Elon Musk Endorses Trump for President After Assassination Attempt

On Saturday, just minutes after former President Donald Trump survived a would-be assassin’s bullet, billionaire Elon Musk announced that he would be endorsing Trump’s campaign for a second term.

Axios reports that the endorsement of the world’s wealthiest man, announced via a post on his website X (formerly Twitter), comes shortly after reports that Musk had already donated to a pro-Trump PAC, marking his first financial contribution to any campaign this year.

“I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery,” said Musk in the post, which included the now-iconic video of Trump getting back on his feet and, with blood on his face, triumphantly raising a fist at the crowd to thunderous applause. The post, shared to his 189 million followers, has garnered over 197 million views and 2.2 million likes since it was first posted on Saturday evening.

The endorsement marks a major political shift for Musk and the generally centrist voters that he represents, as the Tesla and SpaceX owner had previously voted for Democrats Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden in recent elections.

While the assassination attempt was the incident that finally turned Musk into an official Trump supporter, Musk had been at odds with the Left for the last several years, particularly since his purchase of Twitter in 2022. Musk bought the platform with the express purpose of restoring freedom of speech, bringing back numerous banned accounts and allowing for more uncensored discourse that was previously not allowed on the platform.

Directly engaging with many of the accounts that had once been banned, Musk has also expressed increasingly right-wing views on such issues as the immigration crisis and the rise of transgenderism, as well as his opposition to political correctness and social media censorship.

Also on Saturday, billionaire Bill Ackman similarly announced his endorsement of President Trump in a lengthy post on X. Ackman, like Musk, had become disillusioned with the Left in recent years, primarily in the aftermath of widespread anti-Israel riots carried out by the far-left.