Elon Musk has not donated to the political action fund he pledged to give $100,000—and the group says they would not accept his money even if he did.
Late last month, the billionaire responded to a tweet from Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan saying he had donated $50,000 to a PAC dedicated to defeating progressive San Francisco Supervisor Dean Preston.
“I will double that,” Musk wrote.
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But GrowSF, the organization behind the Dump Dean PAC, said Monday they have not heard from the billionaire and didn’t want to.
“He has not donated, has not reached out, and cannot donate without first talking to us,” GrowSF Director Steven Buss said in an email to The Daily Beast. “It’s clear he wasn’t serious.”
“We would not accept the money,” he added, confirming his earlier comments to SFGate. “This is a distraction from the issues that matter to voters... Voters deserve a representative that will spend more time focusing on their needs than the tweets of a multi-billionaire.”
Buss said the organization’s online donation tool tops out at $10,000. In order to donate $100,000, he said, Musk would have had to contact the group for wire information, which he has not.
Asked to explain why they would not accept the money, Buss said simply: “Misalignment of values.’
Representatives for Musk did not respond to a request for comment.
Musk—who frequently rails against progressive social causes and has described himself as “economically right of center”—is a vocal critic of Preston, the only socialist supervisor in the city. Last month, in response to Preston’s tweet asking residents not to leave their belongings in parked cars to prevent break-ins, Musk tweeted that the supervisor “needs to be fired.”
“He is arguably the person most responsible for the destruction of San Francisco,” the Twitter owner wrote.
Last week, in response to a Mission Local article about Preston’s proposal to bar armed security guards from unholstering their weapons in response to property thefts, Musk tweeted: “Dean Preston should go to prison.” Preston introduced the ordinance after a 24-year-old man was shot dead by a Walgreens security guard during a suspected shoplifting. It was also supported by the three moderate members of the City Board of Supervisors’ Public Safety and Neighborhood Services Committee.
Preston fired back in a press release calling Musk’s tweets “beyond the pale.”
“A billionaire calling for a democratically-elected official to be sent to prison for no reason is textbook fascism,” he said. “Regardless, I will continue advocating for my constituents even if that makes billionaires uncomfortable and increasingly unhinged.”
