Jonathan McIntosh, Creative Commons 2.0
Elon Musk’s recently announced scheme to bribe voters into backing his favorite presidential nominee, Donald Trump, is a symbol of the economic worldview Republicans are promoting: one where the lines between corporate interests and public regulators are blurred, where government officials and commercial actors scratch each other’s backs so they can gobble up taxpayer dollars.
Musk announced he would be giving away $1 million a day to a lucky winner who signs his America PAC petition affirming the First and Second Amendments.
The sweepstakes are for registered voters in swing states, who, by signing the petition, are passing a sort of Republican purity test on affirming the right to free speech—which the extremist conservatives often use as the basis for spreading racist dogma and conspiracy theories—and the right to bear any and all firearms, including weapons of mass murder such as those used against defenseless children.
Musk’s audacious plan dangerously skirts the boundaries of legality. There are federal election laws in place banning financial incentives to vote. Even something as seemingly benign as offering freebies to those sporting “I Voted” stickers is potentially against the law. Given this, Musk’s lawyers appear to have advised him against directly paying voters to cast their ballots for Trump and so, bribing registered voters to sign a Trumpian petition is what the billionaire seems to have settled on as a workaround.
Political commentators remarked that Musk would likely get away with skirting or breaking the law. After all, the United States justice system is long known for favoring the wealthy. Musk’s move is so outrageous that it even prompted a group of former Republican lawmakers and advisers to write to the U.S. Department of Justice asking Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate him. The Justice Department subsequently warned Musk that he may be breaking the law.
The world’s richest man is throwing his lot in with Trump—and throwing millions of dollars toward electing him from his endless well of cash. Musk has been vocal about why he backs the Hitlerian despot. Trump has also been open about his desire to reward Musk with political power in exchange for financial contributions. It’s a match made in heaven, designed to lead the rest of us into hell.
The overtly transactional relationship between the two goes at least as far back as this past summer when Trump said to a crowd of his supporters—few, if any, of whom are millionaires, let alone billionaires—that the country must give wealthy people like Musk special treatment. “We have to make life good for our smart people, and [Elon Musk is] as smart as you get,” said Trump at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in July 2024.
Since then, Musk has lobbied Trump on social media for a job in the government to enable exactly that: a tailor-made position to strip away regulations holding people like him and corporations like his, accountable on behalf of the public. Trump didn’t even attempt to hide the source of the idea, saying, “At the suggestion of Elon Musk, who has given me his complete and total endorsement… I will create a government efficiency commission,” which would make “recommendations for drastic reforms.”
Musk expects to lead it, having already named the nonexistent agency the “Department of Government Efficiency,” while Trump claimed he would appoint Musk as “Secretary of Cost-Cutting.” During his first term, Trump promised to undo two regulations for every new regulation that was enacted. He has now promised to cancel 10 existing regulations for every new one.
While Musk may come across as merely a “smart” man who, through ruthless efficiency, has created business models that drive innovation and benefit the public, in truth what he is expert at is depending on U.S. taxpayers for handouts. He is, as per a recent report by Politico, “the single biggest beneficiary of U.S. government contracts.” Further, Rolling Stone pointed out that if Musk were to be given a government appointment, he might get a special tax benefit that only federal officials are eligible for, which could reap even more financial benefits for him.
Just as he seems to believe he is above federal election law, Musk does not think environmental or labor regulations apply to him. His SpaceX company, which has delusions of colonizing Mars, has routinely violated the Clean Water Act in Texas by illegally dumping industrial waste near sensitive bodies of water. When the Federal Aviation Administration announced hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines against SpaceX over violations, Musk threatened to sue the agency.
Musk has also flouted labor laws. The National Labor Relations Board ruled that his company Tesla illegally fired union organizers and thereby violated labor regulations. SpaceX has also gotten into trouble with the NLRB over severance payments. In response, Musk is suing the agency, and questioning its constitutionality.
