Remember when Mick Mulvaney went red in the face pointing a finger at the CEO of Mylan, the company that hiked the price of the life-saving Epi-Pen in the name of company profits? The best evidence that he has no intention of helping make the Epi-Pen cheaper comes from his most recent filing with the Federal Elections Commission. Nine days after Mulvaney chastised Mylan CEO Heather Bresch, John Paulson, a New York billionaire hedge fund owner who owns $1 billion worth of Mylan stock, donated the maximum legal personal contribution to Mulvaney’s campaign. No one on earth has as much to lose if Congress brings the price of Epi-Pen down as John Paulson, and clearly he sees a bet on Mulvaney as an investment worth making.
Twice as many out-of-state billionaires donated to the Mulvaney campaign on a single day, September 30, as live in the entire state of South Carolina. John Paulson is the richer of the two, with personal wealth exceeding $8 billion and control over a hedge fund that is worth even more. That hedge fund has investments in all kinds of companies, but its largest single position is in Mylan and their now-infamous Epi-Pen.
Aside from their support for Mick Mulvaney, what do John Paulson and the other billionare, Chicago Cubs owner Joe Ricketts, have in common? Neither billionaire has ever given a nickel to Mick Mulvaney before this fall, or shown any interest in any other South Carolina race for the U.S. House of Representatives, but both billionaires happen to be major supporters of Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign.
John Paulson serves on Trump’s board of economic advisors, making him one of the few billionaires to support Trump as wholeheartedly as Mick Mulvaney. Joe Ricketts has personally donated $1 million to the Trump campaign, and the Ricketts family has committed to help raise $70 million for Trump before the election. His wealth is paltry compared to Paulson’s, checking in at a mere $1.57 billion.
A billion dollars ($1,000,000,000) is a lot of money, a thousand millions, more than most of us can even imagine. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling (named for a Political Action Committee that has given Mick Mulvaney $16,000 since 2010), billionaires can funnel unlimited funds into Congressional and Presidential elections. In 2012, half of all money given to Super PACs came from just 22 individual donors, a statistic highlighted by Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report. John Paulson, whose riches were made when he bet on the collapse of the US housing market, is one of those 22. He stands to gain more than anyone in the world if Epi-Pen profits remain sky high.
It’s no wonder that a New York City billionaire Trump advisor has suddenly taken interest in a little ol’ South Carolina Congressional district that he never bothered with before.