Musk Gave $292.7M to Trump PACs — More Than 12 Other Tech Billionaires Combined

The problem: Every cycle the tech-press writes the same story — Silicon Valley's billionaires are getting more political — backed by four hand-picked donor names and a TechCrunch interview. That framing is wrong. When you pull every individual federal contribution record from the FEC under the personal name of 25 widely-cited tech-founder billionaires across the 2020 and 2024 election cycles, the picture isn't Silicon Valley moves right or Silicon Valley moves left. It's that one person — Elon Musk — gave $292.7M to Trump-aligned super-PACs, and that single number is 55% more than the combined federal political contributions of every other tech-founder billionaire in the audit. The 12 other named donors with FEC records account for 39.2% of the cohort total. Musk alone accounts for 60.8%. This post is what the FEC trail actually shows.

This is a documentary audit of individual federal political contribution records across 25 widely-cited tech-founder billionaires for the 2020 and 2024 federal election cycles. Every figure links back to its underlying FEC filing. The single-donor concentration is real, the methodology is disclosed up front, and the Silicon Valley shift framing the tech-press usually puts on the cycle is almost always wrong about what the data shows.

What is the tech-billionaire federal political giving audit? A point-in-time pull of every individual FEC contribution record under the personal name of 25 widely-cited tech-founder billionaires across the 2020 and 2024 federal election cycles, with each contribution mapped to its receiving committee and that committee's public partisan alignment. The metric measures individual disclosed federal contributions — what each donor paid under their personal name to FEC-registered committees — not LLC-routed giving, 501(c)(4) dark-money, or state-level political activity, which the FEC does not index under personal donor names.

Why it matters: Political-press coverage of the 2024 cycle repeatedly framed tech-billionaire giving as a sector-wide shift. The FEC trail shows the giving is dominated by a single person to a degree that makes any cohort-level claim misleading without that disclosure. Aggregating the cohort across two cycles and naming each donor's top recipient is the cleanest way to see whether Silicon Valley moved or whether one Silicon Valley billionaire moved $292.7M.

Use it when: You are reporting on tech-industry political giving, drafting a 2024-cycle retrospective, briefing on donor concentration, building a market map of crypto-industry political money, or sourcing a citable per-donor figure for any of the named individuals in the cohort.

Key findings

• Elon Musk's combined 2020+2024 individual federal political contributions total $292,727,888 — 60.8% of the $482M cohort total and 5.6x the next-largest donor in the audit. Of that, $249,754,986 (52% of the entire cohort total) went to AMERICA PAC alone, the Trump-aligned 2024 super-PAC Musk founded.
• Musk's giving was 55% more than the combined contributions of the other 12 named donors with FEC data ($292.7M vs $189.4M combined). Cohort-level statistics that include Musk are therefore dominated by a single data point, and the audit reports both with-Musk and without-Musk figures wherever the cohort total is referenced.
• 13 of 25 named billionaires returned individual FEC data under their personal name in the 2020 or 2024 cycles. The other 12 returned zero individual contributions — either they don't politically donate at the individual-FEC-disclosed level, or they route giving via LLCs or 501(c)(4) vehicles the FEC doesn't index under personal name. The audit reports both groups.
• FAIRSHAKE — the crypto-industry bipartisan super-PAC — received $69.5M from this cohort alone, with Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz each contributing exactly $33.5M and Tyler Winklevoss contributing $2.45M. Single-PAC concentration: $69.5M from three named donors flowed through one committee.
• Dustin Moskovitz and Reid Hoffman deployed $89.2M combined almost entirely to D-aligned vehicles (Future Forward / FF PAC, Republican Accountability PAC, Harris Victory Fund, Granite for America). Moskovitz at $51.9M is the cohort's #2 donor and is rarely cited in tech-press 2024-election coverage.
• David Sacks reported $1.29M in 2020+2024 individual contributions, 100% to R-aligned committees including Trump 47 Committee, the Republican National Committee, and Team Moreno. His FEC trail is consistent with public reporting that he hosted a 2024 Trump fundraiser.
• Peter Thiel reported $2,731 across the 2020+2024 cycles — essentially blank. The 2016, 2018, and 2022 cycles (out of audit scope) saw materially larger Thiel giving; the 2020+2024 personal-FEC trail is consistent with his public statement that he sat out personal giving in 2024.

