Elon Musk issues full-throated endorsement of Los Angeles mayoral candidate Rick Caruso: 'He's awesome'

Billionaire business magnate Elon Musk has endorsed Rick Caruso, a candidate running in the Los Angeles mayoral election.

"Los Angeles is fortunate to have someone like Rick Caruso running for mayor. He’s awesome," Musk tweeted on Friday. "It is rare for me to endorse political candidates. My political leanings are moderate, so neither fully Republican nor Democrat, which I am confident is the case for most Americans. Executive competence is super underrated in politics – we should care about that a lot more!" Musk added in another post.

Caruso is a businessman and philanthropist, according to his Twitter bio. The real estate tycoon has a net worth of over $4 billion, according to Forbes.

If any candidate secures more than 50% of the vote in the June 7 primary, they will win the entire mayoral election. If no candidate meets that high bar, the top two finishers will move on to compete in a general election later this year.

Caruso announced in January that he was switching his registration from no party preference to Democrat.

"For more than a decade I have been registered to vote with no party preference — I have been a true political centrist — because neither the Democratic nor the Republican parties captured what I believed we needed to do as a nation," Caruso wrote in January. "Today I am registering as a Democrat so that I can stand firmly on the side of the fundamental values that we will all need to invoke and enforce to thwart the coming attacks on our Democracy."

"I won't be a typical Democrat, that's for sure. I will be a pro-centrist, pro-jobs, pro-public safety Democrat," he wrote.

The Associated Press reported that government records indicate that Caruso had been a Republican for more than 20 years prior to turning independent in 2011 — the outlet said that Caruso switched to the GOP in 2016, then switched to independent in 2019.

"I'm a Democrat, and I'm proud to be a Democrat," Caruso said when questioned Tuesday about his previous switches in registration, according to the Los Angeles Times. "What fascinates me is that we're even having this conversation because the electorate, the voters in the city don’t care about this. What the voters of the city care about is crime and homelessness and corruption."