How Elon Musk stands to cash in on Trump’s presidential victory
Tesla CEO Elon Musk (R) joins former U.S. President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump during a campaign rally at the site of his first assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Oct. 5, 2024.
Jim Watson | Afp | Getty Images
As Donald Trump celebrated his presidential victory early Wednesday morning, Elon Musk was right there with him.
“A star is born. Elon,” Trump said onstage at his Mar-a-Lago resort, thanking the world’s richest person for spending two weeks campaigning in Pennsylvania.
Musk, who poured at least $130 million into a pro-Trump campaign effort, turned Trump support into yet another full-time job in recent months, funding a swing-state operation to register voters and using his social media platform X to constantly tout his preferred candidate, frequently with misinformation.
Musk’s investment in Trump is already paying off, even though Trump doesn’t take office until Jan. 20.
Tesla shares soared 15% on Wednesday, adding roughly $15 billion in paper value to Musk’s net worth. The electric vehicle maker faces headwinds in the global market from China-based competitors, declining European sales and consumers’ growing distaste for his political views.
But with Musk cozying up to Trump, and the president-elect promising to slash the types of regulations that Musk abhors, Wall Street is betting Tesla, on balance, will be a beneficiary.
For Musk, the potential gains go well beyond Tesla.
During his victory speech, Trump also praised Musk’s SpaceX and thanked Musk for delivering Starlink Wi-Fi terminals to Hurricane-stricken parts of the U.S. That all leaves Musk with plenty of reasons to be optimistic that a second Trump administration will pay healthy dividends to him and his businesses.
Musk’s companies are currently embroiled in a range of probes and lawsuits from federal agencies pertaining to matters including alleged securities law violations, workplace safety, labor and civil rights violations, violations of federal environmental laws, consumer fraud and vehicle safety defects.
Given the executive branch’s outsized control over federal regulatory bodies, Musk can look forward to regulators and intelligence agencies winding down some or all of the 19 known ongoing federal investigations and lawsuits against Tesla, SpaceX and X, formerly known as Twitter.
At New York’s Madison Square Garden on Oct. 27, Musk was one of many Trump fans and surrogates to speak during an all-day rally. Much of the coverage of the event focused on comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s bigoted quips, including his description of Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.”
Musk was introduced by Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick, who called the Tesla CEO the “greatest capitalist” in U.S. history. Lutnick said he and Musk were co-founders of the envisioned “Department of Government Efficiency” and he asked Musk how much he thought could be cut from the federal budget.
Musk answered “at least $2 trillion,” which is more than the federal government’s discretionary budget of $1.7 trillion. The remark received a scream from Lutnick and applause from the crowd.
Musk didn’t specify what he sought to cut, but he previously accused agencies including the SEC, Environmental Protection Agency and Federal Aviation Administration of regulatory overreach or infringing on his free speech rights.
He also accused the Biden administration of hiring too many IRS personnel, and has vocally objected to a so-called billionaires tax.
Having a role in a bespoke commission could give Musk power over federal agencies’ budgets, staffing and the ability to push for the elimination of inconvenient regulations.
Musk also said during a Tesla earnings call on Oct. 23, that he intended to use his sway with Trump to establish a “federal approval process for autonomous vehicles.” Currently, approvals happen at the state level.
Tesla has been working on driverless technology for more than a decade but hasn’t yet produced a robotaxi or vehicle safe to use without a human ready to steer or brake at any time.
Additionally, a Trump administration may agree to ramp up the government’s work with his companies.
Musk’s newest startup, xAI, is developing large language models and generative artificial intelligence software that aims to compete with similar products from Microsoft-backed OpenAI, Meta and others.
Meta recently announced its open-source Llama models were available to U.S. government agencies in the areas of defense and national security. And OpenAI is already working with the U.S. military after adding a retired U.S. Army general and former director of the National Security Agency to its board in June.
Musk didn’t respond to a request for comment.
SpaceX catches the first-stage “Super Heavy” booster of its Starship rocket on Oct. 13, 2024.
Sergio Flores | Afp | Getty Images
SpaceX’s billions in federal contracts
According to research on federal spending and prime contracts by FedScout, SpaceX has received more than $19 billion from contracts with the federal government since 2008, including from NASA, the U.S. Air Force and Space Force.
The company is on track to take in several billions of dollars annually from prime contracts with the federal government for years to come, according to FedScout CEO Geoff Orazem.
That number doesn’t include classified spending, smaller items like Starlink terminals, or spending that’s done at the state level via block grants from the federal government, like when the Federal Emergency Management Agency gives states assistance to help recover from natural disasters.
Meanwhile, Tesla has reported around $10 billion in sales of “automotive regulatory credits,” or environmental credits, since 2015, Orazem found by evaluating the company’s financial filings.
These incentives are largely derived from federal and state regulations in the U.S. that require automakers to sell some number of low-emission vehicles or buy credits from companies like Tesla, which often have an excess.
