Musk failed to give $100K to fight Preston
Elon Musk hasn’t donated the $100,000 he pledged last month to defeat Supervisor Dean Preston’s reelection bid — money the opposition campaign says it wouldn’t accept anyway.
After Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator, said he was giving $50,000 to the political action committee opposing the supervisor, Musk announced in a social media post that he would double that donation.
But advocacy group GrowSF, which runs the campaign, said that while Tan followed through on his pledge, Musk hasn’t. In fact, according to GrowSF director Steven Buss, Musk had not reached out about the donation as of Tuesday.
Buss emphasized that even if Musk did try to donate, GrowSF wouldn’t accept the money, citing a “misalignment of values.”
Musk did not immediately respond to emailed requests for comment.
Preston, the sole democratic socialist on the Board of Supervisors, has traded barbs with Musk online, with the billionaire saying at one point that Preston “should go to prison.” Preston recently announced he would no longer use X, formally known as Twitter, due to a rise in misinformation and harassment.
If Musk had donated to the effort opposing Preston, it might have been the largest sum he’s ever given to a campaign at once.
The biggest donation he’s made in a state or federal contest was in 2006, according to California campaign finance records, when he gave $75,000 to a campaign supporting California Proposition 87. The failed ballot measure would have taxed oil production to fund alternative energy research.
Like many business executives, Musk has donated to Democratic and Republican candidates. But compared with some donors like the Koch family and Michael Bloomberg, the world’s richest man has not been a major political giver at the federal level, donating just $964,000 between 2003 and 2023.
The most Musk has donated in a federal election was $50,000 to Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Bakersfield, in 2017, according to records from the Federal Election Commission.
Musk’s biggest direct donation to a candidate for a California state office, in 2010, was nearly $26,000. He gave that sum to Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, to whom he’d already donated $21,000 the same year. Musk later gave another $26,000 to Whitman’s Democratic opponent, Gov. Jerry Brown.
The Tesla CEO hasn’t donated to a state-level campaign since 2014, California campaign finance records show, when he gave to a number of Democratic candidates — including $6,800 to then-Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom. No San Francisco campaign has reported a donation from Musk since at least 1997, the earliest year for which finance data is available.
Musk said on X that he “reluctantly” voted for President Joe Biden in 2020, but in 2022 indicated that he would support Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for president. He has not donated to either candidate, according to FEC data.