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Who Are the Biggest Donors to Trump and Harris?

DUK Editor TeamSeptember 1, 2024
Who Are the Biggest Donors to Trump and Harris?


In presidential fund-raising these days, the donors who matter most are the very small and the very, very big.

The very small are the lifeblood of campaigns, cultivated via email after email, and hounded for recurring donations.

But the very, very big can make contributions that eclipse a million small-dollar donors.

The campaigns of Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump, when combined with their super PACs, have raised $1.3 billion, and that’s not counting money raised by dark-money organizations that are active in the presidential race and don’t disclose their donors. The final two months of the election typically see donors write some of the biggest checks of the campaign season. So we’re just getting started.

Here’s a look at the billionaires that are powering the campaigns.

Mr. Trump has not added many new megadonors to his fold since his 2020 campaign. He himself has not traveled to many fund-raising events across the country — a point of frustration for some of his fund-raisers who sometimes have to travel to Mr. Trump’s own properties to get access to the candidate. Some traditional Republican donors who are uncomfortable with Mr. Trump are focusing their energies on down-ballot campaigns.

But Mr. Trump has, since 2016, transformed the Republican contributor class, developing a network of peculiar big donors loyal to him.

There is no donor who has publicly spent more for Mr. Trump this cycle than Timothy Mellon, heir to the Mellon banking fortune. He has put more than $125 million into Mr. Trump’s campaign — and it’s only September.

Mr. Mellon, a reclusive businessman, burst onto the political donor scene seemingly out of nowhere. And while he has almost no relationship with Mr. Trump, he has financed much of MAGA Inc., a super PAC, providing almost half of the total money it has raised this cycle.

Mr. Mellon is also a friend of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s and put $25 million into a pro-Kennedy super PAC, becoming this cycle’s largest disclosed donor.

The rise of Elon Musk as a political donor has been one of the most extraordinary stories of the 2024 campaign. Mr. Musk, the owner of the social media platform X and chief executive of Tesla, had never displayed much interest in politics, and his own proclivities were liberal. But this spring, he decided to start a super PAC that had grand ambitions to spend as much as $180 million on transforming the Republican Party’s field organizing program.

It had a rocky start. But there’s time, and Mr. Musk has brought in new leadership, including a new personal aide to help him make political decisions. Mr. Musk, at the very least, is someone whom Mr. Trump talks to and listens to: He took Mr. Musk’s advice to choose JD Vance as his running mate, and Mr. Musk appears to have led Mr. Trump to soften his hostility toward electric vehicles.

Miriam Adelson, a fervent supporter of Israel, decided earlier this year to break with the rest of Trump world and start her own super PAC. She is planning to put more than $100 million into the group.

Ms. Adelson took some criticism from Mr. Trump just a few days after meeting with him at the Republican National Convention in July, drawing his ire because she is working with more traditional establishment Republican operatives. But Mr. Trump then showered her with praise at a recent event focused on antisemitism, at which Ms. Adelson spoke.

Dick and Liz Uihlein, the founders of the shipping company ULine, are staunch conservatives and have long been significant donors to the anti-tax organization Club for Growth. So they were drawn to Gov. Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign during the Republican primary.

But they are team players, and they have returned to the Trump fold. Like Ms. Adelson, the pair met with Mr. Trump at the Republican National Convention, according to a person briefed on their meeting.

Linda McMahon is a longtime friend of Mr. Trump’s as well as a major donor. Mr. Trump named her as the head of the Small Business Administration when he was president and granted her a speaking slot at the Republican National Convention. On another night, she joined Mr. Trump in his box at the convention.

Her power comes not just from her money but from her role: She joins another major Trump donor, Howard Lutnick, chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald, as one of the co-chairs of the Trump transition effort.

There has been significant consolidation in the world of Democratic megadonors since 2020, as there are few new big players like Sam Bankman-Fried, who stormed into Democratic politics in 2022 and was convicted of fraud and related crimes in 2023.

But President Biden’s decision to drop out of the race and the Democrats’ quick endorsement of Ms. Harris has energized some female donors — people who were not particularly active in the Biden campaign, but may be in a Harris campaign.

Here are the people who matter most.

Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, has transformed himself into a relentless political creature since Mr. Trump’s election in 2016, at one point telling other donors during the 2020 campaign that he would step out of a board meeting if American politics demanded it.

In addition to being one of the country’s top Democratic donors, Mr. Hoffman has also emerged as a confidant to other wealthy Democrats in Silicon Valley looking to make political donations.

George Soros has long been making donations to support Democrats.

What’s new is that there is a different Mr. Soros also engaged in giving: Alex, Mr. Soros’s eldest son. Alex Soros is equally, if not more, interested in American politics than his father is. Alex Soros is engaged to Huma Abedin, the longtime adviser to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The Soros family tends to be in the old guard of Democratic big-money politics: He is a supporter of more establishment-minded groups, and likes to fund organizations that try to build change over the long term.

“Where’s Mike?” is a question that Democrats routinely ask around this time of year. Mr. Bloomberg, the entrepreneur and former mayor of New York City, has had a frosty relationship with Mr. Biden and has not invested significantly in the 2024 presidential election yet.

But he tends to be a very late donor, often funding a final-ditch effort that isn’t obvious by summertime.

Dustin Moskovitz may be the only person on this list who has not yet donated significantly to support Ms. Harris. But Mr. Moskovitz, the biggest donor in the charitable movement known as effective altruism, is widely expected to cut a major check in the closing months of this race to Future Forward, the Democratic group that he seeded with tens of millions of dollars in 2020.

Mr. Moskovitz, one of the founders of Facebook, is not well-known outside of Silicon Valley, but he has a team of political advisers who wield significant influence in donor circles.

Mr. Moskovitz has in recent months become one of Silicon Valley’s leading anti-Musk voices and expressed alarm about the rightward shift of some in the tech community.

Jeffrey Katzenberg, the former chairman of Walt Disney Studios, is not as wealthy as the other people on this list, but his influence comes from his access to Ms. Harris’s campaign. Mr. Katzenberg, an extraordinary political fund-raiser in Hollywood for decades, became one of Mr. Biden’s national campaign co-chairs and has remained in that role with Ms. Harris now leading the ticket.



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DUK Editor TeamSeptember 1, 2024
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