The Current - Elon Musk is giving away millions to U.S. voters. Is it legal?

Episode Date: October 23, 2024

Elon Musk is giving away $1 million US every day to someone who signs his petition to support “freedom of speech and the right to bear arms,” as long as they’re a registered voter in a swing state. Critics say it’s an attempt to sway votes for Donald Trump — and could be illegal.

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On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current Podcast. I have a surprise for you, which is that we're going to be awarding a million dollars to randomly to people who have signed the petition every day from now until the election. Yeah, yeah, you heard that right. Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Tesla and SpaceX, is promising big money to U.S. voters, but only if they sign his online petition pledging support for the First and Second Amendments aimed at rallying support behind former President Donald Trump.

They also need to be registered voters and live in one of the seven swing states that are crucial to winning the upcoming election. Now, if you're wondering if handing out checks like this during an election campaign is actually legal, well, so are election law experts. Ryan Mack is a tech reporter for the New York Times. He co-authored a book called Character Limit, How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter. Ryan, hello. Hey, how's it going?

Pretty good. Thanks for doing this. Can you just, I mean, it is kind of hard to wrap your head around, but walk us through this latest offer from Elon Musk. What is he trying to accomplish with these checks? he was offering $47 to people who referred others to sign this petition. And this is a petition, I guess, echoing your commitment to free speech, the First Amendment and the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms. And it's since evolved from there into this sort of lottery, this giveaway that he's doing for the next couple of days up into election day,

where he's giving, like he said in the clip, a million dollars away a day. I mean, over the breadth of U.S. election history, have we ever seen anything quite like this? I haven't. No. I mean, there are a lot of laws in place as well around things adjacent to this. But no, I've never seen essentially the world's richest person offering up his wealth as a means of driving people to the polls. And you sort of touched on this, that there are laws adjacent to this. Do we know whether this is in fact legal or not? It seems like it's up for debate. There are a lot of legal scholars who say, yes, this is actually illegal. But there are

others that have said that there's actually a wrinkle here, which is that he is, he's not actually registering people to vote. You have to be already registered to vote to sign this, right? Essentially this petition, right? You're just giving away your name, some personal information to this organization, which is run by his super PAC. But it's kind of this gray area. And so I think it's up to the courts to decide. There could be legal challenges in the coming days. But yeah, we're kind of in uncharted waters at this point. You mentioned his super PAC, the Political Action Committee. Musk is just shoveling money into that. Can you tell us a bit more about what the PAC is

and how that money is meant to be used? Sure. It's a PAC he formed back in the spring, even before he had committed publicly to supporting Donald Trump. That happened in July after the assassination attempt. But he has been talking about collecting money from his friends and from other donors. Thus far, he's disclosed that he's given about $75 million to the PAC. And yeah, we'll see how much he gives in the future.

There's been a lot of talk about him giving as much as $180 million. Thus far, we've only seen $75 million. But those disclosure forms still have yet to be disclosed. But we should get those, right? I imagine we'll get those by about the middle of this month, or will we have to wait until almost election day to see them? That'll come potentially after the election as well. There's different cycles that those come out in. So we may not know the full extent until after the results come in. You know, your piece mentions and does a

really good job of sort of chronicling when Elon Musk kind of goes all in on something, whether it's at SpaceX or Tesla or now an election, he becomes fairly obsessive about it. He was sleeping in the Tesla factory at one point. Can you just describe how active or involved he is in the day to day efforts to get more votes for Trump? For sure. He's quite involved. You know, he was stumping at rallies for him in the last couple days, you know, doing these events around Pennsylvania. And he's moved a base of operations to the state as well. He views Pennsylvania as kind of the linchpin in the election. And if Trump wins, he believes he'll win the election. So he has focused all his time and energy into the state, as well as his money, you know,

with those giveaways. And that's a pattern we've seen in the past, you know, when he believes strongly in something, he is going to go all in, he is going to sleep on the factory floor, he is going to, you know, work into the late night developing rocket parts, for example, at SpaceX. And it's just how he operates. He is, of course, still running and owning X, formerly known as Twitter. I remember when he bought it with the crazy price tag of $44 billion. People even then were raising the question about, well, if you're owner of a social media platform like this, and you do eventually get overtly political, how are we going to account for what that would be in terms of like a campaign donation and such? Can you just walk us through

how the platform right now and how his use of it is being used as a factor in this election? It's a huge factor. I mean, he is now not just the owner, but he is the most followed account. He has more than 200 million followers. Anything that he puts on that platform essentially drives the conversation. It becomes a major talking point. It becomes a trending topic.