One corporate executive, Matt Teske, the CEO of an electric vehicle charging platform named Chargeway, told BBC, “I think Musk’s interests are focused, predominantly, around a handful of things that are important to him related to his businesses, [with] regulation being something he’s voiced concerns around.” It’s no wonder Musk wants to oversee an agency to protect his own interests and make his companies more profitable.
Moreover, if Trump takes office, Musk hopes to become even more dependent on taxpayer money. Industry analysts told the Washington Post they expect Trump to award Musk’s company Starlink billions of dollars of new government contracts if he becomes president.
To summarize: Musk profits by milking taxpayers, rails against the strings attached that are designed to protect taxpayers, and is now using a tiny portion of his resulting fortune to bribe an authoritarian leader so he can do away with the regulations holding him accountable and so he can suck up even more cushy government contracts.
What Musk wants is a corporatocracy, not a democracy. Such context is usually missing from the narrative that Trump backers are fed about billionaires.
Meanwhile, both Trump and Musk have successfully distracted their backers from their grand plans for grift by spewing racist and vicious lies about the most vulnerable people in our midst: undocumented immigrants.
The extent of their lies and the irony of their claims would be laughable if election polls didn’t show a race that is so dangerously close.
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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Sonali Kolhatkarr is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her most recent book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.
How Elon Musk is Trying to Buy Influence Across Americas
The world’s richest people tend to keep low profiles away from the cameras and microphones. This strategy has not only hid them from public opinion, which can quickly find culprits for economic crises and geopolitical disasters, but also kept them away from judicial retaliation. However, in the last several years, some of the richest people in the world understood that their image is a commodity that is valued as it can gain significant traction and influence in public opinion. Many have sought to cash in on this.
Why? The answer is not very complicated: to personally influence politics. Many rich people indeed prefer to have political figureheads on their payroll to do the “dirty work” of pressuring for certain policies, blocking any initiatives which would threaten their bottom line (profit) while they pull the strings behind the scenes. However, watching a rich man like Elon Musk, who has become a celebrity appearing on TV series like The Big Bang Theory or Rick and Morty, as well as countless talk shows, in addition to his voice resonating all over his social media platform X, has paved the way for him to become a political voice that is listened to.
This strategy allows him to feed a powerful ideology that increasingly permeates among young people and that conveniently benefits the wealthy: the most successful businessman must necessarily be an expert voice on politics because if he is successful in business (which for many is the alpha and omega of human existence) he would surely be successful in all the other supposedly lesser aspects of life.
Isn’t Trump the best example of this successful media and political strategy? Elon Musk seems to want to emulate Trump in this respect, albeit through new media technologies. If Trump used paid television and reality shows, Elon Musk had the audacity (and, it must be said, the intelligence) to become an influencer who bought his social network (Twitter, now X, the most “political” of the social networks) and to comment whenever he can on politics in the United States and other countries. It is not unreasonable to think, then, that Musk could have among his dreams and future projects to have direct access to an oval-shaped office in Washington and finally become the most important “influencer” in the world.
Musk and the US election campaign
The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX has not only donated 75 million dollars to Donald Trump’s campaign in three months but has appeared at several Republican campaign rallies, most importantly in Pennsylvania, one of the most important “swing states” and where Trump was recently attacked. He has also put the social network X to work around the clock in favor of the candidate of his choice. In addition, he is currently handing out money to people who sign a petition for which they must be registered voters in a bid to win their votes over for Trump.
In a recent article for Liberation News, Walter Smolarek explains how this method works: “Musk presents his vote-buying scheme as a petition in support of free speech and gun rights. If you sign the petition and live in a swing state, you get USD 47 – or USD 100 if you live in the especially important swing state of Pennsylvania. If you refer a friend to sign the petition, then you get paid too. And then one lucky Pennsylvanian who signed the petition will win a daily lottery and receive USD 1 million! To sign the petition, you have to be a registered voter… The ‘petition’ essentially pays people who lean towards right-wing ideas to register to vote. And then petition signers’ personal information is fed into Musk’s lavishly-funded turnout operation, which bombards the newly-registered voters with non-stop messages to get them to actually cast a ballot on election day.”
