the mega rich spending to swing the US election

A small number of billionaires could help swing the result of the US presidential election, as many of the world’s wealthiest spend hundreds of millions of dollars to help their preferred candidate win.

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are running neck and neck in the final days before the vote, which is on track to be the most expensive in history. The candidates and allied groups had raised more than $3.8bn by mid-October.

A Financial Times analysis of campaign finance filings found billionaires have donated at least $695mn, or about 18 per cent, of the total money raised during this election cycle.

Trump is particularly dependent on US elites, with about a third of the money raised by the campaign and allied groups coming from billionaires, compared to about 6 per cent of the funds raised by Harris-aligned groups.

From January 2023 to mid-October 2024, groups supporting Joe Biden and Harris outraised pro-Trump groups by $2.2bn to $1.7bn.

Overall, at least 144 people on the list of about 800 US billionaires compiled by Forbes are using their wealth to sway the 2024 election.

The figures underscore the huge jump in the amount of cash that has entered US politics since the 2010 Supreme Court case Citizens United vs Federal Election Commission, which allowed individuals to give unlimited sums to super political action groups — or super Pacs — that are independent of the official campaigns.

The campaign filings are likely to underestimate the total raised by mega rich donors as the identity of individuals who give to some non-profit organisations is hidden. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has said privately that he gave $50mn to a pro-Harris non-profit, according to the New York Times, but the figure has not yet appeared in any public financial disclosure.

Harris donors

About $127mn, or roughly 6 per cent, of Harris’s funding has been donated by billionaires, a far smaller proportion than Trump’s. They include:

Dustin Moskovitz

Dustin Moskovitz co-founded Facebook with his Harvard College roommate Mark Zuckerberg before going on to co-found work management software company Asana.

Moskovitz, has a net worth of $15bn, according to Forbes. He gave $38mn to the pro-Harris super Pac known as Future Forward and more than $1mn to other groups supporting the vice-president.

A vocal critic of Trump-supporting Tesla boss, Elon Musk, and his claims on self-driving vehicles, Moskovitz is a proponent of effective altruism, a data-driven way to consider philanthropic efforts.

Reid Hoffman

While other members of the so-called the Pay Pal mafia — Musk, All-In podcast host David Sacks and venture capitalist Keith Rabois — have swung behind Trump, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, 57, has become one of Kamala Harris’s top donors.

Hoffman has given $10mn to Future Forward, the pro-Harris super Pac, and another $6mn to Republican Accountability pac, which publicises critical testimonials from former Trump supporters.

Hoffman, whose net worth is $2.5bn, according to Forbes, has portrayed Trump’s economic plan — which includes wides-ranging tariffs — as inflationary. He has also repeatedly warned the former president will target businesses that do not do his bidding if he wins the election.

“Former president Donald Trump is the kind of salesman no successful businessperson can stand,” wrote Hoffman in a recent Bloomberg op-ed. “He’ll promise the world, only to deliver ‘concepts of a plan.’ His economic agenda is a shortsighted mash of policies that scores of top economists and business leaders predict will add up to higher inflation, less stability and lower growth.”

While Hoffman has become an influential advocate for Harris in the business community, some Democrats have criticised the Microsoft board member for calling on the next president to replace Lina Khan as chair of the Federal Trade Commission.

Khan has challenged the tech behemoths, trying and failing to stop Microsoft’s acquisition of video game developer Activision Blizzard and launching a probe into OpenAI and its partnership with Microsoft.

Michael Bloomberg

Bloomberg, the 82-year-old former New York mayor, whose net worth is more than $104bn, according to Forbes, has never been a fan of Trump.

In 2019, he said he found Trump’s “attitude”, “style” and “lack of civility” to be “offensive”. He then spent more than $1bn on a shortlived campaign for the presidency — and then gave millions more to help Biden win.

On May 30, the day Trump was convicted of falsifying business records in the New York hush money trial, Bloomberg gave $19mn to the Future Forward super Pac (then supporting Biden). 

