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Neither state nor federal courts have stopped Elon Musk from handing out $1 million checks to voters, first in Pennsylvania during last year’s presidential campaign and now in Wisconsin, where Musk is backing a conservative candidate for the state Supreme Court.
In both instances, the giveaways were announced and then the wording was tweaked, perhaps to keep it in line with the letter of election law.
Musk’s lawyers have argued the people receiving the checks aren’t winning a random lottery, but rather are being paid as spokespeople. The people seeing grinning lottery-style pictures in their social media feeds probably don’t know the difference.
Even if this is, somehow, legal, it sure doesn’t feel altruistic.
In order to understand how it took 15 years for the US election system to get from a landmark Supreme Court case to a place where a billionaire is handing out checks to people likely to vote the way he wants and not being stopped by the legal system, I reached out to Saurav Ghosh, director of campaign finance reform at Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan group.
Our conversation, conducted by phone and edited for length, is below.
WOLF: This is the second straight election in which the world’s richest man and a campaign superdonor has handed out million-dollar checks essentially to random people. How can this possibly be legal?
GHOSH: The moment that we’re in is the logical and unfortunate result of the culture of how elections are financed in this country that was unleashed by the Supreme Court in the Citizens United decision.
To start at the beginning, for nearly a century before Citizens United, the law on corporate expenditures in elections had not changed. For decades, the law hadn’t really changed in the most important respects, which included the idea that contribution limits served a vital purpose in limiting influence and potential corruption by any individual donor.
Citizens United and the wave of spending that decision unleashed fundamentally changed all that. What had once been a pretty clear and well-accepted prohibition that corporations cannot spend money on elections was blown away overnight.
In a second decision by the federal appellate court in DC called SpeechNow, the court said that groups that only spend money independently can raise unlimited amounts of money for election spending and can take money from corporations.
Those two decisions, both in 2010, completely changed the landscape of how elections are financed.
It took a few election cycles to really take hold. But what we see regularly now — and it’s not clear that we’ve plateaued at all — is record-breaking increases in the overall amount spent, and particularly the amount spent by these outside spending groups, which include super PACs as well as dark money groups that don’t disclose their donors.
WOLF: Is this new reality what the court envisioned happening?
GHOSH: There were two conditions that the court said would rein in or limit the risk of corruption.
- The spending by corporations — the money that super PACs raise and spend — would be independent of candidates and the political parties. Because it would be independent, no risk of corruption — that was fundamental to the court’s logic.
- The other condition was transparency. The spending by these groups would be openly disclosed. The justices really went out of their way to point out how that would be a huge limitation on any kind of corruption.
The big point is that neither of those two conditions has ever really been true since the 2010 decision. In 2024, what Elon Musk was able to do was the pinnacle of achievement in terms of one billionaire or one megadonor having an outsize effect because of how the law has not been enforced true to the conditions that the Supreme Court set.
WOLF: Musk reported spending somewhere on the level of more than $290 million in 2024. How do we even piece together what he did if there are these groups that don’t have full transparency?
GHOSH: On the transparency side, the dirty truth about campaign finance in today’s world is that we only think we know how much any particular donor spent on an election. There’s a certain amount of spending that is disclosed — super PACs have to disclose where they get their money from, but they can always get their money from an associated dark money group.
So somebody like Elon Musk, he gave $270 [million] or $290 million to super PACs, and that was disclosed in his own name, but there is no disclosure of the money that’s donated through dark money groups, and that is a glaring transparency failure that has been around since Citizens United.
Some people in Congress are trying to fix that, but there is no political will to get that done. There’s a bill in Congress called the DISCLOSE Act that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, has sponsored that would effectively close that loophole by requiring these dark money groups to disclose where they get their money. But it hasn’t passed. And so every election, somebody like Elon Musk can openly give some money, but could also secretly give some money, and that, I think, makes a mockery of the Supreme Court’s condition, their understanding that all this outside money would be openly disclosed.
WOLF: That’s the transparency side. What’s the problem with the condition that these groups, wink nod, must be independent and not coordinate with campaigns?
GHOSH: There have been many, many instances where someone has filed a complaint saying this is coordination. This group is taking their cues from this candidate or from the party committee, and the Federal Election Commission has never enforced the law in anything approaching a way that would actually keep these groups honest about being independent.
