Elon Musk gave $5 million to Donald Trump’s super PAC during a dramatic and bitter falling out with the president, new filings show.
The donation to MAGA Inc. was made a month after Musk said he had “done enough” political spending, and he also gave $10 million that same day to help Republicans keep control of Congress.
The contributions came weeks into Musk’s public feud with Trump, as the tech billionaire was slamming Republicans for voting for the megabill that he argued would blow up the deficit. Still, the SpaceX CEO donated $5 million each to the Congressional Leadership Fund, the Senate Leadership Fund and MAGA Inc. on June 27, according to the groups’ filings with the Federal Election Commission on Thursday. Those are the top super PACs supporting the House and Senate Republicans and the Trump political operation.
The next week, the world’s richest man said he would start his own political party.
Musk, who spent $290 million of his own money to boost Trump and other Republicans last year, led the cost-cutting efforts of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency in the first few months of the Trump administration. When he left that role in May, he also suggested he was done with political giving for the time being: “If I see a reason to do political spending in the future, I will do it. I don’t currently see a reason,” he said at the Qatar Economic Forum.
The $5 million donation to the Trump-linked super PAC MAGA Inc. came weeks after Musk had torched Trump on social media, first over policy differences surrounding the president’s megabill, but also in escalating personal attacks. Musk later deleted some posts, but resumed his criticism of Trump, including his administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, in July….
Category Archives: campaigns
“Trump, Term-Limited, Amasses $200 Million War Chest for Political Ambitions”
President Trump’s super PAC is sitting on about $200 million that it can spend against his rivals, giving a term-limited president a never-before-seen amount of power in his party’s finances and future.
In the first half of 2025, Mr. Trump’s group, MAGA Inc., collected about $177 million from the likes of Elon Musk, Mr. Trump’s erstwhile ally, the TikTok investor Jeffrey Yass and the Silicon Valley executives Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen, according to a filing on Thursday with the Federal Election Commission.
Mr. Trump has been able to capitalize on a thirst from corporate America to get into his good graces. He held a half-dozen fund-raisers for his super PAC this year with tickets costing seven figures a seat. At the dinners, often held at one of Mr. Trump’s properties, executives and lobbyists had the chance to tell the president about their businesses.
The super PAC’s exact cash on hand is $196.1 million, according to the filing.
There is no precedent for politicians so aggressively raising money for their own entities when they do not have a campaign to use it for. In the first half of 2013, a similar political group supporting a term-limited Barack Obama, Priorities USA, raised just $356,000. As of that June, it held $3.4 million, less than 2 percent of the cash on hand of Mr. Trump’s super PAC.
The money raised by MAGA Inc. during the first six months of the year is almost twice the amount collected by the Republican National Committee, which is subject to contribution limits. Mr. Yass donated $16 million to the super PAC and Mr. Horowitz and Mr. Andreessen combined to donate an additional $11 million. His group also collected several seven-figure contributions from crypto companies, an industry that Mr. Trump has embraced, and $5 million from a crypto entity co-founded by the OpenAI chief Sam Altman.
That Mr. Trump is raising so much money for his group has confounded some Republicans.
Some of Mr. Trump’s most loyal supporters have argued that he should try to run for a third term, despite it being unconstitutional. Mr. Trump’s aides have argued that he would be foolish not to accept money that is essentially for the taking, and that the assets can be used to target Mr. Trump’s rivals, beginning with Representative Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican whom MAGA Inc. is attacking. Mr. Massie broke with Mr. Trump on the president’s decision to bomb Iran and on his domestic bill.
With a $200 million war chest, MAGA Inc. figures to be a big part of Republican primaries, making Mr. Trump’s endorsements in those races all the more important. The money is sure to be spent on advertising to back Mr. Trump’s endorsed candidates….
“Old money: Campaign finance and gerontocracy in the United States”
Adam Bonica and Jacob Grumbach have written this article for the Journal of Public Economics. Here is the abstract:
Politicians in the United States rank among the oldest globally. This study examines how money in politics contributes to age inequality in political representation. Using record-linkage to construct a novel data set combining the ages of voters, donors, and candidates, we find that the median dollar in US elections comes from a 66-year-old — significantly older than the median voter, candidate, or elected official. Results from within-district and within-donor analyses confirm that age proximity with candidates increases contributions on the extensive and intensive margins. Finally, we simulate candidate fundraising by age under a hypothetical campaign finance voucher policy.
League of Women Voters, ACLU and Rutherford Institute File Amicus Brief Supporting Republican Representative Bost’s Standing to Sue over Accepting Ballots Arriving After Election Day
They disagree on the merits of Bost’s position, but this filing at the Supreme Court supporting standing for Rep. Bost is still notable.
See also this interesting amicus brief from Professor Michael Morley.