In this article: The leaderboard by total contributions · The Musk megadonor singular · The a16z twin bet · The Moskovitz-Hoffman counterforce · The crypto single-vehicle dominance · The 12 invisible billionaires · The Sacks Trump pivot · The Winklevoss split · The Thiel near-zero · Methodology · What the data does NOT support · Press lift-out · FAQ

Compact examples — the cohort's named-PAC concentration

Three rows showing how single-PAC concentration works inside this cohort.

Each donor concentrated the bulk of their disclosed giving in a single committee. The named PACs are different. The single-vehicle pattern is the same.

The 2020+2024 tech-billionaire FEC leaderboard

This is the cohort sorted by combined 2020+2024 individual federal contributions descending, with each donor's top recipient and that committee's public partisan alignment.

The top of the leaderboard already tells the story. One donor's combined contributions ($292.7M) are larger than the other twelve combined ($189.4M). The top five — Musk, Moskovitz, Andreessen, Horowitz, Hoffman — account for $467.6M (97% of the cohort total). The remaining eight named donors with FEC records together account for $14.6M, or about 3% of the cohort.

The Musk megadonor singular: $292.7M to one side

Elon Musk's combined 2020+2024 individual federal political contributions total $292,727,888. The 2020 cycle accounts for $25,200 across nine small individual contributions. The 2024 cycle accounts for the remaining $292.7M, almost entirely deployed via Trump-aligned super-PACs:

100% of Musk's identifiable 2024 super-PAC giving went to GOP-aligned vehicles. The aggregate ($292.7M) is 5.6x the next-largest donor in the cohort (Moskovitz at $51.9M) and is the single largest individual disclosed federal political contribution figure for any donor across this 25-name cohort by a wide margin. AMERICA PAC alone — the Musk-founded vehicle that did most of the cohort's 2024 ground-game spending — received $249.7M from Musk, which is 52% of the cohort's entire combined 2020+2024 total across all 13 named donors.

The structural read: this is not a Silicon-Valley shift. It is one Silicon Valley billionaire deploying $292.7M to one side, and twelve other tech-founder billionaires (with non-zero FEC trails) deploying $189.4M across an ideologically heterogeneous mix of Democratic super-PACs, Republican super-PACs, the bipartisan crypto super-PAC, and an RFK-Jr-aligned independent vehicle.

The a16z twin bet: $67M to FAIRSHAKE

Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, the named partners of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), each contributed exactly $33,500,000 to FAIRSHAKE — the crypto-industry's bipartisan super-PAC — across the 2020+2024 audit window. Combined a16z-partner FAIRSHAKE giving: $67M from one firm.

After FAIRSHAKE, the partners diverged on partisan giving:

• Andreessen put $5.3M into R-aligned committees (Right For America $4.5M, Trump 47 $844K) and $1.75M into D-aligned (Defend American Jobs $875K, Protect Progress $875K) — a roughly 3:1 R-lean on partisan giving.
• Horowitz put $2.5M into R-aligned (Right For America) and $4.25M into D-aligned (BlackPAC $2.5M, Protect Progress $875K, Defend American Jobs $875K) — a roughly 1:1.7 D-lean on partisan giving.

The single firm produced two of the cohort's top five individual donor positions ($43.2M and $42.5M). Both partners' largest single contribution went to the same crypto-industry vehicle, in identical amounts. The partisan splits diverged sharply once the FAIRSHAKE co-bet was set aside. This is the cleanest single-firm finding in the audit: same firm, same lead-bet vehicle, opposite partisan tilts on the residual. The crypto co-bet is the matched-pair signal; the partisan split is per-partner.

