Elon Musk Has Dumped $276 Million To Save Republicans

Hey everybody, it's Tim Moore from The Bulwark. There are a couple of news items from the last few days that have caught my eye that are concerning on their own, but together paint a, I think, pretty alarming picture of what we have ahead of us here over the next three weeks. So just stick with me as I list them out. One, Donald Trump is posting on Twitter again, like on X.com, not just on his own true social platform. Two, Elon Musk, we're now learning, is the largest campaign donor this midterm, again, after saying he wasn't going to do that after the big, beautiful bill. Trump is trying to finish an illegal deal to purchase diesel from Russia. The Ukraine's military has lost critical access to Starlink right as Russia is escalating their attacks on civilians. So Trump and Elon. Elon and Putin are working back together again, both on Twitter and on the campaigns. Trump and Putin are working together again on oil deals. Elon and Putin are working together on killing Ukrainians. So it seems to me what we have here is a coordinated threat from the rogue president, the richest man in the world, and the Russian autocrat ahead of them. In the midterms. Do any of you think those are the only things that they're doing together? Because I don't. It's not a conspiracy theory channel. Don't want to speculate about what other shenanigans they might have in mind ahead of the midterms. But they definitely all seem to be working together as a team again. You know, famously, Donald Trump and Elon had a falling out. Elon said he was in the Epstein files. Elon's complaints about. You know, the one piece of legislation that they got passed were extensive, both in how much they've increased the debt. He also had some quite spout impact on his businesses. You know, the various provisions in the bill that from a tech standpoint, they didn't think it was particularly good. Do you remember this? Elon was starting the America party. But this is something that happened. Like Elon was going to start the America party ahead of this midterm. And he's going to primary people. That we're going along with Trump. But instead of doing that, he is, again, I repeat, the biggest campaign donor this midterm to Republicans all across the country. And so when you see that Trump is posting on Twitter again, it's like it's not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. You know, if you just scroll down his feed here, he's just posting a lot of the various videos that he's been posting. You know, there's the taxpayer funded one that you and I are paying for about the Venezuela. So, you know, I'm just kind of scrolling down here. There's a lot of black and white. He loves black and white. Now, I think his skin color is not existing in nature. Tom Holman video. There's some ice. I used to back to the deportation videos. They have one really disgusting video, which is some ice anti-immigrant kind of ASMR porn. They're back to doing that a little bit. So. OK, I mean, like the content isn't anything particularly noteworthy, but but the scale, the number of posts on X. I mean, it was a competitive business. Like he had truth social and it wasn't doing that great as a competitive business, but he had a competitive business. There was a reason why he was exclusively posting on truth. There's a reason why they cut the corrupt deal with various finance bros that they got early access to his bleats and that they had to have, you know, truth plus plus or whatever it was. In order to be able to do market manipulation, there's a reason why he was doing stuff over there, like a personal business reason to bring it back to Twitter, which has a bigger market share to me is, again, another piece of evidence of detente. The fact that they're both now aligned with Putin as Putin escalates this war in Ukraine with, you know, innocent people dying with blackouts across Kiev. And, you know, let's just go through some of the. The details of what of what we have here on the Starlink. And this is from The New York Times this week. Ukraine said that its military with no warning had lost some critical access to a military version of Starlink, a pillar of its battlefield communication. Kiev relies on the satellite Internet network, which we pay for, the Pentagon pays for. That led Ukrainian officials and analysts to surmise that restrictions had come from Washington as President Trump is locked in his latest feud with Ukraine's leadership. So you have like. Trump and Musk, like working together on that. This is from The Guardian. The restriction just happened suddenly. It happened, again, seemingly coordinated with a launch of Russian ballistic missiles on Ukraine. There was no warning about the outage coming. And Poland had to come into the mix here like they. The Polish foreign minister. Sikorsky went after Musk, you know, saying basically as the European as a European customer, he's watching him, but everybody sees what's happening here. Like, it's totally political. And this is a game in which the lives of innocent Ukrainians are in the hands of Elon Musk and Donald Trump, his tiny hands, because it's not, you know, the front lines, the ballistic missiles are hitting the cities. They're hitting civilians. and you know the military uh you know needs obviously um uh you know access that's something that our guys reported in the spy i've been covering but uh you know from from a military standpoint but uh you know they need internet access um you know both for missile defense for the you know drone um technology uh to go on offense into russia and to have the rug pulled off out of them suddenly while russia is escalating attacks onto the cities i i don't know any other way to look at this but to say that like elon musk and donald trump are costing the lives of ukrainians while trump and putin are doing a deal on diesel like even though he just signed um legislation you know the lindsey graham legislation um that was going to sanction and tariff countries that bought russian energy so something is up like something changed you know like at some level obviously something is the same because you know trump and elon have been sympathetic to russia um throughout you know that's the russia russia russia thing is real um but like the degree of the cooperation has increased substantially over the last week across economic political and military um verticals so like they're all working together um you know the result is there's huge blackout 600 000 people in kiev lost access to power and yeah i think it's a worthwhile question to say like what are they what else are they working on this message is sponsored by casper so you know there are certain things in life that are