Elon Musk, Bill Ackman and other billionaires react to Trump’s victory

Most of America’s richest citizens are silent on X, formerly Twitter, about the election. But some are actually very vocal.

_{By Kyle Khan-Mullins and Phoebe LiuForbes staff}

“ONEAmerica is a nation of builders,” Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, submitted on X, the social media platform he owns, at 11:50 PM Eastern Tuesday night, hours before the Associated Press called the presidential election in Donald Trump’s favor. Writing from Mar-a-Lago, where he spent election night with Trump, he added: “Soon you will be free to build.”

As the votes rolled in showing the billionaire former president poised to recapture the White House, some of his fellow conservative billionaires rallied the X. Some were celebratory, like crypto billionaire Tyler Winklevoss, who submitted that “We are on the verge of a new American renaissance.” Some began offering explanations for Trump’s rise, like surrogate and former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who claimed that “voters reject censorship, lawlessness and dishonesty.” Still others were impatient with the networks: “It’s absurd that @cnn refuses to call states clearly won by @realDonaldTrump,” hedge fund manager Bill Ackman wrote at 11:40 p.m., although millions of votes remained outstanding in the then-uncalled Rust Belt states of Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.

Liberal billionaires, meanwhile, appeared largely silent, a change from earlier on Election Day. LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman submitted a video at 17. Eastern, declaring that “This election is not about minor political differences. It is about truth vs. fiction, the rule of law vs. chaos, and democracy vs. fascism.” Businessman Mark Cuban, who had hit the campaign trail for Harris, wrote that he “enjoyed facetiming students waiting in long lines @unccharlotte,” adding that voting for Kamala Harris is “worth it!” None of them posted anything election-related after 19, when the polls began to close in key states, until Cuban addressed congratulated Trump and deleted some of his pro-Harris posts, and Musk at 1:23. From As of 9 a.m., as congratulatory posts from pro-Trump billionaires continue to roll in, no other billionaire supporting Harris has spoken out on the platform.

The wealthy have always weighed in on politics, but in the last decade or so their ability to do so has increased. They can now make unlimited donations, so these days each election is more expensive than the last. And in the age of social media, they can speak directly to legions of people who consider them worth listening to. Forbes analyzed posts on X since October 1 from the 200 richest US 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. Collectively, the more than 2,000 posts about the election from these accounts have been viewed 10 billion times.

Of these 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 these posts. As of midnight Wednesday, posts mentioning Trump appeared to be slightly more upbeat — with 49% of those posts categorized as “positive” versus 35% for posts mentioning Harris, according to a sentiment analysis. (However, it’s possible that Musk’s ownership of X has something to do with the platform’s right-wing turn 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 latest pro-Trump posts — many from Musk, Ramaswamy and Ackman. As of 9 a.m. Eastern, a billionaire has yet to post anything anti-Trump after polls close. (Forbes will continue to update this post with reactions throughout the day):

Some of the most negative posts about Trump came from Democratic Illinois Gov. 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. The only post to suggest disappointment with the election results came from billionaire Mailchimp co-founder Ben Chestnut, who lives in Georgia – a swing state that turned red yesterday:

Of the 1,000 recent billionaire posts as of midnight Wednesday, here were several notable themes that skewed pro-Trump, according to a machine learning categorization (using a model trained on a large dataset of unstructured text, the Google-developed BERT model and associated modeling technique BERTopic):

1. Encouragement to vote on both sides (72 posts)

2. Swing states and the roles of undocumented immigrants in them, mainly 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 to do more than just tweet or give money. Cuban became a frequent Harris surrogate on cable news and on the stump. Miriam Adelson wrote 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 stated 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 –Washington Post and Los Angeles Timesrespectively – from supporting Harris.

And of course, some billionaires are talking about the election, just not on X. Donald Trump largely keeps his posts limited to Truth Social, the Twitter outlet that dominates his net worth, though he posted plenty on X on Election Day. Mark Zuckerburg posts only on Facebook-owned Threads, perhaps X’s biggest rival, and stays away from politics (except to chastise the EU for legislative action), but praised Trump as a “badass” in a July interview.

At least one man felt that X had predicted what was to come, even sharing a post saying that X was more indicative than the polls. At 1:17 a.m., as things looked bleaker across the country for Harris, Musk wrote to his followers: “You are the media now.”

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