Turns out America elected Elon Musk, too

• Elon Musk wasn't a public Trump backer until this summer. Then he went all-in.
• Now that Trump has won, Musk is seemingly attached to him — in public and behind the scenes.
• Money and politics have always been connected. But we've never seen anything like this.

American voters re-elected Donald Trump this month. At the moment, it also looks like they've elected Elon Musk.

That's because the world's richest man, having endorsed Trump, campaigned for him, and pumped a reported $200 million into Trump's campaign, now seems to be acting like a shadow president.

Yes, there's his upcoming role running the "Department of Government Efficiency" for Trump, alongside former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. And Musk is relentlessly promoting Trump on Twitter, the site he bought in 2022 and renamed X.

But that's just the beginning: Since Trump's election, Musk has joined "almost every meeting and many meals that Mr. Trump has had," The New York Times reports, and is offering advice about policies and personnel. He is promising to direct his America political action committee to support Trump allies in midterm elections in 2026 and in elections after that.

Musk, who The Wall Street Journal says has been in "regular contact" with Russian President Vladimir Putin since 2022, is now joining Trump on calls with world leaders, including one with Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelenskyy. And the Times reports that earlier this week Musk met with Iran's ambassador to the United Nations — allowing Iran to open a diplomatic channel to Trump without formally sitting down with him.

And much of this is happening in the open, as Musk parks himself at Mar-a-Lago, Trump's Florida country club.

"He likes this place. I can't get him out of here. He just likes the place," Trump joked in a speech Thursday night. "And you know what, I like having him here too. He's good. He's done a fantastic job."

We don't know how long this relationship will last — more on that later. But as long as it does, it is worth noting that this tie-up between the richest man in the world and the leader of the free world is something we've never seen before.

"It's totally extraordinary. It's never happened before. We've never even come close to it," says David Nasaw, a professor of history at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

Nasaw, who has written biographies of tycoons like William Randolph Hearst and Andrew Carnegie — who was the world's richest man in his lifetime — notes that it's standard for very wealthy men to try to influence government. What's different here is how close Musk is to Trump — literally — and how public it is.

"In the past, the oligarchs, having elected their candidate, assumed - rightly — that their candidate was going to do the job," he tells me. "Then, having done that, if they had advice to offer, they would do that using cutouts, who would get in touch with the president. Musk has inserted himself in a way that just hasn't been done."

This is a relationship that fired up quite recently. While Musk and Trump's politics have seemed aligned for some time — here's Musk in the fall of 2023, visiting the Texas/Mexico border, where he described an immigration crisis he called "insane" — they weren't publicly linked up until this summer.

In March, after reports that Trump had met with Musk in Florida, Musk insisted he wasn't backing his campaign: "Just to be super clear, I am not donating money to either candidate for US President," he tweeted.

Within a few months of that statement, Musk had formally endorsed Trump, campaigned for him at rallies, and took charge of Trump's get-out-the-vote efforts.

But Trump didn't spend much time talking about Musk's role in his second presidency during the election. He first floated the idea of having Musk run a government efficiency office in early September, but it wasn't a focus of his rallies and pitches.

Musk's name never surfaced once during Trump's debate with Kamala Harris in September, or the JD Vance-Tim Walz debate in October. If you were paying attention, you might have noticed that Musk was one the last speakers to appear before Trump at his Madison Square Garden rally in late October — a sign of his importance to Trump.

But that's a lot different from telling people that if he were re-elected, he would be relying on Musk to help plot his administration, and to represent the country on an international stage.

Next question: How long will this continue? On the one hand, both Trump and Musk have big incentives to continue their partnership. Trump values Musk's money, and his intelligence, and he likes the idea of being endorsed by the world's richest man; Musk likes adulation too, plus he has very concrete and lucrative connections to the US government via his network of companies.

On the other hand, both men are famously short-fused, and both men — I've emailed Musk and a Trump spokesman, but haven't heard back — adore the spotlight. And that combination makes it easy to imagine a break-up down the line.

It's also possible that Trump will find that Musk's advice and consent simply won't be as valuable to him over time. Perhaps he may notice that while Musk has been extraordinary at building companies that require an engineering brain — Tesla and SpaceX — he has faltered at Twitter, a product that requires "a different type of social-emotional intelligence," as his former employee Esther Crawford noted.

And Nasaw points out that both Carnegie, who helped elect Theodore Roosevelt, and Hearst, who helped elect Franklin Roosevelt, expected to be rewarded once their candidates won — but were basically ignored.

Maybe we'll see a repeat of that. Except that by tying himself directly to the next president, in full view of everyone, Musk has already shown that history doesn't repeat precisely. We're in uncharted waters here.