worth investing in in a good night's sleep well that's definitely one of them you cannot beat a good night's sleep i know because i don't get many of them this podcast is sponsored by casper casper makes reliable high quality mattresses designed to deliver consistent comfortable sleep night after night and out of 99 mattresses consumer reports named casper's the one mattress it's top rated all foam mattress of 2026 that's a pretty damn big endorsement if you've been talking about upgrading your bed now's the time casper's friends and family sale means you can save up to 20 percent on a mattress that you deserve they offer a wide range of mattress types from firm to soft so you can find what works for you plus there's a 100 night risk-free trial so you can try it out at home 100 nights it's pretty long time to try out a mattress thank you casper and casper has just launched a brand new kids mattress so even the youngest sleepers in your family can get that same comfort and quality remember the day always ends well with casper right now save up to 20 on mattresses when you go to casper.com one last time that's c-a-s-p-e-r.com and save up to 20 on the mattress that you deserve you know let's go back to elon's uh midterm engagement here just since the start of july he's funneled 276 million into republican groups um by far the largest known donor uh he gave a total of 158 million to senate leadership fund to try to save the senate majority um he is engaging in some pretty weird and creepy advertising um and i want to show one example of this i think that the good news here is that this is like bizarre and off-putting and i think likely to backfire the bad news is if they're doing creepy shit like this uh you know we don't have full visibility into all of the targeting they're doing and you know there might be other more nefarious and effective stuff afoot but let's let's take a look at this video why are they smiling because christopher hasn't made a plan to vote yet they know if voters like you sit this election out they're one step closer to a radical socialist takeover of america Again, that's a bad ad. I don't really see that working. But the Christopher thing is like they're doing that with – that's why it has a weird voice. Christopher. Because like if I was getting this ad, they would target it and it would say Timothy. Just like when I get texts from random super PACs or campaigns and sometimes they say your name on that. That's like a little strange but oftentimes because you signed up for the email list with your name. But like they're doing this just using their targeting, matching to lists, et cetera. And I think that if you're getting a YouTube pre-roll ad and it was like, Tim, like Elon Musk says vote for this and not socialism. I just think like this is kind of the direction that these guys are going. Like they are really – I think there's a more – like the inverse version of that you see, which is like voter suppression efforts targeting individuals. Like that is something that they could be up to. I mean we've seen in the European elections the way that Russian disinformation and Russian bots and totally Russian false news like getting injected into campaigns. Like we've been seeing that all across Europe. And I think that like this week one of the other stories that was out there was like that Ukraine had hit this data center in Russia. And that was like impacting like traffic in bot farms. And I think that that was a little overstated. Like I think that there are a lot of things happening about why there was some decrease in traffic to some of those terms. But I don't see any evidence that this – that type of kind of bot interference into the discourse is diminishing in any meaningful way certainly because of that attack. So if anything, I think that's going to escalate over the next few weeks. Like you can kind of see it all happening right now. Right. The way they're working together. And I think the other thing is you can see the way that it's – that that like axis of evil, that that cabal is expanding out to the other most powerful people in the world, which are these AI executives. And again, similarly to all this, like over the past week you see a series of things. There was Mark Benioff at Salesforce did a post where he's – where they're now calling it SI force to suck up to Trump. Satya Nadella. The Microsoft CEO. He did a post talking about the risks in the superintelligence world. There was a big Sam Altman interview in Vanity Fair. Vanity Fair loves all the tech executives of the new establishment now. They asked him about Trump. They did like word rapid fire with famous people. One of them was about – the first one is Donald Trump and Altman says powerful. It's like is he – is he powerful right now? Like you guys are making him powerful. You know, like he had negative things to say about a lot of other people. When they asked about Dario Amadei over at Anthropic, his competitor, he said pass. You know, Zuckerberg has been sucking up to Trump recently. When you put all that together, the degree to the control that they have over the discourse, they're engaging in geopolitics. Elon Musk to such a degree that he's engaging directly in the ability of a free country to protect itself, you know, by shutting off their internet access. I just think that like as they see the threats to their power increase, the things that they will do to work together with other nefarious but aligned, to take an AI phrase, individuals to hold on to that power, it's going to skyrocket. I mean, like they're going to continue to, I think, advance these coordination efforts and use all the things that they have. The things that they have at their disposal, which is significant. When you think about all the tech platforms and then, you know, the U.S. government and who knows, Russian government and others. Like they've got a lot of levers they can pull and they're starting to pull them and we're going to keep an eye on it for sure here over the next few weeks. Again, I'm not sure it's working. We talked about this with Susan Rice. Like there's a level of this that like there's some stupidity in the strategy and there's tragedy what's happening in Ukraine. But I don't know that the Trump. Musk Batman and Robin routine is going to have the same impact this time that they did in 2024 for a bunch of reasons, mostly self-inflicted mistakes by Trump. That doesn't mean the threat isn't real. We must be vigilant. And I suspect that there'll be a few more stories that we can throw on this pile here to talk about the coordination that we're seeing between Putin, Trump and Musk. So we'll keep an eye on it. Subscribe to the feed. Tell your friends. We'll see you all soon.