The Moskovitz-Hoffman Democratic counterforce

Dustin Moskovitz (Asana co-founder, Open Philanthropy backer) and Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn co-founder) deployed combined 2020+2024 individual contributions of $89.2M, almost entirely to D-aligned vehicles:

• Moskovitz $51.9M — FF PAC (Future Forward, Harris super-PAC) $50.0M, Harris Victory Fund $930K, DNC $413K. All D-aligned. Moskovitz is the cohort's #2 donor by individual disclosed contribution and the largest single Democratic-aligned individual donor in this audit.
• Hoffman $37.3M — FF PAC $10.25M, Republican Accountability PAC $6.14M (an anti-Trump-Republican accountability vehicle, Dem-funded), One For All Committee $3.3M, Granite for America $2.0M, Harris Victory Fund $1.68M. All D-aligned or anti-Trump.

Moskovitz is rarely cited in mainstream tech-press 2024-cycle coverage despite being the cohort's #2 donor by individual disclosed contribution. The structural reason is that his giving routes through a single super-PAC (FF PAC) and a public-philanthropy-backer profile (Open Philanthropy) that doesn't generate the same press hooks as a candidate-fundraiser visit. The FEC trail is unambiguous: $50M to one Democratic super-PAC, with the remainder split across additional D-aligned vehicles.

Hoffman split his giving between pro-Harris super-PACs ($11.9M into FF PAC + Harris Victory Fund) and anti-Trump-Republican accountability vehicles ($8.1M into Republican Accountability PAC + Granite for America) — explicitly funding both pro-Democratic and anti-Trump-Republican efforts in parallel. Outside the top-5, additional Dem-aligned committees (One For All Committee $3.3M, HMP $1.55M, Mainstream Democrats PAC $1.28M, DCCC $1.07M, plus a long tail of state-D and Dem-orbit PACs) bring his Dem-aligned total close to his full $37.3M trail.

The crypto-industry single-vehicle dominance

FAIRSHAKE — the crypto-industry bipartisan super-PAC — received $69.5M from this cohort alone:

FAIRSHAKE is registered as bipartisan and gave to candidates in both parties during the 2024 cycle. The structural finding is the single-PAC concentration: three named tech-founder billionaires deployed $69.5M through one committee, which is more political money than the cohort's combined Dem-aligned super-PAC giving outside of FF PAC. The crypto industry's 2024 political infrastructure was, on the FEC trail, a single-vehicle play funded disproportionately by a16z partners.

The 12 invisible billionaires: zero FEC trail

Of 25 widely-cited tech-founder billionaire names probed against the FEC, 12 returned zero individual contributions in the 2020 or 2024 cycles under their personal name:

Doug Leone, Larry Ellison, Cameron Winklevoss, Vinod Khosla, Brian Armstrong, Patrick Soon-Shiong, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, Jensen Huang.

This audit cannot distinguish between this person doesn't politically donate at the individual FEC level and this person routes via LLCs / 501(c)(4) vehicles that the FEC doesn't index under personal name. Both are real patterns. Public reporting documents that several of these names route giving via routes that don't surface under personal name in the FEC index — Gates via the Gates Foundation (which by 501(c)(3) rules cannot fund federal candidates) and Microsoft alumni vehicles, Eric Schmidt via Schmidt Futures' political arm, Bezos via The Washington Post and personal LLCs, Zuckerberg via Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and 501(c)(4) civic-engagement vehicles.

The audit reports the 12 zero-result names as zero-result for the named-individual FEC trail. That is not a claim those individuals don't politically donate. It is a claim that the FEC name-match approach is bounded, and that the bound is part of the audit's reproducibility guarantee. The interpretation of why a given name returns zero — apolitical, indirect routing, or both — is left to the reader.

This is the methodology-as-strength frame: name what's not in the dataset, instead of pretending the cohort is complete.

The Sacks Trump pivot

David Sacks (Craft Ventures, All-In Podcast co-host) reported $1.29M in 2020+2024 individual federal contributions. Top recipients:

100% of Sacks's identifiable partisan giving in this cohort window went to R-aligned committees. Sacks has been a publicly-documented Trump 2024 fundraiser host (a June 2024 fundraiser at his San Francisco home was widely reported). The FEC trail is consistent with that public reporting. Sacks went on to be named White House AI and Crypto Czar in the 2025 administration — not a fact in the audit's FEC scope, but worth flagging for any post-cycle retrospective using these numbers.

