Electric vehicle billionaire Elon Musk has said he is “super pro climate,” called global warming “a major risk” and claimed to have done “more for the environment than any single human on Earth.”
Since then, the Tesla chief executive has endorsed the presidential bid of Donald Trump, who has dismissed climate change as a “hoax” and vowed to roll back federal subsidies for EVs while promoting oil and gas drilling. As heat continues to smash global temperature records, Musk has also expressed new doubts about the need to limit warming.
The world’s richest man is perhaps the one person who could sway Trump on climate policy if the former president returns to the White House, according to GOP lawmakers. Musk, who plans to publicly interview Trump on Monday, told Tesla shareholders in June that the Republican presidential nominee regularly calls him.
Musk could also influence a second Trump administration on policies for energy, self-driving cars, space and artificial intelligence — in some cases to his own benefit, experts say. The Tesla CEO seems to have shifted Trump’s messaging on electric vehicles, which he warned earlier this year could cause a “bloodbath” in the auto industry. Last week, Trump said he has “no choice” but to support EVs “because Elon endorsed me.”
What Trump has said about electric vehicles and Elon Musk
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In addition to leading the $600 billion car company, Musk is the chief executive of commercial aerospace giant SpaceX and the tech startup xAI. He also owns a tunnel digging company, the Boring Co., the medical technology firm Neuralink, and the social media platform X.
But Democrats and scientists are increasingly concerned about the potential for Musk to serve as Trump’s climate whisperer, due in part to his profusion of business conflicts and far-right rhetoric. He has repeatedly stoked racial fears, suggesting earlier this month that United Kingdom immigration trends would lead to an “inevitable” civil war. And Musk’s views on global warming — as well as on birth rates, gender-affirming care and the coronavirus — are far outside the scientific mainstream.
“I told him once, it doesn’t matter what you believe” about climate change, Sen. Kevin Cramer said of Trump. “People believe and they want us to fix it. So whose fixes are we going to apply: ours or somebody else’s?”
The North Dakota Republican is a supporter of a self-described “America first” environmental policy that would impose carbon tariffs on imported goods.
“Maybe President Trump would call on some people like Elon Musk” for climate policy advice, Cramer told POLITICO’s E&E News. Trump “may not agree with him on the premise, but could maybe agree with him on the solution. It’s politics, after all.”
Trump wants ‘every kind of a car’
Musk could help Republicans more surgically target the rollbacks that Trump has touted on the campaign trail for electric vehicles tax credits, renewable energy and other climate technologies, according to Rep. Garret Graves.
“Elon may be able to help Trump think through this a little bit differently,” the Louisiana Republican said.
“How do you do this in a way that actually makes sense, checking both an economic sustainability box and an environmental sustainability box?” said Graves, who noted that he owns two electric motorcycles but argued EVs don’t make sense for every driver. Graves served as the ranking member on the climate select committee that Republicans disbanded when they regained control of the chamber last year.
An advisory role for Musk could resemble the unpaid gigs that Trump had offered to other donors and political allies in his previous administration. Several news outlets have reported that Musk plans to make significant contributions to America PAC, a pro-Trump political group.
Trump already appears to be taking cues from Musk on electric vehicles, the main source of his fortune.
“I’m for electric cars. I have to be, because Elon endorsed me very strongly,” Trump said at a rally last week in Georgia, where EV manufacturing has flourished with the support of Biden administration policies. “So I have no choice.”
But Trump added, “I’m for them for a small slice,” noting that “you want to have gas-propelled cars, you want to have hybrids, you want to have every kind of a car imaginable.”
The campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, rejected the idea that “arrogant billionaires” like Musk could help improve GOP policymaking.
“Elon knows Trump is a sucker who will sell America out, cutting his taxes while raising taxes on the middle class,” campaign spokesperson James Singer said in an email. “Vice President Harris has been standing up to people like Elon and fighting for the middle class her entire career — and it’s why she is going to win in November.”
Musk didn’t respond to questions sent via Tesla and SpaceX.
From Trump critic to climate crank
Musk wasn’t always a MAGA man.
In 2016, he told CNBC that Trump did not “seem to have the sort of character that reflects well on the United States.” Although Musk would go on to serve on a couple of Trump’s business advisory councils, he resigned from them in protest of the then-president’s move to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement, a United Nations-brokered deal that seeks to limit global warming.
“Climate change is real,” Musk said in a 2017 post on Twitter, the social network he bought last year and rebranded as X. “Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world.”
Musk’s public drift to the right began during the Covid-19 pandemic, when he defied California regulators — with Trump’s support — and reopened a Tesla manufacturing plant in the state. Later, he bristled at President Joe Biden’s embrace of incumbent car companies and organized labor. Tesla is the only U.S. automaker without a unionized workforce.
The Biden administration has also opened nearly a dozen probes of Musk and his companies.
At the same time, Musk has been publicly moderating his climate views and amplifying conservative anxieties about protections for transgender and gay students and the potential for population collapse due to declining birth rates — a fringe theory favored by the father of 12.
