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

Most of America's wealthiest citizens are keeping quiet about the election on X, formerly Twitter. But some are actually very vocal.

_{From Kyle Khan Mullins And Phoebe LiuForbes contributor}

“AAmerica is a nation of builders,” Elon Musk, the world's richest man, posted at 11:50 pm Eastern on Tuesday night on X, the social media platform he owns, hours before the Associated Press tipped the presidential race in favor proclaimed by Donald Trump. In a letter from Mar-a-Lago, where he spent election night with Trump, he added: “Soon you will be free to build.”

As the votes came in showing the billionaire former president was ready to take back the White House, some of his fellow conservative billionaires gathered at New American Renaissance.” Some began offering explanations for Trump's victory, such as surrogate and former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who claimed that “voters reject censorship, law-abiding and dishonesty.” Still others expressed impatience with the networks: “It's absurd that @cnn refuses to call states that were clearly won by @realDonaldTrump,” wrote hedge fund manager Bill Ackman at 11:40 p.m., even though there are still millions across the country of votes outstanding at the time were unnamed states in the Rust Belt, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.

Meanwhile, the liberal billionaires seemed largely silent, unlike before. LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman posted a video at 5 p.m. Eastern time declaring, “This election is not about petty political differences. It's about truth vs. fiction, rule of law vs. chaos, and democracy vs. fascism.” Businessman Mark Cuban, who supported Harris in the election campaign, wrote that he “had a lot of fun Facetiming students in long Lines to wait @unccharlotte,” adding that voting for Kamala Harris is “worth it!” After 7 p.m., as polls began to close in key states, neither posted anything election-related until Cuban congratulated Trump and deleted some of his pro-Harris posts, and Musk deleted congratulatory posts at 1:23 a.m. from 9 a.m Pro-Trump billionaires continue to pour in, but no other Harris-supporting billionaires have spoken out on the platform.

The rich have always interfered in politics, but over the last decade or so their ability to do so has increased. You can now donate without limit, 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 think they're worth listening to. Forbes analyzed posts on X since October 1st from the 200 richest 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. In total, the more than 2,000 posts about the election on these accounts were 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 these posts. As of midnight Wednesday, posts mentioning Trump appeared to be slightly more optimistic – 49% of those posts were rated “positive,” compared to 35% of posts mentioning Harris, according to sentiment analysis. (However, it is possible that Musk's ownership of

Here are some of Musk, Ramaswamy and Ackman's top posts about Trump in the month leading up to the election. A billionaire hasn't posted anything against Trump since the polls closed. (Forbes I 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 Shark tank Notoriety, even though the Cuban deleted his openly pro-Harris posts on Wednesday morning. The only post suggesting disappointment with the election results came from billionaire Mailchimp co-founder Ben Chestnut, who lives in Georgia – a swing state that flipped red yesterday:

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

1. Encourage people on both sides to vote (72 posts)

2. Swing states and the role of undocumented immigrants in them, largely by Musk and Trump himself (34 posts)

3. Economic issues, including national debt and tariffs (23 posts):

4. Discussions on the topic of election fraud (22 posts):

However, many billionaires have followed Musk's path and done more than just tweet or give money. Cuban became a frequent Harris surrogate on cable news and on the stump. Miriam Adelson wrote an editorial for the newspaper she owns, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, endorsing Trump as “the right man – the only man – for the job,” while Hoffman called Harris pro-tech in the pages of The New York Times. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and pharmaceutical billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong have 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 Mark Zuckerburg only posts on Facebook's own threads, perhaps Facebook's biggest rival

At 1:17 a.m., as things looked bleaker for Harris across the country, Musk wrote to his followers: “You are the media now.”

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