The Tyler-Cameron Winklevoss split

The Winklevoss twins (Gemini co-founders) showed asymmetric political-giving footprints across the 2020+2024 cycles:

Tyler's top recipients were FAIRSHAKE $2.45M, Trump 47 $2.20M, Commonwealth Unity Fund $510K, MAGA Inc $355K, RNC $289K — R-aligned plus crypto-bipartisan. Cameron returned zero individual federal contributions in the audit window under his personal name.

The twins co-founded Gemini and run the company together. Their political-disclosure trails diverge sharply. The same caveat applies as for the 12 zero-result names: the audit can document what the FEC indexes under personal name, not what either Winklevoss may route via LLCs or 501(c)(4) vehicles. The asymmetry is reported as a finding about FEC trails, not about underlying political activity.

The Thiel near-zero

Peter Thiel — the most-cited tech-billionaire political donor of the 2016-2022 era — reported $2,731 in combined 2020+2024 individual federal contributions. The 2016, 2018, and 2022 cycles are out of this audit's scope; public reporting documents Thiel as a major donor in those cycles ($1.25M to Trump 2016, $20M+ to JD Vance and Blake Masters in 2022). The 2020+2024 personal-FEC trail is essentially blank.

This is consistent with the public record: Thiel publicly stated he was sitting out the 2024 cycle on personal giving, and his political vehicles (Mithril Capital, Founders Fund partners) gave through firm-level LLC routes the FEC doesn't index under his personal name. The Thiel row is the cohort's clearest example of why the FEC personal-name approach is bounded: a donor who was the iconic tech-political-money story of 2016-2022 returns near-zero across the audit window. That is the FEC's name-match limitation, not a claim that Thiel withdrew from political activity.

What the actor produces (audit defensibility)

For each donor name probed, the fec-campaign-finance Apify actor returns:

• A cohort-summary record with totalAmount, topCommittees (named PACs with $ amounts), topEmployers, topStates, donorTierDistribution, and partisanDistribution (note: structurally undercounts super-PAC giving — see methodology).
• A cross-cycle-profile record with per-cycle partisan-lean (note: only useful for donors active in both 2020 and 2024 with non-super-PAC giving — most large 2024 super-PAC contributions return partisanLean: "none").
• Individual contribution records (95-300 per donor, depending on cohort size cap).
• narrative, anomaly, priority-ranking, relationship-cluster, and elite-cluster-significance records.

The audit was invoked with crossCycleYears: [2020, 2024] and mode: opposition-research for each of the 25 named cohort entries. Every named claim in this post traces back to a public FEC URL of the form https://docquery.fec.gov/cgi-bin/fecimg/?<doc-id> (the actor returns pdfUrl per contribution).

Methodology

The audit's claims rest on three documentable inputs. Each one has a known limit. Stating those limits is the post's audit-defensibility move.

