From Elon Musk to ex-Marvel chairman – who paid how much for Donald Trump campaign in US Elections 2024

US Elections 2024: Donald Trump's presidential campaign is thriving ahead of the US Presidential Elections, backed by large donations from Elon Musk and other investors.

 Here's a look

Sudeshna Ghoshal
Updated16 Oct 2024

With less than a month remaining for the US Elections 2024, Republican nominee Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns are in full swing. From million-dollar donations by Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Silicon Valley venture capitalists to ‘creative accounting strategies’ and television ads, the former US President's accounts ahead of the presidential polls reveal an intricate network.

Mint brings to you a look at who paid how many millions.

$75 million from Tesla CEO Elon Musk

Donald Trump’s biggest endorsee, Elon Musk, donated $75 million( ₹555 crore) to pro-Trump America political action committee (PAC) over a period of three months, reported Reuters. Founded by the Tesla CEO, America PAC received the highest donation compared to other pro-Trump groups.
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$ 30 million from ex-Marvel Chairman, tech CEOs

Venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz of the Andreessen Horowitz company in Silicon Valley each donated $2.5 million to Right for America PAC, stated a Bloomberg report citing the latest filings by the Federal Election Commission. Andreessen also gave an additional $844,600 — the federal limit — to Trump’s campaign and the Republican Party, marking a total donation of over ₹21 crore.

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In addition, the Right for America’s biggest backers, Isaac Perlmutter, the former chairman of Marvel Entertainment, and their wife, Laura Perlmutter, contributed $25 million. According to a Bloomberg report, Apollo Global Management LLC CEO Marc Rowan also gave $1 million.

$72 million in swing states

Right for America and America PAC are both pro-Trump super PACs that focus most of their spending in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. According to Bloomberg, America PAC spent around $72 million in the swing states during July-September 2024.

Only 11 people on payroll

As millions of donations pour in for Donald Trump, the Republican’s accounting strategies also call for a close watch. As of August 2024, Trump had only 11 people on his campaign committee. This fraction is less than 25 per cent compared to the 200 people Trump had in 2020.

The few numbers on the payroll are because Donald Trump is shuffling costs from his campaign committee to other accounts allied or shared with the Republican Party. Such a shuffle enables him to funnel millions of dollars into television ads, which would otherwise have been locked up in party and fund-raising accounts, reported the New York Times.

$19 million for two television ads

The Trump campaign has spent more than $19 million on two television ads that have aired nearly 55,000 times since Oct. 1, stated a report by CBS News, citing data from AdImpact. Make America Great Again Inc., the leading super PAC supporting Trump, has spent over $1.1 million during the same time period on a similar ad that was aired more than 6,000 times, stated the report.

Here’s Where Musk Gets the Money to Fund Trump’s Campaign

Story by Al Root
• 1d • BARRONS/DOW JONES

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is giving a lot of money to help re-elect former President Donald Trump. That raises one issue Tesla investors hate to consider: Where is he getting the money?

Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported Musk donated $75 million to a Trump political action committee in the third quarter, citing federal filings.

Musk’s support for Trump isn’t new. And investors knew Musk planned to contribute millions. Still, money is being spent and the numbers are getting larger.

Musk is the world’s richest person, according to Forbes, worth some $250 billion, but he doesn’t actually generate much cash flow. He doesn’t take an annual salary at Tesla. Most of his wealth is in stock of his companies. Tesla stock accounts for roughly 60% of Forbes wealth figure.

Tesla is also the only publicly traded company in what Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas describes as the Musk-onomy, which also includes X, xAI, and SpaceX. That raises the risk of selling Tesla stock to fund his expenditures.

Investors don’t like stock sales from any corporate insiders, let alone Musk. It can be an omen of bad things to come. That reason doesn’t appear to be the case with Musk’s historical stock sales. But his sales have been surprises, generating needless stock volatility and questions about how much he would sell and when he would be done. (No one likes to buy stock ahead of large sales that push prices down.)

Related video: Elon Musk commits $70 million to boost Donald Trump (Scripps News)

Fortunately, that isn’t likely. Musk sold Tesla stock to help him buy Twitter, which is now X, but that purchase was measured in the billions. There is an easier way for Musk to raise cash.

It’s relatively simple for Musk to borrow against his Tesla fortune. Excluding options, he has roughly 411 million shares worth about $90 billion. Bankers are typically willing to advance cash when the loan is secured with an ample amount of stock.

At the end of March, Musk had pledged about 238 million shares of his Tesla stock as collateral, according to company reports. That gives him access to about $12 billion in loans.

Tesla didn’t respond to a request about Musk’s current collateral and lending.

It’s difficult to know exactly how Musk chooses to generate and spend money. For now, investors have to be content that he has enough without needing to liquidate any of his core Tesla holdings.

The news about Musk’s donation didn’t hit shares. Tesla stock added 0.8% Wednesday, closing at $221.33 while the S&P 500 added 0.5% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.8%.

