Live: Joe Biden to give White House address
Elon Musk has hosed down reports he planned to give millions to Donald Trump’s campaign, ahead of Joe Biden‘s likely final Oval Office speech and voter registration surges. Follow live updates.
Tech billionaire Elon Musk has flat out denied that he planned to donate a staggering $US45 million ($A68 million) per month to Donald Trump’s re-election campaign.
Asked by a reporter on Wednesday local time if he had planned to donate to Trump’s campaign, Musk answered, “No, that’s just made up.”
The Tesla CEO denied reports that emerged last week that he had planned to donate the money to a Super Pac focused on getting Trump re-elected.
Earlier, Musk appeared on conservative media figure Jordan Peterson’s show, where he said the claim was “simply not true”. “I am not donating $45m a month to Trump,” he said.
“Now what I have done is that I have created a Pac or Super Pac or whatever you want to call it,” he said. It is called the America Pac.”
Super Pacs, short for Political Action Committees, are independent political organisations to which donors can give unlimited amounts of money, while donations to individuals or non-Super Pacs are capped.
After the Peterson interview, Musk replied on X to a clip from the interview saying, “Yeah”, and to another tweet referencing the reports saying, “Yeah, it’s ridiculous. I am making some donations to America PAC, but at a much lower level and the key values of the Pac are supporting a meritocracy & individual freedom. Republicans are mostly, but not entirely, on the side of merit & freedom”.
The denial comes days after Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race, endorsing his Vice President Kamala Harris, who now has enough delegates to claim the Democratic nomination in August.
Originally published as Live: Joe Biden to give White House address