You know, he has a ton of replies and engagement on the platform. He's often algorithmically boosted to that For You tab that you see on there, the kind of curated tab for most users. And anecdotally, I've seen a lot of people say in recent days that, you know, when they log into Twitter, the first few tweets they see in that For You page are his own, you know, and that has a huge impact on a place where a lot of people discuss politics and social issues and culture. And Musk, of course, hasn't always been a Trump supporter.

Trump certainly hasn't always been a fan of Musk's either. Do you, in reporting this, did you get a sense of an explanation for the turnaround? Like, what happened there? Yeah, if you rewind two years ago, they effectively hated each other. This was someone who said, you who said Trump should sail into the sunset, for example, and not run for re-election and supported Ron DeSantis early in the cycle. Donald Trump called Musk a BS artist and a con man and someone who would come to the White House and would get on his knees and beg if he needed to for help. And now you have this kind of marriage

of convenience, this friendship. They're talking multiple times a day. I think Donald Trump realizes the power that comes with an Elon Musk endorsement and the popularity that comes with it. Musk himself views Trump, you know, in various ways, but I think he sees him as a much more favorable candidate to the Democrats, especially when his various companies are under investigations and inquiries from federal regulators. So, you know, there is, I guess, a bromance of necessity at this point. And I mean, it has moved all the way through bromance. I mean, Trump has basically, I don't know if he's offered him a job, but he certainly talked about giving Musk

a specific kind of position within government when all this is over. Do we have a sense of what that could look like? Yeah, and that came up in an interview that they did on Spaces, the ex-livestreaming platform, this idea of a government efficiency commission, which Musk kind of offered up, you know, randomly in some ways, but he's talked about wanting to oversee government spending, oversee government regulation. And that has now become a central point of Trump's economic platform, this idea that he's going to reduce spending, cut jobs that are not needed, in his view. And he's saying that he's going to put Musk in charge of that. So on the one hand, he's been promised a job with power and influence. On the other hand, he runs several companies that are wildly dependent on government money and government spending as SpaceX is a massive government contractor. Doesn't this have conflict of interest written all over it?

Yeah, you can say that multiple times over for the various tie-ins that companies have with the government. But yes, that is the question we're all asking. And you have someone like SpaceX, for example, or a company like SpaceX that takes in billions of dollars a year in federal contracts from the U.S. government. You know, it's the biggest customer. Their biggest customer is the U.S. government. Beyond that, you know, you have companies like Tesla who are under investigation from things like NHTSA for the self-driving technology. That's the National Transportation Safety Administration. Right. And you have, you know, I think we tabulated it, but at least 20 federal ongoing investigations and inquiries into those companies right now. There are various conflicts that we

may not even know about, you know, and those are the ones we just know about. And so this is kind of unprecedented. I mean, I do sometimes wonder if we're making more of Elon Musk than we would have other sort of media barons in the past. He's certainly not the only billionaire to get this involved in politics. What does make his situation unique, though? I think it's enthusiasm. You know, I don't remember Rupert Murdoch going on stage and jumping behind a candidate and, you know, rallying a crowd, for example. I mean, that kind of public-facing effort, I've never really seen before. Financially, he is going all the way as well. You know, we're talking millions of dollars. And it's kind of pretty clear as to, you know, why he's doing it. You know,

we talked about this conflicts of interest as well. And, you know, what's at stake for Elon Musk? It's pretty blatant in some ways of why he's doing this. Which kind of leads you to the last question is if Trump doesn't win, do you have a sense of what Elon Musk will do next? I don't. But I've kind of taken this view that he'll be sort of fine in the sense that his company, you, has a virtual monopoly on getting things into space. The US government is completely reliant on his company. Tesla is still a dominant electric vehicle manufacturer around the world. So from a business perspective, I think he's going to be just fine, even if Trump does lose. He certainly has billions of dollars still,

even after probably paying too much for Twitter. Listen, Ryan, thank you for this. Really appreciate you taking the time. Thanks for having me. Ryan Mack is a tech reporter for the New York Times. He co-authored a book called Character Limit How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.