Donors | The billionaires who fund campaigns

Today, in presidential fundraising, the biggest donors are the very small and the very, very large.

Very small donors are the lifeblood of campaigns, courted by email and solicited for recurring donations.

But very, very large donors can make contributions that exceed those of a million small donors combined.

The campaigns of Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, combined with their super PACs, have raised $1.3 billion, not including money raised by organizations that are active in the presidential race and don’t disclose their donors. The last two months of the campaign are when donors typically write some of the biggest checks of the campaign, so we’re just getting started.

Here’s a look at the billionaires fueling the campaigns.

Donald Trump’s top donors

Since his 2020 campaign, Donald Trump hasn’t added many new megadonors to his portfolio. He hasn’t attended many fundraising events across the country — a source of frustration for some of his donors, who sometimes have to travel to Mr. Trump’s properties to get access to the candidate. Some traditional Republican donors, who aren’t comfortable with Trump, are focusing their energies on smaller campaigns.

But since 2016, Mr. Trump has transformed the Republican donor class, developing a network of large individual donors who are loyal to him.

Tim Mellon

No donor has publicly spent more on Mr. Trump this cycle than Timothy Mellon, the heir to the Mellon banking fortune. He has poured more than $125 million into Mr. Trump’s campaign, and it’s only September. Mellon, a reclusive businessman, burst onto the political donor scene seemingly out of nowhere. Although he has virtually no relationship with Mr. Trump, he has funded much of the super PAC “MAGA Inc.,” providing it with nearly half of the money it has raised this election cycle. Mr. Mellon is also a friend of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and has poured $25 million into a pro-Kennedy super PAC, becoming the largest disclosed donor this cycle.

Elon Musk

Elon Musk’s rise as a political donor has been one of the most extraordinary stories of the 2024 campaign. Mr. Musk, the owner of the X platform and CEO of Tesla, had never shown much interest in politics, and his own leanings were liberal. But last spring, he decided to launch a super PAC, with grand ambitions of spending as much as $180 million to transform the Republican Party’s field organizing agenda. It was a rocky start. But Mr. Musk has put in place new leadership, including a new personal assistant to help him make policy decisions. Mr. Musk is, at the very least, someone Mr. Trump talks to and listens to: He took Mr. Musk’s advice in choosing J.D. Vance as his running mate, and Mr. Musk appears to have gotten Trump to tone down his hostility toward electric vehicles.

Miriam Adelson

Miriam Adelson, a staunch supporter of Israel, decided earlier this year to break away from the rest of Mr. Trump’s world and create her own super PAC. She plans to invest more than $100 million in the group. M^me Adelson was criticized by Mr. Trump just days after meeting him at the Republican National Convention in July, drawing his ire because she works with more traditional members of the Republican establishment. But Mr. Trump then heaped praise on her at a recent event dedicated to combating anti-Semitism, where Ms.^me Adelson spoke.

Dick and Liz Uihlein

Dick and Liz Uihlein, founders of the shipping company ULine, are staunch conservatives and longtime major donors to the anti-tax organization Club for Growth. So they were drawn to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign during the Republican primaries. But they are team players, and they have returned to Mr. Trump’s fold. Like Miriam Adelson, the couple met Mr. Trump at the Republican National Convention, according to a person briefed on their meeting.

Linda McMahon

Linda McMahon is a longtime friend of Donald Trump and a major donor. Mr. Trump appointed her to head the Small Business Administration when he was president and gave her a speaking role at the Republican National Convention. On another night at the convention, she joined Trump in his dressing room. Her power comes not just from her money, but also from her role: She joins another major Trump donor, Howard Lutnick, the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, as co-chair of Donald Trump’s transition team.

Kamala Harris’s Biggest Donors

The world of Democratic megadonors has consolidated considerably since 2020, with few new big players like Sam Bankman-Fried, who burst into Democratic politics in 2022 and was convicted of fraud and related crimes in 2023.

But President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from the race, and Democrats’ rapid support for Mr.^me Harris, have energized some female donors — people who weren’t particularly active in Mr. Biden’s campaign but might be in Mr.^me Harris.

These are the people who matter most.

Reid Hoffman

Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, has transformed himself into a relentless political creature since Mr. Trump’s election in 2016, telling other donors during the 2020 campaign that he would walk out of a board meeting if American politics demanded it. In addition to being one of the nation’s top Democratic donors, Mr. Hoffman has also emerged as a confidant to other wealthy Silicon Valley Democrats looking to make political donations.

George and Alex Soros

George Soros has a long history of donating to Democrats. What’s new is that another Soros has also signed on to donate: Soros’ son Alex. Alex Soros is just as interested, if not more, in American politics than his father. He is engaged to Huma Abedin, a longtime adviser to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The Soros family tends to be part of the old guard of Democratic bigwigs: Alex Soros is a supporter of more establishment groups and likes to fund organizations that are trying to effect long-term change.

Michael Bloomberg

“Where’s Mike?” is a question Democrats routinely ask this time of year. Bloomberg, an entrepreneur and former New York mayor, has had a frosty relationship with Joe Biden and has yet to invest as much as he usually does in the 2024 presidential election. But he tends to be a very late donor, often funding a last-minute effort that isn’t obvious in the summer.

Dustin Moskovitz

Dustin Moskovitz may be the only person on this list who has yet to make a significant donation to support M^me Harris. But Moskovitz, the largest donor to the charitable movement known as “effective altruism,” is expected to write a large check in the final months of this race to Future Forward, the Democratic group he funded with tens of millions of dollars in 2020. Mr. Moskovitz, a founder of Facebook, is not well-known outside Silicon Valley, but he has a team of political advisers who wield considerable influence in donor circles. In recent months, Mr. Moskovitz has emerged as one of Silicon Valley’s leading anti-Musk voices and has voiced alarm at the rightward shift among some in the tech community.

Jeffrey Katzenberg

Former Walt Disney Studios chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg isn’t as wealthy as the others on this list, but his influence comes from his access to M’s campaign.^me Harris. Mr. Katzenberg, a Hollywood political fundraiser extraordinaire for decades, became one of Joe Biden’s national campaign co-chairs and has retained that role even as Kamala Harris now leads the charge.

This article was originally published in the New York Times.

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