He has not made a public donation to Harris since then. However, he and Gates discussed making a multimillion-dollar private donation, the New York Times recently reported.

Trump donors

Pro-Trump groups have received at least $568mn from billionaires, or about a third — 34 per cent — of all the money his campaign has raised. About $432mn has come from just four donors.

Tim Mellon

Mellon is one of the biggest donors of the 2024 election cycle, giving $150mn to Trump’s super Pac, Make America Great Again Inc — about 45 per cent of its total funding.

The reclusive Mellon, 82, is scion of one of America’s most venerable banking dynasties, but one of the least well-known figures in Trump’s orbit.

Clues to his decision to spend so much on the former president come largely from his self-published 2014 book, panam.captain, in which he reveals how he switched from supporting the Democratic party when Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980.

The book also dwells controversially on race, engaging in racist stereotypes in a chapter called “Slavery Redux”.

Mellon has donated to the Republican party in the past, and in 2020 he gave more than $50mn to the Texas Republican governor Greg Abbott’s effort to build a wall along the US-Mexico border, but this is eclipsed by his donation to Trump groups this year.

Elon Musk

Musk, the world’s richest man, had given more than $118mn to the pro-Trump America Pac by mid-October. 

That figure is expected to rise; Trump’s campaign fundraising this week said Musk would match supporters’ donations up to the legal limit of $924,600. America Pac has spent more than $133mn on yard signs, ads and employees to knock on doors and encourage people to vote. 

Musk, has also paid registered voters in swing states $47 for signing a petition and given a few people $1mn each. The Department of Justice has warned the payments may violate US law.

Despite heading Tesla, SpaceX, xAI and X, Musk has invested a considerable amount of his time on the election, rallying voters on stage in the crucial swing state Pennsylvania and constantly posting on his social media platform.

The billionaire views government regulations as the obstacles to his vision of the future and appears to believe that if Trump wins, he would gain substantial influence over how the government treats his companies, which already benefit from electric vehicle tax credits and multibillion-dollar federal contracts.

A number of government agencies — including the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Securities and Exchange Commission — have investigated his businesses.

“If the current trend of strangulation by overregulation is not turned around, we won’t get to Mars,” Musk said at a recent rally.

Miriam Adelson

Adelson, an Israeli-American physician and widow of Sheldon Adelson, has given more than $100mn to the pro-Trump Preserve America Pac.

Owner of the Las Vegas Sands casino, the Las Vegas Review Journal and Israel Hayom newspapers, she is also the majority owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team. Her net worth is more than $34bn, according to Forbes.

In 2018, Trump awarded Adelson the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the US’s highest civilian honour, for her work combating substance abuse and supporting Jewish causes, including Birthright Israel and Friends of the Israel Defense Forces. 

Adelson has compared Hamas’s October 7 2023 attack on Israel to the Holocaust, writing in the Review Journal it was “per capita, the worst terrorist attack in world history”.

Liz and Dick Uihlein

Liz and Dick Uihlein, the billionaire founders of the Uline shipping and packing company, have given nearly $70mn to their pro-Trump Restoration Pac and $10mn more to Maga Inc.

In a March interview with the FT Liz Uihlein explained why she was supporting Trump despite having supported Ron DeSantis in the Republican primary — and expressed her hope that the Florida governor would run again in 2028.

Liz Uihlein said she had feared the fight over abortion rights would help the Democrats win re-election, but said Americans’ unhappiness with inflation and immigration were working in Trump’s favour. She also lamented the US’s inability to prevent Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis from attacking Red Sea shipping routes.

Liz Uihlein said: “The fact that we’re allowing them to make our ships go around the Horn of Africa. It’s ridiculous we can’t control this.”

Despite her financial support, Liz Uihlein has reservations about Trump’s personality.

“Everybody likes Trump’s policies, but we have almost 10,000 people that work for us, and I would never talk to them, the way Trump talks to people,” she told the FT. “I don’t treat people like that.”