Elon Musk is the world's richest man and, for the past year, a persistent political figure, in no small part for his big role helping propel Donald Trump back to the White House.

It's been a year since Musk endorsed Trump for the US presidency ahead of the 2024 election. In a whirlwind year, the multibilionaire entrepreneur has walked the halls of government, confirmed himself as a darling of the political right and seen his public popularity slide on the back of several contraversies.

And as some pundits predicted, the bromance between the world's most powerful man and its richest wouldn't last, with their economic agenda diverging in a spectacular public spat fought across social media just months into the second Trump administration.

Despite his exit from Trump's inner circle, Musk remains a powerful figure. His status as one of the world's wealthiest individuals courts media and public attention like few others before him, thanks to his extensive business interests as the head of technology, automotive and media companies, his political ambitions and his unorthodox personal life.

South Africa's richest export

Born in Pretoria, South Africa, to property developer, engineer and former local politician Errol Musk and Canadian model and dietitian Maye Musk, the billionaire first emigrated to the US in the 1990s.

He co-founded early internet businesses like online city guide Zip2 and financial services platform X.com, which later merged with a similar platform, PayPal.

Today, Musk is probably best known for establishing the private space exploration company SpaceX and providing the initial capital to establish the electric carmaker Tesla, for which he is now credited as a co-founder. He is the chief executive officer of both.

Other businesses he has founded include tunnel constructor The Boring Company and brain implant developer Neuralink.

He took ownership of the social media platform Twitter in 2022, which he eventually rebranded "X," and has utilized as an express channel to broadcast his personal opinions to the world. X has since been incorporated into the company xAI, which houses Musk's AI and social media properties.

During his time at the helm of the platform, X has become a recognized host of misinformation. Musk also fired many staff members, allowed previously banned, controversial users, including Trump, back onto the platform and alienated advertisers.

Musk backs Trump 2.0 

Despite courting public attention for his work running Tesla and Space X, Musk's showman persona reached a new level during the 2024 presidential campaign.

Though he previously described himself as a moderate with a donation history of contributing to candidates of both parties at the state and national levels, Musk hitched his considerable cultural and financial weight to Trump's eventually successful presidential campaign.

The billionaire created and pumped more than $119 million (about €116 million) into a political action committee, "America PAC." He also spent weeks before the election encouraging voters in key battleground states to go to the polls, at one point offering million-dollar prizes.

He contributed more than $290 million to Republican candidates at all levels in the 2023-24 election cycle.

Courting the far-right

Having rebranded as a leading figure of the American right, Musk's gaze extended beyond the US as the election season ramped up early in Germany.

An opinion piece in the Die Welt newspaper supporting the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, a one-on-one voice interview with the party's leader, Alice Weidel, on X and a video link at the party's campaign launch positioned him as a vocal supporter of the European right.

Between his endorsements for the AfD, Musk's controversies reached fever pitch when, at a Trump inauguration rally in January, he gestured to a crowd of supporters in a way many felt was reminiscent of a Nazi salute. While others suggested it was a "Roman salute," most associate the gesture with European fascism.

It led to protests and vandalism of Tesla cars and dealerships across Europe.

DOGE demolition and Tesla tanks

While pushing favored candidates, Musk also seemingly became Trump's right-hand. He was central to the government's efforts to recast the government. Appointed as a special advisor to the president, Musk's vision of a spending taskforce, named the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), though not formally part of the government, was tasked with cutting what Trump and Musk called "waste, fraud and abuse" within government departments.

Among scalps were the foreign aid service USAID, federal departments like Health and Human Services and Education and agencies like the General Services Administration and Social Security.

Following his controversies at the inauguration, reports of declining Tesla sales began to stream in, with sharp declines across Europe and other regions reported. It led to Trump — a big advocate of conventional gasoline-powered car manufacturing — taking ownership of a Tesla in a press opportunity at the White House.

As the impact and scale of DOGE's impact on government continued and Tesla's sales declined further, so too has Musk's popularity. According to the Silver Bulletin, the polling aggregator operated by statistician Nate Silver, Musk's net favorability was even when he endorsed Trump in 2024, -2% on election day, -5.2% at the inauguration and -23% on July 14, a full year after he endorsed the Trump campaign.

Turmoil with Trump

By the end of May, the Trump-Musk partnership appeared to be over. He exited his special advisor role on May 29, and Trump, in a televised ceremony, gifted the world's richest man a golden key.

Since then, the pair apparently has had little positive to say about each other.The relationship continued to sour as Trump announced changes to migrant visas, tariffs on key trading partners and a massive tax and spending bill that Musk argued undid much of the DOGE's work to cut government costs.

Musk's acrimony to the policy has been so great that on June 5, he began resurfacing old X posts from Trump and other key Republicans opposing government debt, claiming Trump would have lost the election and asking if a new political party should exist. He also insinuated in since-deleted posts that Trump was named in the so-called Epstein Files, a blackmail list of convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Will Elon Musk enter politics?

It is unclear where Musk's political ambitions lie.

However, since the Trump tax and spending bill passed, Musk has moved to form what he is calling the "America Party." Any success of such a party would define more than a century of two-party dominance in the US.

Having been born in South Africa, he can't run for US president, but, as a US citizen, he could stand for a lower office. He could also simply work to influence policy through his considerable wealth. Already he has indicated he will fund Republican congressman Thomas Massie's reelection campaign. Massie was one of the few Republicans to vote against Trump's bill.

This article was originally published on November 8, 2024, and was updated on July 16, 2025.

Edited by: Davis VanOpdorp