--:-- Noel King: Elon Musk is giving away prizes to compel people in swing states to register to vote.
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--:-- Noel King: I'll be back with one, two, three. Not that one, the Elon one.
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--:-- Noel King: So every day between now and the election, we'll be awarding a million dollars starting tonight. One million dollars. It's fun, but is it okay?
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--:-- Noel King: The Justice Department sent a letter to Musk's super PAC warning that giveaway may be illegal. Federal law prohibits paying people to register to vote.
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--:-- Noel King: On Today Explained, Elon Musk is barnstorming for Donald Trump. What does he want out of it?
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--:-- Noel King: The idea that he might be, you know, on a friendly term with the White House and being given some kind of role in cutting regulations he doesn't like that could kind of keep him from doing what he wants to do in business, that's incredible power.
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--:-- Noel King: Support for Today Explained comes from BetterHelp.
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--:-- Noel King: Let me tell you a true story. Last weekend, I got an email from a listener who wanted to discuss their problems with me. And I said, look, I don't think that this is about me personally. At least I hope it's not.
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--:-- Noel King: You're listening to Today Explained.
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--:-- Noel King: Tim, can we have some fun? People rarely accuse me of being fun.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: I'm Tim Higgins, a business columnist for The Wall Street Journal, and I have to have at least some sense of humor because my beat is media and technology.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: But mostly... We like to say that I write mostly but not entirely about Elon Musk, his companies, his rivals, the world he lives in.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: These days, I'm writing a lot about what he's doing in politics.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: I just got back from Pennsylvania where I was on the campaign trail with Elon Musk, which is an odd place to be because he's not a politician.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: Well, I mean, I have been red-pilling my friends like crazy lately.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: Elon has been in Pennsylvania with a mission of trying to register as many people to vote as possible and get out and vote early.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: There was a deadline earlier this week to register to vote in that state.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: You've got to just be total evangelists about the voting, but like hound everyone you know to get registered because after Monday, it's no good.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: It's part of a broader effort he has going in the battleground states to register people to vote.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: Really, the goal would probably be to try to turn out Republicans in his broader effort to get Donald Trump reelected to the White House.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: but really an intense ground game in the days leading up to that Pennsylvania deadline, really trying to bring a lot of attention.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: And wherever Elon goes, there's a lot of attention, but even more attention when he starts holding town hall meetings in cities across the state, hitting on that idea that get out there, register to vote, vote early.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: He has kind of a message that he's concerned about voter fraud.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: And the way to counter that is to just have the margin of victory so big that it can exceed any sort of cheating that may take place.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: So we've got to aim for just a massive margin. That's the key.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: What is an Elon Musk town hall like? This guy is a businessman, not a politician.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: And on top of that, if we're being honest, he's kind of odd, right?
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--:-- Tim Higgins: And so this is not like Mitt Romney holds a town hall.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: This, I imagine, is something a bit different.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: What's it been like being there?
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--:-- Tim Higgins: I will say that in a previous life, I was a political reporter and attended a lot of political events and a lot of campaign stops.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: And in a lot of ways, an Elon Musk political event is like a major politician.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: Hundreds of people would show up, line up, very excited to hear what he was going to say.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: But in some ways, it was less scripted and more authentic than you might hear from a typical Washington, D.C. politician.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: I don't actually have any, like, as you can see, there's no teleprompter or anything.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: I'm just like, what should I say next? I don't know.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: People were very excited to talk about and hear about his business acumen, the things that he has done, but also hear how he might be involved in a Trump administration, how he might bring his strengths and his experiences to government.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: When you cut the government spending and you have a stack of all these deregulations, can you live stream on X and use not a flamethrower and burn that into the ground?
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--:-- Tim Higgins: Yeah. Yeah. You know, there's this idea that he's going to help reduce the size of government.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: He's going to slash spending.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: And I heard from a lot of potential voters, a lot of voters at Elon's events excited at the prospect of Elon Musk taking his cost-cutting ways that we saw at Twitter turned X to government.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: I think a bonfire of nonsense regulations would be epic.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: There is some billionaire populism flowing through Elon Musk veins and his delivery and his seeming authenticity of the way he talks really appeals to a certain group of people
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--:-- Tim Higgins: The question is will that excitement and that enthusiasm translate into the voting booth.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: Will he get these young people in places like Pennsylvania to turn out for Trump?