“Democrats Plan $20 Million Fund to Target Texas Republicans for Redistricting”
The largest super PAC backing House Democrats is creating a new fund with upward of $20 million to target congressional Republicans in Texas if legislators there follow through on plans to redraw district lines to eliminate Democratic seats ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
At the direction of President Trump, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, a Republican, has called a special session of the State Legislature to remake the lines in the state in order to squeeze as many as five Democrats out of office in an effort to pad the current slim Republican majority in the House.
National Democrats have decried the redistricting effort — lines are typically drawn once a decade after the census — as an effort to rig a Republican majority.
“Republicans are trying to steal five seats in Texas,” said Mike Smith, the president of the House Majority PAC, which is creating the new account, called the Lone Star Fund.
The new account, he said, is partly a bid to tell congressional Republicans from Texas that their own jobs could be put in jeopardy by the remapping as Republican voters are shifted into formerly Democratic seats. But he said it was also a bid to recruit some unlikely Republican allies to oppose the new maps because they fear for their own careers.
“They should be scared and they should be vocal about being scared because they’re about to get a bunch of money dropped on their head,” Mr. Smith said.
The advertising assault on those Republicans will actually begin on Monday, when Unrig Our Economy, a liberal-leaning outside group, is starting an ad campaign worth more than $2 million focusing on four current Republican congressional districts in Houston, Dallas and near the Mexican border, the group said….
Lloyd Mayer on the Johnson Amendment
The always insightful tax and election law scholar Lloyd Mayer on the Johnson Amendment here. From the post:
Churches and other houses of worship can endorse political candidates without risking the loss of their tax-exempt status, the Internal Revenue Service said in a legal document the tax-collection agency filed on July 7, 2025. This guidance is at odds with a law Congress passed more than 70 years ago that’s known as the Johnson Amendment and applies to all charitable nonprofits, whether they are secular or religious.
The Conversation U.S. asked Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, a law professor who has studied the regulation of churches’ political activities, to explain what this statute is, how the IRS seeks to change its purview and why this matters.
What’s the Johnson Amendment?
The Johnson Amendment is a provision that Lyndon B. Johnson added to a tax bill passed by Congress in 1954, when he was a senator. It says that any charity that wants to be tax-exempt under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code cannot “participate in, or intervene in … any political campaign on behalf of … any candidate for public office.” In the U.S., all houses of worship are designated as charities by the IRS.
The IRS has interpreted the Johnson Amendment for more than 70 years to mean that charities cannot speak in favor of political candidates or take any other action that supports or opposes them.
“Jocelyn Benson vs. GOP: What is this fight over Michigan election manuals really about?”
I agree with Votebeat’s topline description of the latest tiff in the Wolverine State:
Michigan’s top election official is locked in a clamorous legal battle with Republican lawmakers over access to election training materials, a conflict that likely has less to do with policy than politics — and the coming race for governor.
“A.I. Is Starting to Wear Down Democracy”
That’s the headline in the NYT, and the second exaggerated NYT headline I’ve flagged today. I don’t know that the article actually delivers what the headline promises (and headlines are usually not, as I understand it, written by the reporters themselves, which continues to strike me as a disservice to the reporters in situations like these).
But if you skip the headline and read the piece itself, you’ll find a really useful catalog of some of the ways in which AI has been used in recent elections, with embedded multimedia examples.
“Voters beware: 25 states restrict AI in elections. SC is in the other half.”
As the Daily Gazette points out, though 25 states have either bans or rules about disclosures for AI in campaign materials, the current draft of the “Big Beautiful Bill” has a 10-year moratorium on state AI regulations that would likely block enforcement of many of these statutes.
FTC ad placement consent decree with a … very unusual provision
The FTC announced its approval today of a consent agreement governing the acquisition by Omnicrom of The Interpublic Group – both offer (inter alia) media buying services. The agreement allows the purchase but prohibits Omnicrom from directing ad spending to or away from any publisher based on the “political or ideological viewpoints” of the publisher or of nearby content on the publisher’s platform unless it’s pursuant to the terms of a specific agreement between Omnicrom and the company doing the advertising and purchasing Omnicrom’s services. And even if one company has an explicit banned- or preferred-publisher list (or asks Omnicrom to come up with one), the agreement stops Omnicrom from sharing that list with any other client.
The agreement sure seems like it’s going to make it significantly harder for Omnicrom to effectuate a client’s “Please don’t show my ad next to Nazi propaganda” wish. But also, on its face, it also seems like it’s going to make it significantly harder for Omnicrom to create a business model favoring certain kinds of “political or ideological” advertising, or placing ads targeting Republicans or Democrats?