Write to Al Root at allen.root@dowjones.com

Elon Musk and other billionaires invest staggering sums into electing Trump, plus other takeaways from third-quarter filings

David Wright, Fredreka Schouten, Matt Holt and Alex Leeds Matthews, CNN
Wed, October 16, 2024 

Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks as former President Donald Trump looks on during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on October 5, 2024.

Some of the world’s wealthiest figures – led by conservative donor Miriam Adelson and tech billionaire Elon Musk – have funneled tens of millions of dollars into political groups in recent months to boost Donald Trump’s White House bid, new reports filed Tuesday with federal regulators show.

Musk, the world’s richest person, gave nearly $75 million to a pro-Trump super PAC that he helped form over the summer – a massive cash infusion aimed at helping turn out voters in key battleground states. Adelson, a staunch Trump backer and heir to a casino fortune, gave even more, plowing $95 million into another outside group backing the former president, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission covering the three months ended September 30.

Altogether, just three billionaires – Musk, Adelson and Midwestern packaging magnate Richard Uihlein – donated roughly $220 million in a three-month period to groups backing the Republican’s candidacy.

Their staggering donations underscore the crucial role that a handful of billionaire megadonors are playing in Trump’s efforts to edge past his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, as their race has intensified.

Harris has set a blistering pace – raising $1 billion since she became the Democratic standard-bearer in late July – a milestone achieved faster than any other presidential contender. And Tuesday’s filings show that a high-dollar fundraising committee that channels money to her campaign and aligned Democratic committees, took in $633 million during the third quarter – four times the amount raised by Trump’s equivalent fundraising arm in that time.

But Harris’ team has implored her supporters to send in even more – highlighting both the billionaire backing for Trump’s candidacy and her campaign’s scramble to reach the still-undecided voters in battleground states that her aides hope will break for the vice president in the final sprint to Election Day.

In the battle for control of Congress, meanwhile, individual Democratic incumbents and candidates in some key Senate and House races widened their financial advantage over their Republican opponents. Deep-pocketed Republicans donors also tried to close the gap by boosting a GOP super PAC working to seize the Senate majority.

Here are some key takeaways from the filings:

Billionaires back a Trump return to the White House

Musk has emerged as a significant force in Trump’s bid to return to the White House. America PAC, the super PAC Musk funds, has unleashed a massive door-knocking operation in states such as Pennsylvania on Trump’s behalf – though the strategy of a presidential campaign outsourcing its field operation is largely untested.

According to filings through the weekend, America PAC had reported spending nearly $96 million on the presidential race, including just under $57 million on canvassing and field operations.

The new filing from America PAC, detailed seven separate contributions from Musk that totaled close to $75 million between the start of July and end of September – marking the first contributions that Musk has made to the group. It received its initial funding from a network of the billionaire’s former partners and business associates.

Musk was its sole donor during the third quarter, however.

America PAC has taken on a critical supporting role for the Trump campaign, according to its independent expenditure filings, which cover some spending beyond September 30. In addition to the presidential contest, the group has also spent millions targeting several highly competitive House races, including contests in California and New York, viewed as key to Republicans retaining their control of the chamber.

Tuesday’s filings show other conservative billionaires also plowing extraordinary sums into the effort to reelect Trump.

Adelson’s $95 million went to another leading pro-Trump super PAC, Preserve America, – accounting for virtually all of the money it collected during the July-to-September quarter. Adelson and her late husband, Sheldon, were among the largest givers to Republican candidates and causes in the past decade, and Miriam Adelson has now given the group a total of $100 million this year.

Preserve America has spent nearly all that it raised in the third quarter and has dropped nearly $92 million on independent expenditures, mostly in ads.

Advertising data shows that Preserve America still has about $29 million worth of ad time booked for the month of October through Election Day, including to boost Trump in the swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin.

Another leading pro-Trump super PAC, Restoration PAC, also reported a huge haul from a single major donor. Uihlein gave about $49 million to the group in the third quarter. In all, Uihlein has now given nearly $59 million this year to Restoration PAC, which is currently spending millions on the air in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Georgia.

Other Trump supporters contributing big sums during the third quarter included billionaire former Marvel executive Ike Perlmutter and his wife, Laura, who donated nearly $5 million late last month to the pro-Trump super PAC Right for America.

Harris has also benefited from a major outside effort funded by big-money donors.

FF PAC, the lead super PAC backing the vice president’s campaign, has bought a total of $371 million worth of ad time since the start of 2023, according to AdImpact data, including to support President Biden before he ended his reelection bid in July. It is the largest single outside advertiser in the presidential race.

FF PAC will disclose its September fundraising and spending activity on Sunday. But through the end of August, according to its most recent filings, the group had reported raising more than $200 million this election cycle, including receiving $19 million from the billionaire former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and $10 million from LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.