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--:-- Tim Higgins: And that's the gamble here.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: He is trying to bring his attention-getting capabilities to places like Pennsylvania and other battleground states to get out the vote for Donald Trump.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: And he's doing it in part with a lottery.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: Well, this is an interesting thing.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: So I was in Harrisburg Saturday night when he surprised the audience.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: There was more than a thousand people gathered at this modern church building to hear him talk.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: And he starts off his stump speech typically goes for about 10 minutes, but it was different this night.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: And in fact, it was a little awkward to begin with because something just seemed to be going out.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: So I have a surprise for you, which is that we're going to be awarding a million dollars to randomly to people who have signed the petition every day from now until the election.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: And so the effort started off in Pennsylvania, but has expanded to other battleground states that he's operating in.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: And the idea, according to Elon, is to put attention on his efforts to get people to sign this petition.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: One of the challenges we're having is like, well, how do we get people to know about this petition?
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--:-- Tim Higgins: Because the legacy media won't report on it.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: And not everyone's on X.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: So I figure, how do we get people to know about it?
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--:-- Tim Higgins: Well, this news, I think, is going to really fly.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: What does the petition actually say?
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--:-- Tim Higgins: It's very simple.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: It says basically you support the First Amendment and the Second Amendment.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: It's not lengthy.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: The big thing here is it's part of his broader effort to get people to register.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: You have to be registered to vote to sign the petition.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: So in a lot of ways, you know, if you were on the fence or you didn't, you know, haven't been registered, all of a sudden you have this kind of incentive to do it because, hey, you might win the lottery, the Elon lottery.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: But one of the big things here that Elon has been really vocal about is getting people signed up to vote in these places, trying to bring, you know, kind of a red wave come November.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: How many people have won the lottery?
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--:-- Tim Higgins: And do we know anything about them?
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--:-- Tim Higgins: They tend to be Trump supporters.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: The most recent one was very excited.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: Elon, thank you so much for everything that you've done to support free speech and stand up for the Constitution and everything that it stands for.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: When in Harrisburg, the first guy that was called up, you know, he seemed just tickled to death.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: So wait, do you want to say anything?
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--:-- Tim Higgins: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, go ahead.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: Thanks, Elon.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: This is great. I'm really ecstatic.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: I want to congratulate you on your rocket catch last week.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: Big curve on it.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: I saw a great video.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: It was one of the other winners.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: It was a woman, and she got a big check.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: It was like Ed McMahon.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: Your wealth and responsibility you are using to save speech, and we just all appreciate it.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: We really do.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: So thank you so much.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: Thank you.
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--:-- Noel King: So question arises from the lottery, which is, hey, wait a second. Is this legal?
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--:-- Noel King: Well, that's a very good question and one that there's not agreement on.
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--:-- Noel King: Election law specialists are essentially divided about whether this one million dollar giveaway is legal since it's essentially providing an incentive to register to vote.
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--:-- Noel King: Right. You know, so that might be the loophole.
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--:-- Noel King: That might be the way that Elon can do it because you have to remember that it is a federal crime to pay people with the intention of inducing or rewarding them to cast a vote or get registered to vote.
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--:-- Noel King: So the nuance here could be that Elon is just giving this money for signing his petition.
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--:-- Noel King: And in a lot of ways, it's kind of classic Elon Musk.
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--:-- Noel King: You know, as a businessman, he is always kind of conducting himself in ways that are untraditional.
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--:-- Noel King: And people sometimes complain about it.
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--:-- Noel King: And he figures out a way to do things that people say aren't possible or shouldn't be done the way they are being done.
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--:-- Noel King: And that's kind of some of his magic.
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--:-- Noel King: Now, I'm going to ask you, because you've been on the trail, you've been watching, you've been observing.
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--:-- Noel King: Do you think that this stunt helps Donald Trump?
