Donald Trump’s richest supporter has been busy finding new ways to corrupt democracy.
A handout, not a hand up: Trump and his biggest donor, Elon Musk, in Pennsylvania on October 5, 2024.(Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images)
American campaign finance laws are so ridiculously lax—thanks to a string of Supreme Court decisions such as Citizens United (2010), which loosened restrictions on dark money—that it is hard to imagine a scenario where a rich person would get into legal trouble for swaying an election. Even so, Elon Musk, reportedly the world’s richest man, with a net worth of more than $240 billion, is pushing his luck with actions that, at the very least, merit criminal investigation.
For the duration of the election, Musk has set up camp in the swing state of Pennsylvania, where he’s offering a $100 reward to anyone who signs a petition supporting the First and Second Amendments (in effect, standard right-wing agitprop)—with the possibility of a further $1 million prize for any registered voter who signs the petition.
As CNN reports:
The first million-dollar winner was named Saturday, with Musk handing a giant check to a Trump supporter at his event in Harrisburg, saying, “So anyway, you’re welcome.” He announced the second winner Sunday afternoon during an event in Pittsburgh, handing out another check on a stage adorned with big signs reading, “VOTE EARLY.”
In an interview Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro said Musk’s giveaway was “deeply concerning” and is “something that law enforcement could take a look at.” Shapiro, a Democrat, was previously the state attorney general.
Musk has promised to keep handing out a million dollars a day till Election Day. He has turned the election into a gaudy lottery game, one where there is a lucrative incentive for low-propensity Republican voters to register. Josh Shapiro is not the only one to worry about possible lawbreaking. Even The Wall Street Journal, a newspaper friendly to Donald Trump, acknowledged that the $100 prize was “pushing the envelope of election law.”
The addition of a million-dollar prize for registered voters goes beyond pushing the envelope and is plausibly viewed as an excursion into the territory of lawlessness. Writing in the Election Law Blog, law professor Rick Hansen of UCLA asserts, “Though maybe some of the other things Musk was doing were of murky legality, this one is clearly illegal,” since 52 USC 10307(c) offers the stiff penalty of a $10,000 fine or imprisonment for up to five years for anyone who “pays or offers to pay or accepts payment either for registration to vote or for voting.”
Nor is this the only example of Musk skating on thin legal ice when it comes to campaign spending. Musk has given more than $100 million to a dark-money group called Building America’s Future. In Open Secrets, Anna Massoglia reports that Building America’s Future has created “an initiative called Progress 2028 that purports to be Kamala Harris’ liberal counter to the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 [but] is actually run by a dark money network supporting former President Donald Trump.”
The website for Progress 2028 makes it sound like Harris supports an array of left-wing policies on issues like immigration, trans rights, and environmentalism that she in fact opposes. For example, the document states, “Undocumented immigrants are the backbone of our country, and by removing barriers, we unlock incredible potential. Kamala Harris believes that every person, no matter their immigration status, deserves access to basic healthcare.” Alas, from a leftist perspective, we have to admit that Harris does not believe healthcare is a basic right for anyone—let alone undocumented immigrants.
Messages from the purported Project 2028 have also been sent as texts, with links to the website. This might take Project 2028 beyond the realm of dirty tricks into the realm of criminality.
As Joshua Micah Marshall notes at Talking Points Memo:
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If these [websites] said “paid for by Harris for President” you’d have a straight up campaign finance violation. But that’s not what they’re doing. So I don’t think the Musk group is doing anything illegal here.
The one part of this I’m not sure about, however, is the texts. Texts, like the US mail and phone calls, come under specific regulatory and even legal frameworks. In some cases, it’s not enough to be technically accurate in the way I’m describing above. If you’re trying to impersonate someone that can be enough to get you in trouble. That’s very different from a website in which you can say basically anything.
Musk’s group is, in the most charitable interpretation, in legally murky territory—one that certainly merits a Justice Department investigation, as does Musk’s million-dollar prize for registered voters. Sadly, this is unlikely, since Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice has hardly distinguished itself as eager to pursue Trump-related criminality.
However, Garland’s notorious fecklessness might actually be a benefit in this case, since Musk’s contempt for democracy is best answered with a political response rather than legal redress. The legal system is slow and cumbersome, and the election is less than two weeks way. Instead of demanding a legal penalty for Musk’s actions, Democrats would do better to run against Musk as an oligarch threatening democracy. Musk is the perfect face of the new American robber barons.
Musk is so eager to elect Trump he’s willing to do anything it takes, by hook or by crook. Even his legal actions stink of desperation and shadiness. One example is the microtargeting of ethnic groups. As the website 404 Media reports:
An Elon Musk-funded group called Future Coalition PAC is targeting Muslim voters in Michigan and Jewish voters in Pennsylvania with diametrically opposed political advertisements about Kamala Harris. In areas of Michigan with relatively large Muslim populations, the Super PAC is painting Harris as a close friend of Israel and is suggesting that she is beholden to the beliefs of her Jewish husband Doug Emhoff; in parts of Pennsylvania with relatively large Jewish populations, the advertisements call Harris antisemitic and say she “support[s] denying Israel the weapons needed to defeat the Hamas terrorists who massacred thousands.”
Musk’s eagerness to elect Trump is clearly rooted in a squalid quid pro quo. Trump has promised to put Musk in charge of government efficiency. Since Musk’s companies receive billions in government contracts every year—and often clash with government regulators—Musk would in effect be given the power to trim the very agencies that regulate him. As The New York Times noted, “That would essentially give the world’s richest man and a major government contractor the power to regulate the regulators who hold sway over his companies, amounting to a potentially enormous conflict of interest.”
Speaking at a rally in Philadelphia, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez observed: “Elon Musk thinks that dangling money in front of a working person is a cute thing to do” and “Elon Musk thinks your vote can be bought.”
Ocasio-Cortez has exactly the right approach to this issue. Democrats have long warned about Trump’s threat to democracy. But surely the billionaires around Trump who are salivating at the prospect of taking over the government if Trump wins pose a far greater threat. As his brain descends into a long twilight struggle with coherence, Trump himself will hardly be in a position to run his own administration. Rather, he’ll turn the car keys over to billionaires and their minions such as JD Vance and the apparatchiks of the Heritage Foundation. Musk ought to be the poster boy for this oligarchic threat and offers Democrats a major target for the closing two weeks of the campaign.
Jeet HeerTwitterJeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.