• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, October 21, 2024

Elevator Pitch: 

If someone pitched that premise to me, I’d tell them it’s so farfetched and cornball nobody would buy it. But that’s exactly what Elon Musk is doing. And half the country doesn’t see anything wrong with that.

As someone who has covered presidential campaigns for nearly half a century, I’m the first to acknowledge that it has never been a perfect process, and that rich and powerful people have always had undue influence, but at least we had some ethical, regulatory and legal standards that would prevent anything like this from ever happening in America. Except maybe on the Big Screen via an outlandish movie premise.

Now it’s our new reality.

You can check my math, but my tally shows Musk so far has pledged to spend more than $2 billion either paying swing state voters directly, or awarding a $1 million daily sweepstakes prize to Pennsylvanians, who sign his petition. And yes, the petition doesn't explicitly state they are pledging to vote for Donald Trump, but that's what Musk's super PAC is campaigning for, so you be the judge of its influence.

From a media math POV, that translates into potential cost of $22.4 million per swing state electoral vote, if every registered voter in those states signs Musk's petition.

Cash payments aside, Musk has also put his immense wealth toward another important part of the election: canvassing for voter turnout.

If you haven't already read it, I suggest you read an excellent New York Times story analyzing Musk's -- as well as other immensely rich and powerful Silicon Valley billionaire bros -- support for Trump, influence in getting one of their own (J.D. Vance) on the ticket, as well as the underlying plutocratic rationale behind their new extreme right politics, especially their disdain for electoral democracy.

The article flags a recent Federal Election Commission ruling that received relatively little media coverage, but has profound new implications for rich and powerful people like Musk to influence the outcome of presidential elections, noting: "For the first time, campaigns could share voter data with super PACs, and vice versa, enabling PACs to run their own field teams."

According to the report, Musk had a goal of hiring "an army" of 5,500 canvassers to turn out 800,000 to 1 million voters for Trump in the battleground states.

The article gives a great breakdown of how much money Musk has invested in the effort so far, as well as how he has been micromanaging the process to date, but the main point is that Musk -- and other Silicon Valley billionaires -- are using their wealth to influence the outcome of a presidential election in an unprecedented way, and that their intentions have less to do with American democracy than with their own-self interest to gain even more power by leveraging their wealth.