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--:-- Tim Higgins: I can't say.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: Ultimately, the proof will be in the pudding, so to speak.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: You know, there's a lot of theatrics that are going on right now.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: And it's drawing attention to Trump.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: It's drawing attention to Elon Musk.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: And that can be a good thing.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: You know, I mentioned that I, you know, in my previous life was a political reporter.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: And I think about some of the lessons that I had as an early Cub reporter in Iowa during the Iowa caucuses chasing around Howard Dean, who, as you recall, seemed like the guy who was going to win.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: You know something? Not only are we going to New Hampshire, Tom Harkin, we're going to South Carolina and Oklahoma and Arizona.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: And it was in those final days that I was really impressed with the, there's so many people coming, so much enthusiasm around him, except those people didn't caucus.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: And John Kerry won.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: And we're going to Washington, D.C. to take back the White House.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: And it's just a reminder that, you know, sometimes these surrogates, sometimes the people around the situation are super excited.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: But really, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter unless the people turn out and vote.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: And one of the things that's different here about Elon as a surrogate is that he is putting time and resources into that ground game and trying to turn people out to vote.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: So it's not just about creating excitement.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: It's also about turning that excitement into action.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: But still, at the end of the day, you know, you got to get the votes.
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--:-- Tim Higgins: And so we'll see if it really matters or if it really worked.
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--:-- Noel King: That was The Wall Street Journal's Tim Higgins.
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--:-- Noel King: Support for Today Explained comes from Built Rewards.
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--:-- Noel King: We're back and back to back and wall to wall with The Wall Street Journal today.
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--:-- Noel King: Dana Mattioli is the journal's senior reporter on tech investigations.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: I'm Dana Mattioli, the journal's senior reporter on tech investigations.
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--:-- Noel King: And I am the author of The Everything War, Amazon's Ruthless Quest to Own the World and Remake Corporate Power.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: So the assumption is that Elon Musk with this lottery is trying to help Donald Trump.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: What is the thinking there? How could this help Trump?
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: Well, for one, this creates this media maelstrom.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: The world's richest man has an idea to engage registered voters, cold, hard cash.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: And he's putting his money where his mouth is.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: Elon's on that stage, jumping around, skipping like a dipshit on these things.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: You know it.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: It's all over the news, and this is great media for Donald Trump's campaign.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: So that's one thing at a time where both candidates are furiously fundraising to get on airwaves, to get on TV, to get on podcasts.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: Right.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: Also, you know, what happens to the emails that are put into this petition?
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: I'm sure they're being targeted with Trump rhetoric.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: He set up a super PAC to help Donald Trump.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: The lottery is part of that.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: It's called America PAC.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: Just to start, remind us what a PAC is exactly.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: Yeah, a PAC is a political action committee.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: It's a way for donors to donate lots of money to election efforts for candidates.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: You know, for average citizens that are donating to a campaign, you tap out at a certain level of spending that you can't give more than a stated amount.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: For PACs, you're able to give much bigger sums.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: That's why you often see billionaires being part of these PACs.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: So Elon Musk started this over the spring.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: He had a bunch of vendors to his house in Austin, and he told them that he wanted to create a red wave of voters for Donald Trump.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: And from there, he got some of his friends that are also wealthy people to donate money to get the pack off the ground.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: But interestingly, at that time, he did not want to be the face of this pack.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: He got his wealthy friends to donate to it so that it could get up and running, but he didn't want to donate to it until after July 1st so that he wouldn't show up on the federal filings for the PAC over the summer.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: The goal of the PAC is mostly to get Trump reelected, but they are getting involved in some GOP down ballot races as well.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: As of the most recent filings, Elon had contributed $75 million to it, which is an exorbitant sum.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: They also have other outside donors as well.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: But his portion of that is $75 million.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: So he, by and large, has funded most of the expenditures.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: And that's before they announced this million-dollar-a-day lottery, which he's funding as well, which is pretty substantial in terms of spending too.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: In what other ways, other than money, is Elon Musk supporting Donald Trump?
