Over the weekend, Elon Musk pledged to give away $1m a day to registered voters in battleground states in the US who sign a petition by his America Pac in support of the first and second amendments. He awarded the first prize, a novelty check the size of a kitchen island, at a Pennsylvania rally on Saturday and the second on Sunday in Pittsburgh. He says he’ll keep doing it until the election on 5 November. The stunt is potentially illegal, experts say.
After endorsing Donald Trump in July, Musk quickly founded America Pac and funded it with $75m. For the past several weeks, he’s been making multiple in-person campaign appearances per day, focusing especially on Pennsylvania, a swing state.
What is Musk campaigning for?
My colleagues Nick Robins-Early and Rachel Leingang published a piece last week looking at Musk’s inescapable influence on the US presidential election. The article dives into the past several months of Musk’s political activities, but I was particularly fascinated by one question it posed: is deregulation the driving motivation behind Musk’s political endeavors across the globe? Is all this spending and campaigning about cutting government departments?
Rachel and Nick write:
These constant fights with the full alphabet of regulatory agencies has coincided with Musk making numerous public statements in favor of deregulation, as well as calling for a full-scale audit of the federal government. That idea has found purchase with Trump, who announced in September that he would launch a Musk-led government efficiency commission that would audit federal agencies for places to cut. Musk wants to call it the Department of Government Efficiency, or Doge, invoking one of his favorite memes, an expressive shiba inu.
Although the plan is vague on details and fails to address the obvious conflict of interest in Musk auditing the regulators that oversee his companies, both Trump and Musk have repeatedly brought up the idea of Musk holding some role in a potential Trump administration. During an appearance on Fox News earlier this week, Trump said that he would create a new position called ‘secretary of cost-cutting’ and appoint Musk.
‘He’s dying to do this,’ Trump said.
What does Musk want around the world?
Musk’s fight for fewer government agencies is not limited to the US, though. Sometimes, his fights with “the regulators” set him against other billionaires. In India, Musk is fighting with the government over the distribution of satellite broadband and emerging victorious over Mukesh Ambani. Asia’s richest man had sought terms more favorable to his own telecommunications empire.
He has proclaimed himself a “free-speech absolutist” and complained about the regulators of speech. When the UK was in the throes of violent race riots a month after its general election, Musk tweeted, “Civil war is inevitable,” and posted a cartoon showing a character in an electric chair, claiming that this would be the government’s punishment for free speech in the UK by 2030. He has made similar critiques of the California government and Joe Biden’s administration.
His fight for deregulation regularly pits him against the judiciary in whichever country where he’s operating. Last month, Brazil blocked access to X over its failure to comply with a judge’s orders and then fined Starlink, a subsidiary of SpaceX, for its sister company’s transgressions. Musk and X eventually acquiesced.
Are the regulators fighting back against Musk?
Recently, some of the regulators have taken a new tack: they’re starting to penalize one Musk company for what another Musk company (or Musk himself) does.
Last week, Europe’s regulators took a page out of Brazil’s book, communicating to lawyers at X that the EU could levy fines against the social media company for failing to comply with the Digital Services Act. Crucially, the regulators suggest calculating that tax not just based on X’s revenues, but the total revenue of Musk’s businesses. The penalty, presumably much higher, could financially hobble the social media platform.
In California, a coastal commission cited Musk’s propensity to tweet misinformation during a vote to reject a petition by SpaceX and the US air force to launch more rockets from a base on a Santa Barbara beach. Musk sued in response, alleging political bias and first amendment violations. He just wants to be left alone to launch rockets and tweet and spend tens of millions on the presidential election in peace.
