For a guy who has spent his entire life making “I am very rich” the keystone of his personal brand, there is something quite poignant about watching Donald Trump get financially cucked by Elon Musk on stage every night. Musk is much younger, much richer, and has had a much more successful series of hair transplants. But needs must, it seems.
As you might be aware, Musk has recently decided to update the tired dystopian fiction trope in which impoverished citizens are forced to compete in deadly gameshows where the winner gets a life-changingly glittering prize, and the losers are killed for sport. In Elon’s rebooted version, the richest man in the world is giving struggling voters the chance to win a million dollars if they sign a “petition” in favour of free speech and the right to bear arms.
You get $47 (£36) just for signing up – $100 in Pennsylvania, for some reason! – and only registered voters can apply. As long as they leave their names – and addresses, for some reason! – they’re all good to enter the lottery pit. Also, it’s not fictional but real, and it’s happening in swing states every single day from now until the election in two weeks’ time. On Saturday, Musk presented his first state-of-the-art cardboard cheque for $1m to a man at a rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. On Sunday, it was the turn of a woman at a town hall in Pittsburgh. On Monday, his Pac (political action committee) launched a drive against election interference, because hey – above all, he’s an ironist.
Like so many of the previous new lows of this campaign, once this tactic manifests itself you immediately find yourself thinking: of course. Of course, of course. Of course Musk, 53, would become a dark mirror version of MrBeast, and use the YouTube giveaway playbook to go viral in the election endgame. It’s at once completely shocking, and also an October not-even-a-surprise. Perhaps the only mirthless smile it can raise is when you consider the utter yesteryearing it represents for Hollywood.
It felt quaint even at the time, but do recall George Clooney spouting off last year about how indispensable Hollywood could be to political campaigns. “I always just say,” George just said, “look, everybody keeps coming into Hollywood for cash, and they don’t come to us for the one thing we do better than anybody, which is tell stories.” Mm. And yet here we are, with the dark stars of the election bypassing the gold-standard magic of a movie industry everyone can see is in crisis, and taking their inspo from YouTube, which isn’t.
Anyway, in scenes also some-way-past familiar: the old good-chap structures of political life are revealed as simply unable to cope with bad chaps who decline to play by the unwritten rules. In fact, even the written rules seem to be in doubt. Is Musk’s stunt legal? Those scrambling to respond to this question are once again falling back on the old “uncharted territory” descriptor. Alas, if you were hoping we could get a couple of cartographers out of bed for this one – like, yesterday? – then prepare for disappointment. What we have instead are leisurely headlines such as “Elon Musk’s pledge for daily $1 million giveaways draw legal questions”.
The Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro, opined on Monday of the giveaways that “I think it’s something that law enforcement could take a look at”. “Could take a look at”, questions being “drawn” – I can’t help feeling the vocabulary choices here indicate the sort of mid-tier to-do list priority that no doubt the relevant cops/jurisprudence professors will get around to solving in a few weeks’ time. No particular reason you’d want to rush this one. Is there?
In the meantime, seemingly nightly, we have the world’s richest man on stage in service of Donald Trump. Or will it turn out to be the other way round? Only time will show, but given Musk is being touted for some kind of anti-regulation role at the same time as his businesses are involved in multiple anti-regulation lawsuits … let’s just say this could go either way. In some ways, both parties could use a hand.
And yet, neither is an underdog. However many years we are through the looking-glass now, I still boggle at the utter WTF-ery of Trump and Musk being able to present themselves as rank outsiders oppressed by the elites. “One of the challenges we’re having is, how do we get the public to know about this petition because the legacy media won’t report on it,” whined Musk at the weekend, in comments promptly reported by the legacy media. Also: you own a media platform, shithead – please don’t try to “my struggle” this one. Other looking-glass lunacies include Musk’s regular assertions that Kamala Harris will end democracy, which he makes while appearing to buy votes in support of a man who has already sparked one insurrection and has explicitly promised to be “a dictator” on day one of his presidency.
They say democracy dies in darkness, but it currently appears to be suffering serious breathing issues under full stage lights. In fact, watching Musk go all-out for Trump, it’s hard not to get ominous circle-of-life vibes, and feel like you’re watching the simultaneous live birth of an American oligarchy. There have been vested interests as long as there has been US politics, of course. But no robber baron of the Gilded Age was ever this relatively rich, or as artlessly open about what – and whom – a relatively tiny amount of money can buy.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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