Audio excerpt — Elon Musk:

“All right. Hello, everyone. So, my apologies for the late start. We unfortunately had a massive, distributed denial of service attack against our servers.”

RUBY:

When Elon Musk sat down to interview Donald Trump on his platform X, it was easy to ridicule – the world’s richest man known for his innovation in space travel was experiencing technical difficulties.

Audio excerpt — Elon Musk:

“So it's not time to proceed but as this massive attack illustrates, there's a lot of opposition to people just hearing what President Trump has to say.”

RUBY:

But the conversation was interesting in another way, showing just how close these two men have become.

Audio excerpt — Donald Trump:

“And so we have to consider it an honour. But congratulations on breaking every record in the book tonight. That's great.”

Audio excerpt — Elon Musk:

“Well thank you.”

RUBY:

You’d almost forget that just two years ago, the pair were openly hostile to each other.

Audio excerpt — Donald Trump:

“You know, he said the other day, ‘oh, I've never voted for a Republican’. I said, I didn't know that. He told me he voted for me. So he's another bullshit artist.”

RUBY:

It’s now been revealed that Elon Musk has been working behind the scenes to fundraise for Trump for months – not just raising millions of dollars but going to great lengths to keep his involvement secret.

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From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones. This is 7am.

Today, Wall Street Journal reporter Dana Mattioli on the political transformation of Elon Musk, and what she uncovered about his secret plans to return Trump to the White House.

It’s Thursday, August 22.

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RUBY:

Dana, you've been looking into Elon Musk's increasing influence on the US presidential race. And you’ve uncovered all of this information about secret Friday meetings that Elon Musk was having, building this network to help Donald Trump. Tell me what you found.

DANA:

Yeah, it's pretty remarkable. Not only has he come out and endorsed Donald Trump since the assassination attempt, he started this super political action committee, what we call a Super PAC in the US.

They're different from a traditional PAC in that, you know, corporations and labour unions form these old fashioned sorts of PACs to back or oppose political candidates, and donors are limited to giving $5,000 a year to PAC, and PACs can only give as much as $3,300 a candidate.

So super PACs are these groups that can raise unlimited sums of money for ads to support or oppose a candidate.

Audio excerpt — News Reporter:

“In SpaceX-like fashion, Trump donations are about to enter a new stratosphere. Elon Musk making some major donations coming up to a new Trump super PAC. That's according to a Wall Street Journal report. The journalist Dana Mattioli broke this story.”

DANA:

We reported that every Friday he has this hour long meeting with all the PACs vendors where he gets, like, progress reports and how many doors were knocked on for Donald Trump. You know, how many voters were registered, what were the conversations like? And this is, like I said, this is a man that runs six different companies, right? It's not like he's got a lot of free time on his hands, but he's spending it with the intent of helping turn out 800,000 voters in swing states in the US to help Trump win the election.

RUBY:

And so we know about this super PAC now, but initially Musk's involvement was secret, right? Can you tell me about that?

DANA:

Yeah. He didn't want to contribute to it until after June 30th because there are regulatory filings, quarterly regulatory filings for these PACs that show all the donors.

So what he did was starting in April, he started talking to vendors, trying to understand how he could be of most of use for this campaign, started hiring vendors, getting proposals. And then he lined up a bunch of people that were not him to fund those first few months of operations with the idea that he would give on or after July 1st, which wouldn't show up until the October filings.

There was a report, I think it was like July 12th by Bloomberg News saying that Elon was involved with this new super PAC called the America PAC. And then we at the Wall Street Journal, we started digging into this to see like what was going on there. And we learned that not only was he involved in the super PAC, he had headed it up and he was willing to give $45 million a month to it.

Audio excerpt — Journalist:

“Mr Musk, are you still donating to Trump? Are you still donating $45 million dollars?”

DANA:

And so we put this big story out, which we were told really aggravated Elon.

