00:00Elon Musk, the National Medal of Science to Elon Musk of SpaceX, for engineering achievements of extraordinary ambition and scale
00:08that have pushed the frontiers of space exploration, intelligence systems, communications, and beyond.
00:20You know, he's exceeding what last in 2024. He was the top donor of any individual in the election. And
00:30that was a record at that time. So now he's come back and he's exceeding that, you know, and at
00:37this show, there's still more to go. So you could put more money in, you know, later this month.
00:42So, you know, puts him head and shoulders above the next biggest donor, which was him.
00:49So giving to a super PAC gives you the plausible deniability that you are not directing how that money is
00:56being spent.
00:58Because there's so little regulation by the FEC, so that is the entity at the federal level, which is supposed
01:07to be policing all of this, even on their best days, they don't enforce the law much.
01:13And now in this second Trump administration, President Trump, one of the things he did in terms of firing various
01:22members of the government, he fired members of the FEC.
01:27So those are commissioners. They need four commissioners to do anything, and they don't have that right now.
01:34So the FEC is particularly neutered and powerless right now.
01:40So the typical way to make dark money dark is you start with a corporation or a billionaire, you give
01:46it to a 501c4, which is a social welfare organization, or a 501c6, which is a trade association.
01:53And once it goes through that dark money nonprofit, that opaque nonprofit, the public can see that the nonprofit is
02:02spending in American elections, they can't tell where the money came from, hence why we call this dark money.
02:08So there's a chance that Mr. Musk has been spending dark for a while, and we just would never know.
