Why Elon Musk and his ‘backup dancers’ pick Trump over Biden (2024)

Donald Trump has again so far bucked traditional Republican presidential politicking by failing to get any support from any Fortune 100 CEOs.

Just like in 2016, none have donated to his campaign (two did in 2020) despite years of the GOP-friendly group backing Republican presidential campaigns going back decades. Trump, who tried to woe some of them during a trip to Washington that reportedly didn’t go as planned, has gone as far to say any executives who don’t support him should “be fired for incompetence.”

But he has secured the backing of venture capitalists like David Sacks and Elon Musk is reportedly being considered for an advisory role in a second Trump administration.

So why are folks like Musk and his “backup dancers” gravitating towards Trump while the traditional executives still shun him? Stephanie Ruhle, NBC News senior business analyst, explains her argument for why:

All of the positive economic data ... is disconnected from how people feel because people haven’t been feeling good about the economy because ... of persistent inflation. So when you keep pushing this narrative that the business community is standing with Donald Trump, it convinces people well, maybe bad news is coming.

But here’s what’s important. There are there is sort of a subgroup of sort of very, very successful Wall Street financiers. You know, there’s Elon Musk and kind of Elon Musk backup dancers, who have been very pro-Trump in the last few weeks and I want to explain why. They know how good the economy is. Elon Musk, and all that Joe Biden has done for electric vehicles, he certainly knows how good the economy is. He knows how good the stock market is.

However, they know that Donald Trump is transactional. They know that if they stand with Donald Trump now, if they’re throwing fundraisers for him and if in fact he becomes the president, they’re going to have a direct line into the Oval Office. So it’s as though they’re trying to recreate kind of Putin oligarchs here. If they help Trump now, he will take their call and give them their “Get Out of Jail Free Pass” six months from now.

Now, that is not the Fortune 100 CEOs out there that have all of these constituents, but this small Wall Street universe, the Nelson Peltzes, the the Bill Ackmans of the world, they’re putting on the Trump show, because they would love to have his kind of power and him in their back pocket if he were to win.

Earlier this month, CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin said he spoke with some people who attended the meeting in Washington — including business leaders he thought would be attracted to supporting Trump against Joe Biden — who said they were turned off after they heard Trump speak.

“I will say I was surprised. I spoke to a number of CEOs who I would say walked into the meeting being Trump support-ish or thinking that they might be leaning in that direction, who said he was remarkably meandering, could not keep a straight thought, was all over the map,” Sorkin said. “What’s interesting to me because these were people who, I think, might have been actually predisposed to him and walked out of the room less predisposed, actually predisposed to thinking … as one person said, ‘This may not be any different or better than a Biden thought if you’re thinking that way.’”

Trump told the CEOs at the Business Roundtable he wants to further cut the corporate tax rate he lowered while in office.

Trump said that he would like to cut the corporate tax rate by a percentage point to an even 20%, a person familiar with his remarks who insisted on anonymity to discuss the closed-door meeting to The Associated Press. The former president focused his remarks on taxes, inflation and the need for more oil production, the person said.

The Business Roundtable has made low taxes its top legislative priority. The group announced that it would spend at least $10 million on a campaign to keep the corporate tax rate at 21% as well as promote business-friendly changes to the U.S. tax code and push to extend tax incentives for research and development.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Matt Arco may be reached at marco@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @MatthewArco.