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: Well, Musk has one of the biggest microphones there is.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: This is a very well-respected CEO.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: He sort of has this rabid fan base, which is uncommon in corporate America.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: I think most average Americans couldn't name the CEO of General Electric or Exxon, but everyone knows Elon Musk.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: He's well-regarded, especially in the Valley.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: And next, he's got 200 million followers.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: So he tweets several times a day.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: He's very prolific on his own website.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: He often is tweeting in support of Donald Trump.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: He often criticizes Kamala on the website.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: You know, over the summer, he hosted this town hall with Donald Trump that had millions of people tune in.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: So he's been a very vocal advocate for Trump.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: And also he's trying to convert a lot of his historically left-leaning Silicon Valley CEOs and VCs over to Trump's side.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: I think a lot of people saw legitimacy in backing Trump after Elon came out in support of him after that assassination attempt in Butler Pennsylvania
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: I not been politically active before and I politically active now because every instinct that I have tells me that this is a fork in the road of destiny
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--:-- Noel King: Where else do we see Elon Musk's money in Republican politics?
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: Interestingly, behind the scenes, he's been this mega donor.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: At The Wall Street Journal, we were able to uncover a lot of the dark money that he's committed to Republican causes.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: We were able to learn that in 2022, for instance, two years ago, he gave $50 million to a very incendiary ad campaign that ran right before the midterms.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: Stop the radical left-wing love affair with criminals. Stop the insanity.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: This was for an ad campaign run by a group called Citizens for Sanity that was backed by Stephen Miller, who, of course, was the Trump immigration czar during his first term.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: And these ads were a mystery to a lot of people.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: They were really explosive.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: They centered around really divisive issues like immigration and crime and transgender children.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: And we were able to find out that Elon was a big financial supporter of that.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: Also, interestingly, we were able to learn that in 2023, Musk secretly gave $10 million to Ron DeSantis.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: And that was his first choice here.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: He was really all in on DeSantis before him.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: So, you know, those are two areas that we've seen him involved.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: We also saw him get involved in local races.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: We broke a story that Elon quietly funded a more moderate Democrat in the primaries for Austin's district attorney because he thought the person who was running against him was too progressive and he didn't want the other person to win.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: So there's lots of ways that Elon has been secretly moving his money and, you know, he hasn't wanted his name attached to it.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: Big money in politics is, for better or worse, a very natural part of American politics these days and has been for a while.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: People might say, well, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, they, you know, they choose their candidates too.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: What is different, if anything, about the way Elon Musk and his money are operating in this campaign?
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: I mean, that's right. This happens on both sides of the aisle.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: I mean, there's George Soros with the Democrats.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: The New York Times just broke that Bill Gates has given $50 million to Kamala's campaign behind the scenes also.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: And dark money is a very popular way that billionaires move their money.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: Because if you think about the CEOs of publicly traded companies, it could be dicey to come out publicly in support of a candidate who then doesn't win.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: People might fear retribution from whoever does win, or you might anger your workforce who might vote differently than how you come out.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: What's different here is that I think Elon has come out almost in a rabid way.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: You don't see Bill Gates getting on stage with Kamala, jumping up and down and going to rallies and doing stump speeches, holding court in Pennsylvania and door knocking, right?
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: Like what Elon's doing is above and beyond that.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: And mind you, this is a man that runs six companies.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: I mean, ostensibly, he shouldn't have time for this.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: Which makes one wonder what Elon Musk wants out of this.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: So Donald Trump has talked about him running something called a Government Efficiency Commission.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: What is that?
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: This is something that they were spitballing during that ex-town hall over the summer.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: I'd be happy to help out on such a commission.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: I'd love it. If it were formed.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: Well, you, you're the greatest cutter.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: I mean, I look at what you do.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: You walk in and you just say, you want to quit? They go on strike.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: I won't mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, that's OK. You're all gone. You're all gone.
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--:-- Dana Mattioli: That was The Wall Street Journal's Dana Mattioli.
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--:-- Noel King: Today's episode was produced by Victoria Chamberlain and Amanda Llewellyn.
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--:-- Noel King: It was edited by Miranda Kennedy and fact-checked by Laura Bullard.
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--:-- Noel King: Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristinsdottir are our engineers.
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--:-- Noel King: I'm Noelle King.
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--:-- Noel King: It's Today Explained.