• Tool: ApifyForge's fec-campaign-finance Apify actor against the Federal Election Commission's individual contributor search. The actor wraps the FEC's public OpenFEC API; it does not scrape paid databases. Each cohort entry was probed with the donor's canonical name, crossCycleYears: [2020, 2024], and mode: opposition-research.
• Underlying data source: FEC OpenFEC — public, free, authoritative as the federal-disclosure index for individual political contributions to FEC-registered committees. Every contribution row in this audit traces back to a public FEC document URL.
• Cohort: 25 widely-cited tech-founder billionaires probed by name. The cohort is a curated list of names cited as tech-founder billionaires with 2024 political activity in mainstream coverage; it is not a complete enumeration of US tech-founder billionaires.
• Date range: 2020 federal election cycle (2019-01 through 2020-12) and 2024 federal election cycle (2023-01 through 2024-11). FEC filings for the 2024 cycle were complete as of the audit date (9 May 2026); the cycle ended in November 2024.
• Partisan-alignment classification — the audit's defensibility lever: The actor's per-record partisanLean field returns "none" for most super-PAC contributions because super-PACs do not have a candidateParty field in the FEC schema (super-PACs support causes and outside-spending efforts, not party-listed candidates). This audit substitutes a manual committee-name → party-alignment mapping based on each PAC's public registration and known affiliation. Categories used: R-aligned (Trump-aligned, GOP-coordinated), D-aligned (Dem-coordinated, including anti-Trump-R accountability vehicles), Crypto-bipartisan (FAIRSHAKE specifically), Independent (RFK Jr-aligned), Corporate (corporate-PAC employee-funded), Unclear. The mapping is a per-committee classification; each named PAC in this post is alignment-tagged based on its public partisan affiliation rather than the FEC's structural candidateParty field.
• Why the actor's partisanShiftDetected field doesn't drive the headline: The shift-detection logic requires a donor to be active in both cycles with detectable partisan lean in both. For most large 2024 super-PAC givers (Musk, Sacks, Andreessen, Horowitz), 2020 individual contributions were small and 2024 contributions were predominantly super-PAC (where lean is unclassified at the per-record level). The shift-detection field returns "none" for these because the underlying lean signal is unmeasurable at the FEC-schema level. This is a structural limitation of FEC disclosure, not an actor defect — but it means the headline must be told via committee-name partisan classification rather than the actor's lean-shift signal.
• The Musk single-donor concentration: $292.7M = 60.8% of cohort total. Cohort-level statistical claims are reported with a with-Musk-excluded figure alongside the headline figure where appropriate, to disclose the one-data-point dominance.
• Reproduction: every count is re-fetchable via the actor with the same per-donor parameters (contributorName: "<name>" + crossCycleYears: [2020, 2024] + mode: opposition-research) on or after 9 May 2026. Anyone with an Apify account can re-run the audit — the underlying FEC OpenFEC endpoints are public and free.

What the data does NOT support

This is the section any journalist or analyst should read before quoting any number from this post. The audit measures one thing — individual disclosed federal political contributions under personal donor name across a specific 25-name cohort for the 2020 and 2024 cycles — and it is honest only when those scope limits are stated.

• The FEC indexes individual contributions under the contributor's personal name on the filing. It does not index LLC-routed giving, 501(c)(4) dark-money grants, donor-advised-fund disbursements, trade-association political budgets, state-level political contributions (FEC covers federal only), or contributions filed under non-canonical name variants (e.g., Lawrence vs Larry). Coverage that uses this audit's totals should describe them as individual disclosed federal contributions specifically, not total political spend.
• The 12 zero-result names are zero-result for personal-name FEC filings only. They are not a claim that those individuals don't politically donate. Public reporting documents that several of them route giving via LLCs, 501(c)(4) civic-engagement vehicles, or family-foundation civic arms that don't surface under personal name in the FEC index.
• The cohort is intentionally bounded. Tech-founder billionaire is a name-curation filter, not a regulatory category. The same audit run with a different curated list (e.g., Forbes 400 tech, Crunchbase founder index, or YC alumni at $1B+ valuation) would surface a different but overlapping set of named entities. The single-donor concentration finding (Musk = 60.8% of cohort total) is robust within this 25-name cohort and almost certainly extends to wider tech-billionaire cohorts — but verifying that requires additional probes against different curated lists.
• The single-donor concentration is structural, not a verdict. The audit shows that one donor accounts for 60.8% of cohort total disclosed giving. This is a description of the FEC trail across this cohort, not a normative judgment on Musk, Trump, AMERICA PAC, or any of the named recipients. Reasonable analysts would frame the same number as either unprecedented individual political concentration or one billionaire exercising the same legal contribution rights as any other US citizen at any scale. The audit does not adjudicate that frame; it documents the dollar concentration.
• Super-PAC contributions are partisan-classified by the audit's manual committee-name mapping, not the FEC's structural candidateParty field. AMERICA PAC, RBG PAC, FF PAC, and the other super-PACs cited in this audit do not carry a structural party tag in the FEC schema. The R-aligned and D-aligned tags in this post are based on each committee's public registration and known affiliation. A reader who disagrees with a specific PAC classification should treat the dollar figures as fact-checked and the alignment tag as a layer of interpretation.
• 2020-cycle super-PAC giving was small for most cohort members. The cycle-level partisan-lean comparisons (e.g., Andreessen 3:1 R-lean, Horowitz 1:1.7 D-lean) are based on each partner's residual partisan committees after the FAIRSHAKE co-bet. The baseline is small; small-baseline partisan ratios should not be over-extrapolated into broader claims about a16z's politics.

