It shouldn’t come as a surprise that as the nation wraps up one of the most acrimonious, neck-and-neck elections in American history, its wealthiest citizens have felt the pull of politics. Still, it’s been something to behold these last few weeks, as those at the apex of the billionaire pyramid made news for intervening in the race.
The New York Times reported that “after decades of sitting on the sideline of politics,” Bill Gates donated $50 million to a nonprofit supporting Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential run — and helped convince his billionaire pal Mike Bloomberg to give big as well. Of course, his ex-wife, Melinda French Gates, had already asserted herself on the public stage as a leading Democratic donor and champion.
Then there was the news that Jeff Bezos interceded into the workings of the Washington Post, the newspaper he owns, which announced it would no longer issue presidential endorsements — shortly before the paper was set to endorse Harris.
But looming over all of them is Elon Musk. He’s been everywhere, making himself, as the Washington Post phrased it, “the public face of Trump’s closing argument — a human October surprise.” On the stump, Harris’s VP pick Tim Walz has jokingly referred to Musk as Donald Trump’s running mate.
There he was bouncing on a stage with Trump at a Pennsylvania campaign event, then facing the throngs at the Madison Square Garden rally. He has frequently shared disinformation about illegal immigrants voting to his more than 200 million followers on X, the social media platform he owns. He has poured at least $119 million over the last several months into his own pro-Trump super PAC, which also took on much of the get-out-the-vote work for Republicans in key battleground states.
This included a novel approach in which Musk paid registered voters in those states who signed a petition from his super PAC favoring conservative causes and entered them in what Musk described as a random drawing for a $1 million prize. A lawsuit by the Philadelphia district attorney to stop the sweepstakes was denied by a Pennsylvania judge yesterday. The Justice Department previously warned that the giveaway may violate federal laws against paying voters.
No Precedent
When it comes to the nation’s richest individuals, I’m not sure there’s a precedent in modern history for how Musk has inserted himself into the presidential race.
For those who oppose Trump, Musk has become an urgent political problem — it’s never a good thing to the have richest man in the world bankrolling and hyping your opponent. But Musk should also be understood as a problem for philanthropy.
Much talk over the last decade has focused on how philanthropic goals often hinge on political realities, and thus, on the need to invest in advocacy work. This has led to acceptance, if not active endorsement, of the blurring boundaries between politics and philanthropy, despite the legal demarcations separating the two.
At the same time, there have been steady calls to correct the power imbalances between grantor and grantee. More broadly, a general apprehension about the power of mega-donors over the nation’s common life has darkened public discourse on philanthropy.
Musk now represents the grotesque culmination of the first trend, and the untroubled violation of the second. Until recently, Musk was notable for his philanthropy largely because of how little thought he appeared to give to it beyond causes that seemed to serve his own business interests. For a while, the best explanation for his lack of attention was that he regarded those interests as philanthropic stand-ins — investing in Tesla and SpaceX was how he chose to deploy his capital for the greater good.
But now, with his almost manic partisan engagement, he can claim to be heeding another call that comes with the responsibilities of great wealth: Pumping millions into what he insists could be the last free election in this country if Harris wins.
Of course, Musk is by no means the only mega-wealthy person bankrolling the election. The Financial Times counted 144 U.S. billionaires who have funded the presidential election, calculating that their contributions make up 18 percent “of the total money raised during this election cycle.” Musk, however, stands out.
In the past, the nation’s wealthiest citizens who were the biggest political spenders — George Soros on left and the Koch Brothers on the right — wielded their dollars with a degree of discretion. There were, of course, strategic reasons for keeping their heads low. And the lack of transparency they often preferred for their political spending posed its own problems. But that discretion also represented a tacit acknowledgment of the problem of large-scale wealth in a democracy and was consistent with broader efforts to restrain that wealth.
Musk has no such reservations. If anything, he seems to take pleasure in bumping up against the legal cover the courts have provided for large-scale corporate spending on politics. Consequently, the figure he casts as the election comes to an end threatens to solidify a new set of norms about the relationship between private wealth, politics, and democratic ideals.
What Now?
So how should philanthropy respond to the problem of Elon Musk? One possibility is to consider the primary ways we already seek to understand or accommodate to the power of concentrated wealth over our public and political life.
That starts with what might be called the arms-race theory of money in politics. Progressives and conservatives have long pointed to the aggressive interventions of wealthy opponents across the partisan divide to justify their own countervailing political moves.
To some extent, history bears this theory out: The increased political engagement of the Ford Foundation and a handful of other funders in the 1950s and ‘60s sparked a conservative philanthropic counter-mobilization a decade later. This resulted in Republican political victories that provoked a progressive freak-out and efforts to create similar networks as those endowed by conservative donors. That in turn led conservatives to bemoan their own subordinate position and to adopt some of the progressive organizational innovations, such as creating separate 501(c)(4) arms at thinks tanks to pursue lobbying. And on it goes.
In the kindest light, one could see the efforts of each side and the challenges they pose to democracy as canceling each other out. At the very least, it’s difficult for either side to decide to unilaterally disarm its donors, providing at least short-term authorization for more money to be shoveled into the electoral furnace.
Relatedly, the philanthropic sector’s attempts to reconcile short-term realism with long-term idealism have resulted in calls to continue the work of philanthropy until philanthropy itself, and the power imbalances it’s premised on, are no longer necessary. If these calls to make philanthropy obsolete gained early prominence in progressive and more radical circles, they have now become fairly mainstream.
In fact, the invocation of this theme can be traced all the way back to Andrew Carnegie’s 1889 “Gospel of Wealth,” in which the steel magnate seeks to justify the “temporary unequal distribution of wealth,” pointing to the possibility of social transformation in the future. In a letter to former British Prime Minister William Gladstone, soon after composing his gospel, Carnegie suggested that an “ideal Commonwealth” which could oversee “the prevention of immense fortunes” might come around sometime in “the two thousandth.” We shall see.
Most promising are recent attempts to integrate democracy into the practice of philanthropy through participatory and trust-based approaches that aim to counteract its inegalitarian strains.
All these efforts have merit. But in the face of the challenge to democracy posed by Musk and the prerogatives of private wealth his actions represent, none seem adequate.
A Crisis Point
Musk’s all-in partisan activism threatens to knock the arms-race equilibrium out of whack. The pervasive sense of the current moment as a crisis point for democracy itself — a variation on Musk’s warning that this could be the last free election — short-circuits the reconciliation of short-term and long-term democratic visions. And at the moment, at least, urging philanthropy to embrace trust-based measures, given the scale of mega-wealth deployed in this election, can seem like a call to bail out a sinking ship by the teaspoon.
That leaves us with one final option to consider: Direct philanthropic investment in democracy, especially in initiatives to reduce concentrated wealth and get money out of politics. This op-ed is not the place to spell out the concrete steps funders can take to do that — many have already done so on the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s pages.
It is meant as a signal flare that should keep burning no matter who wins the election. It is a reminder that, to the extent that philanthropy has any role in preserving a democratic future for this country, its leaders must see the enormous power that a single man has wielded in the final days of this campaign as an urgent problem — precisely because that man and his supporters refuse to see it as one.
