despite no evidence to support this. 

Musk has been scathing about Biden, raising questions over his age and joking he was ‘still sleeping’ after he failed to congratulate one of his companies.

But his support for Trump was far from guaranteed. In 2015, Musk said it would be ’embarrassing’ if Trump was nominated as the Republican candidate for president, criticism he repeated before election day.

This election cycle saw early indications he may have backed Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

DeSantis kicked off his campaign with a live streamed interview with the billionaire, however this did not materialize into a donation.