Press lift-out for journalists

A copy-paste-ready version of the headline finding:

"A 2026 ApifyForge audit of FEC individual contributor records across the 2020 and 2024 federal election cycles for 25 widely-cited tech-founder billionaires found that one donor — Elon Musk — gave $292,727,888 in disclosed individual federal contributions across the two cycles, equal to 60.8% of the $482M cohort total and 5.6x the next-largest donor (Dustin Moskovitz at $51.9M). Musk's combined giving was 55% larger than the combined contributions of the other 12 named donors with FEC trails ($292.7M vs $189.4M). $249.7M of Musk's giving — 52% of the entire cohort total — went to AMERICA PAC, the Trump-aligned 2024 super-PAC he founded. Of the 25 names probed, 13 returned individual FEC records and 12 returned zero individual contributions under their personal name. The crypto-industry bipartisan super-PAC FAIRSHAKE received $69.5M from a16z partners Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz ($33.5M each) plus Tyler Winklevoss ($2.45M). Methodology: individual contributor records pulled via ApifyForge's fec-campaign-finance Apify actor against FEC OpenFEC, with super-PAC partisan classification supplied via a manual committee-name → party-alignment mapping because the FEC schema does not record candidateParty for super-PAC contributions."

Source for citation: ApifyForge, "Musk Gave $292.7M to Trump PACs — More Than 12 Other Tech Billionaires Combined," 9 May 2026. Underlying data: FEC OpenFEC individual contributor records for the 2020 and 2024 federal election cycles, queried via the fec-campaign-finance Apify actor on 9 May 2026.

Embeddable visuals

Three chart blocks, reproducible from the tables in this post.

Chart 1 — The Musk-singular concentration

Single horizontal bar chart. One bar at the top (Musk, $292.7M) extends across roughly 60% of the chart width. Below it, 12 short bars stacked together (Moskovitz $51.9M, Andreessen $43.2M, Horowitz $42.5M, Hoffman $37.3M, Tyler Winklevoss $7.8M, Draper $4.9M, Sacks $1.3M, Altman $0.4M, Lonsdale $0.2M, Bezos $0.015M, Benioff $0.010M, Thiel $0.003M) collectively extend across roughly 40% of the chart width. Visual asymmetry — one giant bar against twelve short ones — is the chart's whole point. Headline: "One donor (Musk, $292.7M) gave 55% more than the other 12 named tech-founder billionaires combined ($189.4M) in the 2020+2024 federal election cycles." Source line: "FEC individual contributor records 2020 + 2024 cycles, via ApifyForge's fec-campaign-finance actor."

Chart 2 — The single-PAC concentrations

Three side-by-side donut charts. Left: Musk's giving — 85% to AMERICA PAC, 7% RBG PAC, 3% Senate Leadership Fund, 2% MAHA Alliance, 1% Sentinel, 2% other. Centre: Andreessen's giving — 78% FAIRSHAKE, 10% Right For America, 2% Trump 47, 4% Defend American Jobs + Protect Progress, 6% other. Right: Moskovitz's giving — 96% FF PAC, 2% Harris Victory Fund, 1% DNC, 1% other. Headline: "Three different alignments. Three single-PAC concentrations. Musk → AMERICA PAC ($249.7M). Andreessen → FAIRSHAKE ($33.5M). Moskovitz → FF PAC ($50.0M)." Source line: "FEC individual contributor records 2020 + 2024 cycles."