In 2024 things got a little bit worse. The FEC, in the spring of 2024, issued an advisory opinion called Texas Majority PAC, where basically they said that certain types of activity, coordinated canvassing operations — that this is a paid service that committees and campaigns pay for, essentially hiring people to go door to door, meet voters and basically tell them why they should vote a certain way. That service, the FEC said, could be coordinated.
You could see, overnight, that from that opinion, the various outside groups backing Donald Trump’s presidential campaign immediately took notice and immediately began planning how the Trump campaign could outsource their ground game to these outside groups. No group made, I think, bigger use of that decision than Elon Musk’s America PAC. His super PAC immediately began spending money on these canvassing operations, particularly in swing states, in open coordination with the Trump campaign.
You went from a place in 2010 where the Supreme Court said no risk of corruption, because this will be independent activity, to where we are in 2024, with a billionaire spending hundreds of millions of dollars, a lot of which was for activity openly coordinated with a presidential campaign.
WOLF: Canvassing with a campaign is one thing. In that case, you’re trying to convince voters to get out there. It seems like a step further when there are $1 million checks being handed out at a rally. How do we get from coordinated activity to writing million-dollar checks?
GHOSH: Well, I should be really clear on this point. I am of the opinion — and I think this is an opinion other election lawyers share — that that is actually not sanctioned by campaign finance law. It’s not a campaign finance issue. It’s really more a question of election laws that prohibit vote-buying, but that appears to be what Musk’s program did in the 2024 election, and potentially even with what’s happening with the judicial election in Wisconsin.
WOLF: But people made those arguments in the fall of 2024 in Pennsylvania. The attorney general made the argument in Wisconsin. Nobody has stopped Musk to date. If it runs afoul of the law, is there any mechanism to stop this behavior?
GHOSH: What you’re seeing here is largely the era of directly challenging what seemed to be well-settled legal principles. That’s the MO of the Trump administration, generally. Musk’s payoffs for voters to sign a petition — I think they’re illegal. I think pursuing a lawsuit in the courts is what you would usually use to challenge something illegal like that, but we’re in extraordinary times where it’s not even clear if that would be enough to stop them. It certainly should be.
WOLF: Then we’re in a catch-22, if there seems to be no way to challenge what could be illegal behavior.
GHOSH: Well, I think this is the challenge of our time, right? There are mechanisms, but they are currently manned by folks who are hostile to the laws they’re supposed to enforce. The FEC has that problem, and we’ve documented it. In fact, one of the main reasons why I think we’re in the position we are today, with elections being dominated by special interests spending billions of dollars, is because the FEC, the regulator that’s charged with enforcing the law, has consistently failed to do that.
WOLF: It feels like an individual has more constraints on them. I can only give the maximum amount allowed by law to a political campaign, but somebody of means, or a corporation, can give as much as they want to a dark money group without putting their name to it. That’s a pretty clear double standard.
GHOSH: It’s a double standard that is a byproduct of our inequality in society. If somebody has a desire to influence elections and they say, well, I’d like to give $500 in this election, and they pick five candidates, that’s the model for campaign finance. You express your preferences through who you choose to donate to. But what is any individual $500 weighed against somebody like Elon Musk or some Fortune 500 company setting up a super PAC and giving it $200 million? There’s this deep imbalance that is essentially taking our economic disparities and turning them into political disparities. And that’s really what campaign finance law has always been about, that certain things are not for sale, that political office is not for sale in the same way as a yacht or an island. The law, over many years, has been degraded, not enforced, and is now being openly unwound. I think the situation has gone from bad to worse.
WOLF: How would you describe the current state of campaign finance law to the general American?
GHOSH: The state of affairs is really dire, but it also can be fixed. It’s not dire in a way where we don’t know what to do. There are bills that are in Congress now that could fix a lot of the problems that we’ve just been talking about. I mentioned the DISCLOSE Act. It would do a lot to improve transparency. There are also bills that would redefine how coordination works, and essentially would close a lot of these loopholes, including the one that the FEC carved out last year.
So it’s really important for people to know that the issues that they care about, the sort of kitchen-table issues that affect their lives, often rest on this fundamental issue of, where are politicians getting their money? And I think as we move more and more toward a billionaire-, megadonor-funded election system, we see people’s fundamental problems and what they want to see happening in government being disregarded. Instead, somebody like Elon Musk, who essentially ensured that his guy won the White House, it’s their policy that’s being driven forward.
