“America is a nation of builders,” Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, posted on X, the social media platform he owns, at 11:50 p.m. Eastern Tuesday night, hours before the Associated Press called the presidential race in Donald Trump’s favor. Writing from Palm Beach County, where he was spending Election Night with Trump, he added, “Soon, you will be free to build.”

As votes rolled in showing the billionaire former president poised to retake the White House, some of his fellow conservative billionaires rallied on X. Some were celebratory, like crypto billionaire Tyler Winklevoss, who posted that “We are on the brink of a new American Renaissance.” Some began offering explanations for Trump’s surge, like surrogate and former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who claimed that “voters are rejecting censorship, lawfare, and dishonesty.” Still others were impatient with the networks: “It is absurd that @cnn refuses to call states that have clearly been won by @realDonaldTrump,” hedge fund manager Bill Ackman wrote at 11:40 p.m., even as millions of votes remained outstanding across the then-uncalled states in the Rust Belt, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.

By the next day, many other billionaires, including Michael Dell and Jeff Bezos, went online to react to Trump’s victory, in most cases sending him congratulations. Also among those responding were some of Kamala Harris’ biggest backers, including LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman and businessman Mark Cuban, who addressed congratulations to Trump after having deleted some of his pro-Harris posts earlier. Bill Gates,........

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