Chart 3 — The 13-named vs 12-invisible split

Half-and-half bar visual. Left half: 13 named donors with FEC trails, listed by total. Right half: 12 names returning zero individual FEC records, listed by name only (Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, Jeff Bezos*, Larry Ellison, Doug Leone, Vinod Khosla, Brian Armstrong, Patrick Soon-Shiong, Cameron Winklevoss, Jensen Huang). Footnote: Bezos is technically on the left side at $15K via Amazon corporate PAC. The 12 named on the right have zero personal-name FEC records. Headline: "13 of 25 widely-cited tech-founder billionaires returned individual FEC contribution records under their personal name in the 2020+2024 cycles. The other 12 returned zero — either don't politically donate at the individual FEC level, or route via LLCs / 501(c)(4) vehicles the FEC doesn't index by personal name." Source line: "FEC OpenFEC individual contributor search, 25-name probe via ApifyForge's fec-campaign-finance actor."

Frequently asked questions

What is the FEC individual contributor record?

The FEC individual contributor record is the public federal disclosure that documents a contribution from a named individual to an FEC-registered committee. It is the row-level record behind the Federal Election Commission's individual contributor search. Each record contains the contributor's name, employer, occupation, address, the receiving committee, the amount, and the contribution date. It is the cleanest single source for who gave what to which federal political committee, and it is the primary input to this audit. It does not include LLC-routed giving (the LLC name doesn't match a personal name in the FEC index), 501(c)(4) dark-money disbursements (not federally disclosed at individual donor level), donor-advised-fund grants, or state-level contributions. It is federal individual giving only.

Why does Musk's $292.7M dominate the cohort total?

Musk founded AMERICA PAC, the Trump-aligned super-PAC that did much of the 2024 ground-game spending in seven battleground states, and personally contributed $249.7M to it across the cycle. Combined with $20.5M to RBG PAC, $10M to Senate Leadership Fund, $6M to MAHA Alliance, and $2.3M to Sentinel Action Fund, Musk's total disclosed individual federal giving for 2024 alone was approximately $292.7M. The other 12 named donors with FEC records collectively gave $189.4M across both cycles. The numerical dominance is a structural feature of the cohort: super-PAC contribution limits are unbounded, and one donor exercised that unbounded right at $292.7M. Cohort-level statistics that include Musk are dominated by a single data point, and this audit reports both with-Musk and without-Musk figures wherever appropriate.

Why did 12 of the 25 probed names return zero FEC contributions?

The FEC indexes individual contributions under the contributor's personal name on the filing. It does not index contributions routed via LLCs (where the LLC name doesn't match a personal name), 501(c)(4) dark-money vehicles (which are not federally disclosed at the individual donor level), donor-advised-fund grants to politically-active 501(c)(4)s, or family-foundation civic arms. Public reporting documents that several of the 12 zero-result names route giving via these vehicles. The audit reports the 12 names as zero-result for personal-name FEC trails specifically — not as zero political activity. The FEC name-match approach is bounded, and that bound is part of the audit's reproducibility guarantee rather than a defect.

Is FAIRSHAKE bipartisan in practice?

FAIRSHAKE is registered as a bipartisan super-PAC and gave to candidates in both major parties during the 2024 cycle. The crypto-industry's stated rationale for the bipartisan structure is that crypto regulation is a cross-party concern and the industry's lobbying objective is pro-crypto regulatory outcomes regardless of which party controls a given seat. The audit's classification of FAIRSHAKE as crypto-bipartisan rather than R-aligned or D-aligned reflects its public registration and known disbursement pattern, and is distinct from the R-aligned and D-aligned classifications applied to single-party super-PACs in the cohort. Reporting on the crypto-industry's 2024 political spend should distinguish FAIRSHAKE's bipartisan disbursement record from the partisan-tilted contribution patterns of its individual donors after the FAIRSHAKE co-bet.

Why is Dustin Moskovitz rarely mentioned in tech-press 2024-cycle coverage?

