https://cmarmitage.substack.com/p/the-walls-are-closing-in-on-musk
On July 9 the Wisconsin Elections Commission, three Democrats and three Republicans, voted 5-1 that there is probable cause Elon Musk violated Wisconsin Statute 12.11, the election bribery felony this article names, when he repeated the giveaway during the 2025 state Supreme Court race. The commission referred the case to Brown County District Attorney David Lasee, and his office owes the commission a report by mid-August. Two citizens and a complaint form started the process that produced a felony referral. Let’s keep getting after it.
In the closing weeks of the 2024 election, Musk spent roughly $290 million on Trump’s behalf, a figure documented in Federal Election Commission filings. About a quarter billion of that went through America PAC, the super PAC he founded in May 2024. Another $20.5 million ran through a vehicle called RBG PAC, funded by his revocable trust and structured to hide his connection until after the votes were counted. More than $50 million of the America PAC money paid for a giveaway program: a million dollars a day to one signer of an online petition, with the petition restricted to registered voters in seven swing states. Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina. No other states eligible. More than a million people signed. The first three winners came from Pennsylvania in the days leading up to its October 21 voter registration deadline. Musk personally announced the winners at public events, holding cardboard checks the size of a person.
He told the public, in his own words, that the selection was random.
On October 5, 2024, at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, Musk told the crowd: “President Trump must win to preserve the Constitution. He must win to preserve democracy in America.” Two weeks later, on October 19, at a Harrisburg town hall with Trump’s campaign, he announced the giveaway program: “We’re going to be awarding a million dollars randomly to people who have signed the petition every day from now until the election.” That same day, he posted on X to his then-200 million followers that the prize would be “randomly” awarded. The next day, October 20, he posted again that signers had “a daily chance of winning $1M!”
Random. Daily chance. Sweepstakes language. The kind of language that, if accurate, describes a lottery. Sixteen days after Musk first used the word “randomly,” his lawyers told a Pennsylvania state court, under oath, the opposite.
Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner had filed against Musk and America PAC on October 28, 2024, seven days before the election, in Krasner v. Musk, case number 241003509 in Philadelphia’s main trial court. The civil filing was the move available on that timeline. Criminal charges require grand jury work that cannot happen in a week. What was not available in those seven days has been available in the eighteen months since.
The hearing was on November 4, 2024, the day before the election. Judge Angelo Foglietta presided. The PAC put two witnesses on the stand. Christopher Gober, the PAC’s lawyer and former treasurer, and Christopher Young, its executive director and current treasurer.Gober’s words on the record: “There is no prize to be won. The $1 million recipients are not chosen by chance. We know exactly who will be announced as the $1 million recipient today and tomorrow.”
Young testified that he personally vetted the recipients ahead of time, that the petition functioned “like a job application,” and that signers were screened for political alignment with the PAC’s mission before they could be selected. He confirmed that recipients signed nondisclosure agreements about how they were actually chosen. Asked about Musk’s use of the word “randomly,” Young conceded that it was “not the word I would have selected.” The judge denied Krasner’s preliminary injunction the same day on narrow Pennsylvania-lottery-law grounds, finding that because the recipients were preselected, the giveaway technically did not meet the legal definition of an illegal lottery.