With Trump’s election win making him $20 billion overnight, you can’t deny that Elon Musk knows how to make good on an investment.
After the results became clear, shares in Tesla jumped by 10 per cent – making the world’s richest man even richer.
Forbes’ Real Time Billionaires List currently values the founder of the electric car company at an astonishing $285.6 billion. At $20 billion, the overnight jump in his wealth is over three times Trump’s entire net worth.
Not that the real estate mogul has done too badly since winning the election.
The President-elect’s fortune rose by $231 million overnight, bringing its total value to over $6 billion.
Still, these numbers must seem paltry to Musk. No wonder he felt the need to hand over millions to the Trump campaign.
His most controversial intervention came when he offered a $1 million daily prize to the winner of a lottery made up of registered voters in swing states who had signed a pro-Constitution petition.
But this is nothing, however, compared to the $119 million he spent in total on securing a Republican victory.
And his contribution wasn’t just financial in nature. For all the talk of ‘the death of Twitter’, Musk used his ownership of the social media platform to promote the Trump campaign.
Professor Timothy Graham from the Queensland University of Technology found ‘an alarming strategy’ behind the content Musk posted to his 200 million followers.
The expert in digital media argues that “by bombarding audiences, journalists, and other key stakeholders with a constant supply of allegations, rumours, conspiracy theories and unverifiable claims, Musk and the Trump campaign eat up all the oxygen of attention.”
All this, he says, distracts people from what his opponents are saying.
Clearly, it worked.
Elon Musk has seen these efforts pay off, with his wealth growing by billions within hours.
It’s sinister enough that the world’s richest man can use all his political and financial resources to influence the results of an election in a democratic nation.
But it’s even more shocking that he can make such staggering amounts of money in the process.
And all of this, of course, takes place in an economy stacked against the poorest.
As Warren Gunnells, Senator Bernie Sanders’ Director of Policy, pointed out on Musk’s own platform: “The $7.25 an hour federal minimum wage has not been raised in 15 years.
The $2.13 an hour tipped minimum wage has not been raised in 33-years.
Welcome to the Divided States of Oligarchy.”