Moskovitz at $51.9M is the cohort's #2 donor by individual disclosed federal contribution, and is the largest single Democratic-aligned donor in this audit. Public reporting on his political giving exists but is concentrated in Open Philanthropy coverage and Future Forward super-PAC reporting rather than tech-press headlines. The structural reason: his giving routes through a single super-PAC (FF PAC) rather than candidate-fundraiser visits or public-personality moments, and his public profile (Asana co-founder, effective-altruism-adjacent philanthropist) doesn't generate the same press hooks as a candidate event. The FEC trail is unambiguous: $50M to one Democratic super-PAC, with the remainder split across additional D-aligned vehicles.

How does this audit compare to ApifyForge's defense-contractor lobbying ROI 2024 audit?

Both posts use the same federal-disclosure-data-source pattern. The defense-contractor lobbying ROI 2024 audit used Senate LDA filings cross-referenced with USAspending contracts to compute a per-company influence-spend ROI ratio across the top nine DoD contractors. This audit uses FEC individual contributor records to compute per-donor totals across a 25-name tech-founder-billionaire cohort. Different regulatory sources (Senate LDA + USAspending vs FEC OpenFEC), different cohort framing (industry vs named-individual), same audit pattern: pull the public federal disclosure record, name every figure to its underlying filing, disclose the methodology limits up front. The American X health-charity officer pay audit is the third audit in this methodology family — it documents concentration-in-named-entities in a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt cohort using IRS Form 990 records.

Why is Peter Thiel's 2020+2024 total only $2,731 when he was a major 2016 and 2022 donor?

Thiel's 2020+2024 personal-FEC trail is essentially blank. The 2016 cycle ($1.25M to Trump 2016) and 2022 cycle ($20M+ to JD Vance and Blake Masters) are out of this audit's scope; both are documented in public reporting. The 2020 and 2024 cycles show near-zero personal contributions because (1) Thiel publicly stated he was sitting out the 2024 cycle on personal giving, and (2) his political vehicles (Mithril Capital, Founders Fund partners) gave through firm-level LLC routes the FEC doesn't index under his personal name. The Thiel row is the cohort's clearest example of why the FEC personal-name approach is bounded: the iconic tech-political-money story of the 2016-2022 era returns near-zero across the audit window.

Where can I download the underlying FEC data myself?

Yes — FEC individual contributor records are public and free. The FEC publishes the individual contributor search directly, and the OpenFEC API is freely available for batched record-level pulls. Per-contribution PDFs are linked from each FEC document URL. For batched pulls with cohort filtering, cross-cycle aggregation, top-committee summaries, and per-donor partisan-distribution computation, ApifyForge's fec-campaign-finance Apify actor wraps the same OpenFEC endpoints and adds the per-donor enrichment used in this audit.

Related ApifyForge backlink-bait audits

This post is part of an ongoing series of public-data audits using ApifyForge actors. Each post documents a specific industry, regulatory, or platform dataset; together they form a citation network of named-entity research that journalists, analysts, and AI systems can pull from. The methodology pairs:

1. Defense contractor lobbying ROI 2024 — Senate LDA filings cross-referenced with USAspending contracts. Methodology sibling: the same federal-disclosure-data-source frame, applied to industry-level lobbying ROI rather than named-individual contributions.
2. American X health charity officer pay 2023 — IRS Form 990 records of American X health-classified 501(c)(3)s. Methodology sibling: concentration-in-named-entities finding within a single regulatory category, with explicit methodology disclosure as a strength.
3. SEC executive departure index 2024 — SEC EDGAR 8-K Item 5.02 named-entity audit. Methodology sibling: named-entity audit against an authoritative public regulatory data source.

This post is the first in the series to use the fec-campaign-finance actor; the audit was invoked with crossCycleYears: [2020, 2024] and mode: opposition-research for each of the 25 named cohort entries.

Ryan Clinton publishes Apify actors and MCP servers as ryanclinton and builds developer tools at ApifyForge. The audit above was produced via the fec-campaign-finance Apify actor against the Federal Election Commission's OpenFEC individual contributor records; the methodology, analysis, and framing are independent of any product positioning.

Last updated: May 2026