More shifting roles

Trump 47, a joint fundraising committee that collects high-dollar donations that flow to the former president’s campaign and an array of GOP committees, took in six-figure donations during the third quarter from some boldfaced names, including Steve Mnuchin, who served as Trump’s Treasury secretary, and longtime Trump friend Dana White, the CEO of Ultimate Fighting Championship. White had a prominent speaking role at the Republican National Convention over the summer.

The Trump 47 committee raised $145 million during the third quarter and started October with nearly $53 million remaining in its accounts.

Tuesday’s filings show Trump 47 footing the bill in recent months for some traditional campaign expenses, such as facility rentals. The committee helped underwrite at least $15.8 million in travel and event costs – helping free up resources in Trump’s principal campaign account to spend on advertising in his battle against a better-funded rival. In August alone, advertising expenses accounted for more than $3 out of every $4 spent by Trump’s main campaign committee.

On Wednesday night, the former president is slated to preside over a fundraiser for Trump 47 at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. The event’s top givers either contributed or raised the maximum of $924,600 apiece, according to a copy of the invitation obtained by CNN.

Big donors also fuel fight for Congress

Leading super PACs targeting Senate races reported huge fundraising totals in the third quarter, with Democrats’ narrow majority on the line. .

Senate Majority PAC, a top Democratic super PAC aligned with Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, raised over $119 million during the third quarter – a record for the group, edging past the roughly $116 million raised by its Republican counterpart, the Senate Leadership Fund.

Senate Majority PAC received $30 million from a Democratic dark money organization, Majority Forward, along with seven-figure contributions from some of the party’s top wealthy supporters, including Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker ($2.5 million), former Google CEO Eric Schmidt ($2 million) and Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings (just under $2 million).

The Senate Leadership Fund’s receipts also showed some of the leading donors to Republican candidates and causes opening their wallets. They included Citadel CEO Ken Griffin ($20 million, bringing his annual total to $27.5 million), Elliott Management co-CEO Paul Singer ($10 million, bringing his annual total to $20 million) and Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman ($9 million).

In addition, Miriam Adelson gave the fund $5 million in the third quarter, bringing her annual contribution to the group up to $15 million.

Meanwhile, the Congressional Leadership Fund – the main super PAC supporting House Republicans – hauled in more than $81 million in the third quarter. Timothy Mellon, the reclusive GOP megadonor, donated $5 million to the group, and Adelson gave an additional $4 million. The group entered October with nearly $153 million on hand.

Its Democratic counterpart, House Majority PAC, files on a monthly basis and raised nearly $20 million in July and $11.5 million in August and said it raised $69 million in September, according to The New York Times.

Senate Democrats make their final stand

With Republicans almost certain to flip West Virginia’s Senate seat, Democrats hoping to keep their majority in the chamber cannot afford to lose another seat if Harris ends up winning the presidency. Their top priority is defending two vulnerable red-state incumbents: Montana Sen. Jon Tester and Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown. Donors have responded accordingly.

No Senate candidate, incumbent or challenger, raised more than Tester. The Montana dirt farmer raised $32 million in the third quarter and entered October with more than $7 million on hand. His Republican challenger, retired Navy SEAL Tim Sheehy, raised about $10 million and had $4 million banked.

Brown raised a staggering $31 million – a sizable increase from the $13 million he raised in the second quarter – and ended the quarter with more than $4 million in the bank. His GOP opponent, businessman Bernie Moreno, raised $6.5 million and entered October with $3 million on hand.

Democratic candidates in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Maryland – all states that feature on CNN’s list of the top Senate seats most likely to flip – outraised their Republican opponents in the third quarter by significant margins.

In battleground Wisconsin, Republican banker Eric Hovde, who is challenging Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin, loaned his campaign $7 million in the third quarter, bringing his self-funding total to $20 million. Baldwin, for her part, raised more than $13 million in the three-month period.

And in Texas – a rare potential pickup opportunity for Democrats – Rep. Colin Allred, the Democratic nominee, swamped two-term GOP Sen. Ted Cruz, $30 million to about $18 million, in third-quarter fundraising. Cruz, however, entered October with a massive cash advantage.

House Democrats hold cash advantage in key races

In the battle for the House, where Republicans are defending a razor-thin majority, Democratic candidates entered the final stretch of the campaign in a better financial position.

In 32 districts that Inside Elections with Nathan L. Gonzales rate as a “toss-up” or tilting toward one party, Democrats, on average, raised $2.6 million and had about $1.8 million in cash on hand entering October. The average Republican candidate raised about $1.1 million and had $1.4 million left to spend for the final weeks of the race. (The averages did not include a pair of California candidates – Democrat Adam Gray in the 13th District and GOP Rep. Michelle Steel in the 45th District – whose fundraising reports were not available just after midnight Wednesday.)

A few candidates in the 32 races stood out for reporting quarterly hauls not usually seen in House contests. In Virginia’s 7th District, Democrat Eugene Vindman – the twin brother of a star witness at Trump’s first impeachment trial – raised an eye-popping $6.5 million in the third quarter. The closest House candidate to match Vindman was Alaska Rep. Mary Peltola, who raised about $4 million in the same period.