In a June 2023 post on X, Musk suggested that land use changes, including farming, have “no meaningful impact on climate change.” He reiterated those claims in February with a post supporting Dutch farmers who were protesting European Union environmental reforms.
Yet research shows that agriculture, forestry and land development are responsible for at least 13 percent of global emissions.
“I’m not sure he completely understands the climate problem,” Jonathan Foley, executive director of the climate solutions organization Project Drawdown, said of Musk’s agriculture assertions.
“Does he really believe this?” Foley asked in an email. “If so, how does he get his (bad) information? Who is advising him, and how can we get him in touch with better science advisors on climate?”
Jet-setting Musk defends oil
Musk also argued recently that concerns about the immediate impacts of climate change are misplaced. Advanced artificial intelligence is his biggest fear.
Warming is “possibly overstated in the short term, but we should be concerned about it long term,” he wrote on X in August 2023. Musk was responding to a claim by former Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy that global warming “is a hoax.”
In December, at a conservative political gathering in Italy, he again suggested that “climate change alarm is exaggerated in the short term,” according to Reuters. He also suggested that, while fossil fuels must be phased out eventually, “we should not demonize oil and gas in the medium term.”
Yet scientists warn that climate change is already wreaking havoc across the globe in the form of extreme heat, raging wildfires, worsening weather events, rising oceans, and diminishing access to food and water. The next few years are an essential window when it comes to averting the worst impacts of climate change, scientists say.
Under the Paris Agreement, world leaders are striving to keep temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius — a target that requires global emissions to peak almost immediately, fall by nearly half in the next 15 years and hit net zero by 2050.
Musk’s actions on climate change are sometimes contradictory. In 2021, he committed $100 million to a contest intended to help accelerate technologies that can remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But last year, he spent the equivalent of nearly seven weeks in flight, criss-crossing the globe in heavily emitting private jets.
“Musk’s track record on the policy front [is] poor, and putting our faith in him as some sort of purported climate champion seems increasingly ill-advised,” said Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania.
‘He’s going to be influential’
Many Republican lawmakers are excited about the advisory role Musk could play in a rebooted Trump administration. They brushed off concerns that Musk could use the position to promote his companies and protect his investments.
“I was with President Trump on [July 27] in Nashville, and President Trump basically said ‘Elon Musk and I remain very good friends and talk about these issues a lot,'” said Wyoming Sen. Cynthia Lummis.
“I don’t think that people should be cut off from each other, or talking to each other, just because there’s a certain economic self-interest involved,” she added. “I hope they continue to talk.”
Other Republicans see Musk’s commercial entanglements not as a potential liability but as one of his strengths.
“He’s going to be influential — whether it’s energy, whether it’s space, whether it’s artificial intelligence,” said Sen. John Hoeven of North Dakota. “He’s going to be a big part of the discussion because of all the things he’s doing [that have] a huge impact and the big reach he and his companies have.”
The Trump campaign denied that Musk’s support would earn him any favors if the former president takes back the White House.
“The only candidate who can be bought off and paid off is Kamala Harris,” campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a one-line statement.
Ties to Trump could ‘alienate’ customers
Financial analysts see Musk’s potential proximity to power as beneficial for the billionaire, although it could also entail some commercial risk.
A second Trump administration would likely be negative for U.S. automakers overall “but positive for Tesla because it would take the rebates away and give Tesla and Musk price and scale advantage,” said Dan Ives, the managing director of equities research at Wedbush Securities. The industrywide transition to electric vehicles would continue, he added, although at a slower and less profitable pace.
Musk said as much during Tesla’s most recent earnings call last month. Repealing the Inflation Reduction Act would hurt the company “slightly,” he said. But in the “long term, it probably actually helps,” Musk added, because it would be “devastating for our competitors.”
During the Biden administration, “Musk has really been background noise,” Ives said. “In a Trump administration, he clearly would have a bigger presence and that could have positive implications potentially on the autonomous, full self-driving path” that Tesla has been pursuing for years, he said.
“That would be the most bullish scenario for [Tesla] under a Trump administration,” according to Ives.
On the other hand, “Musk has inserted himself into the political conversation and there’s a double-edged sword around that, especially when you’re selling mass-market vehicles,” he added. “You could alienate a big piece of your potential customer base.”
The GOP platform calls for “preventing the importation of Chinese vehicles” and enhancing “partnerships with the rapidly expanding Commercial Space sector.” Those moves would likely benefit Tesla and SpaceX, which is already a major federal contractor.
“Musk would have a seat at the table under a Trump administration,” Ives said. “It would be a get-the-popcorn-out moment.”
While Musk’s proximity to Trump might at times enhance environmental policy and, potentially, Democratic causes under a Republican administration, some liberal lawmakers are skeptical of the increasingly conservative billionaire’s climate convictions.
“I don’t take him at his word about anything,” said Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, referring to Musk. “It is impossible to reconcile any degree of seriousness about climate change with any degree of support for a President Trump.”
Kelsey Brugger contributed reporting.
