Billionaires have business interests hinging on election outcome
Alexander Bolton
5 min read
Billionaires who have funneled tens of millions of dollars into the 2024 election or who have made key decisions affecting the race have a lot riding on the outcome.
Two of the biggest names to get attention this fall are Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post.
Also in the mix are Bill Gates, the former CEO of Microsoft who donated $50 million to a nonprofit that supports Vice President Harris, and Reid Hoffman, the billionaire founder of LinkedIn, who is also backing Harris.
These titans of industries have major economic stakes in federal policy ranging from subsidies for electric vehicles (EVs) to lucrative military contracts and antitrust actions by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Department of Justice.
Musk, who has endorsed former President Trump, has been a critic of the Biden-Harris administration’s tax credits for electric vehicles, which he says help his competitors more than Tesla.
He said in July that a rollback of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which would be a top priority of a new Trump administration, might hurt Tesla “slightly” but would be “devastating for our competitors.”
Joe Sacks, the executive director of the EV Politics Project, said Tesla is “losing market share to companies that are subject to the $7,500 tax credit to cars that are being manufactured here in North America.”
“Tesla is not subject to the same tax credit and so there are certainly incentives there,” he added. “That’s at play.”
“He stands to benefit from eliminating the kind of key EV provisions from the IRA,” he said.
Sacks said Musk “also has a role to play in getting the former president to stop EV bashing,” noting that Trump has softened his attacks on electric vehicles since Musk endorsed his candidacy.
Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.
Musk’s other major business venture, SpaceX, has more than $15 billion in contracts with the Department of Defense and NASA.
The New York Times reported this month that Musk’s companies have been the targets of at least 20 government investigations or reviews related to issues ranging from consumer safety to environmental concerns.
Trump hasn’t said what position Musk might have in his administration, but the South African-born entrepreneur is expected to wield a lot of influence if Trump returns to the Oval Office.
Bezos has also come under scrutiny in recent days after it was widely reported that he decided to end The Washington Post’s tradition dating to 1976 of endorsing presidential candidates.
Bezos explained in an essay published by the Post that such endorsements “create a perception of bias” and “non-independence.”
“Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one,” he said.
The last-minute decision to kill the pending endorsement of Vice President Harris, however, sparked outrage and raised questions about whether Bezos’s financial interests weigh on a decision not to pick a fight with Trump given his strong chance of being reelected president.
Dan Froomkin, a former Washington Post staffer wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2022 that Bezos’s businesses interests posed a “conflict of interest.”
Amazon, the company Bezos founded and in which he retains a large financial interest, has a significant amount of business with the federal government and will likely be in the mix for major federal contracts in the future.
Amazon Web Services was awarded a 10-year, $10 billion contract with the National Security Agency in 2021 and a contract with the Defense Department to work on its Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability in 2022.
It was one of five companies, along with Google, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle, to provide products and services to the Central Intelligence Agency over 15 years.
And the Navy signed a blanket purchasing agreement worth $724 million with Amazon Web Services in 2022.
Amazon once claimed that it had been blocked from government contracting because of Trump’s complaints about The Washington Post’s coverage of his administration.
The Washington Post reported Wednesday that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy tried to establish a better relationship with Trump by reaching out to him in August, after he formally became the Republican Party’s nominee for president.
Amazon and Amazon Web Services did not respond to a request for comment.
Bezos also founded a space-exploration company, Blue Horizon, that has significant business interests that could be impacted by federal policymaking.
It has a $3.4 billion contract with NASA to build a lunar lander, and advocates for the company sought a $10 billion funding provision for it in Endless Frontier Act in 2021.
Senior officials with the company met with Trump briefly after he gave a speech in Austin, Texas, last week, soon after The Washington Post spiked its endorsement.
Hoffman, the LinkedIn founder and Harris supporter, meanwhile, sits on the board of another company with major financial interests in doing business with the federal government.
Microsoft split a big cloud-computing contract from the Defense Department with several competitors including Amazon, Google and Oracle in 2022.
Microsoft also faces an antitrust investigation from the FTC related to OpenAI, in which Microsoft is a major investor.
He has donated $7 million to help the Biden-Harris campaign and has organized a fundraising effort for Harris in Silicon Valley.
Beyond that, Harris has voiced support for a billionaire minimum tax and raising the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent.
“Nurses and firefighters are paying a higher tax rate than billionaires and the biggest corporations and I plan on making that fair,” Harris told “60 Minutes” earlier this month.
But Harris hasn’t said whether she would support one of President Biden’s most controversial proposals — taxes on unrealized capital gains — which would inflict a big financial hit on the nation’s wealthiest individuals and families.
“The billionaires, what they know about Trump is he’ll lower taxes and he’ll deregulate. … He’ll shut down antitrust and they see that has a huge benefit,” said Bob Borosage, co-director of Campaign for America’s Future, a progressive advocacy group.
“They’ve got antitrust problems in Europe so they really want an American president who’s not going to go down that route,” he said.
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