During this year's Republican primaries, Peltz gave $100,000 to a super pac supporting Tim Scott,
the South Carolina senator,
but Scott dropped out before a single G.O.P. vote was cast.

By the time of Peltz’s dinner, it was clear that Trump would secure the Republican nomination for an unprecedented third consecutive election.

Peltz, who was no longer on speaking terms with the ex-President, opened the discussion with a blunt assessment of the race.

“I don’t like Donald Trump,” an attendee recalled Peltz saying.

“He’s a terrible human being, but our country’s in a bad place, and we can’t afford Joe Biden.”

So, Peltz concluded, however much they might dislike it, “we’ve all got to throw our support behind him.”

Some of Peltz’s guests remained skeptical,
holding to the view, as the attendee put it, that
“Trump’s a terrible person
—I’m going to focus on the Senate.”

Most of the donors, however, adopted a more pragmatic approach to the ex-President.

Many of them had been granted significant access to the White House during his four years in office.

Some were expected to be considered for senior roles in a second term:

Trump has personally floated the name of the hedge-fund tycoon #John #Paulson, for instance, as a potential Secretary of the Treasury, touting him as
“a money machine.”

“They know how transactional he is,” the attendee told me.

“They’re hoping to have some influence over the course of appointments and therefore the direction of his Administration.”

A few of Peltz’s guests were all in.
#Steve #Wynn, the Las Vegas gambling titan, has known Trump for decades;

his wife, #Andrea #Hissom, is close to the former First Lady, Melania, and the two couples have spent time together in Palm Beach.

And then there was #Elon #Musk, the world’s richest man, who had reportedly got to know Peltz through Peltz’s son #Diesel, a tech entrepreneur.

At the time, Musk had said that he would NOT back a candidate in the Presidential race.

By the fall, he would enthusiastically endorse Trump, spending $75 million to support him through a new super pac,
-- and spreading pro-Trump lies and conspiracy theories on his social-media platform, X.

Trump, the richest man ever to serve in the White House, is himself a billionaire,
though the extent of his wealth has long been in question.

(As of mid-October, with stock in Trump’s social-media venture, Truth Social, experiencing a pre-election bounce, Forbes estimated his net worth at about $5.5 billion.)

In 2016, Trump hardly bothered to court big donors.

He was shunned by much of the G.O.P. élite and largely self-funded his Republican primary campaign.

He lambasted Jeb Bush, the brother and son of Presidents, as a tool of the moneyed class.

“Super pacs are a disaster,” Trump said in a 2016 debate.
“They’re a scam. They cause dishonesty.
And you’d better get rid of them, because they are causing a lot of bad decisions to be made by some very good people.”

But in 2020, as an incumbent President, Trump embraced super pacs and their funders.

The two main super pacs supporting his campaign raised
$255 million on his behalf that year;

his total fund-raising came to more than
$1 billion.

However, Biden, like Hillary Clinton four years earlier, raised even more than Trump,
bringing over-all spending in the 2020 Presidential race to a record $5.7 billion.