Regulatory credits were about 60% of Tesla’s net income in the second quarter of 2024, and 39% in the third quarter. Other government rebates on EV sales represented about 50% of Tesla’s third-quarter profit.
Trump hasn’t made clear whether he’ll maintain those rebates and regulatory credit programs. He previously said he may cut the federal $7,500 EV tax credit.
Additionally, Trump has promised to slash income taxes and to implement steep tariffs. While tariffs could help protect Tesla from Chinese competitors, such a move could involve significant disruption to Tesla’s automotive supply chain, which relies on some materials and parts from China.
When it comes to worker protections, Musk has been seeking to strike down the constitutional authority of the National Labor Relations Board through litigation. He may find such lawsuits are no longer needed if Trump is willing to eliminate or reduce the power of the agency, which is supposed to ensure that companies follow federal laws allowing workers to form unions and engage in collective bargaining with their employers.
Then there’s Musk’s involvement with sanctioned governments.
At SpaceX, Musk has withheld the use of Starlink, the company’s satellite internet service, over Taiwan, even for U.S. troops based there. The Wall Street Journal reported that Musk cut off access as a favor requested by Russian President Vladimir Putin allegedly on behalf of Chinese President Xi Jinping during a series of ongoing, frequent talks between the two men.
In response to the reports, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said if they were true, Musk’s conversations with Putin should be be federally investigated.
According to analysis by NBC News, Musk has repeatedly posted pro-Kremlin content to his hundreds of millions of followers on X. He even engaged with content from Tenet Media and its creators at least 60 times on the social network. Tenet was at the center of an alleged Russian covert operation to manipulate U.S. public opinion ahead of the 2024 election, according to the Department of Justice.
While Vice President-elect JD Vance recently called Putin a U.S. adversary, Trump has frequently spoken of his affection for the Russian president, even since Russia’s devastating invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Kremlin officials have celebrated Trump’s victory in this week’s election.
Musk, who publicly endorsed Trump moments after the first assassination attempt on the former president in July, has said he intends to remain involved in U.S. politics for the long haul.
He said in a discussion on X on Tuesday that his super PAC would continue its work after the presidential election and would seek to influence the outcomes of midterms, intermediate elections and elections of local prosecutors across the U.S.
A priority, Musk said, would be to help elect district attorneys “who prosecute repeat violent criminals who are obviously a danger to people.”
Partiful’s CEO, Shreya Murthy, and CTO, Joy Tao
Courtesy: Partiful
When Shreya Murthy and Joy Tao decided to launch a party-planning startup in 2020, they settled on a business goal of “bringing people together in person.”
The Covid-19 pandemic demanded the exact opposite.
Despite the challenge of the pandemic, Partiful survived, and five years later, the New York startup is now used by millions of people to plan events such as birthday parties, housewarmings and weddings.
The app’s a favorite of those ages 20 to 30, and it’s added 2 million new users since January, Partiful CEO Murthy told CNBC. The company has never revealed its exact base of monthly users.
Partiful drew attention on social media after Apple, known for replicating features from popular apps on the iPhone, launched its own event-planning service in February, and the startup posted a joke about “copycats” on its X account.
Of course, Partiful isn’t the first party-planning app. It competes against not only Apple Invites, but also Eventbrite, Evite, Punchbowl and others.
Each service differs slightly in its target markets and features. Evite, for example, uses a “freemium” model, where certain invitation designs and other features are paywalled. Eventbrite is often used to promote and sell admission to large public events.
What sets Partiful apart from its competitors — and appeals to its Gen Z user base — is its often humorous, casual designs, some of which are created by Partiful’s in-house designers.
“Friend invited me to a gathering that doesn’t have a Partiful….feeling lost, confused, unprepared…much like when I (Gen Z) receive a phone call out of the blue,” X user Athena Kan posted in August.
For the first quarter of 2025, Partiful averaged 500,000 monthly active users, up 400% year over year, with 9 out of 10 users on the app based in the U.S., according to estimates provided to CNBC by Sensor Tower, a market research firm. That compares with Eventbrite’s 4.4 million monthly active users, which is up 2% year over year, and Punchbowl with approximately 85,000 monthly users, which is down about 2% compared to a year ago. A spokesperson for Evite told CNBC that the service saw more than 20 million monthly active users for the first quarter of 2025.
It’s unclear how many people still use Facebook’s once-popular event-planning feature Facebook Events. Facebook’s parent company, Meta, shut down the standalone app.
Sample invitations from the Partiful app
Source: Partiful
Bringing people together in real life
Murthy and Tao both went to Princeton University and worked at Palantir Technologies at the same time, but they didn’t meet until they were introduced later by a mutual friend. Both were looking to move to the consumer-facing side of tech.
Tao, then a software engineer at Meta, wanted to leave the company to focus on products that were more relatable to daily life, and said that the social media company’s goal of keeping users engaged on their apps sometimes can create “perverse incentives.”
