Famous US Automaker Faces The Music As Million-Dollar Vote Scheme Goes South

August 19, 20264 minutes Tina Casey 0 Comments

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Elon, Elon, Elon. What were you thinking, Elon Musk? In the run-up to Election Day 2024, the Tesla CEO famously promised to gift $1 million each to a series of randomly selected voters in Pennsylvania. The selection was not so random after all, and a federal judge has just decided that a lawsuit seeking damages from Musk can move forward.

Why Are We Talking About Elon Musk?

Why, indeed. Realistically speaking, every leading automotive CEO has an interest in the outcome of elections in the US, and they lobby furiously to get what they want. However, Elon Musk has sailed far past Mary Barra, Jim Farley, and other lesser-knowns to insert himself directly, aggressively, and expensively into the democratic process itself.

There are many examples, but let’s focus on the lawsuit. In the run-up to Election Day 2024, Musk launched a publicity campaign for his personal funding platform, America PAC (political action committee), in which he encouraged people to connect with voters in swing states. “Elon Musk’s pro-Trump America PAC is offering people $47 if they successfully get one registered swing-state voter to sign a petition supporting the First and Second Amendments of the Constitution,” reported NBC News on October 7, among many others. As a self declared “free speech absolutist,” Elon Musk is well known for supporting the First Amendment. The Second Amendment less so, but perhaps his affinity for right-wing political violence is behind that item.

Election protection advocates cried foul, but the payoff soon ballooned to $100. Additionally, the offer also applied to registered voters themselves, not just to referrers, and a separate petition against “activist judges” was circulated in the swing state of Wisconsin.

To further the interests of publicity, Musk also indicated that he would select a random signee each day for a $1 million bonus. “Billionaire Elon Musk has upped his financial offer for registered swing state voters to sign a conservative-leaning petition, announcing Saturday that his pro-Trump super PAC would be awarding $1 million to a random signee every day from now until the election,” NBC News duly noted on October 20.

Critics charged that the $1 million amounted to an illegal lottery if not outright bribery, but a federal judge disagreed and allowed it to continue.

The Million-Dollar Payoff Goes South

Musk made a similar $1 million offer in a failed attempt to influence the 2025 judicial election in Wisconsin. And now, cue the lawsuits. The Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, for example, seeks to prevent Musk from making any further cash offers in the state.

In July, the Wisconsin Elections Commission also rolled into action. “Billionaire Elon Musk likely broke Wisconsin law when he promised to hand out $1 million checks to voters in the 2025 state Supreme Court election,” Associated Press reported on July 15, noting that the WEC referred two complaints to the Brown County district attorney’s office.

As of August 7, a special prosecutor has been reviewing the charges. No word yet on the outcome, and in the meantime another case against Musk has been winding its way through the federal courts in Texas, in which plaintiffs in Arizona haved alleged fraud and breach of contract because the $1 million winners were not — shocker! — chosen randomly as promised.

In June, a federal judge in Texas dismissed the breach of contract charge but allowed the case to move forward on the fraud charge. “US Magistrate judge Susan Hightower recommended that the fraud claim proceed because there’s a question of whether Musk induced the woman to sign the petition by falsely saying that the winners of the money would be chosen randomly,” Bloomberg Law reported on June 25. The same judge also ordered Musk to sit for a deposition in the case.

In the latest development, on August 18 Judge Robert Pitman, US District Judge for the US District Court of the Western Division of Texas, Austin Division affirmed Judge Hightower’s recommendation to proceed on the fraud charge and dismiss the breach of contract charge.

The next step involves determining whether or not the fraud lawsuit qualifies for class action status, potentially exposing Musk to however many people signed his America PAC petitions with the expectation they might be randomly tapped for a $1 million prize. The 60-day window on that process began with the judge’s ruling on August 18.

Really, Why Are We Talking About Elon Musk?

The America PAC debacle is just the latest example of Elon Musk flexing his wealth and his outsized media presence to influence public policy, to a degree unmatched by any other 21st century automotive CEO (if you can find one, drop a note in the discussion thread). While Musk initially presented himself, and Tesla, as a planet-saving super hero, his actions have resulted in a public policy reversal of epic proportions, with a devastating impact on the US wind, solar, and EV industries to name a few.

Musk’s political posturing emerged in force during Trump’s first term, when Musk used his publicity megaphone to push back against the recommended COVID-19 lockdowns and vaccines. Always on brand, Musk also promised — and then reportedly failed to deliver — ventilators directly to California hospitals. He also reportedly shipped outdated and potentially disease-spreading BPAP machines to hospitals in New York, and he dismissed a safe return-to-work plan developed collaboratively among other leading automakers.

After Trump left office for the first time in 2021, Musk focused his efforts on undercutting the Biden administration, one example being Musk’s support for disruptive “trucker convoy” in Canada during the winter of 2022, at a time when the former President was focused on rallying NATO support for Ukraine against Russia’s then-looming invasion (for the record, Canada and the US are both NATO members).

Later that year Musk purchased the popular social media platform Twitter, in which he encouraged Ukraine to cede territory to Russia (spoiler alert: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had other ideas), before moving on to remake Twitter into a white supremacist organizational hub now known as X. He also spent considerable energy waging legal battles against media organizations critical of his politics.

That brings us to the 2024 election cycle, when Musk sailed in with a boatload of dollars to shovel into PACs (political action committees) supporting Donald J. Trump’s second, successful bid for the Oval Office. As a reward, he got to manage Trump’s budget-cutting schemes through the “DOGE” office.

The rest is history, including a rising tide of evidence that the dismantling of the US Agency for International Aid, facilitated by Musk through DOGE, has impacted the health and safety of vulnerable populations around the world, aside from DOGE-related damage done here at home (here’s one example).

Charges that DOGE has put the the health and welfare of millions of children and adults in jeopardy seems to have hit Musk in a sensitive spot, though it’s too late to undo the damage, even if he wanted to. For that matter, Musk recently pledged to pump more money into the mid-term elections, so hold on to your hats…

Photo (cropped): Cybertruck in lake courtesy of Gravpevine Police Department via CleanTechnica archive.

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