Good morning. Elon Musk brought energy and cash to the 2024 presidential race, camping out in Pennsylvania, giving away $1 million a day to registered voters, and helping Donald Trump back into the White House.
Now, he's just as omnipresent, but he's blazing a much different path.
Importantly, after Trump won in 2024, he appointed Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy as co-leads of the Department of Government Efficiency, which was supposed to slash government spending. Ramaswamy's tenure with DOGE didn't last long, and Musk was pushed out of the White House by Trump in May amid nasty name calling and finger pointing between the two men.
Two months later, Musk said he was launching his own political party, the America Party. One month later, he abandoned that and soon reunited with the GOP. He and Trump eventually made up, and Musk is pumping money into the midterms to try to help Republicans.
That's not all he's doing.
Musk ordered the slowdown of Ukraine's Starlink and later discussed the matter with Trump, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.
This happened last week, and set off an international crisis as it made it much harder for Ukraine to defend itself. Before the WSJ article, the White House claimed it didn't know how this happened, and Trump said he'd love to know who was behind the decision.
Musk was able in 2024 to help Republicans build a coalition of voters, but now Democrats are using Musk to build their own coalition.
James Talarico, the Democratic Senate candidate in Texas, on Tuesday released a video clip alleging that Musk was trying to "buy" the Senate seat there with the more than $150 million he is using to help GOP candidate Ken Paxton.
"Elon Musk is trying to buy this Senate seat in Texas," Talarico said in the video. He added, "In all likelihood, if you've seen an attack ad on your TV, that was Elon."