Elon Musk Leaps to Trump’s Side in Rally Appearance

Elon Musk, the billionaire head of Tesla and SpaceX, strode onto the stage to cheers at Donald J. Trump’s rally on Saturday night, lifted his arms above his head and jumped into the air — twice — exposing his navel as his shirt rode up.

Wearing an “Occupy Mars” shirt underneath a sport coat, he nodded to his black “Make America Great Again” baseball cap.

“As you can see, I’m not just MAGA, I’m dark MAGA,” he said.

Mr. Musk publicly endorsed Mr. Trump in the minutes after a gunman tried to kill the former president on July 13 in Butler, Pa., in a post on X, the social media platform he owns. So when Mr. Trump returned Saturday to hold a rally at the same venue where he was attacked, he brought Mr. Musk along.

In addition to bouncing up and down onstage, he urged the crowd to “Fight! Fight! Fight!” — an echo of the words Mr. Trump had uttered after the attack.

The crowd seemed to know Mr. Musk, who drew cheers as he was introduced by the former president. Mr. Trump lavished praise on Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man, for building an American car company and saving “free speech” with X.

“President Trump must win to preserve the Constitution,” Mr. Musk said, after bounding to the mic with his hands in the air. “He must win to preserve democracy in America.”

While Mr. Musk posts about Mr. Trump frequently on X, his speech on Saturday was his first at one of the Republican nominee’s rallies. His short address recalled some of what he has already said online, like his baseless claim that Democrats want to take away people’s right to vote. (In fact, Republicans have filed lawsuits in several states seeking to shrink the electorate, largely by disqualifying voters more likely to be Democrats.)

“The other side wants to take away your freedom of speech,” Mr. Musk said at the rally. “They want to take away your right to bear arms. They want to take away your right to vote, effectively.”

Typically a subdued public speaker, Mr. Musk, who has a net worth exceeding more than $260 billion according to Forbes, raised his energy. He repeatedly asked those watching to ensure that they were registered to vote and urged listeners to be “a pest” when it came to reminding others to vote.

Mr. Musk has been closely involved with that effort, having founded the America PAC, a super PAC that has been focused on ground game strategies to support the Trump campaign in key battleground states.

While they once criticized each other in the past, Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump have built a close alliance in recent months, with lending Mr. Musk lending his star power and his large platform on X to the Trump campaign.

In August, he interviewed the president on a live audio conversation on the platform. That was when Mr. Musk, whose companies have received billions of dollars in federal contracts and subsidies, proposed that he could run a “government efficiency commission” in a future Trump administration. The plan to cut federal spending and bureaucracy has become a pillar of Mr. Trump’s economic plan.