In this way, Musk is not only leveraging his political clout to convince Americans that Trump embodies salvation and that Harris will necessarily lead the country to ruin, but he is also subverting electoral laws and using his fortune to get the candidate of his choice elected.
Musk in Latin America
Before he was paying voters in the US, the billionaire was attempted to influence leaders and events in Latin America.
The world’s richest man has met with the radical neoliberal and far-right president of Argentina, Javier Milei, on multiple occasions to promise high levels of investment in the lithium-rich South American country and to cement their relationship of mutual admiration. In September, the South African business magnate wrote on X, “President Javier Milei is doing an incredible job restoring Argentina to greatness!” adding “The example you are setting with Argentina will be a helpful model for the rest of the world.”After they met on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York City, Musk wrote on his platform X, “My companies are actively looking for ways to invest in and support Argentina.” Their relationship reveals something evident to so many: economic investments do have a clear ideological hue, including those that come from companies that are supposedly not interested in politics. However, Musk’s case is different: he cares about politics, and he does so publicly.
Así fue el reencuentro entre Elon Musk y Javier Milei.
Argentina volverá a ser grande otra vez. pic.twitter.com/Tddga9EYrV
— El Peluca Milei (@ElPelucaMilei) September 23, 2024
This was more than obvious in Venezuela’s recent presidential elections, where Musk and Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro had several heated exchanges on social media. In a video, Musk, elevating himself to the category of “orchestra conductor”, told Venezuelans: “When you get freedom, don’t repeat the same mistakes. Value democracy and freedom. It will be a gift from me and your great leaders to free yourselves from this dictatorship. And the only thing I ask in return is that you never again allow a communist and dictatorial government to rule you. Don’t make that mistake again. That’s all I ask.” On several occasions Maduro has responded directly to Musk stating that Musk is scared but Maduro is willing to face off against the businessman. Following this spat, X was suspended in Venezuela for 10 days and many high-ranking members of the government and PSUV have not returned to the platform. Musk has continued to use his platform to condemn Maduro and socialism and call for the “return of democracy”.
Musk also recently faced off with Brazilian authorities in a legal dispute. After he had failed to follow through on the request from Judge Alexandre de Moraes to assign a legal representative of the company in the country after several X employees were fired and to block accounts that, according to Moraes, spread hate messages and fake news, Moraes ordered the suspension of X in Brazil. Musk quickly claimed that it was due to an act of censorship and took the opportunity to accuse the Brazilian government (including President Lula Da Silva) of being anti-democratic: “The oppressive regime in Brazil is so afraid of the people knowing the truth that it will ruin anyone who tries…Freedom of expression is the cornerstone of democracy and an unelected pseudo-judge in Brazil is destroying it for political purposes.” For his part, Judge Moraes said about the accounts (which mostly defended former President Jair Bolsonaro and the people who invaded the National Congress and the Federal Supreme Court on January 8): “Freedom of expression should not be confused with permission to disrespect laws or promote anti-democratic ideals”. X was reinstated in Brazil over a month later on October 9 after Musk agreed to pay its pending fines, block the accounts, and assign a legal representative.
In 2020, after a Twitter user accused Musk of backing the coup in Bolivia against Evo Morales, Musk famously wrote on X (now deleted) “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.”
These are just some of the cases in which Musk has expressed his opinion on politics and justice in Latin America (always in favor of right-wing politicians and against left-wing ones), a territory that, due to its economic resources, is of significant importance for the richest person in the world. Whether through political alliances (as in Argentina), media disputes (as in Venezuela), or accusations against the justice system of other countries (as in Brazil), Musk is becoming a character that is not only in the US public eye but also a political element that Latin American governments must now consider to carry out their governance.
