Just after his huge stock grant, Elon Musk commits USD45M/month to harm EVs and crush Tesla's sales in the US by supporting Trump and Vance.

Elon Musk will spend USD45 million per month to elect Donald Trump, a presidential candidate who has repeatedly targeted EVs during his campaign and who has promised to end EV incentives in exchange for a billion dollars in bribes from the oil industry.

According to the WSJ, Musk is committing USD45 million per month to a newly-formed Super PAC intended to increase republican voter turnout in swing states, with the goal of electing convicted felon and three-time republican nominee Donald Trump to the presidency.

Musk's move comes as he has shown little interest in electric cars lately, spending much more attention on various culture war causes that he has picked up on while scrolling through Twitter – the company he bought for USD44 billion which has since lost 72% of its value.

Since his acquisition of Twitter, Musk spent little attention managing Tesla, instead spending most of his time on social media.

But to purchase Twitter, Musk sold several tranches of Tesla stock, reducing his ownership percentage in the company and depressing Tesla's stock price.

This led to a desperate campaign to have Tesla shareholders vote to advise to reinstate his previously-voided illegal pay package. In the runup to the vote, Musk spent more time with a flurry of activity at Tesla, engaging in puzzling and self-destructive actions like firing the most successful team in the company and canceling an upcoming mass market EV, all while threatening to do (what he perceives as) harm to his company if he doesn't get his way.

In the end, most of shareholders who hadn't been turned off by Musk's arbitrary management style were convinced, and voted to advise that his package be reinstated.

Now he's using a chunk of that newfound (potential) wealth and investing it into something quite puzzling, for a man whose wealth was built by electric cars: trying to defeat electric cars.

Not only has he made EVs a target several times in his campaign, primarily through ridiculous rants that show little understanding about how anything works, but he has also signaled his intent to reverse the Inflation Reduction Act, a bill signed by President Biden which has been phenomenally effective at bringing manufacturing jobs to the USand has helped to lower the price of EVs for consumers.

In addition, Project 2025, a conservative playbook for the election, includes several action items which would harm EV policy and result in dirtier air and water and more climate change. The Heritage Foundation, the organization that has worked to advance Project 2025, boasts that Trump attempted to institute most of their policy recommendations in his last tour of the White House, so it can be expected that many of the Project's ideas would make their way onto the president's desk should America make the mistake of electing him.

The last time he found himself in the White House, his EPA attempted to undertake a number of illegal actions to increase pollution – many of which, thankfully, were stopped by the courts (the Natural Resources Defense Council won 92% of its cases against Trump's anti-environment actions, for example).

The promise of courts being sensible and following the law is less certain this time around though, given the US "Supreme" Court's recent history of just making it up as they go along.

One of Trump's anti-EV actions which we covered extensively on Electrek was over California's EPA waiver, a provision of the Clean Air Act which Trump's EPA tried to repeal. California eventually won that fight, allowing it to remain the United States testbed for advanced vehicle technologies and clean air regulation, leading to boons in clean air nation- and indeed world-wide.

Trump's VP pick is J.D. Vance, who took $352,037 in donations from the oil and gas industry in his run for Congress, becoming one of Congress' top recipients of fossil fuel money. Prior to those donations he acknowledged climate science, but after taking hundreds of thousands in bribes, he now spreads the fossil fuel industry's anti-science propaganda. Vance is also supported by billionaire Peter Thiel.

Vance is another faux-populist who, among other things, has https://electrek.co/2024/07/15/elon-musk-supports-new-vp-candidate-crush-tesla-sales-us/introduced legislation to make EVs more expensive and give a massive government subsidy to polluting gas cars, aiming for a swing of USD15k in subsidies per vehicle compared to current prices. This would be on top of thetens of thousands in implicit subsidy already afforded to gas vehicles over their lifetime due to the ignored costs of pollution (which Musk himself favours a correction for in the form of a carbon tax, but it's not too popular with his fellow far-right loons).

Vance is behind the 'Drive American Act', which not only would remove the incentives to buy battery-electric vehicles (BEV and PHEV), but it replace it with an equivalent USD7,500 incentive to buy American-made fossil fuel-powered vehicles (ICE and HEV).

Vance has introduced the Drive American Act, which would eliminate over USD100 billion in existing electric vehicle (EV) subsidies and replace them with the America First Vehicle Credit to promote gas-powered vehicles made in the United States. As Senator Vance has repeatedly pointed out, the Biden administration's existing EV subsidies penalize UAW workers who build popular, gas-powered vehicles and the American consumers who wish to buy them.

And finally, there's the note that car dealerships are, by and large, major republican donors. And one of the main thorns in the side of Musk and Tesla from the beginning has been the dealership lobby, which time and time again has tried to stop Tesla from selling cars or stop EV adoption, tending to find more success in republican states.

Not only does the Inflation Reduction Act reduce prices of all sorts of green solutions for American consumers and businesses, it has also led to a renaissance in American manufacturing with hundreds of billions invested and hundreds of thousands of jobs created.

The Inflation Reduction Act is also limited to vehicles assembled in North America, which most of Tesla's vehicles are, and which use a lot of US-sourced parts, which Tesla tops the list of. While you can bypass most of the IRA's restrictions by leasing, this law has still disproportionately benefitted Tesla given its American roots, enabling the Model 3 to become a fantastic deal right now (and it's a great deal when leasing too).

Moving on to Biden's infrastructure plan – something which Trump was never able to pass – this includes a provision calledNEVI, which grants billions to EV charging companies.

This catalyzed Tesla to create the NACS charging standard in the hope of attaining some of those federal dollars. Then, due to the actions of Rebecca Tinucci and her Supercharger team, Tesla was able to shift the entire industry over to Tesla's NACS plug. Musk later unceremoniously fired Tinucci and the entire Supercharger teamdespite their success.

As a result, Tesla could now qualify for billions in federal dollars to help them expand their Supercharger network, and Tesla can sell energy, at a profit, to vehicles of other makes. This could lead to potential profits of untold billions if Tesla is able to keep its massive lead in fast charging. And none of this would have happened without Biden's NEVI.

Tesla's core mission, which is right up there on it's website, is to "accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy." Previously, it was stated similarly, as "to speed the world's transition to sustainable transportation." Both of these missions are opposed by the republican party platform Musk is donating to.

It's clear that EVs benefit air quality and the world in many ways, and Musk claimed many times that the reason he got into EVs is because he saw sustainable transport as key to survival of the human race.

One example of Musk's desire to portray his independence was when Trump tried to pull out of the Paris Agreement against public support for staying in. Trump justified the move with a number of falsehoods that showed his lack of understanding of even the most basic aspects of international relations, science, and finance.

Prior to that move, Musk had been on Trump's "advisory counci", but he immediately dropped out after the Paris announcement, rightly recognizing that "Climate change is real. Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world".

One could suggest that this massive donation is an attempt to get himself at the table, so that he can have some influence to reduce the anti-environment tendencies of this prospective administration. But if that were the case, it would be more likely that he would donate to both candidates, who are currently 50/50 in the polls, so that he can have influence in either administration.