Elon Musk, the owner of X, said Thursday morning he believes Nikki Haley’s presidential campaign is “dead.”
Musk’s comments were made in response to a post from conservative activist Christopher Rufo that said, “Nikki Haley coming out in support of Disney, BlackRock, ESG, and child sex-changes is just perfect: the right hand of the left.”
Her campaign is dead
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 7, 2023
Musk, for his part, is a self-described centrist who has said he voted for President Biden in 2020. He said last year that he would support Ron DeSantis if he were to enter the presidential race. However, in August, he called Vivek Ramaswamy a “very promising candidate.”
DeSantis and Ramaswamy criticized Nikki Haley during the debate on Wednesday for what they described as a cozy relationship with big corporations and wealthy donors.
Ramaswamy called out a $250,000 donation made by major Democratic donor Reid Hoffman to a super PAC supporting Haley.
Hoffman, the billionaire cofounder of LinkedIn and a Biden supporter, explained in a LinkedIn post that he donated to Haley because “my first priority is to defeat Trump, and the primary is the first of two chances to do so.”
“Larry Fink, the king of the woke industrial complex, the ESG movement, the CEO of BlackRock, the most powerful company in the world, now supporting Nikki Haley,” Ramaswamy added.
Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase who has described himself as “barely a Democrat,” recently implored business leaders at the New York Times DealBook event, “Even if you’re a very liberal Democrat, I urge you, help Nikki Haley, too.”
Debate moderator Megyn Kelly noted Haley left government service in 2018 with just $100,000 in the bank and then has amassed an estimated $8 million in the years that followed thanks to lucrative corporate speeches and board memberships. Kelly asked Haley if she was in too tight with the corporations and billionaires to court average Republican voters.
Haley argued she’s been a “conservative fighter all my life” and said she will “take support from anybody we can take support from.”
“When it comes to these corporate people who suddenly want to support us, we’ll take it,” she said. “I don’t ask them what their policies are; they ask me what my policies are.”
DeSantis, for his part, touted his record of taking on ESG in Florida and accused Haley of meeting with the same people pushing ESG and wanting to change the country without going through the constitutional process.
“We know from her history Nikki will cave to those big donors when it counts and that is not acceptable,” DeSantis said.
Haley invited Disney to come set up shop in her home state of South Carolina earlier this year, taking a dig at DeSantis over his feud with the entertainment giant.
“South Carolina was a very anti-woke state, it still is, and if Disney would like to move their hundreds of thousands of jobs to South Carolina and bring the billions of dollars with them, I’ll let them know I’ll be happy to meet them in South Carolina and introduce them to the governor and the legislature that would welcome it,” she said.
Last year, DeSantis signed a bill to strip Disney of its 56-year-old “independent special district” status, which had granted it the privilege of creating its own regulations, building codes, and other municipal services after the company’s then-CEO spoke out against Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law.
While lawmakers decided against dissolving the district, they instead elected to give DeSantis the power to appoint the district’s board members.
On the issue of transgenderism, DeSantis has criticized Haley for her 2016 dismissal of a bill to prevent biological boys from using girls’ restrooms when she was South Carolina governor. She called the bill “unnecessary” at the time.
However, as a presidential candidate, Haley has said she would be prepared to sign a law banning hormone blockers and gender-transition surgery for minors.