The US justice department has sent a letter to Elon Musk’s Super Pac warning that the billionaire and Tesla CEO’s $1m-a-day giveaways may violate federal law, according to multiple reports.
A letter from the department’s public integrity section, which investigates potential election-related law violations, went to the Pac, reports in CNN and New York Times said.
South Africa-born Musk, who has thrown his support behind Donald Trump in advance of the 5 November election, announced on Saturday while speaking before a crowd in Pennsylvania that he was giving away $1m each day until election day to someone who signs his online petition supporting the US constitution.
He handed $1m checks to two separate people over the weekend: one to a man in Harrisburg on Saturday and another to a women in Pittsburgh on Sunday. Another voter in North Carolina has won $1m. Between in-person campaign events in support of the Republican presidential candidate, Musk has tweeted his congratulations to the winners and urged other registered voters in swing states to sign his petition and enter the lottery.
Election law experts had called the sweepstakes potentially illegal. The Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro, had called on law enforcement to investigate.
Musk, ranked by Forbes as the world’s richest person, so far has supplied at least $75m to America Pac, according to federal disclosures, making the group a crucial part of Trump’s bid to regain the White House.
Even among major political donors, the degree of Musk’s involvement in Trump’s campaign for president has been unusual. He is not only spending tens of millions of dollars to back his favored candidate, but also campaigning in person, literally jumping up and down on stage at a Trump rally, and now appearing in person across Pennsylvania as a high-profile campaign surrogate. Online, Musk is attacking Kamala Harris, and spreading election misinformation to his 202 million followers on X, the popular social media platform that he owns.
Analysts have suggested that one reason Musk may be interested in investing in a second Trump presidency is that the billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and the owner of X, formerly known as Twitter, has long resented government regulations, and might see Trump as someone who would champion deregulation in areas convenient to his billionaire backer.
Those observing his behavior in the campaign so far have noted Musk’s “complete eschewal of discretion as a mode of political engagement”, a particularly unusual choice for an ultra-wealthy individual, as well as his eagerness to receive attention.
Musk has faced legal and financial repercussions in the past for doing things that he thought were brilliant but that regulators did not. In 2018, Musk and Tesla agreed to pay $40m in fines over a tweet Musk had sent, including one saying that he was going to take Tesla public for $420 a share. Later, Musk tweeted that he did not regret the tweet and that the fines were “worth it”
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