Right-wing media owner Paul Marshall bought a large stake in Elon Musk’s company Tesla prior to the U.S. presidential election, DeSmog can reveal.

At the same time, Marshall’s outlets were regularly producing content in support of Musk, now a key figure in Donald Trump’s administration who has decimated several government agencies since the new president’s inauguration on 20 January.

The value of the Tesla shares owned by Marshall’s hedge fund, Marshall Wace, increased by more than $500 million in the final three months of 2024.

Earlier in the year, Marshall Wace rapidly increased its stake in Tesla, an electric vehicle company, from 1.2 million shares in June to 3.8 million in September – with the value of its position jumping from $247 million to $1 billion.

A boom in Tesla’s share price following the election of Trump saw Marshall Wace’s position soar to $1.5 billion on 3.6 million shares by the end of December. 

Tesla’s share price has since dipped to its pre-election level, though it’s not yet known whether Marshall Wace sold all or part of its shares prior to this downtrend.

In the run-up and aftermath of Trump’s election victory, which saw Musk appointed to lead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Marshall’s media outlets were full of praise for the Tesla owner.

Appearing on GB News on 6 August, former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie suggested that, if he had to undergo open heart surgery, he would rather Musk held the scalpel rather than an NHS doctor who may be on strike – the latter described by MacKenzie as “left-wing turds”.

On the same day, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage used his GB News show to call Musk a “hero”.

These attitudes were mirrored a few months later, on 17 December, when Farage claimed that Musk is “one of the most admired people in the world” and “a gigantic inspirational figure”. The same day, former Home Secretary Suella Braverman stated on GB News – the channel co-founded by Marshall in 2021 – that Musk is “one of the greatest innovators we’ve seen”.

Similar sentiments were published in The Spectator during this period – the conservative magazine bought by Marshall for £100 million in September.

On 15 October, under the headline “Thank God for Elon Musk”, scriptwriter Gareth Roberts compared “the swoop and grandeur of SpaceX” – Musk’s space exploration firm – to the “petty, noodling nonsense of Ed Miliband’s Great British Energy”.

This was followed-up on 13 November by a piece from financial journalist Matthew Lynn, praising Trump’s “brilliant appointment” of Musk, who Lynn described as an “innovator” with a techno-libertarian ideology that “has the intellectual depth to restructure the state”.

There is no evidence that Paul Marshall has exerted editorial pressure on his media outlets to support Musk, nor that these outlets promoted Tesla for Marshall’s financial benefit. Indeed, another of Marshall’s publications, UnHerd, has carried strong critiques of Musk in recent weeks.

Marshall Wace and Paul Marshall declined to comment.

GB News has given a prominent platform to anti-climate ideas and individuals since its launch in June 2021. A DeSmog investigation found that one-third of GB News presenters expressed climate science denial on air in 2022, while half attacked the UK’s net zero emissions targets. However, the broadcast regulator Ofcom has so far refused to investigate the channel for spreading false climate claims.

“GB News has repeatedly lauded Elon Musk’s role in the Trump administration and lambasted his critics – all the while choosing not to disclose that their co-owner holds massive investments in one of Musk’s companies,” said Richard Wilson, director of the campaign group Stop Funding Heat.

“This conflict of interest will only add to mounting concerns about Ofcom’s failure to enforce its impartiality rules when it comes to GB News.”

DeSmog also revealed that, as of June 2023, Marshall Wace held shares worth £1.8 billion in 112 fossil fuel companies, including in Shell, Equinor, and Chevron.

Marshall and Musk have been leading opponents of climate action in recent months. Speaking at the 2025 Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference – another project funded by Marshall – the hedge fund manager claimed that the West has been infected by a “climate derangement syndrome” through which we seem willing to “sacrifice our economic prosperity and our people’s livelihoods all for the sake of making some fractional changes to the level of CO2 in the atmosphere”.

According to the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), the UK’s net zero economy grew by 10 percent in 2024, employing almost a million people in full-time jobs with an average wage of £43,000 – £5,600 higher than the national average.

Meanwhile, Musk has been vocally promoting far-right, anti-climate parties and politicians across the globe over recent months. The Tesla CEO has publicly expressed his support for Reform UK – a party that campaigns to scrap the UK’s 2050 net zero target – as well as the Alternative für Deutschland, which supports withdrawing Germany from the flagship Paris climate agreement.

Tesla, GB News, and The Spectator were approached for comment.

Musk, DOGE, and Tesla

Tesla’s share price soared in the wake of Trump’s victory, reaching a high point of $479.86 on 17 December and propelling Musk’s personal fortune to more than $400 billion – at the time up by $170 billion since the 5 November election.

While Trump is expected to slash government support for electric vehicles, which are more climate friendly than their combustion engine equivalents, investors were betting on Musk’s proximity to Trump in turn benefitting Tesla.

However, a spate of negative press has sent the company’s stock tumbling in recent months, currently standing at $270 – down 44 percent on its post-election peak.

In January, Tesla reported its first ever annual decline in sales, accompanied by lower than expected revenue. Musk’s actions in government have also further impacted the company’s sales. European Tesla sales fell by 49 percent in the first two months of the year compared with the same period in 2024, even as overall sales of electric vehicles grew.

Tesla dealerships have also been targeted by protests across the U.S. as Musk has been upending the federal social security system, gutting the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and boosting far-right conspiracy theories.

Seemingly in an attempt to halt Tesla’s recent share price collapse, Trump featured in a promotional stunt for the firm outside the White House. Accompanied by Musk, the president personally inspected five Tesla models and pledged to buy one.

Trump, who received more than $32 million from the oil and gas sector for his 2024 campaign, has pledged to once again withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, which set an international target for limiting global warming. He has also declared a “national energy emergency” to allow the U.S. to “drill, baby, drill” for new fossil fuels.