CNN’s Kristen Holmes contributed to this report.

They Say There’s Never Been a Man Like Donald Trump in American Politics. But There Was—and We Should Learn From Him.

Zachary D. Carter
Wed, October 16, 2024

The story of Georgia’s political firebrand Tom Watson will never be a defining national myth. Its extraordinary implications for American democracy notwithstanding, Watson’s life is saturated with too much tragedy to qualify for the righteous optimism demanded by the national canon. When Watson’s statue was removed from the steps of the Georgia state Capitol in 2013, the event went virtually unnoticed outside Atlanta. Without historian C. Vann Woodward’s transcendent 1938 biography, Watson would have surely disappeared even from academic study, like most politicians of his era.

But Watson’s life retains an unsettling power that, once encountered, inescapably colors interpretations of the American past and present. Watson was the most charismatic leader of the late-19th-century political thunderclap that came to be known as American populism, and his story resonates with the full promise and peril of the American project—he can be understood without exaggeration as the heroic scion of the Boston Tea Party and the fevered progenitor of Donald Trump’s violent fantasies.

Born to slave-owning Confederate parents, Watson watched his family descend into poverty after the Civil War, and rose to prominence in Georgia politics as a lawyer and newspaperman who assailed the prevailing economic order. Watson accurately described Gilded Age political rule as a predatory alliance of Southern political bosses and Northern capitalists. As the 1880s turned to the 1890s, Watson came to understand racial division as an essential tool of this bipartisan system—one that elites in both parties inflamed to weaken the political power of Black and white working people by turning them against each other. He ran for Congress as a member of the independent People’s Party, winning support from prominent Black intellectuals, including W.E.B. Du Bois, with his pledge to erase America’s “color line” in pursuit of agrarian liberation. The radicalism of the People’s Party is easily obscured by the fact that so many of its early demands were eventually enacted, from an eight-hour workday to free mail delivery to a progressive income tax. But the most extraordinary aspect of the Populist Party was its coalition. When Georgia police arrested Black voting rights activist H.S. Doyle on the streets of Augusta ahead of the 1892 election, one of Watson’s henchmen sprang Doyle from prison and sheltered him at Watson’s estate, where more than 2,000 members of the People’s Party armed themselves to successfully defend Doyle from a state-backed lynch mob.

But Watson eventually lost his 1892 campaign, and the populist movement that had gripped the country disintegrated within a few years. By the early 20th century, the party was gone, and Watson had transformed himself from a prophet of racial cooperation into a fountain of white-hot racial resentment. He endorsed the complete disenfranchisement of Black voters, ranted against Catholics and socialists, and eventually used his newspaper to incite a lynch mob into murdering Jewish factory superintendent Leo Frank.

Watson’s embrace of the dark side brought him his greatest electoral success. When he died in 1922, Watson was a United States senator from Georgia, representing the very Democratic Party he once denounced.

Watson was an effective demagogue because he practiced a politics of anger in an era that demanded it. Even at his most inspiring—and his losing 1892 campaign was an intoxicating cultural phenomenon—Watson didn’t so much promise to help as fight. He had a policy platform, but he was also operating an economic cooperative and very nearly an armed rebellion. Throughout the Gilded Age, workers and farmers really were being exploited by a predatory oligarchy. The political system was indeed thoroughly corrupt, and the economy was a system of mass deprivation marked by financial crises, endless deflation, agricultural mismanagement, mechanized industrial cruelty, and child labor. People had a right to be angry.

Today’s global economy is for the most part gentler, but a similar politics of anger has returned. The 2008 financial crisis distilled a sense that the game was rigged against ordinary people. The federal government saved banker bonuses and shrugged off financial fraud as unemployment soared to 10 percent and more than 9 million homes were lost to foreclosure. The wealthiest one percent of American households captured half the economic gains across Barack Obama’s presidency, and by the close of 2015, the bottom 99 percent had recovered only about two-thirds of the income it had lost during the crash.

It’s not hard to understand how a politics of anger can be mobilized when the political system fails ordinary people while taking extraordinary measures to protect the wealthy. What is more difficult to process is how that anger has been sustained over the past eight years.

The unemployment rate was below 5 percent for all but the final nine months of Donald Trump’s presidency and for all but the first six months of Joe Biden’s. For context, the unemployment rate never moved below 5 percent between January 1974 and April 1997. And while nobody enjoyed the bout of inflation that set in between 2021 and 2022, worker wage gains have outpaced price increases since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Inflation peaked at 7.2 percent in June 2022—but inflation was actually higher across the entire first year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency (followed by nine consecutive months of double-digit unemployment) without a populist uprising. The U.S. labor market hasn’t been as robust as it is today in 50 years, and even accounting for inflation, the overall economic performance of the past two years has been the best since at least the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency. The U.S. economy is not without problems; housing is too expensive, for instance, and just about everything associated with being a parent has become extremely difficult. But it just isn’t true that the nation’s political system has been ignoring the plight of ordinary workers. It has responded quite vigorously to their needs in the form of repeated multi-trillion-dollar investments in domestic industry and direct household support.

