When it comes to billionaires and American politics, these incredibly wealthy people tend to maintain relatively low public profiles. Sure, they write big checks, fund big operations and are immediately recognized by those who follow campaign finance closely, but they’re usually not household names.
However, there are occasional exceptions. NBC News reported:
As Elon Musk steps up his work on behalf of former President Donald Trump, Vice President Kamala Harris is calling on her own billionaire, Mark Cuban, to reprise the role he played for Hillary Clinton in 2016 with a series of high-profile appearances on the side. keep. she and her husband this week. Cuban appeared with Harris in Wisconsin on Thursday and will hold a town hall for her in Phoenix on Saturday before heading to Michigan on Sunday to campaign with Second Gen. Doug Emhoff.
The result was an unexpected contrast, with Cuban and Musk making very different comments on the same afternoon.
Cuban, perhaps best known to the public as a “Shark Tank” investor, spent a fair amount of time in Wisconsin focusing on the radicalism of Trump’s proposed trade tariffs, and it seemed that those in attendance at the Harris rally were impressed by his comments.
Mark Cuban: “You know, in my career I’ve learned a lot about business, including how tariffs work…this is the same guy who also thought Mexico would pay for the wall.” pic.twitter.com/URWZTL6Rwq
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 17, 2024
About 900 miles to the east, Musk spoke to an audience in the Philadelphia area — unlike Cuban and Harris, the conspiratorial billionaire’s favorite candidate wasn’t there — where he touched on a topic he probably should have avoided. NBC News also reported:
Billionaire Elon Musk promoted debunked conspiracy theories about election fraud Thursday at the first of a series of planned campaign events in Pennsylvania aimed at rallying support for former President Donald Trump’s campaign. At a town hall at a high school outside Philadelphia, Musk referred to the false conspiracy theory that Dominion Voting Systems was part of a plot to rig the U.S. elections in recent years.
“If you have mail-in ballots and no proof of citizenship, it’s almost impossible to prove fraud,” he said. “Statistically, there are some very strange things happening that are statistically incredibly unlikely. There is always talk of the Dominion voting machines, for example. It’s weird that I think they were used in Philadelphia and Maricopa County [in Arizona] but not in many other places. Doesn’t that seem quite coincidental?”
It didn’t take long for a company spokesperson to push back in a statement: “Fact: Dominion does not serve Philadelphia County. Fact: Dominion’s voting systems are already based on voter-verified paper ballots. Fact: Hand counts and audits of such paper ballots have repeatedly proven that Dominion machines produce accurate results. These are not matters of opinion. They are verifiable facts.”
The problem, of course, isn’t just that Musk promoted debunked conspiracy theories in a way that contradicted the facts; the problem is compounded by the fact that Musk has picked up a live wire that is better left untouched.
After all, when Fox News made false claims about Dominion, the voting systems company walked away with a $787.5 million settlement. There is also a separate case that Dominion has filed against Newsmax.
With this in mind, it probably wasn’t a good idea for Musk to go down the same conspiratorial path.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
