Elon Musk, the world's richest man and an avid supporter of Donald Trump, was plunged into new controversy on Friday after a report that he is in regular contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The Wall Street Journal story, which has been denied by the Kremlin, comes days after the US Justice Department sent a letter to Musk's America PAC warning that its $1 million giveaways to registered voters may violate federal law.
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Musk, 53, the chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla and the owner of X, formerly Twitter, has thrown his millions, time and considerable influence into sending the former Republican president back to the White House since endorsing him in July.
Musk has reportedly donated $118 million to his personal pro-Trump political action committee, an organization that collects funds for elections.
He's also appeared on stage with Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania and hosted a series of town halls on his own in the battleground state seen as critical in the November election.
Musk, who supported Barack Obama but has become increasingly conservative in recent years, peppers his 202 million followers on X daily with messages championing Trump and denigrating his opponent, Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.
Many of the X posts by the South African-born billionaire decry the number of migrants crossing into the United States from Mexico or echo discredited conspiracy theories.
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Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz has accused Musk of spending millions to help Trump "buy an election" and jokingly suggested that the billionaire – not J.D. Vance – is Trump's real running mate.
Trump has pledged if he wins the election to tap Musk to head a "government efficiency commission" tasked with slashing bureaucracy and waste.
Musk already holds a top secret clearance because of SpaceX, which launches rockets for NASA and the Pentagon, and the Wall Street Journal said his contacts with Putin have raised "potential national security concerns" among some members of the Biden administration although there is no evidence of any "possible security breaches."
NASA administrator Bill Nelson said Friday the report "should be investigated."
"If the story is true that there have been multiple conversations between Elon Musk and the president of Russia, then I think that would be concerning, particularly for NASA and the Department of Defense and for some of the intelligence agencies," Nelson said at an event hosted by online news outlet Semafor.
'One contact'
The Journal said the Musk-Putin conversations touched on "personal topics, business and geopolitical tensions," although at one point the Russian leader asked the US billionaire to avoid activating his Starlink satellite internet service over Taiwan as a favor to Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov rejected the report, saying "it's all untrue, absolutely false information."
Putin had one contact with Musk before 2022, Peskov said, when they spoke on the phone.
"It was a fact-finding conversation," he said. "They talked about more visionary technology, about technology for the future."
SpaceX's Starlink has been a vital communications tool for Ukrainian forces battling Russian troops and Musk "categorically" denied earlier this year that any terminals had been sold to Russia.
"My companies have probably done more to undermine Russia than anything," Musk said during a streamed event on X.
SpaceX has taken away two-thirds of Russia's space launch business and "Starlink has overwhelmingly helped Ukraine," he said.
While Musk's alleged conversations with Putin are drawing scrutiny, so are his daily $1 million giveaways to registered voters – from the Justice Department and election watchdog groups.
Federal law prohibits paying people to register to vote and the department's public integrity unit reportedly warned Musk's America PAC in a letter this week that the sweepstakes may be illegal.
Adav Noti, executive director of the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, denounced the giveaways as "egregious."
"It is extremely problematic that the world's richest man can throw his money around in an attempt to directly influence the outcome of this election," Noti said. "This is not how our democracy should work."
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