Nevertheless, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance will almost certainly secure the votes of nearly half the American electorate this November, deploying a campaign of vicious dishonesty that would make Sen. Watson proud. This isn’t a populist campaign in any meaningful economic sense; Trump’s vow to repeal Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, for instance, is a promise to renege on more than $1 trillion in American manufacturing. But it remains a campaign predicated on anger. At the recent vice presidential debate, Vance repeatedly squeezed anti-immigrant vitriol into his economic commentary—claiming that illegal immigration was “one of the most significant drivers of home prices in this country” (a transparently ludicrous explanation for the post-COVID rise in home prices, which was produced not by a mass influx of foreigners but by the dislocations of the pandemic). One week, Trump and Vance are roiling Springfield, Ohio, with preposterous lies about immigrants eating pets; the next, they’re inventing fables about the government diverting disaster-relief aid to undocumented workers and ranting about immigrants bringing “bad genes” into the country. Occasionally Trump or Vance pays lip service to a policy idea for a few hours—not even their most fervent supporters pretend to care—before getting back to the campaign’s main business of bashing immigrants.

Why on earth would such madness get political traction? For many liberals, the answer is simply that the country is riddled with racism, a response that is both true and trivial. Racism has bedeviled this continent for centuries, but demagogues who seek power through raw resentment fail all the time. New York Mayor Eric Adams has been trying to pin the city’s troubles on migrants for years now, and everybody hates him. Pat Buchanan and David Duke tried to do the same thing in the 1990s and couldn’t win over their own party. Watson’s story shows that, for a time, the right leader could inspire even ex-Confederates to literally fight on behalf of Black voting rights.

Something important happened at the end of Trump’s presidency and the beginning of Joe Biden’s. Nobody wants to talk about it—not even conservatives bring up masks and school closures anymore, and much of the discourse surrounding inflation studiously avoids reference to the massive economic disruption of COVID-19. But one of the most important cultural artifacts of the period is the sudden spread of vaccine skepticism to the cultural mainstream. The anti-vaxxer delusion that vaccines cause autism has lingered at the fringes of the autism community in no small part because it provides narrative meaning to a difficult and random experience. There is tremendous joy in the life of a special needs parent, but there is also a great deal of fear and pain. Fear, because you do not know how the world will respond to your child, and pain, because you must watch your child struggle for no fault of their own. For many, it is more comforting to believe that their child’s hardships are not a random act of fate but a product of deliberate malfeasance. The idea that bad things happen for bad reasons is more palatable than the belief that they happen for no reason at all.

It is not only anti-vaxxers who seek such comfort. Americans on both the left and the right avert their eyes from the story of Tom Watson not only because the story is ugly and violent but because we insist on being able to control our own destiny. From Huck Finn to Indiana Jones, American mythology tends to write its heroes as variations on the story of David and Goliath—tales of underdogs who secure unlikely triumphs against an overbearing order. Even when that order is part of America itself, individual heroism soothes the audience with the promise that the world’s wrongs can be righted with enough derring-do. Horatio Alger’s novels of children born into poverty could be read as an indictment of the Gilded Age social order, but the romance of these stories always lies in a boy taking fate by the horns. Watson disturbs us not only because he turns to evil but because an extraordinary leader’s earnest, Herculean attempt to right the world’s wrongs comes up short. To win, he assents to the dominion of dark forces beyond his control.

By the time the peak of the pandemic had passed, Joe Biden was too old to provide his country with the leadership that might have helped it process the tragedy it experienced in 2020 and 2021. One of Biden’s unique gifts as a public communicator has always been his ability to translate his experience with personal tragedy into public consolation—at his best, he is a remarkably empathetic orator, capable of connecting with people from wildly different walks of life through the common experience of pain. But he didn’t, or couldn’t, do that in his 80s. By the end of his presidency, Biden was holed up in the White House with his family, assiduously denying both political reality and his own fate.

We all lost something in the pandemic, but the nation has never mourned those losses in any meaningful collective manner. A politics of anger is not a particularly clean fit for an era of fear and pain, but for millions of Americans, it is a more comforting substitute than a politics of hope.

Kamala Harris Pushes Back as Bret Baier Repeatedly Cuts Her Off in Fox News Interview: ‘You Have to Let Me Finish’ 

Sharon Knolle
Wed, October 16, 2024 

Kamala Harris frequently pushed back against “Special Report” Fox News host Bret Baier while interviewing with the network for the first time Wednesday.

At one point during the combative exchange, which kicked off early in the sit-down with Baier’s first question about the U.S.-Mexico border policy, the vice president and Democratic presidential nominee told him, “You have to let me finish.”

