Jeff Bezos, Michael Dell and Mark Zuckerberg are among the three dozen billionaires to congratulate Trump so far.
By Kyle Khan-Mullins and Phoebe Liu, Forbes Staff
“America is a nation of builders,” Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, posted on X, the social media platform he owns, at 11:50 p.m. Eastern Tuesday night, hours before the Associated Press called the presidential race in Donald Trump’s favor. Writing from Palm Beach County, where he was spending Election Night with Trump, he added, “Soon, you will be free to build.”
As votes rolled in showing the billionaire former president poised to retake the White House, some of his fellow conservative billionaires rallied on X. Some were celebratory, like crypto billionaire Tyler Winklevoss, who posted that “We are on the brink of a new American Renaissance.” Some began offering explanations for Trump’s surge, like surrogate and former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who claimed that “voters are rejecting censorship, lawfare, and dishonesty.” Still others were impatient with the networks: “It is absurd that @cnn refuses to call states that have clearly been won by @realDonaldTrump,” hedge fund manager Bill Ackman wrote at 11:40 p.m., even as millions of votes remained outstanding across the then-uncalled states in the Rust Belt, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.
By the next day, many other billionaires, including Michael Dell and Jeff Bezos, went online to react to Trump’s victory, in most cases sending him congratulations. Also among those responding were some of Kamala Harris’ biggest backers, including LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman and businessman Mark Cuban, who addressed congratulations to Trump after having deleted some of his pro-Harris posts earlier. Bill Gates, who quietly gave $50 million to Harris’ campaign, was among the latest to send a message to Trump, congratulating him and Vance and saying that America is at its strongest when “we use ingenuity and innovation to improve lives.”
The wealthy have always weighed in on politics, but in the last decade or so, their ability to do so has ramped up. They can now make unlimited donations, so these days each election is more expensive than the last. And in the era of social media, they can talk directly to legions of people who consider them worth listening to. Forbes analyzed posts on X since October 1 from the richest 200 American billionaires with accounts we could find. Billionaires often have large followings on X—Musk, the most-followed person on his platform, has more than 200 million followers. Overall, the 2,000-plus posts about the election from those accounts have been viewed 10 billion times.
Of those posts, 472 mention Kamala Harris and 652 mention Donald Trump. Using RoBERTa, a machine learning model trained on more than 100 million posts on X, Forbes also analyzed the sentiment of those posts. As of midnight on Wednesday, posts that mentioned Trump seemed to be a bit more optimistic—with 49% of those posts categorized as “positive” versus 35% for posts mentioning Harris, per a sentiment analysis. (It’s possible, though, that Musk’s ownership of X has something to do with the platform’s rightward bent in this context, given that he has emerged as one of Trump’s biggest supporters, even spending election night with the presidential candidate.)
Here are some of the most recent pro-Trump posts from billionaires—including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who controversially killed his Washington Post’s endorsement of Harris last week, a day before executives from his space company Blue Origin met with Trump. As of 3:15 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday, in the wake of Trump being declared the winner, no billionaires have posted anything explicitly anti-Trump, though Mike Bloomberg posted a critical editorial on Bloomberg News, writing that “Dealing with a reckless president is an exhausting job, but it can and must be done – and it’s a job for members of both parties.” Forbes will continue to update this post with reactions throughout the week:
Additionally, Mark Zuckerburg posted on Facebook-owned X alternative Threads: “Congratulations to President Trump on a decisive victory. We have great opportunities ahead of us as a country. Looking forward to working with you and your administration.”
Some of the most negative posts about Trump came from Democratic Illinois governor JB Pritzker, venture capitalist Vinod Khosla and Mark Cuban of Shark Tank fame, although as of Wednesday morning, Cuban has deleted his openly pro-Harris posts. (Cuban declined further comment in an email to Forbes.) The only posts expressing disappointment at the results of the election came from billionaire Mailchimp cofounder Ben Chestnut (who lives in Georgia, a swing state that flipped red yesterday), Bloomberg and Reid Hoffman:
Of the 1,000 most recent billionaire posts as of midnight on Wednesday, here were several notable themes that skewed pro-Trump, per a machine learning categorization (using a model trained on a large dataset of unstructured text, the Google-developed BERT model and related modeling technique BERTopic):
1. Encouraging people to vote, on either side (72 posts)
2. Swing states and undocumented immigrants’ roles in them, largely from Musk and Trump himself (34 posts)
3. Economic issues, including the national debt and tariffs (23 posts):
4. Discussions about voter fraud (22 posts):
Plenty of billionaires took the Musk route of doing more than just tweeting or giving money, though. Cuban became a frequent Harris surrogate on cable news and on the stump. Miriam Adelson penned an op-ed in the newspaper she owns, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, endorsing Trump as “the right man—the only man—for the job,” while Hoffman pitched Harris as tech-friendly in the pages of The New York Times. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and pharma billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong blocked the newspapers they own—The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, respectively—from endorsing Harris.
And of course, some billionaires are talking about the election, just not on X. Donald Trump largely keeps his posts restricted to Truth Social, the Twitter knockoff that dominates his net worth, though he did post plenty on X on Election Day. Mark Zuckerburg only posts on Facebook-owned Threads, perhaps X’s biggest rival, and stays away from politics (other than chastising the European Union for regulatory moves), but did praise Trump as “badass” in a July interview.
At least one man felt that X had been predictive of what was to come, even resharing a post that said X was more indicative than the polls. At 1:17 am, as things looked bleaker across the country for Harris, Musk wrote to his followers: “You are the media now.”