Audio excerpt — Elon Musk:

“At no point did I say I was donating $45 million a month to Trump.That was a fiction made up by The Wall Street Journal.”

DANA:

They started a witch hunt to see how exactly it leaked out. And then subsequently, we followed it up about what was going on inside the super PAC. And, you know, in July, there was a big shake-up where a lot of the top people at the PAC were replaced with people from Governor Ron DeSantis’ failed presidential bid, and they fired many of their big vendors and had several weeks very close to the election, the elections fewer than 90 days away, where they, you know, weren't knocking on doors, they weren't registering voters. And it led to a bit of chaos.

RUBY:

Okay. So we've got Elon Musk funnelling about $45 million USD a month into this Super PAC, which is an incredible amount of money. But at the same time it seems like there's quite a bit of chaos going on inside that PAC. Can you tell me a little bit more about what we know about what it actually achieved and what was happening behind the scenes?

DANA:

So since launching, the Super PAC had relied on two very big vendors. One was called In Field Strategies, the other one's called Raconteur. And as of July 12th, they had knocked on 725,000 doors in swing states. They had 150,000 substantive conversations with prospective voters. They got 26,000 people to agree to get their absentee ballots. And, they'd also started the voter registration process for more than 8,500 people. So they're making pretty decent progress.

Then there was the shake up, where people from the DeSantis campaign came over and the vendors were fired sort of abruptly. And as a result of that, the door knocking stopped. There were those 8,500 voter registrations that were started. They were never mailed out to the voters to finish the process to actually register to vote. The website for the super PAC was not maintained and there was this bad glitch on the website. And they stopped spending money and placements for advertising on Facebook and Instagram and all of their social medias were not updated once the vendors were let go, this had a pretty big disruption for the PAC, you know, very close to when the election is taking place.

RUBY:

After the break, how Elon Musk broke with the democrats.

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RUBY:

Dana, you've been looking into Elon Musk's involvement in this Super PAC, America PAC, but can you tell me about exactly when Musk began to involve himself with getting Donald Trump reelected?

DANA:

Yeah, it's really fascinating. Elon for many years has said that he voted exclusively Democratic, down the Democratic ticket. He, you know, was a big fan of President Obama.

Audio excerpt — Elon Musk:

“Obama is sticking to his guns. I mean, he's sticking to the fairly radical changes that he initiated…”

Audio excerpt — Elon Musk:

“I think it's by far the best space policy that we've had since Apollo. I mean that’s my honest opinion.”

DANA:

When you look at the companies he has, he's got six different companies and many of them have, you know, environmental missions, which are mostly associated with the Democratic Party. Things, you know, things like getting off of fossil fuels, when you think of a company like Tesla. Or SpaceX is about, you know, going to space because, you know, there's a view that the Earth might not be sustainable. So he'd really been committed to democratic causes and voted for Democrats. And more recently, we've seen this break between Elon and the Democrats. And some of that stemmed in the last four years with the Biden administration.

Audio excerpt — News Reporter:

“Tesla CEO Elon Musk accused President Biden of ignoring his electric vehicle company and paying more attention to legacy automakers.”

DANA:

You know, Tesla is by far the biggest EV maker or electric vehicle maker in the US and whenever Biden hosted other carmakers at the white House or had EV summits, Tesla never got the invite.

Audio excerpt — News Reporter:

“Musk said, quote, ‘the notion of a feud is not quite right. Biden has pointedly ignored Tesla at every turn and falsely stated to the public that GM leads the electric car industry...”

DANA:

And that really irked Tesla, but also Elon. So there's one thing to be disenchanted by the Democratic Party. Another thing to throw your power and your giant microphone and a lot of money behind Donald Trump, right? Who he had openly criticised too, right? So there's been a big turning point there and what we've seen is if you follow Musk's tweets closely, you could see that there's this political evolution happening. He started to espouse more right wing sentiment.