Baier quizzed Harris about her immigration and border policy, and redirected questions about Republican nominee Donald Trump’s mental acuity with questions about current President Joe Biden.

Harris clarified that she does not believe in criminalizing border crossings: “I’ve not done that as vice president and I will not do that as president,” she said.

The VP continued, “I’m the only person who’s running for president who has prosecuted transnational criminal organizations from the Sinaloa Cartel to the Guadalajara cartel to people who have trafficked in guns, drugs and human beings. I have spent a significant part of my career going after people who present a threat to the safety of the American people and cross our border with the intent of doing us harm and cross our border illegally.”

“Joe Biden is not on the ballot,” Harris reminded him.

She added, “I would like that we would have a conversation that is grounded in full assessment of the facts, which includes, I think this interview is supposed to be about the choices that your viewers should be presented about this election, and the contrast is important.”

To which Baier replied, “Yes, ma’am.”

“I have much more to say,” the Democratic nominee said as Baier was repeatedly told to wrap up. She then directed people to her website, encouraging them to read its 80 pages of comprehensive policy.

Baier also asked Harris which country she considers the biggest threat to America right now, and was surprised when she said it was Iran.

“Each occasion that Iran posed a threat to Israel, I was there … in the Situation Room and the most recent attack, working with the heads of our military and doing what America must always do to defend and to support Israel … to allow Israel to have the resources to defend itself against attack, including from Iran and Iran’s terrorist proxies in the region. And my commitment to that is unyielding and unwavering,” Harris said.

Watch a segment from Harris’ sit-down with Baier in the videos above and below.

The post Kamala Harris Pushes Back as Bret Baier Repeatedly Cuts Her Off in Fox News Interview: ‘You Have to Let Me Finish’ | Video appeared first on TheWrap.

Power Demand from Data Centers Keeping Coal-Fired Plants Online

Darrell Proctor
Wed, October 16, 2024 

POWER (@POWERmagazine).

The power generation sector is looking at numerous ways to provide enough electricity to satisfy demand from data centers. Bloomberg Intelligence recently said its research shows data centers, buildings filled with servers and other computing equipment for data storage and networking that supports operations and artificial intelligence (AI), could be responsible for as much as 17% of all U.S. electricity consumption by 2030. The U.S. Dept. of Energy (DOE) has said one data center can require 50 times the electricity of a typical office building. Several technology groups are looking at nuclear power, including the use of small modular reactors (SMRs), to meet their electricity needs. Energy analysts have said natural gas, whether burned in large-scale facilities or peaker plants, also will be important. Power consumption from data centers, though, also is benefiting coal-fired power plants, some of which may be kept running longer than expected in order to meet the increased demand for electricity from companies such as Google, Meta, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and others. Some coal-fired plants already have gotten a reprieve in areas where more energy is needed as data centers come online, or are in the planning stages. The topic reportedly was discussed when C-suite executives from Alphabet (Google), AWS, Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia, and OpenAI met with government officials in Washington, D.C., last month to discuss ways to support U.S. infrastructure for AI, including data centers. Part of the discussion was about repurposing old coal sites as data center campuses. The DOE has said it will share resources with data center developers about how to repurpose former coal mines, or coal-fired power plants, to be home to data centers. Energy DELTA Lab, a collaborative effort that includes Dominion Energy Virginia and Appalachian Power, already is working on the Data Center Ridge project at a former mining site in Wise County, Virginia.
Life Extension

Maksim Sonin, an energy expert who has collaborated with several companies, including Chevron and Shell, and is a Sloan Fellow at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, said, "Driven by recent trends in AI development, projected power consumption by data centers in the U.S. is expected to increase in the range from 8% to 17% by 2030—or potentially even higher, as progress in AI technologies is not linear but exponential, as seen in Silicon Valley today." Sonin told POWER, "With this sharp upward trend, it is highly likely that coal-fired power plants will remain a part of the U.S. energy system for longer, although their role is expected to diminish," as more renewable and other energy resources come online. "Coal plants will have an extension of their life due to data center demand," said Tim Echols, a commissioner and vice-chair of the Georgia Public Service Commission. Echols' home state is actively recruiting data centers and manufacturing facilities to provide jobs and boost local economies. It already added a significant new source of power when two nuclear reactors entered service at Plant Vogtle last year and this year, providing about 2,200 MW of new electricity output in the state. Plant Vogtle, where two other reactors have operated since the 1980s, is now the nation's largest nuclear power plant, with more than 4,600 MW of generation capacity. Echols told POWER in an Oct. 16 interview that Georgia is preparing for a large increase in power demand. "There could be a massive increase of capacity approved next year. Data centers will account for most of it," he said. How to satisfy data center power demand is being discussed by utilities and energy officials nationwide. Allan Schurr, chief commercial officer with Texas-based Enchanted Rock, which provides microgrid backup power solutions to data centers and other critical infrastructure, said the debate also should include onsite generation. "AI data centers require more generating capacity—that's a given," said Schurr. "While we are waiting for nuclear power to bring substantial additional baseload to the grid, we don't want to needlessly 'recarbonize' our energy resources by extending the life of older, less-efficient fossil generation plants like coal. Schurr told POWER, "Today's grid has significant available capacity with the exception of about 500 hours per year that can be mitigated with dispatchable generation. And the grid needs those 500 hours of additional capacity so we can continue to add solar and wind resources into the energy mix. Data centers can facilitate this dispatchable generation from their own onsite generation, making them assets to the grid instead of liabilities." The utilities and grid operators arguing to keep coal-fired plants online say it makes sense to keep existing baseload power sources operating, at least until more nuclear or renewable energy is available. That's why states including Nebraska, Virginia, and Utah among others, have plans to keep coal-fired units running to support the supply of electricity.

