The decision time is nearing, and some Americans have more at stake in the Trump-Harris race than others. Much, much more.
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00:00Hi, I'm Stefan Grobe and I cover the U.S. presidential elections for Euronews.
00:06We're just a couple of days before election day and today I want to talk about something
00:11that happened for the first time in the U.S. and this is how billionaires flex their muscles
00:19and really it hasn't been done like this before.
00:32There are roughly 800 billionaires in the United States, 150 billionaire families and
00:39they have been trying to influence this race like never before, as I said, and I just got
00:46hold of a report from the organization Americans for Tax Fairness and according to these numbers,
00:531.9 billion U.S. dollars have been spent by the 150 billionaire families during the cycle
01:00for presidential and congressional races.
01:03That is a lot of money.
01:06Now 58 percent, now this is 58 percent more than during the last election cycle four years
01:12ago in 2020, 58 percent more.
01:16That's an amazing amount of money and I'll give you some figures, roughly 570 million
01:24dollars have gone to the campaign of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris has received roughly
01:30130 million dollars during this campaign from billionaires, but these numbers are probably
01:38not the entire truth because many billionaires try to conceal their political donations by
01:47not revealing their identity.
01:52We know for certain that people like Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg have donated each
01:5850 million dollars to the Kamala Harris campaign.
02:02We know that Elon Musk has donated roughly 118 million dollars to a pro-Donald Trump
02:08super PAC that is a political action committee that funds and supports political candidates.
02:15You know that in the United States you can donate as much as you want in terms of money.
02:20There are absolutely no limits and this contribution by Elon Musk probably replaces the ground
02:28games in states that Donald Trump needs to win.
02:32So this is how important it is and you also know that Musk is obsessively supporting Donald
02:38Trump on his platform X.
02:40He himself is giving speeches and appearing at political rallies of Donald Trump which
02:49is kind of problematic should Trump win because Elon Musk has a lot of contracts with the
02:56government and he is slated to become one of Donald Trump's cabinet members should Trump
03:06win the election.
03:08So there are a lot of conflicts of interest involved.
03:12We'll see how this is going to shake out.
03:14Of course Donald Trump is a billionaire himself.
03:17Everybody thinks that he is although he has never revealed his tax papers, his tax returns.
03:25Other billionaires have tried to exercise an indirect influence on the election and
03:33here I'm thinking of the owners of the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post both
03:39big newspapers in the United States who basically blocked their newsrooms from endorsing Kamala
03:45Harris.
03:46So an awful lot of money again 1.9 billion US dollars.
03:51I guess some of them some of these people will regret their investments because one
03:57way or another they're going to lose whether this money these contributions will play a
04:06big role will have an impact on the final result.
04:09That is of course something we don't know yet.
04:14In any case we know the winner next week.