Elon Musk offers Pennsylvania voters $100 to sign his pro-Trump petition – Mother Jones

AP Photo/Matt Rourke

Elon Musk obsessed The attempt to get Donald Trump into the White House has taken a desperate turn. On Friday, the tech CEO tweeted to more than 20 million followers that he was offering $100 to registered voters in Pennsylvania who sign his pro-Trump petition.

This $100 deal is an expansion of a previous deal he made with swing state voters earlier this year, giving all voters in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and North Carolina the same would be willing to offer $47 Refer a friend to the petition.

However, this $100 special offer is exclusive to Pennsylvanians.

According to the website, the goal is to “get 1 million registered voters in swing states to stand up for the Constitution, particularly freedom of speech and the right to bear arms.”

The tech CEO tweeted this offer shortly after hosting his first solo political event at a town hall in Pennsylvania on Friday evening, where he reportedly spread debunked election conspiracy theories.

While this petition isn't his only attempt to flip the swing state in Trump's favor (last week, Musk offered to go door-to-door in Pennsylvania to petition for the former president), it is certainly one of his silliest .

As my colleague Tim Murphy writes:

This particular approach has drawbacks, for the same reason that paying people to collect signatures often does: you incentivize bad data, which is not what you really want in a campaign. Paid petitioners constantly get into trouble because the signatures they collect don't match real people or were submitted without the voter's knowledge. The PAC says it has some safeguards in place and that you won't receive your $47 until both the referrer and referee are verified. But the money creates a real reason People who not Support Trump to sign up and take Musk's money. It's a great way for Harris-supporting students at Arizona State University to get money for beer – it's definitely easier than donating plasma.

In other words, it's possible that this is a genius move by a man with an evolutionarily advanced brain. But it's also possible that Musk is simply doing the thing with the rich – the classic thing rich technician One thing – to go into a new situation and assume that all of your ideas are important.

On Saturday, Musk will speak at a Pennsylvania megachurch closely associated with the New Apostolic Reformation, a religious movement that believes Christians are called to take over government.