Elon Musk Was Sole Funder of Shady Pro-Trump PAC That Claimed RBG Was Also Anti-Abortion
The election was over a month ago, and somehow, we continue to learn new, horrifying information. On Thursday, newly revealed Federal Election Commission filings showed that Elon Musk — notorious for his creepy birth rate obsession — was the sole funder behind one of the shadiest pro-Trump PACs this election cycle: RBG PAC. Named after the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a liberal reproductive rights icon, the PAC’s whole purpose was to lie and claim that Donald Trump could be trusted to protect abortion rights — because, the PAC insisted, he and Ginsburg shared the same position on the issue.
The PAC materialized out of thin air just days before Election Day, filing its paperwork on October 16, the deadline for new super PACs to form. It immediately spent $20 million on ads, which featured women gently assuring their fellow women voters that “freedom to choose is important to me, and there’s been a lot of talk on where [Trump] stands. But he’s been clear: He does not support a federal abortion ban. Trump does support reasonable exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother. His position is my position.”
In the final months of the 2024 election, Musk emerged as one of Trump’s top (and most annoying) donors; by the end of the cycle, he poured over $200 million into Trump’s campaign. Now, we know he spent over $20 million trying to deceive pro-choice voters during the first presidential election after the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health ruling.
RBG PAC’s website declared in large text, “Why did Ruth Bader Ginsburg agree with Donald Trump’s position on abortion? Because RBG believed that the federal government shouldn’t dictate our abortion laws. Donald Trump also does not support a federal ban on abortion. On this issue, great minds think alike.” The Musk-funded PAC’s main message was that Trump and Ginsburg both agreed abortion should be left up to the states, but this, obviously, isn’t true at all. First, because Trump, a serial liar, is not going to leave abortion up to the states. And second, because Ginsburg was clear she regarded abortion as a fundamental right no matter where you lived. She criticized Roe not because she supported abortion being left to the states, but because she feared a court ruling wouldn’t be enough to protect a right to abortion.
On top of that, Ginsburg famously loathed Trump. (Though, crucially, part of what allowed Trump to appoint anti-abortion justices to the Supreme Court was Ginsburg’s controversial decision to not retire during the Obama years.) Ginsburg's granddaughter, reproductive rights attorney Clara Spera, made it clear the PAC “has no connection to the Ginsburg family” and called it “an affront to my late grandmother’s legacy.” Her statement to the New York Times continued, “The use of her name and image to support Donald Trump’s re-election campaign, and specifically to suggest that she would approve of his position on abortion, is nothing short of appalling.”
Musk’s role in funding a PAC dedicated to misrepresenting Trump’s anti-abortion position makes all of this grosser. This is a man who is, again, famously obsessed with fearmongering about the birth rate, prompting him to support and bankroll anti-abortion politicians and try to impregnate every woman within a one-mile radius of him. Couched beneath faux-intellectual language about saving mankind from extinction, Musk’s aggressively pro-natalist position is all about coercing as many women as possible to give birth, which he's clearly trying to achieve by getting anti-abortion extremists elected. Money in politics is a disease.
Even as Trump lied and said that he supported leaving abortion up to the states, he repeatedly suggested that he'd support a 15 or 16-week federal ban. Lest we forget, he appointed three anti-abortion extremists to the Supreme Court with the obvious goal of killing Roe. And, despite years of Republicans calling feminists "hysterical" for their warnings about Roe, Trump's SCOTUS appointees did, in fact, overturn it. On the campaign trail, Trump even suggested there should be restrictions on birth control and expressed support for states to track people’s pregnancies to enforce abortion bans. Despite all of this, he declared himself women’s great “protector,” and that he’d “protect” us “whether [we] like it or not.” And, with the help of hundreds of millions from Musk, he’s about to do just that.