Skip to main content

Kanye West claims he and Elon Musk have talked about presidential bid for years

 

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has publicly supported Kanye West’s ambitious 2020 presidential bid, but the two have reportedly been talking about this for years. 

Recommended Videos

In a new interview with Forbes on Wednesday, West discussed his presidential “bid,” which he randomly announced on Twitter on the Fourth of July and confirmed his earnest intentions to follow through with it. He told Forbes that Musk is one of his advisers, alongside his wife, Kim Kardashian West. 

“We’ve been talking about this for years,” West said, adding, “I proposed to him to be the head of our space program.”

Musk initially responded to Kanye’s now-viral tweet by saying, “You have my full support!”

You have my full support!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 5, 2020

The duo has been friends for a while, and Musk praised West in 2015 for Time’s annual list of the most influential people. 

“But Kanye does think. Constantly. About everything. And he wants everybody else to do the same: to engage, question, push boundaries,” Musk wrote in Time. “Now that he’s a pop-culture juggernaut, he has the platform to achieve just that.”

Musk previously supported Democratic candidate Andrew Yang for the 2020 presidential race. He has not publicly commented on whether or not he is actually one of West’s advisers. 

Both Musk and West are notorious for being outspoken and often stirring up controversy for their opinions, so a potential partnership on an unexpected and last-minute presidential campaign isn’t out of the question. 

But West’s presidential bid may be over before it even starts. He’s missed the deadline to file as an independent candidate in North Carolina, Texas, New Mexico, and Indiana, according to Ballotpedia. Nine states including, New York and Florida, have upcoming July deadlines where West still might be able to make the ballot. 

Allison Matyus
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Allison Matyus is a general news reporter at Digital Trends. She covers any and all tech news, including issues around social…
Google just gave vision to AI, but it’s still not available for everyone
Gemini Live App on the Galaxy S25 Ultra broadcast to a TV showing the Gemini app with the camera feature open

Google has just officially announced the roll out of a powerful Gemini AI feature that means the intelligence can now see.

This started in March as Google began to show off Gemini Live, but it's now become more widely available.

Read more
This modular Pebble and Apple Watch underdog just smashed funding goals
UNA Watch

Both the Pebble Watch and Apple Watch are due some fierce competition as a new modular brand, UNA, is gaining some serous backing and excitement.

The UNA Watch is the creation of a Scottish company that wants to give everyone modular control of smartwatch upgrades and repairs.

Read more
Tesla, Warner Bros. dodge some claims in ‘Blade Runner 2049’ lawsuit, copyright battle continues
Tesla Cybercab at night

Tesla and Warner Bros. scored a partial legal victory as a federal judge dismissed several claims in a lawsuit filed by Alcon Entertainment, a production company behind the 2017 sci-fi movie Blade Runner 2049, Reuters reports.
The lawsuit accused the two companies of using imagery from the film to promote Tesla’s autonomous Cybercab vehicle at an event hosted by Tesla CEO Elon Musk at Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) Studios in Hollywood in October of last year.
U.S. District Judge George Wu indicated he was inclined to dismiss Alcon’s allegations that Tesla and Warner Bros. violated trademark law, according to Reuters. Specifically, the judge said Musk only referenced the original Blade Runner movie at the event, and noted that Tesla and Alcon are not competitors.
"Tesla and Musk are looking to sell cars," Reuters quoted Wu as saying. "Plaintiff is plainly not in that line of business."
Wu also dismissed most of Alcon's claims against Warner Bros., the distributor of the Blade Runner franchise.
However, the judge allowed Alcon to continue its copyright infringement claims against Tesla for its alleged use of AI-generated images mimicking scenes from Blade Runner 2049 without permission.
Alcan says that just hours before the Cybercab event, it had turned down a request from Tesla and WBD to use “an icononic still image” from the movie.
In the lawsuit, Alcon explained its decision by saying that “any prudent brand considering any Tesla partnership has to take Musk’s massively amplified, highly politicized, capricious and arbitrary behavior, which sometimes veers into hate speech, into account.”
Alcon further said it did not want Blade Runner 2049 “to be affiliated with Musk, Tesla, or any Musk company, for all of these reasons.”
But according to Alcon, Tesla went ahead with feeding images from Blade Runner 2049 into an AI image generator to yield a still image that appeared on screen for 10 seconds during the Cybercab event. With the image featured in the background, Musk directly referenced Blade Runner.
Alcon also said that Musk’s reference to Blade Runner 2049 was not a coincidence as the movie features a “strikingly designed, artificially intelligent, fully autonomous car.”

Read more