Tesla CEO Elon Musk is increasingly becoming a surrogate for US presidential candidate Donald Trump on the campaign trail
AFP

Tech billionaire Elon Musk has contributed $75 million to his pro-Trump America PAC over the course of three months, cementing him as one of the biggest donors to the Republican campaign, according to new campaign finance records filed Tuesday.

As per the filing with the Federal Election Commission, America PAC spent about $72 million from July to September in its bid to woo voters to go for Trump. This super PAC aims to drive voter turnout in critical states that could determine the election outcome.

In July, Musk poured in $14.95 million to the super PAC. In August, he added $30 million and another $30 million in September, according to NBC News. The figure contributed by the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX to his super pro-Trump PAC reported exceeds that of any other PAC aiming to mobilize pro-Trump voters.

According to The Hill report, the super PAC, since June, has added more than $102.2 million into this year's presidential race. Of that, tens of millions of dollars have been spent on supporting the Republican presidential candidate and targeting his Democratic rival, Kamala Harris.

Moreover, the super PAC also spent about $8.9 million of that total opposing President Joe Biden before he withdrew from the White House race in mid-July, as per the money-in-politics trackers at OpenSecrets.

The tally from OpenSecrets showed that the PAC became the seventh biggest spender of 2024 in the election cycle, all within just a matter of months.

Other top spenders in the top 10 include Future Forward USA, Make America Great Again Inc., Koch-affiliated Americans for Prosperity, Fairshake PAC, and other super PACs aligned with both Democratic and Republican Senate leadership.

After spending heavily in the third quarter, America PAC reported less than $4 million in cash on hand as of September 30, per the filing.

Besides Musk, other top contributors to Trump's campaign are venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. Each of them shelled out $2.5 million in support of the former president, Bloomberg reported.

The pair announced their support for Trump in July, surprising many in Silicon Valley. "I'm going to have a lot of friends who are probably pissed off at me for saying anything nice about President Trump," Horowitz said at the time.

"So here we are, and for little tech, we think Donald Trump is actually the right choice," he said.

In October, he made another surprising announcement where he said that he would be making a "significant" donation to the Harris campaign, despite not endorsing her policies or having any prior knowledge of them. However, there's no record of any such contribution in federal filings to date.