Campaign finance reports reveal State Representative Justin Pearson (D-Memphis) received a donation from the Jane Fonda Climate PAC, as well as donations from an individual connected to an environmental cleanup company, in the months before he began escalating his criticism of Elon Musk’s xAI for the company’s Colossus supercomputer in Memphis.
The fourth quarter campaign finance report in 2024 shows Pearson received $3,000 from the Jane Fonda Climate PAC, or JanePAC, on November 11, 2024. This donation occurred six days after Pearson was reelected to the General Assembly on November 5.
Fonda, 87, launched the political action committee (PAC) in 2022, according to TIME, which reported the progressive actress founded the group to support “climate champions” in “down ballot” races.
The actress’ role with her eponymous PAC increased last year, when CBS News reported Fonda, “hand-picked over 130 lower-level candidates who will stand up to the fossil fuel industry using her political action committee, JanePAC.”
Fonda told the outlet her activism led her to take a professional pause last year, with the actress reportedly telling her agent, “When the election is happening that’s going to determine the future, I couldn’t do it.”
Her activism followed remarks at the Cannes Film Festival the previous year, when Fonda blamed white men for climate change.
“It’s good for us all to realize, there would be no climate crisis if there was no racism. There would be no climate crisis if there was no patriarchy. A mindset that sees things in a hierarchical way,” Fonda said, according to the New York Post. “White men are the things that matter and then everything else [is] at the bottom.”
The contribution from JanePAC was the largest Pearson received during that reporting cycle, but on the same date it was recorded, his campaign also received $1,800 from John McQuillan Jr., an executive at Triumvirate Environmental, which was awarded a contract by the U.S. Government Services Administration (GSA) to provide environmental training, cleanup, and disposal.
McQuillan’s donation to Pearson was not the largest expense of the year, as The Boston Globe reported he spent $10 million to fund the McQuillan Institute for Science, Technology, and the Human Future on October 25, 2024.
The newspaper stated McQuillan founded the institute due to concern about the state of American democracy amid emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous vehicles. Musk is notably involved in both of these emergent fields through Tesla and xAI.
“We need to be able to develop policy to regulate these new discoveries,” he said.
McQuillan told the outlet, “There’s technology everywhere we go, and it’s coming out way faster than a democracy can manage it.”
Two weeks after Pearson received the donations from JanePAC and McQuillan, he received a combined $3,600 from Gerald and Kate Chertavian, who were briefly profiled by The Post for their philanthropic efforts in 2015.
Gerald Chertavian was honored as one of former President Barack Obama’s “Champions of Change,” and an archive of the White House website during the Obama administration explains that Chertavian’s nonprofit, Year Up, aimed to help “urban young adults to make successful transitions to careers and higher education.” His wife, Kate Chertavian, is a fine art collector who previously worked for the late British singer and songwriter, David Bowie.
Though it was announced in June 2024 that Memphis would be the site of xAI’s Colossus supercomputer, which powers the AI chatbot Grok, it was in April 2025 when Pearson pledged to rally Memphians against the company as it sought to install natural gas turbines.
“I represent 72,000 people who didn’t get to have any say on whether or not Elon Musk and Brent Mayo and all these folks put gas turbines in our community,” said Pearson in April. “We got to send thousands of comments against Elon Musk, putting more gas and more pollution in our environment, in our neighborhood. And it is only a step in the right direction. There has to be regulation that comes behind this.”
The lawmaker’s brother, KeShawn Pearson, is notably the leader of Memphis Community Against Pollution. The brothers appeared together for a “Democracy Now” interview in May, when they called for “environmental intersectionalism” to oppose xAI in Memphis.
Memphis-Shelby County Schools (MSCS) recently accepted an offer by xAI to complete major upgrades at four of the district’s high schools, including new resources emphasizing scientific education.
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Tom Pappert is the lead reporter for The Tennessee Star, and also reports for The Pennsylvania Daily Star and The Arizona Sun Times. Follow Tom on X/Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Justin J. Pearson” by Justin J. Pearson.
Communist gets money from Communist group. Film at 11.