When it comes to billionaires and American politics, these incredibly wealthy people tend to maintain relatively low public profiles. To be sure, they write big checks, finance large operations, and are immediately recognized by those who follow campaign financing closely, but they tend not to be household names.
There are, however, occasional exceptions. NBC News reported:
As Elon Musk steps up his work on behalf of former President Donald Trump, Vice President Kamala Harris is calling in her own billionaire, Mark Cuban, to reprise the role he played for Hillary Clinton in 2016 by holding a series of high-profile appearances alongside her and her husband this week. Cuban appeared with Harris in Wisconsin on Thursday and is set to hold a town hall for her Saturday in Phoenix before he heads to Michigan on Sunday to campaign alongside second gentleman Doug Emhoff.
The result was an unexpected contrast, with Cuban and Musk delivering very different remarks on the same afternoon.
Cuban, perhaps best known to the public as a “Shark Tank” investor, spent a fair amount of time in Wisconsin, focusing on the radicalism of Trump’s proposed trade tariffs. And by all appearances, those in attendance for the Harris rally were impressed by his remarks.
Roughly 900 miles to the east, Musk spoke to a Philadelphia-area audience — unlike Cuban and Harris, the conspiratorial billionaire’s preferred candidate was not there — where he touched on a subject he probably should’ve avoided. NBC News also reported:
Billionaire Elon Musk promoted debunked conspiracy theories about election fraud Thursday at the first of a series of planned campaign events across Pennsylvania meant to rally support for former President Donald Trump’s campaign. At a town hall hosted at a high school outside Philadelphia, Musk referred to the false conspiracy theory that Dominion Voting Systems was part of a plot to rig U.S. elections in recent years.
“When you have mail-in ballots and no proof of citizenship, it’s almost impossible to prove cheating,” he said. “Statistically there are some very strange things that happen that are statistically incredibly unlikely. There’s always this question of, say, the Dominion voting machines. It is weird that, I think, they were used in Philadelphia and in Maricopa County [in Arizona] but not in a lot of other places. Doesn’t that seem like a heck of a coincidence?”
It didn’t take long for a company spokesperson to push back in a statement: “Fact: Dominion does not serve Philadelphia County. Fact: Dominion’s voting systems are already based on voter verified paper ballots. Fact: Hand counts and audits of such paper ballots have repeatedly proven that Dominion machines produce accurate results. These are not matters of opinion. They are verifiable facts.”
Of course, the problem isn’t just that Musk promoted debunked conspiracy theories in a way at odds with the facts; the problem is made worse by the fact that Musk picked up a live wire better left untouched.
After all, when Fox News peddled false claims about Dominion, the voting systems company walked away with a $787.5 million settlement. There’s also a separate case that Dominion brought against Newsmax.
With this in mind, it probably wasn’t a great idea for Musk to go down the same conspiratorial road.