Elon Musk’s daily giveaway of million-dollar checks to swing-state voters is generating the buzz he no doubt hoped for. But Mr. Musk’s oversize checks are distracting from a less-visible campaign the world’s richest man is conducting: laying the groundwork to cast doubt on the election results if his favored candidate, former president Donald Trump, loses.
Campaigning solo for Mr. Trump on Sunday afternoon, Mr. Musk urged a capacity crowd of about 1,200 at a Pittsburgh theater to post about suspected election irregularities. “Be very loud about it if you have any concerns,” he said at the end of a two-hour town hall event. He didn’t say anything about them being substantiated. A woman had asked whether Mr. Musk is confident that fighting (nonexistent) widespread election fraud is a battle that can be won. “I don’t know what’s real and what’s not real,” Mr. Musk said.
That’s not stopping the billionaire from amplifying often easily disprovable falsehoods to adherents who see him as a visionary. He used in-person rallies across Pennsylvania over the weekend to peddle lies about the integrity of the election. Even though no voting machines in the United States are directly connected to the internet, Mr. Musk repeatedly claimed that they can be easily hacked and that artificial intelligence makes it simpler to do so. “We should not allow voting machines of any kind,” he said in Pittsburgh. “We want paper ballots, in person, with I.D.” In fact, every battleground state in the presidential race already has fully auditable paper trails.
“It’s a pretty good indicator that if someone uses the word ‘disinformation’ a lot, they are the ones creating the disinformation,” Mr. Musk said. On Monday, he also shared a meme that falsely claimed “Barack Hussein Obama repealed the Smith-Mundt act” in 2012 to allow the federal government to issue propaganda to U.S. citizens. A study from the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that 50 of Mr. Musk’s false or misleading claims about the election during the first seven months of this year were debunked by independent fact-checkers but still generated some 1.2 billion views.
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D) accused Mr. Musk of “spreading dangerous disinformation” over the weekend by sharing a misleading post that claimed her state has more registered voters than people who are eligible to vote. After Mr. Musk retweeted a false claim this spring that as many as 2 million noncitizens had registered to vote in Pennsylvania, Arizona and Texas, a bipartisan group of local election officials complained that this prompted local activists to clamor for purging voter rolls.
Mr. Musk is one of many who is spending heavily in this year’s election. But his profile is especially high. He owns one of the country’s most prominent social media platforms, X, previously known as Twitter, on which he has 202 million followers and his tweets are placed in users’ feeds. And, even in the rough-and-tumble world of politics, he is being especially brazen. Moments after accusing Democrats of engaging in “sedition” and warning that “there will be no democracy” if Vice President Kamala Harris wins, Mr. Musk decried the “vitriolic hatred on the left.” His operation is telling Jewish voters that Ms. Harris doesn’t support Israel and Muslim voters that Ms. Harris is too close to Israel.
The danger is that Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump might convince supporters that the only way they could lose is through fraud. Encouraging vigilante vote-integrity investigations via social media, of the sort that spread confusion and misunderstandings about the 2020 election, threatens to stoke unfounded doubt about the country’s electoral system and procedural chaos as activists pressure voting officials.
Mr. Musk presented himself in Pennsylvania as a reluctant surrogate who feels compelled to save the country from ruin, but he clearly has an interest in the election’s outcome; he has billions in government contracts through companies SpaceX and Starlink, and Mr. Trump accepted Mr. Musk’s offer to run the “Department of Government Efficiency” should he win, which could allow the entrepreneur to target regulators who have investigated his companies.
Mr. Musk also clearly enjoyed the adulation from a crowd chanting his name and calling him a hero.
A woman told Mr. Musk that she suffers from kidney failure and wondered whether he could develop a new kidney for her. Another wondered whether he could come up with a plan to stop school shootings. “I don’t actually have an answer for everything,” he replied. It was possibly the truest thing Mr. Musk said during his visit to the Keystone State.