“For me, driving more people to spend more time staring at their phone, staring at this endless feed of content, wasn’t super motivating, wasn’t super meaningful to me personally,” said Tao, Partiful’s tech chief and a self-described “avid party planner.”
Meta declined to comment.
Tao and Murthy went through a sort of “dating period” where they asked each other what they thought leading a startup together could look like. Among the voids they identified was how intimate social events, such as birthday parties where a host would be likely to see the attendees again, were still planned on text chains that made it difficult to track, communicate or plan an ideal event time with guests.
“If you’re not sure when people are free, that’s a really annoying problem,” Murthy said.
She and Tao took the leap.
With few in-person events happening during the 2020 lockdowns, Partiful’s engineering team focused on building the platform’s text message-based infrastructure so that the service could be used by both iPhone and Android users.
Partiful’s team, which has now grown to 25, operates out of downtown Brooklyn. The service is no longer limited to text messages and its website. The company launched apps for the iPhone and Android devices in 2023 and 2024, respectively, and Partiful now serves as a one-stop destination for organizing the different phases of planning and hosting a party. The company has reportedly raised $20 million in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz.
Speaking Gen Z’s language
What makes Partiful fun for users is how customizable an invite can be.
Hosts can create a free birthday invite with a lime-green parody cover of Charli XCX’s “brat” album, for example, or plan a girls’ night out with a cover photo of Shrek in sunglasses. They can track “yes,” “no” or “maybe” RSVPs under a portrait of Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg, and invited guests can use a “boop” feature to send random emojis rather than a direct message to each other.
Party planners can also send out uniform text blasts to the group before and after the event and manage an in-app photo album for uploading memories.
Partiful is available for anyone to use, but Murthy said the company sees the most need for the service among young users in the “postgrad” period of life. That’s a stage where people might be moving to new cities and away from their established college friend groups.
“You’re starting your adult life and have to not only figure out, ‘How do I rent an apartment? How do I work a new job? How do I exist in this new version of myself?'” Murthy said. “On top of that, you’re also having to rebuild your entire social circle.”
For the hosts and partiers in its user base, Partiful has become part of their social routine, and it has continued to gain traction online. The company told CNBC that over 60% of its active app users check Partiful every week.
As for Apple, Partiful isn’t sweating its new rival just yet.
Apple Invites requires that users have an iCloud+ subscription to create events, though it’s free to RSVP if a guest doesn’t have an Apple account. That service starts at 99 cents a month in the United States. Apple did not respond to a request for comment.
Partiful is free, at least for now.
Like many other tech companies that rely on distribution services such as Apple’s App Store, Partiful has a nuanced relationship with its much-larger counterpart. Partiful could lose some users to Apple, but it can also benefit from promotion by the app distributor.
That’s what happened in 2024, when Partiful was named a finalist for Apple’s App Store Awards for Cultural Impact, and won Google Play’s “Best App of 2024.” The app remained an “editor’s choice” pick on the App Store as of publication.
For now, Partiful remains confident.
“We haven’t really seen any users that have been leaving Partiful for Apple Invites,” Murthy said.
WATCH: Why iPhones may get more expensive amid Trump tariffs
An attendee wearing a Super Mario costume uses a Nintendo Switch 2 game console while playing a video game during the Nintendo Switch 2 Experience at the ExCeL London international exhibition and convention centre in London, Britain, April 11, 2025.
Isabel Infantes | Reuters
Nintendo on Friday announced that retail preorder for its Nintendo Switch 2 gaming system will begin on April 24 starting at $449.99.
Preorders for the hotly anticipated console were initially slated for April 9, but Nintendo delayed the date to assess the impact of the far-reaching, aggressive “reciprocal” tariffs that President Donald Trump announced earlier this month.
Most electronics companies, including Nintendo, manufacture their products in Asia. Nintendo’s Switch 1 consoles were made in China and Vietnam, Reuters reported in 2019. Trump has imposed a 145% tariff rate on China and a 10% rate on Vietnam. The latter is down from 46%, after he instituted a 90-day pause to allow for negotiations.
Nintendo said Friday that the Switch 2 will cost $449.99 in the U.S., which is the same price the company first announced on April 2.
“We apologize for the retail pre-order delay, and hope this reduces some of the uncertainty our consumers may be experiencing,” Nintendo said in a statement. “We thank our customers for their patience, and we share their excitement to experience Nintendo Switch 2 starting June 5, 2025.”
The Nintendo Switch 2 and “Mario Kart World“ bundle will cost $499.99, the digital version “Mario Kart World” will cost $79.99 and the digital version of “Donkey Kong Bananza” will cost $69.99, Nintendo said. All of those prices remain unchanged from the company’s initial announcement.
However, accessories for the Nintendo Switch 2 will “experience price adjustments,” the company said, and other future changes in costs are possible for “any Nintendo product.”
It will cost gamers $10 more to by the dock set, $1 more to buy the controller strap and $5 more to buy most other accessories, for instance.
WATCH: Nintendo has ‘a lot of work to do’ to convince casual users to upgrade to Switch 2: Kantan Games
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