Trump leans on big donors

Elon Musk presents himself, with his controversial exploits. But there are also the Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler, rowing champions (they took part in the Beijing Olympics), who conceived Facebook's predecessor at Harvard, then engaged in legal feuds with Mark Zuckerberg and are now considered cryptocurrency gurus (among Trump's latest passions). There is Tim Mellon, converted to apostle of the Maga from a shy heir to one of the historic banking fortunes and now at the top of the list of Trump's foragers. Then there is Miriam Adelson, widow of Sheldon, former king of the Las Vegas Sands casinos and ever the ultra-conservative champion. And in the middle crop up celebrities from high finance and Silicon Valley, from John Paulson (being talked about for a possible Treasury appointment) to Steve Schwarzman, from Paul Singer to Marc Andreessen.

These are the many faces of Donald Trump's super-supporters, who have financed his race in a challenge with record costs: in all, Forbes magazine has identified 52 billionaires who have financially supported the tycoon, with at least half of them donating over a million each.

Overall, a river of nearly four billion dollars flooded the election, with over a billion coming from a handful of 144 billionaires. In Trump's case, the handful is particularly small: over a third of his funds, nearly 700 million, came from mega-donors, almost twice as many as the big donors who backed Harris. A poker of four figures 'invested' 432 million on the right-wing leader's success. The Washington Post went so far as to list 50 big donors, individuals and entities, who mobilised 2.5 billion for the entire range of candidates running in the two camps. Beyond the somewhat discordant data, a clear imbalance emerges here in favour of the Republicans, who pocketed a total of 1.6 billion from the elite supporters.

But let us come to the protagonists of the funding. The 82-year-old Mellon, amidst the discontent of much of his own family dynasty, has put at least 150 million on the plate for Trump, half of the money raked in by the Make America Great Again Inc. group. Including funds for other Republican causes, the total rises to 200 million.

Musk has been little short of that: he has poured 118 million - but the figure is steadily rising - into his America Pac, specially created in favour of Trump. Another 12 million he has poured into supporting Republicans in the race for parliamentary seats. Certainly, with the money, the Tesla and SpaceX patron is the leader of Corporate America who has exposed himself most publicly, even jumping on stage at rallies with his candidate. In doing so, he has also ignored accusations and allegations that he has broken the law by buying votes and voter registrations by cheque, including a repeated million-dollar lottery for lucky people drawn by lot in uncertain states. Not only that, he has glossed over the shadows of conflicts of interest in the event of his ventilated appointment as spending cut czar in the event of a Republican victory. Too bad he has multi-billion dollar federal contracts and that among the agencies he would starve are those that control his businesses, from cars to space.