Unless Omnicrom is effectively a common carrier – and I’ll confess I don’t know the shape of the industry enough to know – it’s hard to see how this squares with the company’s First Amendment rights…
“The Real Problem With the Democrats’ Ground Game”
Russell Berman in The Atlantic:
They called it the “Big Send.” Democrats gathered in living rooms, libraries, and coffee shops across the country to write letters to millions of potential voters in swing states and competitive congressional districts, urging them to vote in November. During the 2020 pandemic election, the novel but decidedly 20th-century tactic had cut through the glut of digital messages that inundated Americans’ cellphones and inboxes, and organizers hoped it would similarly boost turnout for Democrats in 2024.
It did not.
In a study set to be released later today, the group behind the letter-writing effort, the nonpartisan Vote Forward, found that personal messages sent to more than 5 million occasional voters deemed at risk of staying home last fall had no effect on turnout. (The group’s campaign produced a modest increase in turnout among a second, slightly smaller set of low-propensity voters, but it still fell short of previous Vote Forward programs.) What’s unusual is not Vote Forward’s lackluster findings, but that the group is ready to tell the world about them. Every election, a constellation of progressive organizations sells donors and volunteers on the promise that their data-driven turnout programs will deliver victory at the polls. These mobilization efforts have taken on ever-greater importance in an era of tight elections, where the presidency and majorities in Congress can hinge on just a few thousand votes.
Progressive groups are only too happy to brag about their wins; they’re much less likely to divulge details about their campaigns that flopped. Driving this reticence is a fear that donations will dry up—or go to other organizations in a highly competitive campaign industry—if funders find out their money made little difference on the ground. In several instances, researchers told me, Democratic firms have either pushed them to suppress the results of studies that didn’t produce desired findings or cherry-picked data to make the numbers look better. “We have a people-pleasing problem in our party,” Max Wood, a progressive data scientist, told me.
Yasmin Radjy, the executive director of Vote Forward and its progressive campaign arm, Swing Left, is trying to change that culture. Just as Democrats are now debating, sometimes fiercely, why their party’s message failed last year, Radjy believes that to emerge from “the political wilderness,” they need to have candid conversations about their organizing and turnout efforts. Radjy has been frustrated by what she describes as Democrats’ lack of introspection and transparency. For months, she’s been asking party organizers and consultants what they learned in 2024, and what they’re going to do differently going forward. “We’ve got to actually be honest about both what works and what doesn’t work,” she told me. In the next election, “if we are serving volunteers, donors, and voters reheated leftovers from 2024, we are doing it wrong.”…
“A Super PAC Is Encroaching on the DCCC’s Territory”
A super PAC with close ties to House Democratic leadership is taking a more active role with House candidates ahead of next year’s elections, expanding its political operation into the realm traditionally occupied by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
While many Democratic strategists and elected officials welcome the new hands-on approach from House Majority PAC, some question whether it excessively overlaps with the DCCC, reducing the committee’s role and ceding some responsibility for candidate management to the outside group.
“Judge tosses Democratic Party challenge to Trump order’s impact on FEC”
A federal judge has dismissed a Democratic Party lawsuit claiming an executive order issued by President Donald Trump was intruding on the independence of the Federal Election Commission.
In a ruling Tuesday night, U.S. District Judge Amir Ali said the Democratic Party groups’ case was simply too speculative to justify emergency intervention from the court. The FEC had pledged to remain independent, had received no directive from the White House to change its practices and vowed to abide by the law. Without evidence undermining those promises, Ali said he was compelled to dismiss the suit.
The Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee filed the suit in February after Trump issued an executive order that sought to assert greater control over executive branch agencies that have traditionally operated with considerable independence from the White House.
From the court’s opinion, which finds the executive order to be more bark than bite (so far):
The possibility that the President and Attorney General would take the extraordinary step of issuing a directive to the FEC or its Commissioners purporting to bind their interpretation of FECA is not sufficiently concrete and imminent to create Article III injury. . . .
Here, the committees do not allege that the President or Attorney General has applied section seven of the executive order to the FEC or its Commissioners by purporting to issue an “authoritative” or “controlling” interpretation of FECA despite the FEC and its Commissioners’ statutorily protected independence. Exec. Order No. 14215 § 7. Nor do the committees plausibly allege the President or Attorney General plans to do so. And the Court cannot conclude from the text of section seven alone, which refers to executive employees generally and does not mention the FEC, that this type of extraordinary step by the President or Attorney General is certainly impending or a “substantial risk.”
“Mike Lindell’s defamation trial begins Monday”
Former MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell will not be sleeping through his defamation trial. Lindell has decided to take the stand in his own defense in what the staunch MAGA supporter has coined “the trial of the century.” It starts Monday morning with jury selection at Denver’s Alfred A. Araj United States Courthouse. Opening statements are expected to be thirty minutes long and will likely be over by the end of the day.
The upcoming two-week trial, overseen by United States District Judge Nina Wang, stems from a defamation lawsuit filed in 2022 by Eric Coomer, a former Dominion Voting Systems employee, who alleges that Lindell accused him of rigging the 2020 election against President Trump during an “Antifa conference call.”