Audio excerpt — Elon Musk:

“I think we need to be very cautious about anything that is anti-meritocratic, and anything that results in the suppression of free speech. So those are two aspects of the woke mind virus that I think are very dangerous.”

DANA:

But he had stopped short of endorsing Donald Trump. And since the assassination attempt there was a lot of people, including Elon Musk, that came out and tweeted their official endorsement of the candidate, and that's exactly what Musk did.

RUBY:

So Elon had been sort of skirting around the edges. Why did he wait until then to publicly endorse Trump?

DANA:

You know, Elon's has all these companies, some of them, you know, have very liberal employee bases. So there's, you know, always the risk of coming out with the political view and irking your own employee base. Companies like Tesla are electric carmakers and Trump is famously very close to the big oil CEOs, so there could be some issues with that. The last election cycle, CEOs did not want to come out in support of Donald Trump. And people I've spoken to this election cycle that our CEOs have said this go around they feel like they could be more open about their support for Donald Trump, they don't need to be closeted, as they say.

Not just with Elon but with other people in Silicon Valley, you know, the venture capitalists, the tech CEOs, that they're frustrated on a number of fronts. Elon in particular, is concerned about illegal immigration in the US. That's something that's like very much a Republican talking point and, you know, border crossings and things of that nature. Elon has expressed concerns about election integrity, which is also a big Trump talking point. They're worried about inflation, the economy. And we've seen this shift to the right in the tech world, so there've been other big name venture capitalist CEOs that have come out in support of Trump this cycle that, you know, prior cycles had voted Democratic, or they sort of hid their support for Trump because it was something that people didn't want to be publicly associated with.

RUBY:

Yeah. And I suppose the bigger kind of question in all of this, when you look at the amount of money that's being spent here, does it work? Are democratic elections won by who can funnel the most money into a campaign?

DANA:

Well, when I speak to, you know, Republican operatives, they sort of describe the need for this type of work. You know, they do need a robust ground game in order to combat what they're seeing from Democrats who do spend a lot of time and money on these issues.

It's really tough to say if they're won that way, but I would say that this is a strategy that both sides rely on. There are super PACs on both sides of the aisle, where very wealthy donors are able to circumvent some of the, you know, individual contribution laws in place. And as it relates to, individual contributions at elections. And this is where, you know, really wealthy donors have influence.

If you wanted to have a wealthy billionaire on your side, there's arguably fewer better than Elon Musk who has one of the world's biggest microphones. That one-on-one conversation where millions of people including undecided voters tuned in, it wasn’t like a typical journalist asking questions and guiding and probing. Some political reporters I spoke to described it as a moderated Trump rally.

It's also fair to say, I mean, this is Elon's, this is not his bailiwick. You know, he is someone who is very innovative. He's able to launch these companies, but he's kind of new to politics and it's, you know, it's got its own world. It's got its own language and it's a lot harder for outsiders to understand.

Audio excerpt — Elon Musk:

“I think that is, that is America, that that is strength under fire. And, so that's, you know, a big, you know, part of the reason why I was excited to endorse you as…”

RUBY:

Dana, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. It's been great having a chat.

DANA:

Thanks for having me.

RUBY:

Dana Mattioli is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal and author of The Everything War: Amazon's Ruthless Quest to Own the World and Remake Corporate Power.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today,

New legislation introduced in Parliament plans to fine MPs who behave badly. The proposal for a new Independent Parliamentary Standards Committee wants the power to investigate workplace complaints against MPs as well as issue fines or suspensions.

It comes as independent MPs Kylea Tink, Allegra Spender and Sophie Scamps joined forces to speak out against “condescending”, “aggressive” and “often misogynistic” behaviour during Question Time.

And,

A child is hospitalised every day in Australia due to domestic or family violence, according to new data published by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.

It found more than 5,000 young people have had a hospital day between 2010 and 2021, with the most common presentation being fractures to the head.

Of those statistics, more than half were female, and more than a third had their first hospital stay under the age of five.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. We’ll see you tomorrow.

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