— Some of the sectors that spent the most were fueled by a handful of wealthy donors, like Elon Musk, looking to pad their bottom lines by electing like-minded lawmakers. But not every industry got a good return on the vast sum it invested — click through for a full breakdown of the business world’s biggest winners and losers. Happy Monday and welcome to PI. Send tips: coprysko@politico.com. And be sure to follow me on X: @caitlinoprysko. SPEAKING OF: Our Hailey Fuchs reports that “as Musk spends weeks palling around with Trump at Mar-a-Lago … their proximity has the space industry fearing that Musk could rig the space race in his favor by diverting billions of dollars in government funding to SpaceX,” essentially setting up a monopoly in the sector. — The threat is especially pronounced for SpaceX rival Blue Origin, whose founder Jeff Bezos has earned the Trump moniker “Jeff Bozo” and who has clashed with Musk and his company for years. — The implications of both men’s relationships with Trump “could shape the next chapter of private space exploration, and the space industry is scrambling to understand how Musk could crowd out competitors or fill influential government positions with his allies, including the head of NASA.” — Elsewhere in the business world, Trump’s reelection has executives looking back on Apple CEO Tim Cook’s playbook of deploying personal lobbying to help stay in the president-elect’s good graces, The Wall Street Journal’s Chip Cutter and Aaron Tilley write. — “In the first Trump administration, the Apple executive pioneered a template for how business leaders should engage with Trump.” But “replicating Cook’s playbook will likely prove challenging, executives say.” — “Few companies carry the name recognition of Apple and Cook. Some lobbyists and corporate advisers have already found that, if Trump doesn’t have an existing relationship with an executive, getting on his schedule now is difficult,” and doesn’t always guarantee success. ANOTHER TAX HIRE: Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld has also picked up a former top aide to a member of the House’s tax writing panel. Lauren Rubin, a former legislative director for Ways and Means member Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.) has joined the firm as a senior counsel focused on tax policy. Rubin has most recently been a senior manager at Washington Council Ernst & Young. CHANGES IN LATITUDE: Trump’s return has D.C.’s lobbyists “preparing for a seismic shift in how — and where — they do business,” Dave Levinthal (a PI alum) reports for Business Insider, with the industry realizing that “having a significant presence in Florida is now an essential part of doing business in Washington.” — “First and foremost, that means hiring lobbyists in the state to work the hallways and links at Mar-a-Lago, where Trump and his inner circle have been charting the transition and making Cabinet picks. A presence at the resort — along with the golf courses Trump owns in West Palm Beach, Doral, and Jupiter — is now seen as a major currency in the lobbying game.” — “Never before, lobbyists say, has the geographic center of power shifted so dramatically with the arrival of a new administration. In many respects, they say, Palm Beach is going to be the new K Street … particularly since Trump no longer owns a luxury hotel blocks from the White House. What’s more, the consensus among lobbyists is that anyone who hopes to influence Trump this time around will have to dispense with traditional lobbying conventions.” FIRST IN PI: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the main group working to elect state Republican attorneys general last year as members of the Republican Attorneys General Association sided with the business community in a Supreme Court case that could have shuttered the CFPB, tax returns show. — The court ruled in May that CFPB’s funding mechanism does not violate the constitution, rejecting the argument brought by a group representing payday lenders who were seeking to overturn a CFPB rule clamping down on the industry. — More than two dozen RAGA members in 2023 filed an amicus brief urging the justices to strike down CFPB’s funding mechanism, as did a coalition of business groups led by the Chamber. Republican attorneys general separately petitioned to deliver their own oral argument in the case but were denied by the court. — According to the Chamber’s tax filing, which was shared with PI by liberal watchdog group Accountable.US, the business group donated $375,000 to RAGA last year, on top of $375,620 donated by the Chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform. Not including a $250,000 donation by the ILR this year, disclosures show RAGA has received more than $7 million from the Chamber and its legal arm since 2018, when the payday lender groups first filed their lawsuit. — A broader analysis by Accountable.US from last August found that the Chamber wasn’t the only organization siding with the payday lenders to donate to RAGA since 2018, but they were by far the largest. — In addition to the Chamber’s donation to RAGA, whose funding took a brief hit after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, it also disclosed contributions of $250,000 apiece last year to the Republican Governors Association and the Republican State Leadership Committee. In a statement, Accountable.US President Caroline Ciccone argued the funding betrays the Chamber’s nonpartisan bonafides, while also pointing to Republican AGs’ recently renewed fight to restrict access to the abortion pill. — “The Chamber has ongoing relationships with both Democratic and Republican state attorneys general,” said Stephen Waguespack, the president of the Institute for Legal Reform and the Chamber’s senior vice president of federation, state and local advocacy. “We have supported RAGA for years because state attorneys general play an important part in enforcing a fair legal environment.” CLEGG’S LONG GAME: Long before Congress voted this spring to force the sale of TikTok by its Chinese parent company or face a ban in the U.S., Facebook and Instagram owner Meta had been planting the seeds for challenging the then-smaller competitor by raising concerns about its ties to the Chinese government in speeches, meetings on the Hill and dinners with Trump — even as Facebook was facing a political maelstrom of its own, per The Telegraph’s James Titcomb and Matthew Field. — It “was one of the company’s first major lobbying initiatives after Sir Nick Clegg, the former [British] deputy prime minister and Liberal Democrat leader, was hired as the company’s head of global affairs in 2018.” Clegg “was a relative DC outsider. However, his self-proclaimed status as an old-fashioned liberal in contrast to TikTok’s Chinese background helped buttress the company’s argument.”
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