The largest single donor in American electoral history ran a $1-million-a-day giveaway to swing-state voters. His own lawyer later told a court the winners were not chosen at random. The litigation is still live, with a jury trial set for 2027.
Nobody has been found liable. The cases are ongoing, Musk denies wrongdoing, and a jury trial is more than a year away. Anyone telling you this has been proven is ahead of the record.
Three things are nonetheless already on the record and not in dispute. The Justice Department warned in writing that the payments might violate federal law. Musk's own attorney told a Pennsylvania court that recipients were selected in advance rather than at random, after the programme had been publicly promoted as a giveaway people could win. And a federal judge has now ruled a jury could reasonably find that Musk knew the selection wasn't random, or was reckless in saying it was.
The connection to the rest of this site is direct rather than thematic. The same donor went on to run an office inside the government, and his companies hold billions in federal contracts — $5.9B for satellite launches, $200M for Pentagon AI work — while a 17-month investigation into that office's ethics vetting was obstructed to the point of being unable to answer basic questions.