Virginia is World Data Center Leader

DC Byte, a UK-based research group that tracks data centers worldwide, has said the U.S. is the world leader in the buildout of data centers. The group said Virginia—home to about half of all U.S. data centers—is the largest data center market worldwide. Loudoun County in Virginia is known as "Data Center Alley." PJM Interconnection, the grid operator that serves Virginia, the District of Columbia, and 12 other states, has conceded some coal-fired power plants will need to continue operating, and miles of new transmission lines must be built, to satisfy ever-increasing demand for electricity. Other power sources will help—Japan's Sumitomo Corp. on Tuesday announced it will partner with CEP Solar (based in Richmond, Virginia) to add 1.5 GW of solar and battery energy storage to support data center growth in the region. "The system is in a major transition right now, and it's going to continue to evolve," Ken Seiler, PJM’s senior vice president in charge of planning, said in a December stakeholders' meeting about how the grid operator can supply more power as it waits for more renewable energy resources to come online. "And we'll look for opportunities to do everything we can to keep the lights on as it goes through this transition." DC Byte in its 2024 Global Data Center Index wrote, "Virginia currently has over 6 GW in the development pipeline including projects under active construction as well as Committed and Early Stage campuses." The group noted, "Cloud is the greatest driver of growth in Virginia. AWS [Amazon Web Services] operates over 40 facilities in the state and Microsoft operates a massive campus in Boydton as well as a smaller facility in Loudoun County. Both companies have more self-build campuses in the pipeline and are also major colocation tenants across the market." DC Byte added, "In 2022, Loudoun County's primary power supplier Dominion Energy announced that it would not be able to meet power demand in the market. Delays in power delivery are expected until 2025 or 2026 while new power infrastructure is built. In the meantime, Dominion Energy would be providing power incrementally." Dominion officials have said they project that power demand in the utility's territory will increase by 85% over the next 15 years. [caption id="attachment_224586" align="alignnone" width="640"]

The 1,100-MW Fort Martin Power Station is located in Maidsville, West Virginia, on the Monongahela River. It has two coal-fired units. It is owned by Monongahela Power (Mon Power), part of FirstEnergy Corp. Source: Mon Power[/caption] PJM is backing a $5.2 billion plan for new transmission lines across several states to bring power to Virginia. The lines would carry electricity produced at several coal-fired power plants that have been slated for closure, including the Longview, Fort Martin, and Harrison stations in West Virginia. In Maryland, meanwhile, PJM has asked Texas-based Talen Energy Corp. to keep Brandon Shores and Herbert A. Wagner—two other coal-fired facilities located near Baltimore—online at least through 2028. The plants had been scheduled to close by June 2025.

Operating Extension for Omaha Coal Plant

The 644-MW North Omaha Station in Nebraska was scheduled to close in 2023. Instead, Google and Meta data centers caused the area's power demand to spike, which led the Omaha Public Power District to decide that the two coal-fired units at North Omaha were needed to maintain reliability of the local power grid. The utility has said it will keep the coal-burning units online at least through 2026. One Google data center is in Papillon, a town about 12 miles southwest of Omaha. DC Byte said the Google facility uses more power than the Meta office, and added that its data shows Google uses more electricity in Nebraska than it uses elsewhere in the U.S. The company also is planning more data centers in the state. Data from Meta and other groups shows that the company's data center in Sarpy County, about 25 miles southwest of Omaha, last year used almost as much power as the North Omaha station produced. The Meta campus includes nine separate complexes, encompassing about 4 million square feet. The Omaha Public Power District has estimated that as much as two-thirds of the projected growth in power demand around Omaha will come from data centers, which are being built on what used to be farmland. Local officials have said opposition to wind and solar farms in rural areas has curtailed additional renewable energy resources that could supply power. The utility has been developing a 2,800-acre solar power project in rural York County, about 100 miles from Omaha, but area residents have voiced concerns about the installation. The utility also has said regulatory issues have slowed plans to replace coal-fired generation with natural gas-fired units. Meta's presence in Omaha was sought by state and local officials; a special electricity rate for industrial customers was created in 2017. That rate was then marketed to Google to entice the search engine giant to build in the area.
Georgia Courting Data Center Operators

