What does Elon Musk want from all this politicking?
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.
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?
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.
