Among Donald Trump's most visible and powerful surrogates on the campaign trail was Elon Musk,

the tech billionaire who owns the platform X, formerly Twitter.

Now with President elect Trump, Musk remains within the inner circle, joining calls with world leaders and weighing in on staffing decisions.

For more on the influence Musk could exert on the next administration

and what he stands to gain, I'm joined by Victoria Elliott, a reporter from Wired who has long

covered Elon Musk. Victoria, welcome. Thanks for joining us. Thanks so much for having me.

So let's just start with the influence Musk has already had on getting Trump back into the White

House. We mentioned he owns and controls the

platform X. He donated over $118 million to the reelection bid. How instrumental would you say

he was in getting Trump reelected? You know, obviously he plowed a lot of money into the campaign,

and he really brought the full weight of his own

personal celebrity, because before Musk even owned Twitter, he was one of the top 10 most followed

people on the platform. So just his audience, even without the sort of super juicing that now we've

seen as he owned it, as he's changed the algorithm algorithm would have been incredibly powerful.

There was a really great report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate that found that the posts on X from Musk alone, between July 13th, when he endorsed Donald Trump and October 25th, reached so many people that if a campaign were to like pay for that kind of visibility, it would have been the equivalent of about $24 million in advertisements.

So even the use of his platform alone to boost the Trump campaign's talking points, to boost its visibility was incredibly valuable.

But then if you zoom out from that, he also sort of gave permission

for a lot of these other more right-leaning people within Silicon Valley, people like David

Sachs and Sean McGuire at Segoia Capitol, to be really public about their support for Trump

and to put their money behind his campaign too. So I think he sort of, you know, really was at the vanguard

of being willing to sort of take the public heat and attention for this such that other

people in his circle felt comfortable backing Trump. And, you know, that's also true for bringing

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