Georgia Power is buying electricity from a sister company, Mississippi Power (both are part of Southern Co.), to help meet power demand in Georgia. The deal came after Georgia Power officials reportedly told state regulators that growing demand for electricity would overrun supply by year-end 2025. Georgia officials have been actively looking to bring data centers and manufacturing plants to that state, and Gov. Brian Kemp earlier this year vetoed a bill that would have suspended a tax break for data centers (the bill had bipartisan opposition). Had the bill become law, the tax break would have been under the review of a special commission on data center energy planning. Kemp in a statement said, "The bill's language would prevent the issuance of exemption certificates after an abrupt July 1, 2024 deadline for many customers of projects that are already in development—undermining the investments made by high-technology data center operators, customers, and other stakeholders in reliance on the recent extension, and inhibiting important infrastructure and job development." Georgia Power has a deal with Mississippi Power to buy 750 MW of electricity through 2028. Mississippi Power is providing the energy from its Victor J. Daniel Electric Generating Plant, better known as Plant Daniel, where two coal-fired units have operated for the past 50 years. The plant also has two natural gas combined-cycle units. It is the state's largest power plant, with nearly 1.6 GW of generation capacity, including 500 MW from its two coal-fired units. Mississippi Power had planned to retire the coal-burning steam turbines in 2027. The deal with Georgia Power, though, could extend that lifecycle. Jeffrey Grubb, the utility's director of resource planning, reportedly was asked by Georgia Power's lawyers about the agreement, and said, "Because those units would have been either retired or sold off-system and we needed certainty that they would be there to serve our customers." Echols, the PUC co-chair, on Wednesday told POWER the contract with Mississippi Power is open to any kind of generation source. "Our contract with Mississippi Power calls for 750 MW, and it doesn't matter where it comes from. That may mean an [operating] extension for the coal plant, or it may not," he said. "Mississippi could do 750 MW of solar plus storage, they could bring in 750 MW of wind power from a neighboring state." Echols noted that a move by regulators in 2022 extended operations for two coal-fired units at Georgia Power's Plant Bowen, one of the nation's largest coal-burning power plants, with about 3.4 GW of generation capacity. Echols said, "In the 2022 IRP [integrated resource plan] ... our commissioners delayed the closure of units 1 and 2 at Plant Bowen. I imagine as we evaluate that in next year's IRP, we will also delay the closure for another three years. We'll have to wait and see what the utility is asking for and how the commissioners feel we need to move forward." Echols told POWER, "There could be a massive increase of capacity approved next year. Data centers will account for most of it." Echols also offered, "I think there is a scenario where we approve two more AP1000 [reactors] at Plant Vogtle if the federal government provides bankruptcy insurance or overrun insurance" for another expansion at the site.
Other Efforts

DC Byte has identified Salt Lake City, Utah, as a growing market for data centers. Meta already operates a 4.5-million-square foot complex in Eagle Mountain, Utah, south of Salt Lake City. State lawmakers have pushed legislation to keep the Intermountain Power Project, a coal-fired station near Delta, Utah, open past the facility's scheduled 2025 closure date. Officials have looked at ways to have the state take over the plant. Lawmakers this year did pass legislation intended to extend the life of Rocky Mountain Power's coal-fired stations in Emery County. Stuart Adams, president of the Utah Senate, during the legislative session this summer said, "The United States has a real problem. We do not have enough power for our data centers. AI development is technology that we have to embrace, and power is the key to it." Building more infrastructure to support that AI development was among the reasons those tech company execs met last month on Capitol Hill. Reports said the discussion included repurposing former coal sites to house data center campuses, in part because those sites usually have access to power lines, water, and a local workforce. The DOE's Pacific Northwest National Lab, which is leading the "coal-to-X" redevelopment campaign, in a guide to the program wrote, "A retired coal site could even be redeveloped to combine a data center with new clean energy on the same site." As Schurr of Enchanted Rock noted, generating onsite power via a microgrid, or through a renewable energy resource, could be preferable to using coal-fired generation. That's of particular importance for data center operators looking to build in remote areas where they need plenty of land, and where there's a lack of transmission infrastructure. Sonin reiterated that coal will play a role in satisfying power demand from data centers, but like Schurr, noted other fuels could work with coal to reduce the environmental impact of keeping coal-fired power plants online. Sonin told POWER, "Emerging technologies that, for instance, allow for substituting some of the coal with ammonia, a carbon-free hydrogen derivative, through a process known as co-firing, may help address public environmental concerns. Current advancements, particularly the potential for upscaling production trains, could reduce the cost of ammonia facilities by 30% and more, making this chemical a viable solution for cutting emissions from coal plants." 

—Darrell Proctor is a senior editor for POWER (@POWERmagazine).