Elon Musk pledged $100,000 to fire Dean Preston PAC and never delivered
Elon Musk hasn’t donated to the political action fund to which he pledged $100,000 – and the group says they wouldn’t 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’m going to double that,” Musk wrote.
But GrowSF, the organization behind the Dump Dean PAC, said Monday it had not heard from the billionaire and did not want to hear it.
“He has not donated, has not reached out, and cannot donate without speaking to us first,” GrowSF Director Steven Buss said in an email to The Daily Beast. “It’s clear he wasn’t serious.”
“We wouldn’t accept the money,” he added, confirming his earlier comments SFGate. “This is a distraction from the issues that matter to voters…Voters deserve a representative who is more focused on their needs than the tweets of a multi-billionaire.”
Buss said the organization’s online fundraising tool has a maximum limit of $10,000. To donate $100,000, Musk would have had to ask the group for telegraphic information, but he didn’t do that, he said.
When asked to explain why they wouldn’t accept the money, Buss replied simply: “Values misalignment.”
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 city’s only socialist supervisor. Last month, in response to Preston’s tweet urging 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,” said the Twitter owner wrote.
Last week in response to a Mission on site Article about Preston’s proposal to ban armed security guards from drawing 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 and killed by a Walgreens security guard during a suspected shoplifting incident. It also received support from the three moderate members of the City Council of Supervisors’ Public Safety and Neighborhood Services Committee.
Preston responded with a press release calling Musk’s tweets “exaggerated.”
“A billionaire calling for a democratically elected official to be sent to prison for no reason is textbook fascism,” he said. “Nevertheless, I will continue to stand up for my voters, even if it makes billionaires uncomfortable and increasingly insecure.”
