Invitation to ”Candlelight ”dinner happened this past Saturday at President Donald Trump Club Mar-A Lake asked prospective guests to spend $ 1 million per seat. Trump attended dinner along with Elon MuskAccording to numerous photos and videos of the event viewed by Wired.
Elon Musk, wearing his standard black sports coat over a black shirt, was seen a trembling hand and waving to other attendees. He was with a woman wearing a floor dress, which appeared to be Shivo Zilis, according to Instagram Reels posted by numerous guests. Zilis, a neuralink -executive, who previously sat on the board of Openai, is the mother of four of Musk’s 14 known children. (Zilis did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
Musk, whose so -called department of government performance has spent the last six weeks Riding federal agencies, sitting next to Trump at dinner.
Wired previously reported In another candle dinner held on March 1, where guests were also invited to spend $ 1 million per person. That event appeared on the President’s public schedule With a note reading “the president attends the Maga Inc. candle financial dinner.” The March 15 dinner did not appear on the official schedule.
“You are invited to a candle dinner with special guest speaker President Donald J. Trump,” declares the invitation, acquired by Wired. “$ 1,000,000 per person.” The invitation has “Maga Inc.” Head and note at the bottom of the invitation read “Donald J. Trump appears at this event only as a special guest speaker and does not ask for funds or gifts.” Maga Inc., or Make America Great Again Inc., is a great PAC that supported Trump’s presidential campaign 2024.
Wired also reported That business leaders could secure a one-on-one meeting with Trump for $ 5 million at Mar-A Lake. The $ 5 million meetings became a “hot ticket” in the business community, a source familiar with them previously told Wired.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for a comment on the event or the lack of the inclusion of the event in the president’s official schedule.
Experts Wired talked about these candlestick dinners noticed concerns about their unusual nature. “I can’t remember a sitting president in the first weeks of his administration asking for millions of dollars in fundraising,” Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, previously told Wired. “The care is less about fundraising and more about access and influence … people who hope to get favorable treatment look at it in their interest in donating money to Trump.”
The candlelight -dinner took place over the same weekend as the Palm event, an annual motorsports in Palm Beach, Florida. One of the weekend events of the party took place at Sea Lake on Sunday afternoon and presented “street sportsmen and cars with motorsport heritage, one-type, conceptual cars, celebrities-owned and cars with racing history,” according to the Palm Event website. Many of these cars appeared the night before at the Candle Dinner, according to Instagram Reels, who featured guests grinding around Rolls Royce, Bugatti and Lamborghini, among other luxury vehicles shown on the lawn.
The evening also coincided with a serious climb in Trump’s crack on immigration. On Saturday, while Trump and Musk had dinner with Maga -donors, a federal judge ordered the White House To stop the deportation of people who claimed the Trump administration were Venezuelan group members. Despite this decision, two aircraft carrying the alleged groups flew from Texas to El Salvador. Senior officials reportedly told Axios that the judgment did not hold strength “because the flights were over international waters.”
